Italy contains two places bearing the name of Ferentinum or Ferentino,
as England contains two places--perhaps more--bearing the several
names of Leeds, Stafford, Birmingham, Hereford, Cambridge, Washington,
Rochester, and others more obvious. And as the Northumbrian Rochester
is also very conveniently written _Rutchester_, so the Etruscan
Ferentinum is also conveniently written _Ferentia_. On an _iter ad
Brundisium_ we cannot possibly have anything to do with Etruscan
Ferentia; our business lies with that Ferentinum which, according to
the Itineraries, was to be found on the _Via Latina_ between Anagnia
and Frusino, and which is to be found there still. But if the name
of the southern Ferentinum is more certain than that of its fellow,
its ancient nationality is less certain. Its historical position is
Hernican; it lies between Hernican Anagnia and Hernican Frusino; yet
it is also spoken of as Volscian, as it may well have become in the
endless warfare of those ever-shifting nations. Yet it is in other
company that we should be best pleased to find it. Our earliest
remembrance of the name places "Ferentinum of the rock" among the
Thirty Cities, and gives it no mean place among them. We go to the spot
with the lines ringing in our ears which place its warriors under the
rule of proud Tarquin himself, on the spot where--
... in the centre thickest
Were ranged the shields of foes,
And from the centre loudest
The cry of battle rose.
Yet, even without book, we may have been a little surprised both to
find a Thirty-city so far in the heart of the Volscian and Hernican
hills, and to find its warriors marshalled along with such distant
comrades as Tibur and Pedum and "Gabii of the pool." And, when we
come back to our books, a horrible thought presses itself upon us more
and more, a thought that Ferentinum may have no right to any place in
that list at all. The name seems to be Lord Macaulay's guess--among a
hundred other guesses--at the manifestly corrupt name which comes next
before Gabii in Dionysios' list of the Latin cities. Some read as near
to our mark as _Fortinei_; so we may hope for the best; but remembering
where Ferentinum stands, very far from Gabii, we confess that our hopes
are small.
In obedience to the Itinerary, it is from Anagni that we make our way
to Ferentino. And as we go from Anagni to Ferentino, we better take
in the special position of Anagni on the top of its isolated hill.
Till we have gone some little distance, we are hardly conscious that
Anagni is there at all; gradually the bell-tower rises into view, and
the rest of the city follows. A few miles only lead us from the hill
of Anagni to the hill of Ferentino. At the first glance it may be that
the spot which we have reached does not specially strike as "Ferentinum
of the rock." It does not seem to stand on such steep cliffs as many
other hill-fortresses, Norba pre-eminently among them. But, when we
begin to follow the line of the walls, we find out that, whether Lord
Macaulay is right or wrong in speaking of Ferentinum at all, he has
at least chosen his epithet wisely. Ferentinum is Ferentinum of the
rock. Large parts of the wall stand directly on vast masses of rock,
and sometimes rock and wall almost lose themselves in one another.
And the walls of Ferentino certainly yield in interest to none of
our series. They are still standing through the greater part of their
ancient circuit, and for the most part they are of two manifest dates,
differing in material and construction. There is an original lower
part of the wall, built of huge blocks of lias which we may describe as
rude, but less rude than the rudest work at Cori. The height to which
this earliest construction of all reaches differs in different parts,
but it has in most parts been patched and raised, not only by later
repairs of all manner of dates, but long before then by a construction
of very respectable antiquity, which would seem venerable if it were
not for the elder and more massive stones beneath it. The later work
has a general likeness to the walls of Anagnia both in construction
and material, and it is distinguished from the more primitive work
by the same mark. The pilers of the elder stones had no notion of the
arch; the builders of the later wall were perfectly familiar with it.
The only complete opening of the earlier work is a small postern with
merely inclined sides; but in one of the ancient gates, not far from
the modern gate by which the visitor is most likely to enter, stones
of the earlier date support an arch of the second date. This ancient
entrance is, as usual, warily placed; the giants, or whoever they
were, from the days of Tiryns onwards, knew perfectly well how to take
a military advantage of any enemy who might attack their strongholds.
Another gate, now known as _Porta Maggiore_, is a much more elaborate
work, with its inner and outer arch still remaining. Here the gate is
placed with great skill, advanced in front at a point where the wall
turns at an angle. The wall may be followed, and followed to great
advantage, through the more part of its circuit. One hardly knows
whether to count it gain or loss that the path becomes most difficult
just at the point where, through large later repairs, the wall becomes
least interesting. When we have to scramble--all at least save Alpine
climbers--with constant thoughts for the safety of our legs and feet,
we are less able to take in the differences in the various forms of
construction, or to consider the dates to which we may be inclined to
refer each. In the more instructive parts of the walls of Ferentino no
such necessity is laid upon us; they may be studied with perfect ease,
and the outlook from the various points of their circuit may be enjoyed
at the same time. And at one point, not far from the _Porta Maggiore_,
it will be well to go down the hill a little way to study the long
inscription cut in the rock in honour of a local worthy and magistrate,
Aulus Quinctilius by name, who seems to have played much the same part
at Ferentinum in pagan days which Sir William Harpur played ages later
at Bedford. He founded everything that, according to the notions of
his day, could be founded. Among other things he ordained that thirty
bushels of nuts should be yearly given to be scrambled for by the
boys of Ferentinum, without distinction of bond or free. Now is the
will of this pious founder carried out? Are there any Italian Charity
Commissioners to look into these matters, and to see that the boys get
their nuts? Or, if the scrambling for nuts be deemed a nuisance--yet
many well-remembered scraps of Latin plead on its behalf--will they
devise a scheme for the better employment of the funds? Or has the
benefaction of the benevolent Quinctilius, like some benefactions
nearer home, been lost altogether? Two or three years ago the _Times_
was filled with letters complaining how a charitable foundation in
Somerset had vanished altogether, and how the founder's monument, once
standing in the church, had been buried under a neighbouring barn. In
one point at least the benevolent Aulus of Ferentinum has been more
lucky. When Ferentinum had _quatuorviri_, they did not bury people in
their temples, still less did they set up monuments in their temples to
people who were not buried in them. So the monument which commemorates
the bounty of Aulus Quinctilius stands in the open air clear enough to
be seen, well fenced in withal, which the visitor may perhaps regret,
as a little time may be wasted in searching for the key. But do his
benefactions go on? We will not hint at their having been alienated
by Goths or Vandals, by East-Roman exarchs or Lombard princes. Can we
trust the really dangerous characters in these parts of the world,
Popes, Popes' nephews, Roman princes, and Roman cardinals, who pull
down buildings and steal their columns to make their own palaces and
villas? Perhaps some of them may have swallowed up the funds which
should go in nuts to the boys of Ferentinum.
We have been writing as we dreamed on the spot. As at Anagni, we
wish--we must confess the weakness--to see independent Hernicans
wherever we can. It gives us therefore a little shock when we come
back and turn to our books, and find the walls of Hernican Ferentinum
spoken of, without any special emotion, as "Roman." We look up
again in a moment, and ask, What is Roman? At Ferentinum the word
certainly means something quite different from what it commonly
means in Britain and Northern Gaul. There we are happy if we light
on anything earlier than the third century A.D. Here no one asks us
to accept any date later than Sulla; some will allow us to go as far
back as the middle of the second century B.C. We are allowed to think
that the walls of Ferentinum were in being when old Carthage and old
Corinth were still standing. But we have not yet got to our great
piece of evidence. Ferentino contains inscriptions much older and more
important--though about the comparative importance some might raise a
doubt--than Aulus Quinctilius and his nuts. But we must get to them
by the proper road; we must get into what once was the _arx_, what
is now the ecclesiastical quarter. Now, at places like Ferentino,
ecclesiastical and domestic buildings seem like something kindly
thrown into the bargain. We go to look at walls, not at churches or
houses; so we get something more than we asked for when we find that
Ferentino contains many houses which are worth at least a glance,
and several churches which are worth much more than a glance. Indeed
at Ferentino the study of walls and that of churches cannot be kept
asunder. That some of the great stones have been taken to build the
small and now disused church of Saint Lawrence is a slight matter. The
most striking feature of Ferentino in any distant view consists of the
mass of buildings which is formed by piling the cathedral church, the
bell-tower, and the Bishop's palace, on the walls of the _arx_, as a
mighty sub-structure. The walls of the _arx_ show the same two dates
as the walls of the tower. In one part we have only the vast rude
stones of the first period; at another part they support the upper
range of the second. The first no one will refuse to our Hernicans, to
Hernicans older than Spurius Cassius; but how about the second, the
"Roman" date? This is claimed in several inscriptions as the work of
the censors Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius--censors, that is, not
of Rome but of Ferentinum. The inscription may be seen in the first
volume of the great _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, p. 238, and
its closer likeness is given at fol. lxvii., lxviii. of the _Priscae
Latinitatis Monumenta Epigraphica_. Now Aulus Hirtius and Marcus
Lollius are names of a frightfully modern sound, suggesting well-known
persons of the days of Divus Julius and Divus Augustus. But no one
asks us to think of them here, though we may likely enough have got
hold of the Hernican forefathers of those better-known Romans. They
had no such need to change their names and the alphabet in which they
are written, as when the son of the Etruscan Avle Felimne became the
Roman Publius Volumnius. Now our Hirtius and Lollius claim to have
built what they built from the foundation; but they must at the outside
only mean that they built the later work on the top of the primæval
wall. And to a zealous eye even the work of Hirtius and Lollius has an
archaic look about it. There are no columns against the wall, as in
the _Tabularium_ of Catulus at Rome; the work is finished with a row
of triglyphs, not unlike those on the tomb of "Cornelius Lucius Scipio
Gnaivod patre prognatus." But we need not go back quite so far as his
day. The further back we can go the better, but any time before Sulla
will do. The history of Ferentinum allows us to carry our Hernicans
of Ferentinum, like our Etruscans of Perusia, down to the Social War.
Ferentinum, it must be remembered, was one of those Hernican towns
which were true to Rome when Anagnia fought against her. What follows
is most instructive. The men of Ferentinum, steady allies of Rome,
refused the proffered reward of Roman citizenship, and chose rather
to remain a distinct, even if a dependent, community. That is to say,
the old Hernican city went on, as long doubtless as to the days of
the Social War, a self-ordering commonwealth, with its own laws and
magistrates--Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius among them--subject
only to the demands of military service which were needed in the wars
of Rome, and sometimes perhaps to the unlawful excesses of powerful
Romans.
This last fact comes out in a strange story told by Aulus Gellius (x.
3). It is an extract from a speech of Gaius Gracchus, setting forth
the wrongs of the Italian allies. The wife of a Roman prætor suddenly
wished the public baths of Ferentinum to be cleared and made ready for
herself. The thing was not done so fast as the great lady wished; so
her husband bade the two quæstors of the town to be seized; one was
scourged, the other threw himself over the wall. This tale, told in the
words of Gracchus, proves a good deal as to the arbitrary way in which
Roman magistrates are not ashamed to deal with the dependent cities
even of Italy, whatever might be their formal relation to Rome.
It is of less importance that Gellius casually speaks of the town as
a _municipium_, while Livy also casually implies its possession of the
Latin franchise. Such _obiter dicta_ do not go for very much. Scholars
sometimes get astray in these times from forgetting that, not only
casual sayings, but even formal documents, may sometimes err. Thus
not long ago we saw a solemn paper in which a public officer, bound to
accuracy, a clerk of the peace, had to describe several towns in the
West of England. We here read of "the county of the city of Bristol,"
the "borough of Gloucester," the "borough of Bath," and the "borough of
Taunton." An inquirer some ages hence might be misled into forgetting
that Bath is a "city" and Gloucester even a "county of a city." May
we not sometimes get wrong about _municipia_ and Latin colonies from
the same kind of cause? Ferentinum was not, in the strict sense, a
_municipium_, but an allied Hernican commonwealth. In the like sort,
we once saw an official document from a high sheriff calling on the
electors of a county to elect, not a "knight of the shire," as they
had done for six hundred years, but a hitherto unheard-of being called
a "member of Parliament." Is it not possible then that Livy, and
even Cicero, may sometimes use a wrong phrase in talking of tribes,
_curiae_, and centuries, in ages long before their own day?
The walls then, though called "Roman" in a vague sense--that is, it
would seem, simply not primæval, like those of Cori and Segni--are
doubtless Hernican in the sense of being built while Ferentinum was
still a separate Hernican community. The walls that we see are most
likely the walls over which the unlucky quæstor threw himself. The
walls of the _arx_, where we read the legend of Hirtius and Lollius,
connect the Hernican town with later times. Just at the point where the
inscription is they are carried up to form the Bishop's palace, and
from the middle of one side rises the bell-tower of the cathedral--a
very good example of the usual Romanesque type of such buildings.
The church of Ferentino is small and unpretending, and a good deal
damaged within, but it still keeps its main features, not only its
bell-tower, but its west front, its apses, its ranges of windows. A
little restoration, in the true sense of the word, would soon make
it into as good a specimen of its own class as could be needed. But,
unless we altogether misunderstood the words of one of its own clergy,
antiquity and simplicity are not esteemed at Ferentino. The little
minster is convicted of the crime of being old, a charge which, except
by comparison with the walls beneath it, cannot be denied. Only, if
the church be an offender on this score, how fearful must be the crime
of the walls? Unless we misunderstood in the most amazing way what
we heard with our own ears, the church of Ferentino, convicted of the
crime of old age, is sentenced to destruction. A new church is actually
begun; when it is finished the old one is to go. Happily the new one as
yet stands still for want of funds; let us hope that funds may refuse
to drop in till a wiser Bishop and Chapter shall rule at Ferentino.
The church at Ferentino is dedicated to Saint Ambrose, who may be seen
there in the worldly garb of the unbaptized prefect, before the infant
voice greeted him as Bishop of Milan. And in the inner buildings of the
_arx_--buildings most worthy of a visit on their own account--strange
tales lurk of the sufferings of the saint, which seem to find no place
either in history or in received legend. Among other things he was
thrown into a boiling caldron. Down below is another church _Santa
Maria Maggiore_, some centuries younger than the cathedral, and a
very pretty example of its style; which, as far as we know, no one
designs to destroy. Singularly graceful, but singularly un-Italian,
it strikes by the power of contrast, as it rises above the walls, or
as we go up to it from the gate which shares its surname. A few other
ecclesiastical and domestic scraps may also be picked up in the city
of the rock. The primitive remains are the great object in all these
places; but it is always a gain when the walls shelter something which
has an interest of another kind. The walls of the stout-hearted people
who chose rather to be citizens of Ferentinum than citizens of Rome
lose nothing by having been turned to an unlooked-for use as the holy
places of their successors, perhaps descendants, of another age and
another creed.