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AVE ROMA IMMORTALIS
STUDIES FROM THE CHRONICLES OF ROME
BY
FRANCIS MARION CRAWFORD
IN TWO VOLUMES
VOL. I
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1899
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1898,
By The Macmillan Company.
Set up and electrotyped October, 1898. Reprinted November,
December, 1898.
_Norwood Press_
_J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith_
_Norwood, Mass., U.S.A._
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOLUME I
PAGE
THE MAKING OF THE CITY 1
THE EMPIRE 22
THE CITY OF AUGUSTUS 57
THE MIDDLE AGE 78
THE FOURTEEN REGIONS 100
REGION I MONTI 106
REGION II TREVI 155
REGION III COLONNA 190
REGION IV CAMPO MARZO 243
REGION V PONTE 274
REGION VI PARIONE 297
LIST OF PHOTOGRAVURE PLATES
VOLUME I
Map of Rome _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
The Wall of Romulus 4
Palace of the Caesars 30
The Campagna and Ruins of the Claudian Aqueduct 50
Temple of Castor and Pollux 70
Basilica Constantine 90
Basilica of Saint John Lateran 114
Baths of Diocletian 140
Fountain of Trevi 158
Piazza Barberini 188
Porta San Lorenzo 214
Villa Borghese 230
Piazza del Popolo 256
Island in the Tiber 280
Palazzo Massimo alle Colonna 306
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
VOLUME I
PAGE
Palatine Hill and Mouth of the Cloaca Maxima 1
Ruins of the Servian Wall 8
Etruscan Bridge at Veii 16
Tombs on the Appian Way 22
Brass of Tiberius, showing the Temple of Concord 24
The Tarpeian Rock 28
Caius Julius Caesar 36
Octavius Augustus Caesar 45
Brass of Trajan, showing the Circus Maximus 56
Brass of Antoninus Pius, in Honour of Faustina, with
Reverse showing Vesta bearing the Palladium 57
Ponte Rotto, now destroyed 67
Atrium of Vesta 72
Brass of Gordian, showing the Colosseum 78
The Colosseum 87
Ruins of the Temple of Saturn 92
Brass of Gordian, showing Roman Games 99
Ruins of the Julian Basilica 100
Brass of Titus, showing the Colosseum 105
Region I Monti, Device of 106
Santa Francesca Romana 111
San Giovanni in Laterano 116
Piazza Colonna 119
Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano 126
Santa Maria Maggiore 134
Porta Maggiore, supporting the Channels of the Aqueduct
of Claudius and the Anio Novus 145
Interior of the Colosseum 152
Region II Trevi, Device of 155
Grand Hall of the Colonna Palace 162
Interior of the Mausoleum of Augustus 169
Forum of Trajan 171
Ruins of Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli 180
Palazzo del Quirinale 185
Region III Colonna, Device of 190
Arch of Titus 191
Twin Churches at the Entrance of the Corso 197
San Lorenzo in Lucina 204
Palazzo Doria-Pamfili 208
Palazzo di Monte Citorio 223
Palazzo di Venezia 234
Region IV Campo Marzo, Device of 248
Piazza di Spagna 251
Trinita de Monti 257
Villa Medici 265
Region V Ponte 274
Bridge of Sant' Angelo 285
Villa Negroni 292
Region VI Parione, Device of 297
Piazza Navona 303
Ponte Sisto 307
The Cancelleria 316
WORKS CONSULTED
NOT INCLUDING CLASSIC WRITERS NOR ENCYCLOPAEDIAS
1. AMPERE--Histoire Romaine a Rome.
AMPERE--L'Empire Remain a Rome.
2. BARACCONI--I Rioni di Roma.
3. BOISSIER--Promenades Archeologiques.
4. BRYCE--The Holy Roman Empire.
5. CELLINI--Memoirs.
6. COPPI--Memoire Colonnesi.
7. FORTUNATO--Storia delle vite delle Imperatrici Romane.
8. GIBBON--Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
9. GNOLI--Vittoria Accoramboni.
10. GREGOROVIUS--Geschichte der Stadt Rom.
11. HARE--Walks in Rome.
12. JOSEPHUS--Life of.
13. LANCIANI--Ancient Rome.
14. LETI--Vita di Sisto V.
15. MURATORI--Scriptores Rerum Italicarum.
MURATORI--Annali d'Italia.
MURATORI--Antichita Italiane.
16. RAMSAY AND LANCIANI--A Manual of Roman Antiquities.
17. SCHNEIDER--Das Alte Rom.
18. SILVAGNI--La Corte e la Societa Romana.
[Illustration: PALATINE HILL AND MOUTH OF THE CLOACA MAXIMA]
Ave Roma Immortalis
I
The story of Rome is the most splendid romance in all history. A few
shepherds tend their flocks among volcanic hills, listening by day and
night to the awful warnings of the subterranean voice,--born in danger,
reared in peril, living their lives under perpetual menace of
destruction, from generation to generation. Then, at last, the deep
voice swells to thunder, roaring up from the earth's heart, the
lightning shoots madly round the mountain top, the ground rocks, and the
air is darkened with ashes. The moment has come. One man is a leader,
but not all will follow him. He leads his small band swiftly down from
the heights, and they drive a flock and a little herd before them,
while each man carries his few belongings as best he can, and there are
few women in the company. The rest would not be saved, and they perish
among their huts before another day is over.
Down, always downwards, march the wanderers, rough, rugged, young with
the terrible youth of those days, and wise only with the wisdom of
nature. Down the steep mountain they go, down over the rich, rolling
land, down through the deep forests, unhewn of man, down at last to the
river, where seven low hills rise out of the wide plain. One of those
hills the leader chooses, rounded and grassy; there they encamp, and
they dig a trench and build huts. Pales, protectress of flocks, gives
her name to the Palatine Hill. Rumon, the flowing river, names the
village Rome, and Rome names the leader Romulus, the Man of the River,
the Man of the Village by the River; and to our own time the
twenty-first of April is kept and remembered, and even now honoured, for
the very day on which the shepherds began to dig their trench on the
Palatine, the date of the Foundation of Rome, from which seven hundred
and fifty-four years were reckoned to the birth of Christ.
And the shepherds called their leader King, though his kingship was over
but few men. Yet they were such men as begin history, and in the scant
company there were all the seeds of empire. First the profound faith of
natural mankind, unquestioning, immovable, inseparable from every daily
thought and action; then fierce strength, and courage, and love of life
and of possession; last, obedience to the chosen leader, in clear
liberty, when one should fail, to choose another. So the Romans began to
win the world, and won it in about six hundred years.
By their camp-fires, by their firesides in their little huts, they told
old tales of their race, and round the truth grew up romantic legend,
ever dear to the fighting man and to the husbandman alike, with strange
tales of their first leader's birth, fit for poets, and woven to stir
young hearts to daring, and young hands to smiting. Truth there was
under their stories, but how much of it no man can tell: how Amulius of
Alba Longa slew his sons, and slew also his daughter, loved of Mars,
mother of twin sons left to die in the forest, like Oedipus,
father-slayers, as Oedipus was, wolf-suckled, of whom one was born to
kill the other and be the first King, and be taken up to Jupiter in
storm and lightning at the last. The legend of wise Numa, next, taught
by Egeria; her stony image still weeps trickling tears for her royal
adept, and his earthen cup, jealously guarded, was worshipped for more
than a thousand years; legends of the first Arval brotherhood, dim as
the story of Melchisedec, King and priest, but lasting as Rome itself.
Tales of King Tullus, when the three Horatii fought for Rome against
the three Curiatii, who smote for Alba and lost the day--Tullus
Hostilius, grandson of that first Hostus who had fought against the
Sabines; and always more legend, and more, and more, sometimes misty,
sometimes clear and direct in action as a Greek tragedy. They hover upon
the threshold of history, with faces of beauty or of terror, sublime,
ridiculous, insignificant, some born of desperate, real deeds, many
another, perhaps, first told by some black-haired shepherd mother to her
wondering boys at evening, when the brazen pot simmered on the
smouldering fire, and the father had not yet come home.
But down beneath the legend lies the fact, in hewn stones already far in
the third thousand of their years. Digging for truth, searchers have
come here and there upon the first walls and gates of the Palatine
village, straight, strong and deeply founded. The men who made them
meant to hold their own, and their own was whatsoever they were able to
take from others by force. They built their walls round a four-sided
space, wide enough for them, scarcely big enough a thousand years later
for the houses of their children's rulers, the palaces of the Caesars of
which so much still stands today.
Then came the man who built the first bridge across the river, of wooden
piles and beams, bolted with bronze, because the Romans had no iron yet,
and ever afterwards repaired with wood and bronze, for its sanctity, in
perpetual veneration of Ancus Martius, fourth King of Rome. That was the
bridge Horatius kept against Porsena of Clusium, while the fathers hewed
it down behind him.
[Illustration: WALL OF ROMULUS]
Tarquin the first came next, a stranger of Greek blood, chosen, perhaps,
because the factions in Rome could not agree. Then Servius, great and
good, built his tremendous fortification, and the King of Italy today,
driving through the streets in his carriage, may look upon the wall of
the King who reigned in Rome more than two thousand and four hundred
years ago.
Under those six rulers, from Romulus to Servius, from the man of the
River Village to the man of walls, Rome had grown from a sheepfold to a
town, from a town to a walled city, from a city to a little nation,
matched against all mankind, to win or die, inch by inch, sword in hand.
She was a kingdom now, and her men were subjects; and still the third
law of great races was strong and waking. Romans obeyed their leader so
long as he could lead them well--no longer. The twilight of the Kings
gathered suddenly, and their names were darkened, and their sun went
down in shame and hate. In the confusion, tragic legend rises to tell
the story. For the first time in Rome, a woman, famous in all history,
turned the scale. The King's son, passionate, terrible, false, steals
upon her in the dark. 'I am Sextus Tarquin, and there is a sword in my
hand.' Yet she yielded to no fear of steel, but to the horror of
unearned shame beyond death. On the next day, when she lay before her
husband and her father and the strong Brutus, her story told, her deed
done, splendidly dead by her own hand, they swore the oath in which the
Republic was born. While father, husband and friend were stunned with
grief, Brutus held up the dripping knife before their eyes. 'By this
most chaste blood, I swear--Gods be my witnesses--that I will hunt down
Tarquin the Proud, himself, his infamous wife and every child of his,
with fire and sword, and with all my might, and neither he nor any other
man shall ever again be King in Rome.' So they all swore, and bore the
dead woman out into the market-place, and called on all men to stand by
them.
They kept their word, and the tale tells how the Tarquins were driven
out to a perpetual exile, and by and by allied themselves with Porsena,
and marched on Rome, and were stopped only at the Sublician bridge by
brave Horatius.
Chaos next. Then all at once the Republic stands out, born full grown
and ready armed, stern, organized and grasping, but having already
within itself the quickened opposites that were to fight for power so
long and so fiercely,--the rich and the poor, the patrician and the
plebeian, the might and the right.
There is a wonder in that quick change from Kingdom to Commonwealth,
which nothing can make clear, except, perhaps, modern history. Say that
two thousand or more years hereafter men shall read of what our
grandfathers, our fathers and ourselves have seen done in France within
a hundred years, out of two or three old books founded mostly on
tradition; they may be confused by the sudden disappearance of kings, by
the chaos, the wild wars and the unforeseen birth of a lasting republic,
just as we are puzzled when we read of the same sequence in ancient
Rome. Men who come after us will have more documents, too. It is not
possible that all books and traces of written history should be
destroyed throughout the world, as the Gauls burned everything in Rome,
except the Capitol itself, held by the handful of men who had taken
refuge there.
So the Kingdom fell with a woman's death, and the Commonwealth was made
by her avengers. Take the story as you will, for truth or truth's
legend, it is for ever humanly true, and such deeds would rouse a nation
today as they did then and as they set Rome on fire once more nearly
sixty years later.
But all the time Rome was growing as if the very stones had life to put
out shoots and blossoms and bear fruit. Round about the city the great
Servian wall had wound like a vast finger, in and out, grasping the
seven hills, and taking in what would be a fair-sized city even in our
day. They were the last defences Rome built for herself, for nearly nine
hundred years.
Nothing can give a larger idea of Rome's greatness than that; not all
the temples, monuments, palaces, public buildings of later years can
tell half the certainty of her power expressed by that one fact--Rome
needed no walls when once she had won the world.
But it is very hard to guess at what the city was, in those grim times
of the early fight for life. We know the walls, and there were nineteen
gates in all, and there were paved roads; the wooden bridge, the Capitol
with its first temple and first fortress, the first Forum with the
Sacred Way, were all there, and the public fountain, called the
Tullianum, and a few other sites are certain. The rest must be imagined.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE SERVIAN WALL]
Rome was a brown city in those days, when there was no marble and little
stucco: a brown city teeming with men and women clothed mostly in grey
and brown and black woollen cloaks, like those the hill shepherds wear
today, caught up under one arm and thrown far over the shoulder in dark
folds. The low houses without any outer windows, entered by one rough
door, were built close together, and those near the Forum had shops
outside them, low-browed places, dark but not deep, where the cloaked
keeper sat behind a stone counter among his wares, waiting for custom,
watching all that happened in the market-place, gathering in gossip from
one buyer to exchange it for more with the next, altogether not unlike
the small Eastern merchant of today.
Yet during more than half the time, there were few young men, or men in
prime, in the streets of Rome. They were fighting more than half the
year, while their fathers and their children stayed behind with the
women. The women sat spinning and weaving wool in their little brown
houses; the boys played, fought, ran races naked in the streets; the
small girls had their quiet games and, surely, their dolls, made of
rags, stuffed with the soft wool waste from their mothers' spindles and
looms. The old men, scarred and seamed in the battles of an age when
fighting was all hand to hand, kept the shops, or sunned themselves in
the market-place, shelling and chewing lupins to pass the time, as the
Romans have always done, and telling old tales, or boasting to each
other of their half-grown grandchildren, and of their full-grown sons,
fighting far away in the hills and the plains that Rome might have more
possession. Meanwhile the maidens went in pairs to the springs to fetch
water, or down to the river in small companies to wash the woollen
clothes and dry them in the shade of the old wild trees, lest in the sun
they should shrink and thicken; black-haired, black-eyed, dark-skinned
maids, all of them, strong and light of foot, fit to be mothers of more
soldiers, to slay more enemies, and bring back more spoil. Then, as in
our own times, the flocks of goats were driven in from the pastures at
early morning and milked from door to door, for each household, and
driven out again to the grass before the sun was high. In the old wall
there was the Cattle Gate, the Porta Mugonia, named, as the learned say,
from the lowing of the herds. Then, as in the hill towns not long ago,
the serving women, who were slaves, sat cross-legged on the ground in
the narrow court within the house, with the hand-mill of two stones
between them, and ground the wheat to flour for the day's meal. There
have been wonderful survivals of the first age even to our own time.
But that which has not come down to us is the huge vitality of those men
and women. The world's holders have never risen suddenly in hordes; they
have always grown by degrees out of little nations, that could live
through more than their neighbours. Calling up the vision of the first
Rome, one must see, too, such human faces and figures of men as are
hardly to be found among us nowadays,--the big features, the great,
square, devouring jaws, the steadily bright eyes, the strongly built
brows, coarse, shagged hair, big bones, iron muscles and starting
sinews. There are savage countries that still breed such men. They may
have their turn next, when we are worn out. Browning has made John the
Smith a memorable type.
Rome was a clean city in those days. One of the Tarquins had built the
great arched drain which still stands unshaken and in use, and smaller
ones led to it, draining the Forum and all the low part of the town. The
people were clean, far beyond our ordinary idea of them, as is plain
enough from the contemptuous way in which the Latin authors use their
strong words for uncleanliness. A dirty man was an object of pity, and
men sometimes went about in soiled clothes to excite the public
sympathy, as beggars do today in all countries. Dirt meant abject
poverty, and in a grasping, getting race, poverty was the exception,
even while simplicity was the rule. For all was simple with them, their
dress, their homes, their lives, their motives, and if one could see the
Rome of Tarquin the Proud, this simplicity would be of all
characteristics the most striking, compared with what we know of later
Rome, and with what we see about us in our own times. Simplicity is not
strength, but the condition in which strength is least hampered in its
full action.
It was easy to live simply in such a place and in such a climate, under
a wise King. The check in the first straight run of Rome's history
brought the Romans suddenly face to face with the first great
complication of their career, which was the struggle between the rich
and the poor; and again the half truth rises up to explain the fact.
Men whose first instinct was to take and hold took from one another in
peace when they could not take from their enemies in war, since they
must needs be always taking from some one. So the few strong took all
from the many weak, till the weak banded themselves together to resist
the strong, and the struggle for life took a new direction.
The grim figure of Lucius Junius Brutus rises as the incarnation of that
character which, at great times, made history, but in peace made
trouble. The man who avenged Lucretia, who drove out the Tarquins, and
founded the Republic, is most often remembered as the father who sat
unmoved in judgment on his two traitor sons, and looked on with stony
eyes while they paid the price of their treason in torment and death.
That one deed stands out, and we forget how he himself fell fighting for
Rome's freedom.
But still the evil grew at home, and the hideous law of creditor and
debtor, which only fiercest avarice could have devised, ground the poor,
who were obliged to borrow to pay the tax-gatherer, and made slaves of
them almost to the ruin of the state.
Just then Etruria wakes, shadowy, half Greek, the central power of
Italy, between Rome and Gaul. Porsena, the Lar of Clusium, comes against
the city with a great host in gilded arms. Terror descends like a dark
mist over the young nation. The rich fear for their riches, the poor for
their lives. In haste the fathers gather great supplies of corn against
a siege; credit and debt are forgotten; patrician and plebeian join
hands as Porsena reaches Janiculum, and three heroic figures of romance
stand forth from a host of heroes. Horatius keeps the bridge, first with
two comrades, then, at the last, alone in the glory of single-handed
fight against an army, sure of immortality whether he live or die.
Scaevola, sworn with the three hundred to slay the Lar, stabs the wrong
man, and burns his hand to the wrist to show what tortures he can bear
unmoved. Cloelia, the maiden hostage, rides her young steed at the
yellow torrent, and swims the raging flood back to the Palatine.
Cloelia and Horatius get statues in the Forum; Scaevola is endowed with
great lands, which his race holds for centuries, and leaves a name so
great that two thousand years later, Sforza, greatest leader of the
Middle Age, coveting long ancestry, makes himself descend from the man
who burned off his own hand.
They are great figures, the two men and the noble girl, and real to us,
in a way, because we can stand on the very ground they trod, where
Horatius fought, where Scaevola suffered and where Cloelia took the
river. They are nearer to us than Romulus, nearer even than Lucretia, as
each figure, following the city's quick life, has more of reality about
it, and not less of heroism.
For two hundred years the Romans strove with each other in law making;
the fathers for exclusive power and wealth, the plebeians for freedom,
first, and then for office in the state; a time of fighting abroad for
land, and of contention at home about its division. In fifty years the
poor had their Tribunes, but it took them nearly three times as long,
after that, to make themselves almost the fathers' equals in power.
Once they tried a new kind of government by a board of ten, and it held
for a while, till again a woman's life turned the tide of Roman history,
and fair young Virginia, stabbed by her father in the Forum, left a name
as lasting as any of that day.
Romance again, but the true romance, above doubt, at last; not at all
mythical, but full of fate's unanswerable logic, which makes dim stories
clear to living eyes. You may see the actors in the Forum, where it all
happened,--the lovely girl with frightened, wondering eyes; the father,
desperate, white-lipped, shaking with the thing not yet done; Appius
Claudius smiling among his friends and clients; the sullen crowd of
strong plebeians, and the something in the chill autumn air that was a
warning of fate and fateful change. Then the deed. A shriek at the edge
of the throng; a long, thin knife, high in air, trembling before a
thousand eyes; a harsh, heartbroken, vengeful voice; a confusion and a
swaying of the multitude, and then the rising yell of men overlaid,
ringing high in the air from the Capitol right across the Forum to the
Palatine, and echoing back the doom of the Ten.
The deed is vivid still, and then there is sudden darkness. One thinks
of how that man lived afterwards. Had Virginius a home, a wife, other
children to mourn the dead one? Or was he a lonely man, ten times alone
after that day, with the memory of one flashing moment always undimmed
in a bright horror? Who knows? Did anyone care? Rome's story changed its
course, turning aside at the river of Virginia's blood, and going on
swiftly in another way.
To defeat this time, straight to Rome's first and greatest humiliation;
to the coming of the Gauls, sweeping everything before them, Etruscans,
Italians, Romans, up to the gates of the city and over the great moat
and wall of Servius, burning, destroying, killing everything, to the
foot of the central rock; baffled at the last stronghold on a dark night
by a flock of cackling geese, but not caring for so small a thing when
they had swallowed up the rest, or not liking the Latin land, perhaps,
and so, taking ransom for peace and marching away northwards again
through the starved and harried hills and valleys of Etruria to their
own country. And six centuries passed away before an enemy entered Rome
again.
But the Gauls left wreck and ruin and scarcely one stone upon another in
the great desolation; they swept away all records of history, then and
there, and the general destruction was absolute, so that the Rome of the
Republic and of the Empire, the centre and capital of the world, began
to exist from that day. Unwillingly the people bore back Juno's image
from Veii, where they had taken refuge and would have stayed, and built
houses, and would have called that place Rome. But the nobles had their
own way, and the great construction began, of which there was to be no
end for many hundreds of years, in peace and war, mostly while hard
fighting was going on abroad.
[Illustration: ETRUSCAN BRIDGE AT VEII]
They built hurriedly at first, for shelter, and as best they could,
crowding their little houses in narrow streets with small care for
symmetry or adornment. The second Rome must have seemed but a poor
village compared with the solidly built city which the Gauls had burnt,
and it was long before the present could compare with the past. In haste
men seized on fragments of all sorts, blocks of stone, cracked and
defaced in the flames, charred beams that could still serve, a door
here, a window there, and such bits of metal as they could pick up. An
irregular, crowded town sprang up, and a few rough temples, no doubt as
pied and meanly pieced as many of those early churches built of odds and
ends of ruin, which stand to this day.
It is not impossible that the motley character of Rome, of which all
writers speak in one way or another, had its first cause in that second
building of the city. Rome without ruins would hardly seem Rome at all,
and all was ruined in that first inroad of the savage Gauls,--houses,
temples, public places. When the Romans came back from Veii they must
have found the Forum not altogether unlike what it is today, but
blackened with smoke, half choked with mouldering humanity, strewn with
charred timbers, broken roof tiles and the wreck of much household
furniture; a sorrowful confusion reeking with vapours of death, and
pestilential with decay. It was no wonder that the poor plebeians lost
heart and would have chosen to go back to the clear streets and cleaner
air of Veii. Their little houses were lost and untraceable in the
universal chaos. But the rich man's ruins stood out in bolder relief; he
had his lands still; he still had slaves; he could rebuild his home; and
he had his way.
But ever afterwards, though the Republic and the Empire spent the wealth
of nations in beautifying the city, the trace of that first defeat
remained. Dark and narrow lanes wound in and out, round the great
public squares, and within earshot of the broad white streets, and the
time-blackened houses of the poor stood huddled out of sight behind the
palaces of the rich, making perpetual contrast of wealth and poverty,
splendour and squalor, just as one may see today in Rome, in London, in
Paris, in Constantinople, in all the mistress cities of the world that
have long histories of triumph and defeat behind them.
The first Rome sprang from the ashes of the Alban volcano, the second
Rome rose from the ashes of herself, as she has risen again and again
since then. But the Gauls had done Rome a service, too. In crushing her
to the earth, they had crushed many of her enemies out of existence; and
when she stood up to face the world once more, she fought not to beat
the AEquians or the Etruscans at her gates, but to conquer Italy. And by
steady fighting she won it all, and brought home the spoils and divided
the lands; here and there a battle lost, as in the bloody Caudine pass,
but always more battles won, and more, and more, sternly relentless to
revolt. Brutus had seen his own sons' heads fall at his own word; should
Caius Pontius, the Samnite, be spared, because he was the bravest of the
brave? To her faithful friends Rome was just, and now and then
half-contemptuously generous.
The idle Greek fine gentlemen of Tarentum sat in their theatre one day,
overlooking the sea, shaded by dyed awnings from the afternoon sun,
listening entranced to some grand play,--the Oedipus King, perhaps, or
Alcestis, or Medea. Ten Roman trading ships came sailing round the
point; and the wind failed, and they lay there with drooping sails,
waiting for the land breeze that springs up at night. Perhaps some rough
Latin sailor, as is the way today in calm weather when there is no work
to be done, began to howl out one of those strange, endless songs which
have been sung down to us, from ear to ear, out of the primeval Aryan
darkness,--loud, long drawn out, exasperating in its unfinished cadence,
jarring on the refined Greek ear, discordant with the actor's finely
measured tones. In sudden rage at the noise--so it must have been--those
delicate idlers sprang up and ran down to the harbour, and took the
boats that lay there, and overwhelmed the unarmed Roman traders, slaying
many of them. Foolish, cruel, almost comic. So a sensitive musician,
driven half mad by a street organ, longs to rush out and break the thing
to pieces, and kill the poor grinder for his barbarous noise.
But when there was blood in the harbour of Tarentum, and some of the
ships had escaped on their oars, the Greeks were afraid; and when the
message of war came swiftly down to them from inexorable Rome, their
terror grew, and they sent to Pyrrhus of Epirus, who had set up to be a
conqueror, to come and conquer Rome for the sake of certain aesthetic
fine gentlemen who could not bear to be disturbed at a good play on a
spring afternoon. He came with all the pomp and splendour of Eastern
warfare; he won a battle, and a battle, and half a battle, and then the
Romans beat him at Beneventum, famous again and again, and utterly
destroyed his army, and took back with them his gold and his jewels, and
the tusks of his elephants, and the mastery of all Italy to boot, but
not yet beyond dispute.
Creeping down into Sicily, Rome met Carthage, both giants in those days,
and the greatest and last struggle began, with half the known world and
all the known sea for a battle-ground. Round and round the
Mediterranean, by water and land, they fought for a hundred and eighteen
years, through four generations of men, as we should reckon it, both
grasping and strong, both relentless, both sworn to win or perish for
ever, both doing great deeds that are remembered still. The mere name of
Regulus is a legion of legends in itself; the name of Hannibal is in
itself a history, that of Fabius Maximus a lesson; and while history
lasts, Cornelius Scipio and Scipio the African will not be forgotten. It
is the story of many and terrible defeats, from each of which Rome rose,
fiercely young, to win a dozen terrible little victories. It is strange
that we remember the lost days best; misty Thrasymene and Cannae's
fearful slaughter rise first in the memory. Then all at once, within ten
years, the scale turns, and Caius Claudius Nero hurls Hasdrubal's
disfigured head high over ditch and palisade into his brother's camp,
right to his brother's feet. And five years later, the battle of Zama,
won almost at the gates of Carthage; and then, almost the end, as great
heartbroken Hannibal, defeated, ruined and exiled, drinks up the poison
and rests at last, some forty years after he led his first army to
victory. But he had been dead nearly forty years, when another Scipio at
last tore down the walls of Carthage, and utterly destroyed the city to
the foundations, for ever. And a dozen years later than that, Rome had
conquered all the civilized world round about the Mediterranean sea,
from Spain to Asia.
[Illustration: TOMBS ON THE APPIAN WAY]
II
There was a mother in Rome, not rich, but of great race, for she was
daughter to Scipio of Africa; and she called her sons her jewels when
other women showed their golden ornaments and their precious stones and
boasted of their husbands' wealth. Cornelia's two sons, Tiberius and
Caius, lost their lives successively in a struggle against the avarice
of the rich men who ruled Rome, Italy and the world; against that
grasping avarice which far surpassed the greed of any other race before
the Romans, or after them, and which had suddenly taken new growth as
the spoils of the East and South and West poured into the city. Yet the
vast booty men could see was but an earnest of the wide lands which had
fallen to Rome, called 'Public Lands' almost as if in derision, while
they fell into the power of the few and strong, by the hundred thousand
acres at a time.
Three hundred and fifty years before the Gracchi, when little conquests
still seemed great, Spurius Cassius had died in defence of his Agrarian
Law, at the hands of the savage rich who accused him of conspiring for a
crown. Tiberius Gracchus set up the rights of the people to the public
land, and perished.
He fell within a stone's throw of the spot on which the great tribune,
Nicholas Rienzi, died. The strong, small band of nobles, armed with
staves and clubs, and with that supremacy of contemptuous bearing that
cows the simple, plough their way through the rioting throng,
murderously clubbing to right and left. Tiberius, retreating, stumbles
against a corpse and his enemies are upon him; a stave swung high in
air, a dull blow, and all is finished for that day, save to throw the
body into the Tiber lest the people should make a revolution of its
funeral.
Next came Caius, a boy of six and twenty, fighting the same fight for a
few years. On his head the nobles set a price--its weight in gold. He
hides on the Aventine, and the Aventine is stormed. He escapes by the
Sublician bridge and the bridge is held behind him by one friend, almost
as Horatius held it against an army. Yet the nobles and their hired
Cretan bowmen force the way and pursue him into Furina's grove. There a
Greek slave ends him, and to get more gold fills the poor head with
metal--and is paid in full. Three hundred died with Tiberius, three
thousand were put to death for his brother's sake. With the goods of the
slain and the dowries of their wives, Opimius built the Temple of
Concord on the spot where the later one still stands in part, between
the Comitium and the Capitol. The poor of Rome, and Cornelia, and the
widows and children of the murdered men, knew what that 'Concord' meant.
[Illustration: BRASS OF TIBERIUS, SHOWING THE TEMPLE OF CONCORD]
Then followed revolution, war with runaway slaves, war with the
immediate allies, then civil war, while wealth and love of wealth grew
side by side, the one, insatiate, devouring the other.
First the slaves made for Sicily, wild, mountainous, half-governed then
as it is today, and they held much of it against their masters for five
years. Within short memory, almost yesterday, a handful of outlaws has
defied a powerful nation's best soldiers in the same mountains. It is
small wonder that many thousand men, fighting for liberty and life,
should have held out so long.
And meanwhile Jugurtha of Numidia had for long years bought every Roman
general sent against him, had come to Rome himself and bought the laws,
and had gone back to his country with contemptuous leave-taking--'Thou
city where all is sold!' And still he bought, till Caius Marius,
high-hearted plebeian and great soldier, brought him back to die in the
Mamertine prison.
Then against wealth arose the last and greatest power of Rome, her
terrible armies that set up whom they would, to have their will of
Senate and fathers and people. First Marius, then Sylla whom he had
taught to fight, and taught to beat him in the end, after Cinna had been
murdered for his sake at Ancona.
Marius and Sylla, the plebeian and the patrician, were matched at first
as leader and lieutenant, then both as conquerors, then as alternate
despots of Rome and mortal foes, till their long duel wrecked what had
been and opened ways for what was to be.
First, Sylla claims that he, and not Marius, took Jugurtha, when the
Numidian ally betrayed him, though the King and his two sons marched in
the train of the plebeian's triumph. Marius answers by a stupendous
victory over the Cimbrians and Teutons, slays a hundred thousand in one
battle, comes home, triumphs again, sets up his trophies in the city and
builds a temple to Honour and Courage. Next, in greed of popular power,
he perjures himself to support a pair of murderous demagogues, betrays
them in turn to the patricians, and Saturninus is pounded to death with
roof tiles in the Capitol. Then, being made leader in the war with the
allies, already old for fighting, he fails at the outset, and his rival
Sylla is General in his stead.
Then riot on riot in the Forum, violence after violence in the struggle
for the consulship, murder after murder, blood upon blood not yet dry.
Sylla gets the expedition against Mithridates; Marius, at home,
undermines his enemy's influence and forces the tribes to give him the
command, and sends out his lieutenants to the East. Sylla's soldiers
murder them, and Sylla marches back against Rome with six legions.
Marius is unprepared; Sylla breaks into the city, torch in hand, at the
head of his troops, burning and slaying; the rivals meet face to face in
the Esquiline market-place, Roman fights Roman, and the plebeian loses
the day and escapes to the sea.
The reign of terror begins, and a great slaying. Sylla declares his
rival an enemy of Rome, and Marius is found hiding in the marshes of
Minturnae, is dragged out naked, covered with mud, a rope about his neck,
and led into a little house of the town to be slain by a slave. 'Darest
thou kill Caius Marius?' asks the old man with flashing eyes, and the
slave executioner trembles before the unarmed prisoner. They let him go.
He wanders to Africa and sits alone among the ruins of Carthage, while
Sylla fights victoriously in the East. Rome, momentarily free of both,
is torn by dissensions about the voting of the newly enfranchised.
Instead of the greater rivals, Cinna and Octavius are matched for plebs
and nobles. Knife-armed the parties fight it out in the Forum, the
bodies of citizens lie in heaps, and the gutters are gorged with free
blood, and again the patricians win the day. Cinna, fleeing from wrath,
is deposed from office. Marius sees his chance again. Unshaven and
unshorn since he left Rome last, he joins Cinna, leading six thousand
fugitives, seizes and plunders the towns about Rome, while Cinna encamps
beneath the walls. Together they enter Rome and nail Octavius' head to
the Rostra. Then the vengeance of wholesale slaying, in another reign of
terror, and Marius is despot of the city for a while, as Sylla had been
before, till spent with age, his life goes out amid drunkenness and
blood. The people tear down Sylla's house, burn his villa and drive out
his wife and his children. Back he comes after four years, victorious,
fighting his way right and left, against Lucanians and Samnites, back to
Rome still fighting them, almost loses the battle, is saved by Crassus
to take vengeance again, and again the long lists of the proscribed are
written out and hung up in the Forum, and the city runs blood in a third
Terror. Amid heaps of severed heads, Sylla sits before the temple of
Castor and sells the lands of his dead enemies; and Catiline is first
known to history as the executioner of Caius Gratidianus, whom he slices
to death, piecemeal, beyond the Tiber.
[Illustration: THE TARPEIAN ROCK]
Sylla, cold, aristocratic, sublimely ironical monster, was Rome's first
absolute and undisputed military lord. Tired of blood, he tried reform,
invented an aristocratic constitution, saw that it must fail, and then,
to the amazement of his friends and enemies, abdicated and withdrew to
private life, protected by a hundred thousand veterans of his army, and
many thousands of freedmen, to die at the last without violence.
Of the chaos he left behind him, Caesar made the Roman Empire.
The Gracchi, champions of the people, were foully done to death. Marius
and Sylla, tearing the proud Republic to pieces for their own greatness,
both died in their beds, the one of old age, the other of disease. There
is no irony like that which often ended the lives of great Romans.
Marcus Manlius, who saved the Capitol from the Gauls, was hurled to his
death from the same rock, by the tribunes of the people, and Rome's
citadel and sanctuary was desecrated by the blood of its preserver.
Scipio of Africa breathed his last in exile, but Appius Claudius, the
Decemvir, died rich and honoured.
One asks, naturally enough, how Rome could hold the civilized nations in
subjection while she was fighting out a civil war that lasted fifty
years. We have but little idea of her great military organization, after
arms became a profession and a career. We can but call up scattered
pictures to show us rags and fragments of the immense host that
patrolled the world with measured tread and matchless precision of
serried rank, in tens and scores and hundreds of thousands, for
centuries, shoulder to shoulder and flank to flank, learning its own
strength by degrees, till it suddenly grasped all power, gave it to one
man, and made Caius Julius Caesar Dictator of the earth.
The greatest figure in all history suddenly springs out of the dim
chaos and shines in undying glory, the figure of a man so great that the
office he held means Empire, and the mere name he bore means Emperor
today in four empires,--Caesar, Kaiser, Czar, Kaisar,--a man of so vast
power that the history of humanity for centuries after him was the
history of those who were chosen to fill his place--the history of
nearly half the twelve centuries foretold by the augur Attus, from
Romulus, first King, to Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor. He was a man
whose deeds and laws have marked out the life of the world even to this
far day. Before him and with him comes Pompey, with him and after him
Mark Antony, next to him in line and greatness, Augustus--all dwarfs
compared with him, while two of them were failures outright, and the
third could never have reached power but in his steps.
[Illustration: PALACE OF THE CAESARS]
In that long tempest of parties wherein the Republic went down for ever,
it is hard to trace the truth, or number the slain, or reckon up account
of gain and loss. But when Caesar rises in the centre of the storm the
end is sure and there can be no other, for he drives it before him like
a captive whirlwind, to do his bidding and clear the earth for his
coming. Other men, and great men, too, are overwhelmed by it, dashed
down and stunned out of all sense and judgment, to be lost and forgotten
like leaves in autumn, whirled away before the gale. Pompey, great
general and great statesman, conqueror in Spain, subduer of Spartacus
and the Gladiators, destroyer of pirates and final victor over
Mithridates, comes back and lives as a simple citizen. Noble of birth,
but not trusted by his peers, he joins with Caesar, leader of all the
people, and with Crassus, for more power, and loses the world by giving
Caesar an army, and Gaul to conquer. Crassus, brave general, too, is
slain in battle in far Parthia, and Pompey steals a march by getting a
long term in Spain. Caesar demands as much and is refused by Pompey's
friends. Then the storm breaks and Caesar comes back from Gaul to cross
the Rubicon, and take all Italy in sixty days. Pompey, ambitious,
ill-starred, fights losing battles everywhere. Murdered at last in
Egypt, he, too, is dead, and Caesar stands alone, master of Rome and of
the world. One year he ruled, and then they slew him; but no one of them
that struck him died a natural death.
Creation presupposes chaos, and it is the divine prerogative of genius
to evolve order from confusion. Julius Caesar found the world of his day
consisting of disordered elements of strength, all at strife with each
other in a central turmoil, skirted and surrounded by the relative peace
of an ancient and long undisturbed barbarism.
It was out of these elements that he created what has become modern
Europe, and the direction which he gave to the evolution of mankind has
never wholly changed since his day. Of all great conquerors he was the
least cruel, for he never sacrificed human life without the direct
intention of benefiting mankind by an increased social stability. Of all
great lawgivers, he was the most wise and just, and the truths he set
down in the Julian Code are the foundation of modern justice. Of all
great men who have leaped upon the world as upon an unbroken horse, who
have guided it with relentless hands, and ridden it breathless to the
goal of glory, Caesar is the only one who turned the race into the track
of civilization and, dying, left mankind a future in the memory of his
past. He is the one great man of all, without whom it is impossible to
imagine history. We cannot take him away and yet leave anything of what
we have. The world could have been as it is without Alexander, without
Charlemagne, without Napoleon; it could not have been the world we know
without Caius Julius Caesar.
That fact alone places him at the head of mankind.
In Caesar's life there is the same matter for astonishment as in
Napoleon's; there is the vast disproportion between beginnings and
climax, between the relative modesty of early aims and the stupendous
magnitude of the climacteric result. One asks how in a few years the
impecunious son of the Corsican notary became the world's despot, and
how the fashionable young spendthrift lawyer of Rome, dabbling in
politics and almost ignorant of warfare, rose in a quarter of a century
to be the world's conqueror, lawgiver and civilizer. The daily miracle
of genius is the incalculable speed at which it simultaneously thinks
and acts. Nothing is so logical as creation, and creation is the first
sign as well as the only proof that genius is present.
Hitherto the life of Caesar has not been logically presented. His youth
appears almost always to be totally disconnected from his maturity. The
first success, the conquest of Gaul, comes as a surprise, because its
preparation is not described. After it everything seems natural, and
conquest follows victory as daylight follows dawn; but when we try to
think backwards from that first expedition, we either see nothing
clearly, or we find Caesar an insignificant unit in a general disorder,
as hard to identify as an individual ant in a swarming ant-hill. In the
lives of all 'great men,' which are almost always totally unlike the
lives of the so-called 'great,'--those born, not to power, but in
power,--there is a point which must inevitably be enigmatical. It may be
called the Hour of Fate--the time when in the suddenly loosed play of
many circumstances, strained like springs and held back upon themselves,
a man who has been known to a few thousands finds himself the chief of
millions and the despot of a nation.
Things which are only steps to great men are magnified to attainments in
ordinary lives, and remembered with pride. The man of genius is sure of
the great result, if he can but get a fulcrum for his lever. What
strikes one most in the careers of such men as Caesar and Napoleon is the
tremendous advance realized at the first step--the difference between
Napoleon's half-subordinate position before the first campaign in Italy
and his dominion of France immediately after it, or the distance which
separated Caesar, the impeached Consul, from Caesar, the conqueror of
Gaul.
It must not be forgotten that Caesar came of a family that had held great
positions, and which, though impoverished, still had credit,
subsequently stretched by Caesar to the extreme limit of its borrowing
power. At sixteen, an age when Bonaparte was still an unknown student,
Caesar was Flamen Dialis, or high priest of Jupiter, and at one and
twenty, the 'ill-girt boy,' as Sylla called him from his way of wearing
his toga, was important enough to be driven from Rome, a fugitive. His
first attempt at a larger notoriety had failed, and Dolabella, whom he
had impeached, had been acquitted through the influence of friends. Yet
the young lawyer had found the opportunity of showing what he could do,
and it was not without reason that Sylla said of him, 'You will find
many a Marius in this one Caesar.'
Twenty years passed before the prophecy began to be realized with the
commencement of Caesar's career in Gaul, and more than once during that
time his life seemed a failure in his own eyes, and he said scornfully
and sadly of himself that he had done nothing to be remembered at an age
when Alexander had already conquered the world.