and foster agreeable illusions. Admitting the general truth of the
definition, it appears perfectly natural that since the Romans had
little or no art of their own, they should have begun to import Greek
art just when they did, after the successful issue of the Second Punic
War. Up to that time the great struggle had lasted. When it was over,
the rest was almost a foregone conclusion. Rome and Carthage had made a
great part of the known world their fighting ground in the duel that
lasted a hundred and eighteen years; and the known world was the portion
of the victor. Spoil first, for spoil's sake, he brought home; then
spoil for the sake of art; then art for what itself could give him. In
the fight for Empire, as in each man's struggle for life, success means
leisure, and therefore civilization, which is the growth of people who
have time at their disposal--time to 'create and foster agreeable
illusions.' When the Romans conquered the Samnites they were the least
artistic people in the world; when Augustus Caesar died, they possessed
and valued the greater part of the world's artistic treasures, many of
these already centuries old, and they owned literally, and as slaves, a
majority of the best living artists. Augustus had been educated in
Athens; he determined that Rome should be as Athens, magnified a hundred
times. Athens had her thousand statues, Rome should have her ten
thousand; Rome should have state libraries holding a score of volumes
for every one that Greece could boast; Rome's temples should be
galleries of rare paintings, ten for each that Athens had. Rome should
be so great, so rich, so gorgeous, that Greece should be as nothing
beside her; Egypt should dwindle to littleness, and the memory of
Babylon should be forgotten. Greece had her Homer, her Sophocles, her
Anacreon; Rome should have her immortals also.
Greatly Augustus laboured for his thought, and grandly he carried out
his plan. He became the greatest 'art-collector' in all history, and the
men of his time imitated him. Domitius Tullus, a Roman gentleman, had
collected so much, that he was able to adorn certain extensive gardens,
on the very day of the purchase, with an immense number of genuine
ancient statues, which had been lying, half neglected, in a barn--or, as
some read the passage, in other gardens of his.
[Illustration: BASILICA CONSTANTINE]
Augustus succeeded in one way. Possibly he was successful in his own
estimation. 'Have I not acted the play well?' they say he asked, just
before he died. The keynote is there, whether he spoke the words or not.
He did all from calculation, nothing from conviction. The artist, active
and creative or passive and appreciative, calculates nothing except the
means of expressing his conviction. And in the over-calculating of
effects by Augustus and his successors, one of the most singular
weaknesses of the Latin race was thrust forward; namely, that giantism
or megalomania, which has so often stamped the principal works of the
Latins in all ages--that effort to express greatness by size, which is
so conspicuously absent from all that the Greeks have left us. Agrippa
builds a threefold temple and Hadrian rears the Pantheon upon its
charred ruins; Constantine builds his Basilica; Michelangelo says, 'I
will set the Pantheon upon the Basilica of Constantine.' He does it, and
the result is Saint Peter's, which covers more ground than that other
piece of giantism, the Colosseum; in Rome's last and modern revival, the
Palazzo delle Finanze is built, the Treasury of the poorest of the
Powers, which, incredible as it may seem, fills a far greater area than
either the Colosseum or the Church of Saint Peter's. What else is such
constructive enormity but 'giantism'? For the great Cathedral of
Christendom, it may be said, at least, that it has more than once in
history been nearly filled by devout multitudes, numbering fifty or
sixty thousand people; in the days of public baths, nearly sixty-three
thousand Romans could bathe daily with every luxury of service; when
bread and games were free, a hundred thousand men and women often sat
down in the Flavian Amphitheatre to see men tear each other to pieces;
of the modern Ministry of Finance there is nothing to be said. The Roman
curses it for the millions it cost; but the stranger looks, smiles and
passes by a blank and hideous building three hundred yards long. There
is no reason why a nation should not wish to be great, but there is
every reason why a small nation should not try to look big; and the
enormous follies of modern Italy must be charitably attributed to a
defect of judgment which has existed in the Latin peoples from the
beginning, and has by no means disappeared today. The younger Gordian
began a portico which was to cover forty-four thousand square yards, and
intended to raise a statue of himself two hundred and nineteen feet
high. The modern Treasury building covers about thirty thousand square
yards, and goes far to rival the foolish Emperor's insane scheme.
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE TEMPLE OF SATURN]
Great contrasts lie in the past, between his age and ours. One must
guess at them at least, if one have but little knowledge, in order to
understand at all the city of the Middle Age and the Rome we see today.
Imagine it at its greatest, a capital inhabited by more than two
millions of souls, filling all that is left to be seen within and
without the walls, and half the Campagna besides, spreading out in a
vast disc of seething life from the central Golden Milestone at the
corner of the temple of Saturn--the god of remote ages, and of earth's
dim beginning; see, if you can, the splendid roads, where to right and
left the ashes of the great rested in tombs gorgeous with marble and
gold and bronze; see the endless villas and gardens and terraces lining
both banks of the Tiber, with trees and flowers and marble palaces, from
Rome to Ostia and the sea, and both banks of the Anio, from Rome to
Tivoli in the hills; conceive of the vast commerce, even of the mere
business of supply to feed two millions of mouths; picture the great
harbour with its thousand vessels--and some of those that brought grain
from Egypt were four hundred feet long; remember its vast granaries and
store-barns and offices; think of the desolate Isola Sacra as a lovely
garden, of the ruins of Laurentum as an imperial palace and park; reckon
up roughly what all that meant of life, of power, of incalculable
wealth. Mark Antony squandered, in his short lifetime, eight hundred
millions of pounds sterling, four thousand millions of dollars. Guess,
if possible, at the myriad million details of the vast city.
Then let twelve hundred years pass in a dream, and look at the Rome of
Rienzi. Some twenty thousand souls, the remnant and the one hundredth
part of the two millions, dwell pitifully in the ruins of which the
strongest men have fortified bits here and there. The walls of Aurelian,
broken and war-worn and full of half-repaired breaches, enclose a
desert, a world too wide for its inhabitants, a vast straggling
heterogeneous mass of buildings in every stage of preservation and
decay, splendid temples, mossy and ivy-grown, but scarcely injured by
time, then wastes of broken brick and mortar; stern dark towers of
Savelli, and Frangipani, and Orsini, and Colonna, dominating and
threatening whole quarters of ruins; strange small churches built of
odds and ends and remnants not too heavy for a few workmen to move;
broken-down aqueducts sticking up here and there in a city that had to
drink the muddy water of the Tiber because not a single channel remained
whole to feed a single fountain, from the distant springs that had once
filled baths for sixty thousand people every day. And round about all,
the waste Campagna, scratched here and there by fever-stricken peasants
to yield the little grain that so few men could need. The villas gone,
the trees burned or cut down, the terraces slipped away into the rivers,
the tombs of the Appian Way broken and falling to pieces, or transformed
into rude fortresses held by wild-looking men in rusty armour, who
sallied out to fight each other or, at rare intervals, to rob some train
of wretched merchants, riding horses as rough and wild as themselves.
Law gone, and order gone with it; wealth departed, and self-respect
forgotten in abject poverty; each man defending his little with his own
hand against the many who coveted it; Rome a den of robbers and thieves;
the Pope, when there was one,--there was none in the year of Rienzi's
birth,--either defended by one baron against another, or forced to fly
for his life. Men brawling in the streets, ill clad, savage, ready with
sword and knife and club for any imaginable violence. Women safe from
none but their own husbands and sons, and not always from them. Children
wild and untaught, growing up to be fierce and unlettered like their
fathers. And in the midst of such a city, Cola di Rienzi, with great
heart and scanty learning, labouring to decipher the inscriptions that
told of dead and ruined greatness, dreaming of a republic, of a
tribune's power, of the humiliation of the Barons, of a resurrection for
Italy and of her sudden return to the dominion of the world.
Rome, then, was like a field long fallow, of rich soil, but long
unploughed. Scarcely below the surface lay the treasures of ages,
undreamt of by the few descendants of those who had brought them
thither. Above ground, overgrown with wild creepers and flowers, there
still stood some such monuments of magnificence as we find it hard to
recall by mere words, not yet voluntarily destroyed, but already falling
to pieces under the slow destruction of grinding time, when violence had
spared them. Robert Guiscard had burned the city in 1084, but he had not
destroyed everything. The Emperors of the East had plundered Rome long
before that, carrying off works of art without end to adorn their city
of Constantinople. Builders had burned a thousand marble statues to lime
for their cement, for the statues were ready to hand and easily broken
up to be thrown into the kiln, so that it seemed a waste of time and
tools to quarry out the blocks from the temples. The Barbarians of
Genseric and the Jews of Trastevere had seized upon such of the four
thousand bronze statues as the Emperors had left, and had melted many of
them down for metal, often hiding them in strange places while waiting
for an opportunity of heating the furnace. And some have been found,
here and there, piled up in little vaults, most generally near the
Tiber, by which it was always easy to ship the metal away. Already
temples had been turned into churches, in a travesty only saved from the
ridiculous by the high solemnity of the Christian faith. Other temples
and buildings, here and there, had been partly stripped of columns and
marble facings to make other churches even more nondescript than the
first. Much of the old was still standing, but nothing of the old was
whole. The Colosseum had not yet been turned into a quarry. The
Septizonium of Septimius Severus, with its seven stories of columns and
its lofty terrace, nearly half as high as the dome of Saint Peter's,
though beginning to crumble, still crowned the south end of the
Palatine; Minerva's temple was almost entire, and its huge architrave
had not been taken to make the high altar of Saint Peter's; and the
triumphal arch of Marcus Aurelius was standing in what was perhaps not
yet called the Corso in those days, but the Via Lata--'Broad Street.'
The things that had not yet fallen, nor been torn down, were the more
sadly grand by contrast with the chaos around them. There was also the
difference between ruins then, and ruins now, which there is between a
king just dead in his greatness, in whose features lingers the smile of
a life so near that it seems ready to come back, and a dried mummy set
up in a museum and carefully dusted for critics to study.
In even stronger and rougher contrast, in the wreck of all that had
been, there was the fierce reality of the daily fight for life amid the
seething elements of the new things that were yet to be; the preparation
for another time of domination and splendour; the deadly wrestling of
men who meant to outlive one another by sheer strength and grim power of
killing; the dark ignorance, darkest just before the waking of new
thought, and art, and learning; the universal cruelty of all living
things to each other, that had grown out of the black past; and, with
all this, the undying belief in Rome's greatness, in Rome's future, in
Rome's latent power to rule the world again.
That was the beginning of the new story, for the old one was ended, the
race of men who had lived it was gone, and their works were following
them, to the universal dust. Out of the memories they left and the
departed glory of the places wherein they had dwelt, the magic of the
Middle Age was to weave another long romance, less grand but more
stirring, less glorious but infinitely more human.
Perhaps it is not altogether beyond the bounds of reason to say that
Rome was masculine from Romulus to the dark age, and that with the first
dawn of the Renascence she began to be feminine. As in old days the
Republic and the Empire fought for power and conquest and got both by
force, endurance and hardness of character, so, in her second life,
others fought for Rome, and courted her, and coveted her, and sometimes
oppressed her and treated her cruelly, and sometimes cherished her and
adorned her, and gave her all they had. In a way, too, the elder
patriots reverenced their city as a father, and those of after-times
loved her as a woman, with a tender and romantic love.
Be that as it may, for it matters little how we explain what we feel.
And assuredly we all feel that what we call the 'charm,' the feminine
charm, of Rome, proceeds first from that misty time between two
greatnesses, when her humanity was driven back upon itself, and simple
passions, good and evil, suddenly felt and violently expressed, made up
the whole life of a people that had ceased to rule by force, and had not
yet reached power by diplomacy.
It is fair, moreover, to dwell a little on that time, that we may not
judge too hardly the men who came afterwards. If we have any virtues
ourselves of which to boast, we owe them to a long growth of
civilization, as a child owes its manners to its mother; the men of the
Renascence had behind them chaos, the ruin of a slave-ridden,
Hun-harried, worm-eaten Empire, in which law and order had gone down
together, and the whole world seemed to the few good men who lived in it
to be but one degree better than hell itself. Much may be forgiven them,
and for what just things they did they should be honoured, for the
hardship of having done right at all against such odds.
[Illustration: BRASS OF GORDIAN, SHOWING ROMAN GAMES]
[Illustration: RUINS OF THE JULIAN BASILICA]
V
Here and there, in out-of-the-way places, overlooked in the modern rage
for improvement, little marble tablets are set into the walls of old
houses, bearing semi-heraldic devices such as a Crescent, a Column, a
Griffin, a Stag, a Wheel and the like. Italian heraldry has always been
eccentric, and has shown a tendency to display all sorts of strange
things, such as comets, trees, landscapes and buildings in the
escutcheon, and it would naturally occur to the stranger that the small
marble shields, still visible here and there at the corners of old
streets, must be the coats of arms of Roman families that held property
in that particular neighbourhood. But this is not the case. They are the
distinctive devices of the Fourteen Rioni, or wards, into which the
city was divided, with occasional modifications, from the time of
Augustus to the coming of Victor Emmanuel, and which with some further
changes survive to the present day. The tablets themselves were put up
by Pope Benedict the Fourteenth, who reigned from 1740 to 1758, and who
finally brought them up to the ancient number of fourteen; but from the
dark ages the devices themselves were borne upon flags on all public
occasions by the people of the different Regions. For 'Rione' is only a
corruption of the Latin 'Regio,' the same with our 'Region,' by which
English word it will be convenient to speak of these divisions that
played so large a part in the history of the city during many successive
centuries.
For the sake of clearness, it is as well to enumerate them in their
order and with the numbers that have always belonged to each. They are:
I. Monti,
II. Trevi,
III. Colonna,
IV. Campo Marzo,
V. Ponte
VI. Parione,
VII. Regola,
VIII. Sant' Eustachio,
IX. Pigna,
X. Campitelli,
XI. Sant' Angelo,
XII. Ripa,
XIII. Trastevere,
XIV. Borgo.
Five of these names, that is to say, Ponte, Parione, Regola, Pigna and
Sant' Angelo, indicate in a general way the part of the city designated
by each. Ponte, the Bridge, is the Region about the Bridge of Sant'
Angelo, on the left bank at the sharp bend of the river seen from that
point; but the original bridge which gave the name was the Pons
Triumphalis, of which the foundations are still sometimes visible a
little below the AElian bridge leading to the Mausoleum of Hadrian.
Parione, the Sixth ward, is the next division to the preceding one,
towards the interior of the city, on both sides of the modern Corso
Vittorio Emmanuele, taking in the ancient palace of the Massimo family,
the Cancelleria, famous as the most consistent piece of architecture in
Rome, and the Piazza Navona. Regola is next, towards the river,
comprising the Theatre of Pompey and the Palazzo Farnese. Pigna takes in
the Pantheon, the Collegio Romano and the Palazzo di Venezia. Sant'
Angelo has nothing to do with the castle or the bridge, but takes its
name from the little church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and
includes the old Ghetto with some neighbouring streets. The rest explain
themselves well enough to anyone who has even a very slight acquaintance
with the city.
At first sight these more or less arbitrary divisions may seem of little
importance. It was, of course, necessary, even in early times, to divide
the population and classify it for political and municipal purposes.
There is no modern city in the world that is not thus managed by wards
and districts, and the consideration of such management and of its means
might appear to be a very flat and unprofitable study, tiresome alike
to the reader and to the writer. And so it would be, if it were not true
that the Fourteen Regions of Rome were fourteen elements of romance,
each playing its part in due season, while all were frequently the stage
at once, under the collective name of the people, in their ever-latent
opposition and in their occasional violent outbreaks against the nobles
and the popes, who alternately oppressed and spoiled them for private
and public ends. In other words, the Regions with their elected captains
under one chief captain were the survival of the Roman People, for ever
at odds with the Roman Senate. In times when there was no government, in
any reasonable sense of the word, the people tried to govern themselves,
or at least to protect themselves as best they could by a rough system
which was all that remained of the elaborate municipality of the Empire.
Without the Regions the struggles of the Barons would probably have
destroyed Rome altogether; nine out of the twenty-four Popes who reigned
in the tenth century would not have been murdered and otherwise done to
death; Peter the Prefect could not have dragged Pope John the Thirteenth
a prisoner through the streets; Stefaneschi could never have terrorized
the Barons, and half destroyed their castles in a week; Rienzi could not
have made himself dictator; Ludovico Migliorati could not have murdered
the eleven captains of Regions in his house and thrown their bodies to
the people from the windows, for which Giovanni Colonna drove out the
Pope and the cardinals, and sacked the Vatican; in a word, the
strangest, wildest, bloodiest scenes of mediaeval Rome could not have
found a place in history. It is no wonder that to men born and bred in
the city the Regions seem even now to be an integral factor in its
existence.
There were two other elements of power, namely, the Pope and the Barons.
The three are almost perpetually at war, two on a side, against the
third. Philippe de Commines, ambassador of Lewis the Eleventh in Rome,
said that without the Orsini and the Colonna, the States of the Church
would be the happiest country in the world. He forgot the People, and
was doubtless too politic to speak of the Popes to his extremely devout
sovereign. Take away the three elements of discord, and there would
certainly have been peace in Rome, for there would have been no one to
disturb the bats and the owls, when everybody was gone.
The excellent advice of Ampere, already quoted, is by no means easy to
follow, since there are not many who have the time and the inclination
to acquire a 'superficial knowledge' of Rome by a ten years' visit. If,
therefore, we merely presuppose an average knowledge of history and a
guide-book acquaintance with the chief points in the city, the simplest
and most direct way of learning more about it is to take the Regions in
their ancient order, as the learned Baracconi has done in his
invaluable little work, and to try as far as possible to make past deeds
live again where they were done, with such description of the places
themselves as may serve the main purpose best. To follow any other plan
would be either to attempt a new history of the city of Rome, or to
piece together a new archaeological manual. In either case, even
supposing that one could be successful where so much has already been
done by the most learned, the end aimed at would be defeated, for
romance would be stiffened to a record, and beauty would be dissected to
an anatomical preparation.
[Illustration: BRASS OF TITUS, SHOWING THE COLOSSEUM]
[Illustration]
REGION I MONTI
'Monti' means 'The Hills,' and the device of the Region represents
three, figuring those enclosed within the boundaries of this district;
namely, the Quirinal, the Esquiline and the Coelian. The line encircling
them includes the most hilly part of the mediaeval city; beginning at the
Porta Salaria, it runs through the new quarter, formerly Villa Ludovisi,
to the Piazza Barberini, thence by the Tritone to the Corso, by the Via
Marforio, skirting the eastern side of the Capitoline Hill and the
eastern side of the Roman Forum to the Colosseum, which it does not
include; on almost to the Lateran, back again, so as to include the
Basilica, by San Stefano Rotondo, and out by the Navicella to the now
closed Porta Metronia. The remainder of the circuit is completed by the
Aurelian wall, which is the present wall of the city, though the modern
Electoral Wards extend in some places beyond it. The modern gates
included in this portion are the Porta Salaria, the Porta Pia, the new
gate at the end of the Via Montebello, the next, an unnamed opening
through which passes the Viale Castro Pretorio, then the Porta
Tiburtina, the Porta San Lorenzo, the exit of the railway, Porta
Maggiore, and lastly the Porta San Giovanni.
The Region of the Hills takes in by far the largest area of the fourteen
districts, but also that portion which in later times has been the least
thickly populated, the wildest districts of mediaeval and recent Rome,
great open spaces now partially covered by new though hardly inhabited
buildings, but which were very lately either fallow land or ploughed
fields, or cultivated vineyards, out of which huge masses of ruins rose
here and there in brown outline against the distant mountains, in the
midst of which towered the enormous basilicas of Santa Maria Maggiore
and Saint John Lateran, the half-utilized, half-consecrated remains of
the Baths of Diocletian, the Baths of Titus, and over against the
latter, just beyond the southwestern boundary, the gloomy Colosseum, and
on the west the tall square tower of the Capitol with its deep-toned
bell, the 'Patarina,' which at last was sounded only when the Pope was
dead, and when Carnival was over on Shrove Tuesday night.