The Empire and its Kingdoms join issue with each other and with the
Barons for the lordship of Christendom; there are two Popes, waging war
with nations on both sides, and Rome is reduced to a town of barely
twenty thousand souls. Then comes Hildebrand, Pope Gregory the Seventh,
friend of the Great Countess, humbler of the Emperor, a restorer of
things, the Julius Caesar of the Church, and from his day there is
stability again, as Urban the Second follows, like an Augustus; Nicholas
the Fifth, the next great Pontiff, comes in with the Renascence. Last of
destroyers Charles, the wild Constable of Bourbon, marches in open
rebellion against King, State and Church, friend to the Emperor,
straight to his death at the walls, his work of destruction carried out
to the terrible end by revengeful Spaniards who spare only the churches
and the convents. Out of those ashes Rome rose again, for the last time,
the Rome of Sixtus the Fifth, which is, substantially, the Rome we see
today; less powerful in the world after that time, but more beautiful as
she grew more peaceful by degrees; flourishing in a strange, motley
way, like no other city in the world, as the Empire of the Hapsburgs and
the Kingdoms of Europe learned to live apart from her, and she was
concentrated again upon herself, still and always a factor among
nations, and ever to be. But even in latter days, Napoleon could not do
without her, and Francis the Second of Austria had to resign the Empire,
in order that Pius the Seventh might call the self-crowned Corsican
soldier, girt with Charlemagne's huge sword, the anointed Emperor of
Christendom.
Once more a new idea gives life to fragments hewn in pieces and
scattered in confusion. A dream of unity disturbs Italy's sleep. Never,
in truth, in all history, has Italy been united save by violence. By the
sword the Republic brought Latins, Samnites and Etruscans into
subjection; by sheer strength she crushed the rebellion of the slaves
and then forced the Italian allies to a second submission; by terror
Marius and Sylla ruled Rome and Italy; and it was the overwhelming power
of a paid army that held the Italians in check under the Empire, till
they broke away from each other as soon as the pressure was removed, to
live in separate kingdoms and principalities for thirteen or fourteen
hundred years, from Romulus Augustulus--or at least from Justinian--to
Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy, in whose veins ran not one drop of
Italian blood.
One asks whence came the idea of unity which has had such power to move
these Italians, in modern times. The answer is plain and simple. Unity
is the word; the interpretation of it is the name of Rome. The desire is
for all the romance and the legends and the visions of supreme greatness
which no other name can ever call up. What will be called hereafter the
madness of the Italian people took possession of them on the day when
Rome was theirs to do with as they pleased. Their financial ruin had its
origin at that moment, when they became masters of the legendary
Mistress of the world. What the end will be, no one can foretell, but
the Rome of old was not made great by dreams. Her walls were founded in
blood, and her temples were built with the wealth of conquered nations,
by captives and slaves of subject races.
The Rome we see today owes its mystery, its sadness and its charm to six
and twenty centuries of history, mostly filled with battle, murder and
sudden death, deeds horrible in that long-past present which we try to
call up, but alternately grand, fascinating and touching now, as we
shape our scant knowledge into visions and fill out our broken dreams
with the stuff of fancy. In most men's minds, perhaps, the charm lies in
that very confusion of suggestions, for few indeed know Rome so well as
to divide clearly the truth from the legend in her composition. Such
knowledge is perhaps altogether unattainable in any history; it is most
surely so here, where city is built on city, monument upon monument,
road upon road, from the heart of the soil upwards--the hardened lava
left by many eruptions of life; where the tablets of Clio have been
shattered again and again, where fire has eaten, and sword has hacked,
and hammer has bruised ages of records out of existence, where even the
race and type of humanity have changed and have been forgotten twice and
three times over.
Therefore, unless one have half a lifetime to spend in patient study and
deep research, it is better, if one come to Rome, to feel much than to
try and know a little, for in much feeling there is more human truth
than in that dangerous little knowledge which dulls the heart and
hampers the clear instincts of natural thought. Let him who comes hither
be satisfied with a little history and much legend, with rough warp of
fact and rich woof of old-time fancy, and not look too closely for the
perfect sum of all, where more than half the parts have perished for
ever.
It matters not much whether we know the exact site of Virgil's
Laurentum; it is more interesting to remember how Commodus, cruel,
cowardly and selfish, fled thither from the great plague, caring not at
all that his people perished by tens of thousands in the city, since he
himself was safe, with the famous Galen to take care of him. We can
leave the task of tracing the enclosures of Nero's golden house to
learned archaelogists, and let our imagination find wonder and delight in
their accounts of its porticos three thousand feet long, its game park,
its baths, its thousands of columns with their gilded capitals, and its
walls encrusted with mother-of-pearl. And we may realize the depth of
Rome's abhorrence for the dead tyrant, as we think of how Vespasian and
his son Titus pulled down the enchanted palace for the people's sake,
and built the Colosseum where the artificial lake had been, and their
great baths on the very foundations of Nero's gorgeous dwelling.
[Illustration: BRASS OF TRAJAN, SHOWING THE CIRCUS MAXIMUS]
[Illustration: BRASS OF ANTONINUS PIUS, IN HONOUR OF FAUSTINA, WITH
REVERSE SHOWING VESTA BEARING THE PALLADIUM]
III
It is impossible to conceive of the Augustan age without Horace, nor to
imagine a possible Horace without Greece and Greek influence. At the
same time Horace is in many ways the prototype of the old-fashioned,
cultivated, gifted, idle, sarcastic, middle-class Roman official, making
the most of life on a small salary and the friendship of a great
personage; praising poverty, but making the most of the good things that
fell in his way; extolling pristine austerity of life and yielding with
a smile to every agreeable temptation; painting the idyllic life of a
small gentleman farmer as the highest state of happiness, but secretly
preferring the town; prudently avoiding marriage, but far too human to
care for an existence in which woman had no share; more sensible in
theory than in practice, and more religious in manner than in heart;
full of quaint superstitions, queer odds and ends of knowledge, amusing
anecdotes and pictures of personal experience; the whole compound
permeated with a sort of indolent sadness at the unfulfilled promises of
younger years, in which there had been more of impulse than of ambition,
and more of ambition than real strength. The early struggles for Italian
unity left many such half-disappointed patriots, and many less fortunate
in their subsequent lives than Horace.
Born in the far South, and the son of a freed slave, brought to Rome as
a boy and carefully taught, then sent to Athens to study Greek, he was
barely twenty years of age when he joined Brutus after Caesar's death,
was with him in Asia, and, in the lack of educated officers perhaps,
found himself one day, still a mere boy, tribune of a Legion--or, as we
should say, in command of a brigade of six thousand men, fighting for
what he believed to be the liberty of Rome, in the disastrous battle of
Philippi. Brutus being dead, the dream of glory ended, after the
amnesty, in a scribe's office under one of the quaestors, and the
would-be liberator of his country became a humble clerk in the Treasury,
eking out his meagre salary with the sale of a few verses. Many an old
soldier of Garibaldi's early republican dreams has ended in much the
same way in our own times under the monarchy.
But Horace was born to other things. Chaucer was a clerk in the Custom
House, and found time to be the father of English poetry. Horace's daily
work did not hinder him from becoming a poet. His love of Greek,
acquired in Athens and Asia Minor, and the natural bent of his mind made
him the greatest imitator and adapter of foreign verses that ever lived;
and his character, by its eminently Italian combination of prim
respectability and elastic morality, gave him a two-sided view of men
and things that has left us representations of life in three dimensions
instead of the flat, though often violent, pictures which prejudice
loves best to paint.
In his admiration of Greek poetry, Horace was not a discoverer; he was
rather the highest expression of Rome's artistic want. If Scipio of
Africa had never conquered the Carthaginians at Zama, he would be
notable still as one of the first and most sincere lovers of Hellenic
literature, and as one of the earliest imitators of Athenian manners.
The great conqueror is remembered also as the first man in Rome who
shaved every day, more than a hundred and fifty years before Horace's
time. He was laughed at by some, despised by others and disliked by the
majority for his cultivated tastes and his refined manners.
The Romans had most gifts excepting those we call creative. Instead of
creating, therefore, Rome took her art whole, and by force, from the
most artistic nation the world ever produced. Sculptors, architects,
painters and even poets, such as there were, came captive to Rome in
gangs, were sold at auction as slaves, and became the property of the
rich, to work all their lives at their several arts for their master's
pleasure; and the State rifled Greece and Asia, and even the Greek Italy
of the south, and brought back the masterpieces of an age to adorn
Rome's public places. The Roman was the engineer, the maker of roads, of
aqueducts, of fortifications, the layer out of cities, and the planner
of harbours. In a word, the Roman made the solid and practical
foundation, and then set the Greek slave to beautify it. When he had
watched the slave at work for a century or two, he occasionally
attempted to imitate him. That was as far as Rome ever went in original
art.
But her love of the beautiful, though often indiscriminating and lacking
in taste, was profound and sincere. It does not appear that in all her
conquests her armies ever wantonly destroyed beautiful things. On the
contrary, her generals brought home all they could with uncommon care,
and the consequence was that in Horace's day the public places of the
city were vast open-air museums, and the great temples picture galleries
of which we have not the like now in the whole world. And with those
things came all the rest; the manners, the household life, the
necessaries and the fancies of a conquering and already decadent nation,
the thousands of slaves whose only duty was to amuse their owners and
the public; the countless men and women and girls and boys, whose souls
and bodies went to feed the corruption of the gorgeous capital, or to
minister to its enormous luxuries; the companies of flute-players and
dancing-girls, the sharp-tongued jesters, the coarse buffoons, the
play-actors and the singers. And then, the endless small commerce of an
idle and pleasure-seeking people, easily attracted by bright colours,
new fashions and new toys; the drug-sellers and distillers of perfumes,
the venders of Eastern silks and linens and lace, the barbers and
hairdressers, the jewellers and tailors, the pastry cooks and makers of
honey-sweetmeats; and everywhere the poor rabble of failures, like scum
in the wake of a great ship; the beggars everywhere, and the pickpockets
and the petty thieves. It is no wonder that Horace was fond of strolling
in Rome.
In contrast, the great and wonderful things of the Augustan city stand
out in high relief, above the varied crowd that fills the streets, with
all the dignity that centuries of power can lend. To the tawdry is
opposed the splendid, the Roman general in his chiselled corselet and
dyed mantle faces the Greek actor in his tinsel; the band of painted,
half-clad, bedizened dancing-girls falls back cowering in awestruck
silence as the noble Vestal passes by, high-browed, white-robed,
untainted, the incarnation of purity in an age of vice. And the old
Senator in his white cloak with its broad purple hem, his smooth-faced
clients at his elbows, his silent slaves before him and behind, meets
the low-chattering knot of Hebrew money-lenders, making the price of
short loans for the day, and discussing the assets of a famous
spendthrift, as their yellow-turbaned, bearded fathers had talked over
the chances of Julius Caesar when he was as yet but a fashionable young
lawyer of doubtful fortune, with an unlimited gift of persuasion and an
equally unbounded talent for amusement.
Between the contrasts lived men of such position as Horace occupied, but
not many. For the great middle element of society is a growth of later
centuries, and even Horace himself, as time went on, became attached to
Maecenas and then, more or less, to the person of the Emperor, by a
process of natural attraction, just as his butt, Tigellius, gravitated
to the common herd that mourned his death. The 'golden mean' of which
Horace wrote was a mere expression, taught him, perhaps, by his father,
a part of his stock of maxims. Where there were only great people on the
one side, and a rabble on the other, the man of genius necessarily rose
to the level of the high, by his own instinct and their liking. What was
best of Greek was for them, what was worst was for the populace.
But the Greek was everywhere, with his keen weak face, his sly look and
his skilful fingers. Scipio and Paulus Emilius had brought him, and he
stayed in Rome till the Goth came, and afterwards. Greek poetry, Greek
philosophy, Greek sculpture, Greek painting, Greek music everywhere--to
succeed at all in such society, Virgil and Horace and Ovid must needs
make Greek of Latin, and bend the stiff syllables to Alcaics and
Sapphics and Hexameters. The task looked easy enough, though it was
within the powers of so very few. Thousands tried it, no doubt, when the
three or four had set the fashion, and failed, as the second-rate fail,
with some little brief success in their own day, turned into the total
failure of complete disappearance when they had been dead awhile.
Supreme of them all, for his humanity, Horace remains. Epic Virgil,
appealing to the traditions of a living race of nobles and to the
carefully hidden, sober vanity of the world's absolute monarch, does not
appeal to modern man. The twilight of the gods has long deepened into
night, and Ovid's tales of them and their goddesses move us by their own
beauty rather than by our sympathy for them, though we feel the tender
touch of the exiled man whose life was more than half love, in the
marvellous Letters of Heroes' Sweethearts--in the complaint of Briseis
to Achilles, in the passionately sad appeal of Hermione to Orestes.
Whoever has not read these things does not know the extreme limit of
man's understanding of woman. Yet Horace, with little or nothing of such
tenderness, has outdone Ovid and Virgil in this later age.
He strolled through life, and all life was a play of which he became
the easy-going but unforgetful critic. There was something good-natured
even in his occasional outbursts of contempt and hatred for the things
and the people he did not like. There was something at once caressing
and good-humouredly sceptical in his way of addressing the gods,
something charitable in his attacks on all that was ridiculous,--men,
manners and fashions.
He strolled wherever he would, alone; in the market, looking at
everything and asking the price of what he saw, of vegetables and grain
and the like; in the Forum, or the Circus, at evening, when 'society'
was dining, and the poor people and slaves thronged the open places for
rest and air, and there he used to listen to the fortune-tellers, and
among them, no doubt, was that old hag, Canidia, immortalized in the
huge joke of his comic resentment. He goes home to sup on lupins and
fritters and leeks,--or says so,--though his stomach abhorred garlic;
and his three slaves--the fewest a man could have--wait on him as he
lies before the clean white marble table, leaning on his elbow. He does
not forget the household gods, and pours a few drops upon the cement
floor in libation to them, out of the little earthen saucer filled from
the slim-necked bottle of Campanian earthenware. Then to sleep, careless
of getting up early or late, just as he might feel, to stay at home and
read or write, or to wander about the city, or to play the favourite
left-handed game of ball in the Campus Marius before his bath and his
light midday meal.
With a little change here and there, it is the life of the idle
middle-class Italian today, which will always be much the same, let the
world wag and change as it will, with all its extravagances, its
fashions and its madnesses. Now and then he exclaims that there is no
average common sense left in the world, no half-way stopping-place
between extremes. One man wears his tunic to his heels, another is girt
up as if for a race; Rufillus smells of perfumery, Gargonius of anything
but scent; and so on--and he cries out that when a fool tries to avoid a
mistake he will run to any length in the opposite direction. And Horace
had a most particular dislike for fools and bores, and has left us the
most famous description of the latter ever set down by an accomplished
observer.
By chance, he says, he was walking one morning along the Sacred Street
with one slave behind him, thinking of some trifle and altogether
absorbed in it, when a man whom he barely knew by name came up with him
in a great hurry and grasped his hand. 'How do you do, sweet friend?'
asks the Bore. 'Pretty well, as times go,' answers Horace, stopping
politely for a moment; and then beginning to move on, he sees to his
horror that the Bore walks by his side. 'Can I do anything for you?'
asks the poet, still civil, but hinting that he prefers his own
company. The Bore plunges into the important business of praising
himself, with a frankness not yet forgotten in his species, and Horace
tries to get rid of him, walking very fast, then very slowly, then
turning to whisper a word to his slave, and in his anxiety he feels the
perspiration breaking out all over him, while his Tormentor chatters on,
as they skirt the splendid Julian Basilica, gleaming in the morning sun.
Horace looks nervously and eagerly to right and left, hoping to catch
sight of a friend and deliverer. Not a friendly face was in sight, and
the Bore knew it, and was pitilessly frank. 'Oh, I know you would like
to get away from me!' he exclaimed. 'I shall not let you go so easily!
Where are you going?' 'Across the Tiber,' answered Horace, inventing a
distant visit. 'I am going to see someone who lives far off, in Caesar's
gardens--a man you do not know. He is ill.' 'Very well,' said the other;
'I have nothing to do, and am far from lazy. I will go all the way with
you.' Horace hung his head, as a poor little Italian donkey does when a
heavy load is piled upon his back, for he was fairly caught, and he
thought of the long road before him, and he had moreover the unpleasant
consciousness that the Bore was laughing at his imaginary errand, since
they were walking in a direction exactly opposite from the Tiber, and
would have to go all the way round the Palatine by the Triumphal Road
and the Circus Maximus and then cross by the Sublician bridge, instead
of turning back towards the Velabrum, the Provision Market and the
Bridge of AEmilius, which we have known and crossed as the Ponte Rotto,
but of which only one arch is left now, in midstream.
[Illustration: PONTE ROTTO, NOW DESTROYED
After an engraving made about 1850]