We follow the stream of Calore till we reach a city which, without
ever having been one of the great cities of the world, without having
been even one of the greatest cities of Italy, has always kept up an
important historic being. Beneventum is a familiar name in all ages;
yet Beneventum has never been either a mighty commonwealth like Venice
or Genoa, or the head of a mighty kingdom like Naples and Palermo.
It has had its princes; if we never heard of them before, we should
learn a good deal of them by studying the monuments of their city.
That is to say, the monuments will tell us a great deal about princes
nine hundred or a thousand years back; no monument that we remember in
Benevento tells us anything about the last prince who bore their title.
Let us suppose a wanderer who began his travels at Autun and who finds
himself, in the course of the same wandering, at Benevento. He will
feel it as a grotesque coincidence that, not so very long ago, a man
was living who had once been Prince of Benevento and who before that
had been Bishop of Autun. Benevento, among many other things that it
is, is also the later city of Talleyrand, as Autun is the earlier. But
there is this difference that one thinks of Talleyrand at Autun and one
does not think of him at Benevento. At Autun he has his place, though
a very strange place, in the long succession of Bishops of Autun; at
Benevento, though he bore the style of its prince, he stands all alone;
we cannot find a niche for him in the succession of the Beneventan
princes. Yet a prince of Benevento whose existence marks the ending
for a season of the long papal dominion in Benevento reminds us that
Benevento had its princes before that papal dominion began. It reminds
us of the two distinctive features in the later history of the city.
Benevento was first the seat of Lombard princes who, placed on the
borders of both empires, contrived to escape all practical submission
to either; it was then the seat of an outlying scrap of papal dominion
surrounded on all sides by the Sicilian realm. In both these characters
Benevento was a kind of curiosity on the historical map of Europe. But
the city had its ups and downs before those days, and amongst other
things it had gone through a somewhat grotesque change of name. It is
hard to believe that a city placed so far inland can really have been
of Greek origin; but legend attributed it to a Greek founder, and its
oldest name had a Greek sound. Greek _Maloeis_, Samnite _Maluentum_,
had, when it was read into Latin _Maloventum_, an ill sound; so, when
the Samnite stronghold was changed into the Roman colony, it took the
name of Beneventum, city of welcome.
Beneventum, marked by Procopius as a strong city in a high place,
stands low as compared with the true hill-cities. Still, as compared
with Capua, it might itself pass for a hill-city. It has just that
amount of rise above the river which there commonly is where there is a
river, such a rise as may be seen in many an English town which is not
as Durham or Lincoln. We miss the primæval walls of the hill-cities;
but we find, on the other hand, works of Roman and mediæval art such as
in the hill-cities we do not find. The arch of Trajan has vanished from
Rome, except so far as it lives in the sculptures which were torn from
it to enrich the arch of Constantine. But at Benevento, as at Ancona,
the memorial of the conqueror of Dacia still abides. The Beneventan
arch may indeed fairly take its place in the Roman series. It belongs
essentially to the same class of designs as the arch of Severus and
the arch of Constantine, while it has little in common with its own
tall and slender fellow at Ancona. At the same time, since it has, in
general effect at least, taken upon itself something of the position
of a town-gate, since it bears the name of _Porta aurea_, to match the
golden gate of Constantinople and the golden gate of Spalato, the arch
of Beneventum has now a somewhat greater air of reality than triumphal
arches commonly have. The weak point of that class of structures
is that they are of no use. They do not, like a wall, a gateway, a
house, a temple, a hall of council, serve any purpose in the ordinary
economy of things. They are purely monumental, set up to commemorate
something or somebody, but in no way to help on men's daily affairs,
public or private. And yet they are not mere monuments, like a statue
or an inscribed stone. A large building of this kind, having very
much the air of a building which does serve some purpose, is a little
deceptive. It is so like a real gateway that it calls up the thought
of a real gateway, and leaves us a little disappointed at finding that
the building, after all, never was of any use to anybody, and was set
up simply to be looked at. There is, therefore, something a little
unsatisfactory in the whole class of triumphal arches, and it may even
be that a slightly ludicrous element is thrown in when we find that the
immediate occasion for rearing this record of the life and exploits
of the "fortissimus princeps" whom it commemorates was the repair of
the Appian Way. But it does not become us to find fault with any built
and graven monument, specially with one of a time of which we have so
few written monuments as the memorable reign of Trajan. We are so much
the slaves of accidental associations, so apt to draw lines at some
altogether unreasonable point, that we may doubt whether the reign of
Trajan holds the place which it should hold in popular imagination.
Suetonius wrote the lives of Twelve Cæsars, and this mere accident has
caused the notion of a break which has no real existence between the
Suetonian Twelve and those who next followed them. The reign of Trajan
marks the Empire at its highest pitch of extent and power, at that
highest pitch which, in its own nature, comes just before the beginning
of decay. His days saw, too, the highest pitch of architectural
magnificence; and with Tacitus and Juvenal to adorn it, one might be
inclined to say that, as an age of Latin literature, the age of Trajan
might hold its own against any earlier period of the Imperial rule. For
we must remember that the great writers of the early days of Augustus
are in truth writers of the republican period living on into the
Empire. The Flavian period, continued under Trajan, is quite as rich as
the earlier days of the Empire itself. And we may notice that the arch
of Beneventum marks the reign of Trajan, and with it the Roman Empire,
at what was really its highest point. It was raised at a time when it
could commemorate conquered Dacia and tributary Armenia. That Dacia and
Armenia could be brought within the range of that Roman world which is
continued in the system of modern Europe is proved by daily witnesses.
But the arch of Beneventum was built too early to commemorate its
hero's later victories in the further East, momentary victories in
lands which neither Alexander nor Trajan could bring within the abiding
range of Western influences.
The arch of Trajan is so distinctly the most famous thing in Benevento
that it has carried us out of all chronological order. But the
historical interest of Beneventum lies earlier and later than Trajan's
day. In truth the _Pax Romana_ forbade that the main interest of any
Italian city should lie in Trajan's day. We may believe or not as
we please in the presence of Diomêdês and Æneas; but Pyrrhos, Hanno,
Totilas, and Manfred are visitors who cannot be forgotten. The city
has looked out on many battles, from the overthrow of the Molossian
to the overthrow of the Swabian. A pleasing tale in its history is
when that Tiberius Gracchus who is the first of a name to appear in
Roman history led back his victorious slave-soldiers to receive the
reward of freedom, and to be welcomed by the rejoicing people of the
faithful colony. For among the Thirty Cities of those days, the Latin
colony of Beneventum was not one of the laggard twelve, but one of
the faithful eighteen that were ready to endure all hardships. In
later warfare the city seems to have been less steadfast. It welcomed
Belisarius, and in after days Totilas took it without any trouble, and
if he destroyed the walls it was not out of revenge for any resistance
on the part of its inhabitants, but for fear they should supply a post
of defence for an imperial army. But the greatest day of Beneventum as
an historical city comes later than Totilas and earlier than Manfred.
The memory of that day may be studied in the chief remaining buildings
in the city, the two greatest churches and the castle. The west front
of the metropolitan church, a grand example of Italian Romanesque, is
furthermore a perfect chronicle of local history. There we may read,
built up into the wall, a crowd of monumental records of the Lombard
princes of Beneventum, with their deeds, especially their dealings
with the dangerous power of the Franks, set forth at length. The
bronze doors are famous, with their long array of Scriptural subjects
ending in a lesson in the ecclesiastical geography of the province,
the figures of the Archbishop of Beneventum and his suffragans. The
harmony of the front is a little marred by the single low and massive
corner-tower; but the inscription sums up the history of Beneventum,
political and physical, for some ages. The city was laid waste by the
Emperor Frederick in 1229 and by an earthquake in 1688. The tower was
built after the first overthrow in 1279; it was restored after the
second in 1690. Destruction wrought by the elements would thus seem
to be more easily repaired than destruction wrought by the hand of
Cæsar. But it is somewhat strange to find Frederick, in his own belief
a successor of Trajan, a follower of Trajan in Eastern conquests,
branded as a destroyer in the city where Trajan's memory is cherished.
But Frederick had to deal with a kind of power which Trajan knew not.
The wrath of the later Emperor fell on a city which was too faithful
to the Roman Bishop. The course of Trajan's rule was not likely to be
interfered with either by the obscure chief of the persecuted Christian
sect, or by any minister of the creed of which Trajan was himself chief
Pontiff.
Within the church the repairs done after the earthquake have wrought a
good deal of mischief. But we can still see the four ranges of columns
of a mighty basilica which must once have taken its place among the
noblest of its class. Their capitals are a little nondescript; but
they do not offend the eye; if they were certified to be of Trajan's
day, it would doubtless be the right thing to admire them. The ambones
and the Easter-light are lovely work of the early fourteenth century,
the days of a real _Renaissance_, truer than that which followed. The
treasury is rich in vestments and other precious things; but the reader
of Anselm's _Life_ looks in vain for that specially gorgeous vestment
which a Beneventan Archbishop of the eleventh century bore away from
Canterbury in exchange for the arm of St. Bartholomew, and which made
its wearer the most splendid object among the assembled fathers at
Bari. If this missing garment carries our thoughts to England, the
round church of St. Sophia--hexagonal in its inner range--carries us
to the Eastern world, and reminds us that there was more than one line
of successors of Trajan, and that Beneventum came under the influences
of both. The cloister, with its amazing series of capitals, its birds,
its elephants, its hunting scenes, may rank with those of Aosta and of
Arles, of which that of Aosta can supply camels to match the Beneventan
elephants. The castle dates only from Pope John the Twenty-second, far
away at Avignon; we look perhaps more carefully at the older fragments
built up in its walls and on the lion in front of it. With the lion
in our thoughts we may look out for other beasts, graven or molten
or abiding in their own relics. Procopius saw there the tusks of the
Kalydonian boar, as in later times he might, either at Warwick or at
Bristol, have seen the ribs of the dun cow. It is for palæontologists
to say what it was that the Beneventan antiquaries really showed
him. Failing this natural wonder we go to pay our respects to another
beast whose shape is due to man's device, in quite another part of the
city. A rudely carved bovine animal, in which local patriotism sees
the Samnite bull--the bull which, on the coins of revived Samnium, so
proudly trampled down the Roman wolf--is now cruelly to be ruled as
nothing better than a monument of intruding Apis-worship. We have less
time to spend at Benevento than at some other cities; but the Roman
arches and vaults of the strange building called _Quaranta Santi_,
the grand Roman bridge below, must not be forgotten, and we must still
give one more thought to the two mighty men whose hopes were shattered
at Beneventum. Manfred fell with his faithful Saracens around him;
Pyrrhos lived to fall by a meaner end at Argos; but Beneventum ended
the real career of both. It is strange how the two were in some sort
the converse of each other. Pyrrhos carried the Epeirot arms into
Sicily and southern Italy; Manfred, lord of Sicily and southern Italy,
established a Sicilian dominion on the coast of Epeiros. Korkyra,
Corfu, the island which has seen every master except the Turk, formed
part of the dominions of both alike. We leave Benevento for another
city in which the East and the West of Europe, and a crowd of other
elements besides, meet yet more closely than they do at Benevento.
At Beneventum the eye of Horace began to be caught by the well-known
mountains of Apulia; Procopius somewhat boldly speaks of inland
Beneventum as being opposite to Dalmatia. The city which we take as
our next chief goal, if not strictly opposite to Dalmatia, is so marked
as being opposite to one Illyrian port as to have sent its name, so to
speak, across the Hadriatic. We will not trouble ourselves to look out
for Equotuticum, or to regale ourselves with either the bread or the
water of Canusium. It is to the walls of Bari, fishy Bari, that we have
to make our way; at Bari, Greek, Latin, Saracen, even Englishman, are
all at home, and Bari is opposite to Antivari.