We have done for a while with the hill-cities, though it would not
be hard to find several other spots of the same kind, rivalling
in historical interest, and, by all accounts, rivalling also as to
existing remains, any of those which we have gone through. But the
special necessities of an _iter ad Brundisium_ carry us to quite other
parts of the Italian peninsula, to parts where the sources of interest
are fully equal to those of Etruscan or Latin cities, but where they
are wholly different in kind. We leave the hills, or touch only their
lowest slopes. For a while the mountains still soar above us, while our
work is in the plains. Presently we lose the mountains even as distant
companions; but before long we have the blue waves of Hadria as their
substitute. At last we reach our goal; we go for a season even beyond
it. And when we have gone as far as the devices of modern science can
carry us, when we have reached the very end of the general railway
system of Central Europe, our landscape again takes in both the sea
and the mountains. But the eye now ranges beyond the bounds of Italy,
beyond the bounds of Western Europe. We see across the narrowed waters
to the heights of another peninsula. Without seeking for more than a
chance likeness between the names--a name that ranges from the Euxine
to the Hudson--without seeking in any sort to identify the Ἀλβανοί of
Dionysios and the Ἀλβανοί of imperial Anna, it is still with a curious
feeling of coincidence that the eyes which not many days before were
looking up to the mount of Alba, now look across the sea to the wilder
mountains of Albania.
Some of those who now looked across had already learned something of
those heights from earlier and nearer experiences. Still it is a new
feeling to look out on them from Italian ground, above all to look
out on them from the spot where the Turk made his entrance into the
western world, and where the signs of his short presence have stamped
themselves deep on local memory. Standing at Otranto, looking on the
Albanian heights, the foremost thought is how near Otranto came to
being to the West of Europe all that the Thracian Kallipolis was to
the East. But we are as yet far from Otranto, far from the heel of the
boot, far even from any point of the Hadriatic coast. We are still on
the western side of the great backbone of Italy; we have still to catch
glimpses of the Tyrrhenian waters, to look, as at distant objects, on
the bold outline of Ischia and on Vesuvius crowned with his pillar of
cloud. But this time we do not obey the seemingly inflexible law which
decrees that he who goes to Rome and does not turn back from Rome must
go and see Naples, whether he dies after the sight or not. This time
we have no call either to Naples itself or to the far more attractive
range of objects of which Naples is the centre. Our errand is to pass
from the primæval cities of the Latin and the Volscian to the cities of
south-eastern Italy. Their chief present attraction lies in the series
of churches raised in the days of the Norman and Angevin kings; but
their memories carry us back through a long series of stirring ages,
not indeed to the hoary antiquity of Cori and Alatri, but to the days
when Southern Italy, the earliest Italy, was counted for a part of
Hellas. It is not for nothing that we look out from thence on those
eastern lands which then perhaps were the less Hellenic of the two.
Greek influence indeed begins--some say that it historically began--on
the western, not the eastern, shore of Italy, in lands which, in the
present journey, we leave to the west of us and see only in glimpses.
We hurry on, passing by much that we might well stop and study, from
Frosinone to Caserta. And we are luxurious enough to rejoice at finding
ourselves there. We have proved that a few days and nights may be
passed among Volscians and Hernicans without damage or even serious
discomfort; but we trust that it is not an avowal to be ashamed of that
it is a pleasing exchange to find ourselves in thoroughly civilized
quarters in the plains of Campania. We have found our Capua; not,
however, at Capua itself, but under the shadow of the royal palace a
few miles off. But we desert Capua only because Capuan comforts--we
will not talk of luxuries--have fled from Capua and have found their
new home at Caserta. Those who have tried a night at Capua itself,
_Santa Maria di vetere Capua_, not the newer Capua on the site of
Casilinum, report that, if Hannibal's army could be quartered there
again, they would certainly not be corrupted by anything excessive in
the way of creature comforts. Anagni and Frosinone are said to be far
in advance of the city which long was to Rome what Paris long was to
London. The excuse doubtless would be that Capua is Capua no longer.
The name of Capua, and with it the stirring history of early mediæval
Capua, has wandered from the true Capua to Casilinum. It is not at the
town now called Capua, but at the village--it is hardly more--of Santa
Maria, that we must look for what is left of Etruscan Vulturnum, of
Samnite, Campanian, and Roman Capua, the special city of pleasure, the
city where, before all others, pleasure was sought for in scenes of
blood.
On our present course we have no special call to either Capua, old or
new. We have in times past seen both the amphitheatre of the elder
Capua and the cathedral portico of the newer. But, when Caserta has
been chosen as a convenient halting-place, it would be a shame for the
historic traveller to pass by two such famous spots without a glance at
either, while in their neighbourhood lies a third object, of no small
value in its own line, which will have the further charm of novelty.
It is well, while still fresh from the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome,
to look again on the amphitheatre of Capua--Capua, the mistress of
Rome in the sports of slaughter. There is a certain special lore of
amphitheatres, the mastery of which does not fall to the lot of all,
even of those who look on the monuments either of Rome or Capua with
a general historical eye. But it is easy to see that in the Capuan
amphitheatre the underground arrangements can be studied as they
hardly can be studied anywhere else. The walls, the seats, are far
less perfect than at Rome; much more then are they less perfect than
at Verona. But the substructure seems wholly untouched. In the Roman
Coliseum the underground work is only partially brought to light,
while of what has been brought to light it is not always clear how
much is the work of the Flavian Emperors, and how much of the mediæval
barons who turned the amphitheatre into a fortress. Here, better than
at Rome, we may study what really happened when the lions came up
from underground to be slaughtered by the imperial hands of Commodus.
If any question is raised as to the date of the building, one who is
not a special Capuan topographer may be satisfied with the fact, that
the inscription of Hadrian claims for that prince only a renovation
and enrichment of the building with columns and statues. This seems
to imply that the shell is older; it may be far older. In idea at
least, the amphitheatre of Capua is far older than that of Rome. It
illustrates a strange but well-known law of human nature, that the
taste for luxury and the taste for blood should find a common home.
Besides the modernized basilica, besides the tombs of various sizes
and designs which line the road--one of which is indeed singularly
like a model of an amphitheatre--the true Capua has little to show
besides the amphitheatre itself. It is strange to see so great a city,
one which for some ages must have been far greater, far more splendid
than Rome, so utterly gone--or rather to see the little that is left of
it translated to another site. But great as Capua undoubtedly was, we
begin to doubt its extreme antiquity. Capua, once Etruscan Vulturnum,
remained Etruscan Vulturnum till the fourth century of Rome. It was the
last remnant of the great Etruscan dominion in that region of Italy.
As such, it represents a state of things far older than Rome. But the
city itself may well be of later date than Rome. At all events, we may
be sure that it is of far later date than Cori and Alatri. The city
by the Vulturnus, down in the plain, taking its name from its guardian
river, marks an advance not only on the mountain strongholds of Segni
and Norba, but on Veii, on Rome itself. It must be far older than
Florence; but it is the fellow of Florence; it marks an equal forsaking
of the oldest type of a city. It is hard to see where the _arx_ of
Capua could have stood, if we are to understand by an _arx_ something
set upon a hill. But what a position that of Capua was, according to
later ideas, is shown by its revival after the Hannibalian war. The
Samnite settlement, parted away from their kinsfolk of the mountains,
had become Campanians, and, to seek shelter against their kinsfolk of
the mountains, they had been fain in some sort to become Romans.
"Cives Romani tunc facti sunt Campani,"
says the line which comes as such a relief after the involved
constructions of later Latin writers, a line which records a fact as
simply worded as it could be in a mediæval chronicle, which gives us
a true leonine rime, and which makes its way through six feet without
a single dactyl. To the Campanian knights their Roman citizenship was
doubtless pleasant enough; it may have been less so to the commons,
who had the private rights only, and who were burthened with a payment
to the knights. Yet we find that the revolt of Capua to Hannibal was
largely the work of noble leaders. The truth doubtless is that the
large amount of independence which Capua still kept only made any
measure of dependence more galling. Then came the blow which made Capua
for a while cease to be a city. Its lands became the property of the
Roman people; its walls were left simply as a shelter for those who
filled them. Yet the great city of Campania arose again, to be once
more a great city till the second blow, when men of Semitic speech came
not as deliverers but as destroyers, when Capua moved to Casilinum,
and when all that was left of the elder city put itself under the
keeping of a heavenly protectress as Santa Maria di Capua. Among those
remnants of what was, the walls of Capua, the _arx_ of Capua, are not
to be found; at all events they do not strike the traveller on his
first or his second visit. For something faintly answering to a Capuan
_arx_, he takes himself to the neighbouring mountains. There, on their
lowest slopes, looking out on Vesuvius and Ischia, looking down on the
Campanian plain, with its river, with its older and its newer Capua, we
come to a spot where a famous temple of the older faith has given way
to a less famous one of the new. A journey from Caserta to the Capuan
amphitheatre in the plain may well take in a journey to the slope of
Tifata, the slope of the hill on which Hannibal so often pitched his
camp, and where the church of Sant' Angelo in Formis has supplanted the
holy place of Diana and Jupiter, which took its name from the mountain
which rises above its massy tower.