CHAPTER II

THE APPIAN WAY

It was the proud boast of the ancient Romans that all roads led to

their city. Rome was the centre and mistress of the world; and as the

loneliest rill that rises in the bosom of the far-off mountain leads,

if followed, to the ocean, so every path in the remotest corner of the

vast empire conducted to the great gilded column in the Roman Forum,

upon which all distances without the walls were marked. To the Romans

the world is indebted for opening up communications with different

countries. They were the great engineers and road-makers of antiquity.

This seems to have been the work assigned to them in the household of

nations. Rome broke down the barriers that separated one nation from

another, and fused all distinctions of race and language and religion

into one great commonwealth. And for the cohesion of all the elements

of this huge political fabric nothing could have been more effectual

than the magnificent roads, by which constant communication was kept

up between all parts of the empire, and armies could be transported to

quell a rising rebellion in some outlying province with the smallest

expenditure of time and strength. In this way the genius of this

wonderful people was providentially made subservient to the interests

of Christianity. At the very time that our Lord commissioned, with His

parting breath, the apostles to preach the gospel to every creature,

the way was prepared for the fulfilment of that commission. The

crooked places had been made straight, and the rough places smooth.

Along the roads which the Romans made throughout the world for the

march of their armies and the consolidation of their government, the

apostles, the soldiers of the Prince of Peace, marched to grander and

more enduring victories.

Of all the roads of ancient Rome the Via Appia was the oldest and most

renowned. It was called by the Romans themselves the _regina viarum_,

the "queen of roads." It was constructed by Appius Claudius the Blind,

during the Samnite War, when he was Censor, three hundred and thirteen

years before Christ, and led from Rome to Capua, being carried over

the Pontine Marshes on an embankment. It was afterwards extended to

Brindisi, the ancient seaport of Rome on the Adriatic, and became the

great highway for travellers from Rome to Greece and all the eastern

provinces of the Roman Empire. A curious link of connection may be

traced between the modern Italian expression, when drinking to a

person's health on leaving home, "far Brindisi," and the distant

termination of the Appian Way, suggestive, as of old, of farewell

wishes for a prosperous journey and a speedy return to the parting

guest. The way was paved throughout with broad hexagonal slabs of hard

lava, exactly fitted to each other; and here and there along its

course may still be seen important remains of it, which prove its

excellent workmanship. This method of constructing roads was borrowed

by the Romans from the Carthaginians, and was tried for the first time

on the Appian Way, all previous roads having been formed of sand and

gravel. The greatest breadth of the road was about twenty-six feet

between the curbstones; and on both sides were placed, at intervals of

forty feet, low columns, as seats for the travel-worn, and as helps in

mounting on horseback. Distances of five thousand feet were marked by

milestones, which were in the form of columnar shafts, elevated on

pedestals with appropriate inscriptions. The physical wants of the

traveller were provided for at inns judiciously disposed along the

route; while his religious wants were gratified by frequent statues of

Mercury, Apollo, Diana, Ceres, Hercules, and other deities, who

presided over highways and journeys, casting their sacred shadow over

his path. Some of the stones of the pavement still show the ruts of

the old chariot-wheels, and others are a good deal cracked and worn;

but they are sound enough, probably, to outlast the modern little

cubes which have replaced them in some parts. A road formed in this

most substantial manner for about two hundred miles, involving

cuttings through rocks, filling up of hollows, bridging of ravines,

and embanking of swamps, must have been an arduous and costly feat of

engineering. Appius Claudius is said to have exhausted the Roman

treasury in defraying the expenses of its construction. It was

frequently repaired, owing to the heavy traffic upon it, by Julius, by

Augustus, Vespasian, Domitian, Nerva, and very thoroughly by the

Emperor Trajan. In some parts, where the soft ground had subsided, a

second pavement was laid over the first; and in the Pontine Marshes we

observe traces of no less than three pavements superimposed above each

other to preserve the proper level.

For a considerable distance outside the Porta Capena, where it

commenced, the Appian Way was lined on both sides with tombs belonging

to patrician families. This was the case, indeed, with all the other

roads of Rome that were converted into avenues of death owing to the

strenuous law which prohibited all interments within the walls; but

the Appian Way was specially distinguished for the number and

magnificence of its tombs. The most illustrious names of ancient Rome

were interred beside it. At first the sepulchres of the heroes of the

early ages were the only ones; but under the Cæsars these were

eclipsed by the funereal pomp of the freedmen, the parasites and

sycophants of the emperors. At first the tombs were built of volcanic

stone, the only building material found in the neighbourhood; but as

Rome became mistress of the world, and gathered the marbles and

precious stones of the conquered countries into its own bosom, and as

wealth and luxury increased, the tombs were constructed altogether of

or cased on the outside with these valuable materials. And this

circumstance gives us a clue to the age of the different monuments.

The custom of bordering the main approaches of the city with

sepulchral monuments was, in all likelihood, derived from the

Etruscans, to whom the Romans owed many of their institutions. These

monuments were usually structures of great beauty and elegance. Some

of them were fashioned as conical mounds, on the slopes of which trees

and parterres of flowers were planted; others were built after the

model of graceful Grecian temples; others were huge circular masses of

masonry; and others were simple sarcophagi with lids, resting on

square elevated pedestals. Most of them were adorned with busts and

statues of the departed, with altars, columns, and carvings. What

these tombs were in their prime, it is difficult for us to picture;

but even their remains at the present day produce the conviction that

no grander mode of approach to a great city could have been devised.

It would seem to us altogether incongruous to line our public roads

with tombs, and to transact the business and pursue the pleasures of

the living among the dead. All our ideas of propriety would be shocked

by seeing a circus for athletic games beside a cemetery. But the

ancient Romans had no such feeling. They buried their dead, not in

lonely spots and obscure churchyards as we do, but where the life of

the city was gayest. One of the grandest of their sepulchral monuments

was placed beside one of the most frequented of their circuses. The

last objects which a Roman beheld when he left the city, and the first

that greeted him on his coming back, were the tombs of his ancestors

and friends; and their silent admonition did not deepen the sadness

of farewell, or cast a shadow upon the joy of return. Many of the

marble sarcophagi were ornamented with beautiful bas-reliefs of

mythical incidents, utterly inconsistent, we should suppose, with the

purpose for which they were designed. Nuptials, bacchanalian fêtes,

games, and dances, are crowded upon their sculptured sides, in seeming

mockery of the pitiable relics of humanity within. They treated death

lightly and playfully, these ancient Romans, and tried to hide his

terror with a mask of smiles, and to cover his dart with a wreath of

flowers.

Why is it that we Christians look upon death with feelings so widely

different? Why, when life and immortality have been brought to light

in the gospel, are the mementoes of mortality more painful and

saddening to us than they were to these pagans who had no hopes of a

resurrection? It seems a paradox, but the Christianity which has

brought the greatest hope into the world has also brought the greatest

fear. By increasing the value of life, our religion has increased the

fear of death. By quickening the conscience, it has quickened the

imagination; and that death which to the man conscious only of a

physical existence is the mere natural termination of life, to the

nature convinced of sin is a violent breach of the beautiful order of

the world, and the gate to final retribution. The ancient Roman was

but a child in spiritual apprehension, and therefore as a child he

surrendered his happy pagan life as thoughtlessly as the weary child

falls asleep at the end of its play. No terrors of futurity darkened

his last hours; he had his own turn at the feast of life, and as a

satisfied guest he was content to depart and make room for others. As

cheerfully as he had formerly begun his ordinary journeys from Rome

through a street of tombs, so now he took the last journey, he knew

not whither, through the valley of the shadow of death, and feared no

evil; not because a greater Power was with him to defend him, but

because for him no evil except the common pangs of dissolution

existed. All that he cared for in death was that he should not be

altogether separated from the presence and the enjoyments of human

life, from the haunts where he had been so happy. He wished to have

his tomb on the public thoroughfare, that he might "feel, as it were,

the tide of life as it flowed past his monument, and that his mute

existence might be prolonged in the remembrance of his friends." I may

observe that the Roman custom of bordering the public roads with tombs

gives a significance to the inscriptions which some of them

bore,--such as, _Siste, viator_--_Aspice, viator_, "Stop,

traveller"--"Look, traveller"; a significance which is altogether lost

when the same inscriptions are carved, as we have often seen them, on

tombstones in secluded country churchyards where no traveller ever

passes by, and hardly even friends come to weep.

Modern Rome is unlike all other European cities in this respect, that

a short distance beyond its gates you plunge at once into a desert.

There is no gradual subsidence of the busy life of the gay metropolis,

through suburban houses, villages, and farms, into the quiet seclusion

of the country. You pass abruptly from the seat of the most refined

arts into the most primitive solitude, where the pulse of life hardly

beats. The desolation of the Campagna, that green motionless sea of

silence, comes up to and almost washes the walls of the city. You know

that you are in the immediate neighbourhood of a teeming population;

but you might as well be a hundred miles away in the heart of the

Apennines, for any signs of human culture or habitation that you

perceive within the horizon. There is no traffic on the road; and only

at rare intervals do you meet with a solitary peasant, looking like a

satyr in shaggy goat-skin breeches, and glaring wildly at you from his

great black eyes as he crosses the waste. Far as the eye can see there

is nothing but a melancholy plain, studded here and there with a ruin,

and populous only with the visionary forms of the past; and its

tragic beauty prepares your mind for passing into the solemn shadow of

the great Niobe of cities. But it was not thus in the brilliant days

of the Empire. For fifteen miles beyond the walls the Appian Way

stretched to the beautiful blue Alban hills, through a continuous

suburb of the city, adorned with all the charms of nature and art,

palatial villas and pleasure-gardens, groves and vineyards, temples

and far-extending aqueducts. These homes and fashionable haunts of the

living were interspersed in strange association with the tombs of the

dead. Through the gate a constant stream of human life passed in and

out; and crowds of chariots and horsemen and wayfarers thronged the

road from morning to night.

It is only seventeen years since the true point of commencement of the

Appian Way was discovered. For a long time the Porta Capena by which

it left Rome was supposed to be situated outside of the present walls,

in the valley of the Almo. But Dr. Parker, at the period indicated,

making some excavations in the narrowest part of the valley between

the Coelian and Aventine hills, came upon some massive remains of the

original wall of Servius Tullius, and in these he found the true site

of the Porta Capena. This discovery, confirming the supposition of

Ampère and others, cleared up much that was inexplicable in the

topography of this part of Rome, and enabled antiquarians to fix the

relative position of all the historical spots. The Via Appia is thus

shown to have extended upwards of three-quarters of a mile within the

present area of the city, over the space between the wall of Servius

Tullius and the wall of Aurelian. And this is still further confirmed

by the discovery, three hundred years ago, of the first milestone of

the Appian Way in a vineyard, a short distance beyond the modern gate

of St. Sebastian, marking exactly a Roman mile from that point to the

site of Dr. Parker's discovery. This milestone now forms one of the

ornaments on the balustrade at the head of the stairs of the Capitol.

The Appian Way shared in the vicissitudes of the city. After the fall

of the Western Empire, about the beginning of the sixth century, when

it was finally repaired by Theodoric, it fell into desuetude. The

people, owing to the unsettled state of the country, were afraid to

move from home. A grievous apathy took possession of all classes;

agriculture was neglected, and the drains being stopped up, the line

of route was inundated, and the road, especially on the low levels,

became quite impassable. For centuries it continued in this state,

until it was overgrown with a marshy vegetation in the wet places, and

covered with turf in the dry. About a hundred years ago Pope Pius VI.

drained the Pontine Marshes, and restored other parts of the road, and

made it available as the ordinary land-route from Rome to Naples. But

it was left to Pio Nono to uncover the road between Rome and Albano,

which had previously been confounded with the Campagna, and was only

indicated by the double line of ruined tombs. After three years of

hard work, and an expenditure of £3000, the part most interesting to

the archæologist--namely, from the third to the eleventh

milestone--was laid bare, its monuments identified as far as possible,

and a wall of loose stones built on both sides, to protect it from the

encroachments of the neighbouring landowners. And now the modern

traveller can walk or ride or drive comfortably over the very pavement

which Horace and Virgil, Augustus and Paul traversed, and gaze upon

the ruins of the very objects that met their eyes.

Taking our departure from the site of the Porta Capena, we are

reminded that it was at the Porta Capena that the survivor of the

Horatii met his sister, who had been betrothed to one of the Curiatii,

and who, when she saw her brother carrying the cloak of her dead

lover, which she had wrought with her own hand, upbraided him in a

passion of tears for his cruelty. Enraged at the sight of her grief,

Horatius drew his sword and stabbed her to the heart, crying, "So

perish the Roman maiden that shall weep for her country's enemy!" The

tomb of the hapless maiden long stood on the spot. It was at the Porta

Capena also that the senate and people of Rome gave to Cicero a

splendid ovation on his return from banishment. Numerous historical

buildings clustered round this gate--a temple of Mars, of Hercules, of

Honour and Virtue, and a fountain dedicated to Mercury, described by

Ovid; but not a trace of these now remains.

On the left, at the back of the Coelian Hill, is a valley covered with

verdure, wonderfully quiet and rural-looking, though within the walls

of a city. In this valley once stood the famous grove where Numa

Pompilius had his mysterious interviews with the nymph Egeria. A

spring still bubbles forth beside a cluster of farm-buildings, which

is said to be the veritable Fountain of Egeria. The temple of the

Muses, who were Egeria's counsellors, was close by; and the name of

the gate of the city, _Porta Capena_, was in all likelihood a

corruption of Camena, the Latin name for Muse, and was not derived, as

some suppose, from the city of Capua. The spot outside the present

walls, formerly visited as the haunt of the fabled nymph, before the

discovery of the site of the Capena gate fixed its true

position--beautiful and romantic as it is--was only the nymphæum of

some Roman villa, used as a place of retirement and coolness in the

oppressive heat of summer. Of all the legends of Rome's earliest days,

none is more poetical than that which speaks of the visits of Numa to

this mysterious being, whose counsels in these sacred shades were of

such value to him in the management of his kingdom, and who dictated

to him the whole religious institutions and civil legislation of Rome.

Whatever historical basis it may have, the legend has at least a core

of moral truth. It illustrates the necessity of solitude and communion

with Higher Powers as a preparation for the solemn duties of life. All

who have influenced men permanently for good have drawn their

inspiration from lonely haunts sacred to meditation--ever since Moses

saw the burning bush in the desert, and Elijah bowed his strong soul

to the majesty of the still small voice at Horeb.

The romance of the grove of Egeria was, however, dispelled when the

valley was turned into a place of imprisonment for the Jews. Domitian

drove them out of the Ghetto, and shut them up here, with only a

basket and a wisp of hay for each person, to undergo unheard-of

privations and miseries. The Horticultural Gardens, where the shrubs

and plants are grown that ornament the public squares and terraces of

the city, now occupy the site of the celebrated grove. The shrill

scream of the railway whistle outside the gate, and the smell of the

gas-works near at hand--these veritable things of the present

century--are fatal to all enchantments, and effectually dissipate the

spell of the muses and the mystic fragrance of the Egerian solitude.

But wonderful is the persistence of a spring in a spot. Continually

changing, it is the most changeless of all things. For ever passing

away, it is yet the most steadfast and enduring. Derived from the

fleeting vapour--the emblem of inconstancy--it outlasts the most solid

structure of man, and continues to well up its waters even when the

rock beside it has weathered into dust. The Fountain of Egeria flows

to-day in the hollow of the Coelian Hill as it flowed nigh three

thousand years ago, although the muses have fled, and the deities

Picus and Faunus, which Numa entrapped in the wood of the Aventine,

have gone back to their native skies with Jupiter; and Mammon and

Philosophy have exorcised that unseen world which once presented so

many beauties and wonders to the imagination of man.

A little farther on to the right, a side path, called the Via

Antonina, leads up to the stupendous ruins of the Baths of Caracalla,

a mile in circumference, and covering a space of 2,625,000 square

yards. The walls, arches, and domes of massive brickwork hanging up in

the sky,--the fragments of sculpture and splendid mosaic pavements

belonging to these baths,--produced a deeper impression upon my mind

than even the ruins of the Colosseum. With the form and majesty of the

Colosseum, owing to its compactness and unity, pictures and other

representations have made us familiar from infancy, so that it excites

no surprise when we actually visit it; but the Baths of Caracalla

cannot be pictorially represented as a whole, on account of their vast

variety and extent, and therefore we come to the spectacle wholly

unprepared, and are at once startled into awe and astonishment.

Notwithstanding the wholesale pillage of centuries, enough in the way

of chambers and baths, marble statues, pillars, and works of art,

still remains in this mountainous mass of masonry to witness to the

unparalleled luxury by which the strength of the Roman youth was

enervated, and the foundations of the empire sapped. Shelley wrote on

the summit of one of the arches his "Prometheus Unbound;" and

certainly a fitter place in which to seek inspiration for such a theme

could not be found.

Beyond the Baths, on the same side of the road, is the most

interesting little church of the two saints Nereus and Achilles,

Christian slaves who suffered martyrdom in the reign of Diocletian. It

is supposed that the Nereus whose body reposes in this ancient church

is the person referred to by St. Paul in his greetings to the Roman

saints at the close of his Epistle--"Salute Nereus, and his sister,

and Olympas, and all the saints which are with them." Bolland, in his

_Acts of the Saints_, mentions that he was a servant in the household

of Flavia Domitilla, niece of the celebrated Christian lady of the

same name, whose mother was the sister of the Emperor Domitian, and

whose two sons were intended to succeed to the imperial throne. This

younger Domitilla, although so nearly related to the imperial family,

was banished to the island of Pontia, because of her refusal to

sacrifice to idols. Her two Christian servants, Nereus and Achilles,

accompanied her in her exile, and were afterwards burned alive, along

with their mistress, at Terracina, and their ashes deposited in the

same resting-place. It is a remarkable circumstance that this church

and the catacomb where they were buried at first, should have borne

the names of the lowly slaves instead of the name of their illustrious

mistress, who was as distinguished by her Christian faith as by her

rank. Time brought to these noble martyrs a worthy revenge for their

ignoble fate; for when their ashes were taken from the catacomb to

this church in the year 524, they were first carried in triumph to the

Capitol, and made to pass under the imperial arches, on which was

affixed the inscriptions "The Senate and the Roman people to Santa

Flavia Domitilla, for having brought more honour to Rome by her death

than her illustrious relations by their works." "To Santa Flavia

Domitilla, and to the saints Nereus and Achilles, the excellent

citizens who gained peace for the Christian republic at the price of

their blood." Jeremy Taylor, in his splendid sermon on the

"Marriage-ring," has a touching reference to the legendary history of

Nereus. The church dedicated to the honour of these Christian slaves

has many interesting associations. It stands upon the site of a

primitive Christian oratory, called Fasciola, because St. Peter was

said to have dropped there one of the bandages of his wounds on the

way to execution. And its last reconstruction, retaining all the

features of the old architecture with the utmost care, was the pious

work of its titular cardinal, Cæsar Baronius, the celebrated librarian

of the Vatican, whose Ecclesiastical Annals may be called the earliest

systematic work on Church History. The church has an enclosed choir,

with two ambones or reading-desks in it, surrounding the altar, as was

the custom in the older Christian churches. The mosaics on the tribune

representing the "Transfiguration" and "Annunciation" are more than a

thousand years old, and are interesting besides as the first

embodiments in art of these sacred subjects. Behind the high altar is

the pontifical chair, supported by lions, with a Gothic gable, on

which Gregory the Great was seated when he delivered his twenty-eighth

Homily, a few sentences of which are engraved on the marble.

Beyond the church of Sts. Nereus and Achilles, on the opposite side,

where the ground rises thirty or forty feet above the level of the

road, there is a rude inscription above the door of a vineyard,

intimating that the Tomb of the Scipios is here. This is by far the

most interesting of all the monuments on the Appian Way. It was the

mausoleum of a long line of the most illustrious names in Roman

history--patriots and heroes, whose virtues and honours were

hereditary. Originally the sepulchre stood above ground, and the

entrance to it was by a solid arch of peperino, facing a cross-road

leading from the Appian to the Latin Way; but the soil in the course

of ages accumulated over it, and buried it out of sight. It was

accidentally discovered in 1780, in consequence of a peasant digging

in the vineyard to make a cellar, and breaking through a part of the

vaulted roof of the tomb. Then was brought suddenly to light the

celebrated sarcophagus of plain peperino stone, which contained the

remains of the Roman consul, Lucius Scipio Barbatus, after having been

undisturbed for nearly twenty-two centuries. Several other sarcophagi

belonging to members of the family were found at the same time, along

with two busts, one of which is supposed to be that of the poet

Ennius, the friend and companion of Scipio Africanus, whose last

request on his deathbed was that he might be buried by his side. Pliny

remarks that the Scipios had the singular custom of burying instead of

burning their dead; and this is confirmed by the discovery of these

sarcophagi. I found the mausoleum to consist of a series of chambers

and approaches to them, excavated in the solid tufa rock, not unlike

the labyrinthine recesses of the catacombs. The darkness was feebly

dispelled by the light of wax tapers carried by the guide and myself;

and the aspect of the narrow, low-browed passages and chambers was

gloomy in the extreme. Here and there were Latin inscriptions

attached to the different recesses where the dead had lain; but they

were only copies, the originals having been removed to the Vatican,

where the sarcophagus of Lucius Scipio Barbatus and the bust of the

poet Ennius may now be seen. The very bones of the illustrious dead

have been carried off, and after a series of adventures they are now

deposited in a beautiful little monument in the grounds of a nobleman

near Padua. The gold signet-ring of Scipio Africanus, with a victory

in intaglio on a cornelian stone, found in the tomb of his son, who

was buried here, is now in the possession of Lord Beverley. It must be

remembered, however, that Scipio Africanus, the most illustrious of

his family, and the noblest of all the Roman names, was not interred

in this mausoleum. A strange mystery hung over the manner of his death

and the place of his burial even in Livy's time. Some said that he

died at Rome, and others at Liternum. A fragment of an inscription was

found near the little lake at the latter place, beside which he

resided during the dignified exile of his later years, which contained

only the words--"... ta Patria ... ne ..." Antiquarians have filled

out this sentence into the touching epigraph recorded by Livy, which

Scipio himself wished to be put upon his tomb: "Ingrata Patria, ne

ossa quidem, mea habes," "My ungrateful country, thou hast not even my

bones." Empty as the tomb of the Scipios looks, no one can behold it

without feelings of profound veneration. The history of the most

heroic period of ancient Rome is linked with this tomb; and all the

romance of the Punic Wars, of Hannibal and Hasdrubal, pass before the

mind's eye, as one gazes upon the desecrated chambers where the son

and relatives of the great conqueror had reposed in death.

Within a short distance of the tomb of the Scipios are the most

celebrated of all the Columbaria of Rome. Previous to the fifth

century of Rome, the bodies of the dead were buried entire, and

deposited in sarcophagi; but after that period cremation became the

universal custom. The ashes and calcined bones were preserved in

_ollæ_, or little jars like common garden flower-pots, made of the

same kind of coarse red earthenware, with a lid attached. These jars

were deposited in rows of little niches sunk in the brickwork all

round the walls of the tomb, resembling the nests in a pigeon-house;

hence the origin of the name. One tomb was thus capable of containing

the remains of a large number of persons; no less than six thousand of

the freedmen of Augustus being deposited in the Columbarium which

bears their name. The entrance to these sepulchral chambers was from

the top, descending by an internal stair; and the passages and walls

were usually decorated with frescoes and arabesques, illustrating some

mythical or historical subject. The names of the dead were carved on

marble tablets fixed above the pigeon-holes containing the ashes.

Columbaria being only used for dependents and slaves, were generally

erected near the tombs of their masters; and hence all along the

Appian Way we see numerous traces of them side by side with the

gigantic monuments of the patrician families. The Columbaria near the

tomb of the Scipios are three in number, and contain the cinerary urns

of persons attached to the household of the emperors from the reign of

Augustus up to the period of the Antonines, when the system of burying

the bodies entire was again introduced. The last discovered

Columbarium is the most interesting of the group. Being only

thirty-three years exposed, the paintings on the walls and the vases

are remarkably well preserved. This tomb contains the ashes of the

dependents of Tiberius, the contemporary of our Lord. One pigeon-hole

is filled with the calcined bones of the court buffoon, a poor deaf

and dumb slave who had wonderful powers of mimicry, and used to amuse

his morose master by imitating the gesticulations of the advocates

pleading in the Forum. Another pigeon-hole contains the remains of the

keeper of the library of Apollo in the imperial palace on the

Palatine. A most pathetic lamentation in verse is made by one Julia

Prima over the ashes of her husband; and an inscription, along with a

portrait of the animal, records that beneath are the remains of a

favourite dog that was the pet of the whole household--a little touch

of nature that links the ages and the zones, and makes the whole world

kin. The whole of this region, called Monte d'Oro, for what reason I

know not, seems to have been a vast necropolis, in which not only

Columbaria for their slaves and freedmen were built by the great

patrician families, but also family vaults for the wealthier middle

classes were constructed and sold by speculators, just as in our

modern town cemeteries.

Very near the modern gate of the city the road passes under the

so-called Arch of Drusus. It consists of a single arch, whose keystone

projects on each side about two feet and a half beyond the plane of

the frontage; and is built of huge solid blocks of travertine, with

cornices of white marble, and two composite columns of African marble

on each side, much soiled and defaced, which are so inferior in style

to the rest of the architecture that they are manifestly later

additions. The whole monument is much worn and injured; but it is made

exceedingly picturesque by a crown of verdure upon the thick mass of

soil accumulated there by small increments blown up from the highway

in the course of so many centuries. It was long supposed that

Caracalla had barbarously taken advantage of the arch to carry across

the highway at this point the aqueduct which supplied his baths with

water. But the more recent authorities maintain that the arch itself,

so far from being the monument of Drusus, was only one of the arches

built by Caracalla in a more ornamental way than the rest, as was

commonly done when an aqueduct crossed a public road. This theory does

away at one fell stroke with the idea so long fondly cherished that

St. Paul must have passed under this very arch on his way to Rome, and

that his eye must have rested on these very stones upon which we gaze

now. It is hard to give up the belief that the stern old arch, severe

in its sturdiness and simplicity as the character of the apostle

himself, did actually cast its haunted shadow over him on the

memorable day when, a prisoner in chains in charge of a Roman soldier,

he passed over this part of the Appian Way, and it signalised a far

grander triumph than that for which it was originally erected. We

should greatly prefer to retain the old idea that under that arch

Christianity, as represented by St. Paul, passed to its conquest of

the whole Roman world; and passed too in character, the religion of

the cross, joy in sorrow, liberty in bonds, strength in weakness,

proclaiming itself best from the midst of the sufferings which it

overcame.

Immediately beyond the Arch of Drusus is the Gate of St. Sebastian,

the Porta Appia of the Aurelian wall, protected on either side by two

semicircular towers, which from their great height and massiveness

have a most imposing appearance. They are composed of the beautiful

glowing brick of the ancient Roman structures, and rest upon a

foundation of white marble blocks, evidently taken from the Temple of

Mars, which once stood close by, and at which the armies entering Rome

in triumph used to halt. The gateway was greatly injured in the sixth

century during the Gothic War, but was repaired by Belisarius; or, as

some say, by Narses. The most remarkable incident connected with it

since that period was the triumphal entry into the city of Marco

Antonio Colonna, after the victory of Lepanto over the Turks and

African corsairs in 1571. This famous battle, one of the few great

decisive battles of the world, belongs equally to civil and

ecclesiastical history, having checked the spread of Mohammedanism in

Eastern Europe, and thus altered the fortunes of the Church and the

world. The famous Spanish poet Cervantes lost an arm in this battle.

The ovation given to Colonna by the Romans in connection with it may

be said to be the last of the long series of triumphal processions

which entered the Eternal City; and in point of splendour and ceremony

it vied with the grandest of them,--prisoners and their families,

along with the spoil taken from the enemy, figuring in it as of old. A

short distance outside the gate, the viaduct of the railway from

Civita Vecchia spans the Appian Way, and brings the ancient "queen of

roads" and the modern iron-way into strange contrast,--or rather, I

should say, into fitting contact; for there is a resemblance between

the great works of ancient and modern engineering skill in their

mighty enterprise and boundless command of physical resources, which

we do not find in the works of the intermediate ages.

Beyond the viaduct the road descends into a valley, at the bottom of

which runs the classic Almo. It is little better than a ditch, with

artificial banks overgrown with weeds, great glossy-leaved arums, and

milky-veined thistles, and with a little dirty water in it from the

drainings of the surrounding vineyards. And yet this disenchanted

brook figures largely in ancient mythical story. Ovid sang of it, and

Cicero's letters mention it honourably. It was renowned for its

medicinal properties, and diseased cattle were brought to its banks to

be healed. The famous _simulacrum_, called the image of Cybele,--a

black meteoric stone which fell from the sky at Phrygia, and was

brought to Rome during the Second Punic War, according to the

Sybilline instructions,--was washed every spring in the waters of the

Almo by the priests of the goddess. So persistent was this pagan

custom, even amid the altered circumstances of Christianity, that,

until the commencement of the nineteenth century, an image of our

Saviour was annually brought from the Church of Santa Martina in the

Forum and washed in this stream. In the valley of the Almo the poet

Terence possessed a little farm of twenty acres, given to him by his

friend Scipio Æmilianus.

After crossing the Almo, two huge shapeless masses of ruins may be

seen above the vineyard walls: that on the left is said to be the

tomb of Geta, the son of the Emperor Severus, who was put to death in

his mother's arms by order of his unnatural brother. Geta's children

and friends, to the number, it is said, of twenty thousand persons,

were also put to death on the false accusation of conspiracy; among

whom was the celebrated jurist Papinian, who, when required to compose

a defence of the murder--as Seneca was asked by Nero to apologise for

his crime--nobly replied that "it was easier to commit than to justify

fratricide." But so capricious was Caracalla that he soon afterwards

executed the accomplices of his unnatural deed, and caused his

murdered brother to be placed among the gods, and divine honours to be

paid to him. It was in this more humane mood that the tomb whose ruins

we see on the Appian Way was ordered to be built. The tomb on the

right-hand side of the road is a most incongruous structure as it

appears at present, having a circular medieval tower on the top of it,

and a common osteria or wine-shop in front; but the old niches in

which statues or busts used to stand still remain. It was long

supposed to be the mausoleum of the Scipios; but it is now ascertained

to be the sepulchre of Priscilla, the wife of Abascantius, the

favourite freedman of Domitian, celebrated for his conjugal affection

by the poet Statius. Covered with ivy and mural plants, the monument

has a very picturesque appearance.

The road beyond this rises from the valley of the Almo, and passes

over a kind of plateau. It is hemmed in on either side by high ugly

walls, shaggy with a profusion of plants which affect such situations.

The wild mignonette hangs out its pale yellow spikes of blossoms, but

without the fragrance for which its garden sister is so remarkable;

and the common pellitory, a near ally of the nettle, which haunts all

old ruins, clings in great masses to the crevices, its leaves and

ignoble blossoms white with the dust of the road. Here and there a

tall straggling plant of purple lithospermum has found a footing, and

flourishes aloft its dark violet tiara of blossoms; while bright tufts

of wall-flower send up their tongues of flame from an old tomb peering

above the wall, as if from a funeral pyre. The St. Mary thistle grows

at the foot of the walls in knots of large, spreading, crinkled

leaves, beautifully scalloped at the edges; the glazed surface

reticulated with lacteal veins, retaining the milk that, according to

the legend, flowed from the Virgin's breast, and, forming the Milky

Way in mid-heaven, fell down to earth upon this wayside thistle. Huge

columns of cactuses and monster aloes may be seen rising above the top

of the walls, like relics of a geologic flora contemporaneous with the

age of the extinct volcanoes around. But the most curious of all the

plants that adorn the walls is a kind of ivy which, instead of the

usual dark-greenish or black berries, bears yellow ones. This species

is rare, but here it occurs in profusion, and is as beautiful in

foliage as it is singular in fruit. The walls themselves, apart from

their floral adorning, are very remarkable, and deserving of the most

careful and leisurely study. They are built up evidently of the

remains of tombs; and numerous fragments of marble sarcophagi,

pillars, inscriptions, and rich sculpture are imbedded in them,

suggestive of a whole volume of antiquarian lore, so that he who runs

may read.

On the right of the road, in a vineyard, are several Columbaria

belonging to the family of Cæcilius, an obscure Latin poet, who was a

predecessor of Terence, and died one hundred and sixty-eight years

before Christ; and on the left are the Columbaria of the freedmen of

Augustus and Livia, divided into three chambers. These last when

discovered excited the utmost interest among antiquarians; but they

are now stripped of all their contents and characteristic decorations,

and the inscriptions, about three hundred in number, are preserved in

the museums of the Capitol and Vatican. On the same side of the road,

in a vineyard, a Columbarium was discovered in 1825 belonging to the

Volusian family, who flourished in the reign of Nero; one of whose

members, Lucius Volusius, who lived to the age of ninety-three, was

extolled on account of his exemplary life by Tacitus.

On the same plateau is the entrance to the celebrated Catacombs of St.

Calixtus. It is on the right-hand side of the road, about a mile and a

quarter from the present gate, and near where stood the second

milestone on the ancient Appian Way. A marble tablet over the door of

a vineyard shaded with cypresses points it out to the visitor. The

rock out of which this and all the Roman Catacombs were hewn seems as

if created specially for the purpose. Recent geological observations

have traced in the Campagna volcanic matter produced at different

periods, when the entire area of Rome and its vicinity was the seat of

active plutonic agency. This material is of varying degrees of

hardness. The lowest and oldest is so firm and compact that it still

furnishes, as it used to do, materials for building; the foundations

of the city, the wall of Romulus, and the massive blocks on which the

Capitol rests, being formed of this substance. Over this a later

stratum was deposited called _tufa granolare_, consisting of a similar

mechanical conglomerate of scoriæ, ashes, and other volcanic products,

but more porous and friable in texture. It is in this last formation,

which is so soft that it can be easily hollowed out, and yet so solid

that it does not crumble, that the Catacombs are invariably found.

There is something that appeals strongly to the imagination in the

fact that the early Christians should have formed the homes of their

dead and the haunts of their faith in the deposit of the terrible

volcano and the stormy sea! The outbursts of the Alban volcanoes were

correlated in God's scheme of providence with the outbursts of human

fury long ages afterwards; and the one was prepared as a means of

defence from the other, by Him who maketh His ministers a flaming

fire.

The Catacombs were specially excavated for Christian burial,--tombs

beneath the tombs of the Appian Way. Unlike the pagans, who burned the

bodies of their dead, and deposited, as we have seen, the ashes in

cinerary urns which took up but little space, the Christians buried

the bodies of their departed friends in rock-hewn sepulchres. They

must have derived this custom from the Jewish mode of interment; and

they would wish to follow in this the example of their Lord, who was

laid in an excavated tomb. Besides, it was abhorrent to their feelings

to burn their dead. Their religion had taught them to value the body,

which is an integral part of human nature, and has its own share in

the redemption of man. Their mode of sepulture therefore required

larger space; and as the Christians grew and multiplied, and more

burials took place, they extended the subterranean passages and

galleries in every direction. It is computed that upwards of six

millions of the bodies of the early Christians were deposited in the

Catacombs. The name which these rock-hewn sepulchres first received

was _cemeteries_, places of sleep; for the Christians looked upon

their dead as only asleep, to be awakened by the trump of the

archangel at the resurrection. And being used as burial-places, the

Catacombs became the inalienable property of the Christians; for,

according to Roman law, land which had once been used for interment

became _religiosus_, and could not be transferred for any other

purpose. It was long supposed that the Catacombs were subsequently

made use of as places of abode, when persecution drove the Christians

to seek the loneliest spots; but this idea has been dispelled by a

more careful examination of them. There can be no doubt, however, that

they were employed as places of religious meeting. Numerous

inscriptions found in them touchingly record that no Christian worship

could be performed in the imperial city without the risk of discovery

and death; and therefore the members of the Christian flock were

obliged to meet for worship in these dreary vaults. The passages in

some places were expanded into large chambers, and there divine

service was performed; not only for the benefit of those who came to

bury their dead, but also for those who resided in the city, and were

Christians in secret.

Passing from the roughly-paved road into the vineyard where the

Catacombs of St. Calixtus are situated, the first objects that caught

my eye were the dark, gaunt ruins of a tomb and a chapel of the third

century, now wreathed and garlanded with luxuriant ivy. Beside these

ruins I descended into the Catacombs by an ancient staircase, at the

foot of which my guide provided me with a long twisted wax taper,

calculated to last out my visit. A short distance from the entrance, I

came to a vestibule surrounded with loculi or rock-hewn graves. The

walls were plastered, and covered with rude inscriptions, scratched

with a pointed iron instrument. These were done by pilgrims and

devotees in later ages, who had come here--many of them from distant

lands--to pay their respects at the graves of the saints and martyrs.

Two of these pilgrims, from the diocese of Salzburg, visited these

Catacombs in the eighth century, and left behind an account of their

visit, which has afforded a valuable clue to Cavaliere de Rossi in his

identification of the chambers and graves. Passing from this open

space, I soon reached a sepulchral chapel, lined with the graves of

the earliest popes--many of them martyrs--who were buried here for

about a century, from the year 200 to the year 296 of our era. The

gravestones of four of them have been found, with inscriptions in

Greek. A beautiful marble tablet by Pope Damasus, who died in 384,

stands where the altar of the chapel originally stood, and records the

praises of the martyrs whose remains lay in the neighbouring chambers;

ending with a wish that he himself might be buried beside them, only

he feared that he was unworthy of the honour. This good Pope, like an

older "Old Mortality," made it a labour of love, to which he

consecrated his life, to rediscover and adorn the tombs which had

been hidden under an accumulation of earth and rubbish during the

fearful persecution of Diocletian.

From this chapel of the Popes I came through a narrow passage to a

wider crypt, where the body of St. Cæcilia was laid after her

martyrdom in her own house in Rome, in the year 224. There is a rude

painting of this saint on the wall, clothed with rich raiment, and

adorned with the jewels befitting a Roman lady of high station. And at

the back of a niche, where a lamp used to burn before the shrine of

the saint, is painted a large head of our Saviour, with rays of glory

around it shaped like a Greek cross. This is said to be the oldest

representation of our Lord in existence, and from it all our

conventional portraits have been taken. Doubts have, however, been

thrown upon this by others, who assert that all the paintings in this

chamber are not older than the seventh century. After this, I wandered

on after my guide through innumerable narrow galleries hewn out of the

soft reddish-brown rock, and opening in all directions; all lined with

horizontal cavities for corpses, tier above tier, in which once were

crowded together old and young,--soldiers, martyrs, rich and poor

mingling their dust together, as in life they had shared all things in

common. Here social distinctions were abolished; side by side with the

obscure and unknown slave were some of the most illustrious names of

ancient Rome. These shelves are now empty, for nearly all the bones

and relics of the dead have been removed to different churches

throughout Europe. Even the inscriptions that were placed above each

grave--on marble tablets--have been taken away, and now line the walls

of the museums of St. John Lateran and the Vatican. A few, however,

remain in their place; and I know nothing more affecting than the

study of these. For the most part, they are very short, containing

only the name and date; sometimes only an initial letter or a

rudely-drawn cross, indicating that it was a time of sore trial, when

such hurried obsequies were all that the imminent danger allowed.

Sometimes I came upon a larger record--such as, "Thou sleepest sweetly

in God;" "In the sleep of peace."

But the most touching of all the inscriptions were those which were

scratched rudely in a few places on the walls by visitors to the tombs

of their fellow-Christians. The survivors came often to weep over the

relics of the dead. Here a husband records the virtues of a beloved

wife; there, a son invokes the precious memory of a pious father or

mother; and all of them express their calm resignation and unshaken

hope. One inscription especially struck me. It was very rude, and

almost obliterated, for seventeen hundred years had passed over it. It

was a husband's lamentation over a dead wife: "O Sophronia! dear

Sophronia! thou _mayest_ live?--Thou _shalt_ live!" How eloquently did

that rough, faded scrawl, over a long-forgotten grave, speak of the

human fear that perhaps his wife was lost to him for ever--"Thou

mayest live?" and of the noble faith that triumphed over it--"Thou

_shalt_ live!" Nothing affects and astonishes one more in these

inscriptions than this calm, assured confidence that death was but a

profound sleep,--a rest unspeakably grateful after such a weary life

of awful suffering,--and that they should see their beloved ones

again. It was a literal realisation of the words of the Epistle to the

Hebrews: "And others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that

they might obtain a better resurrection." They surrendered all that

life holds dear, and life itself, from loyalty to the God of truth,

knowing whom they had believed, and persuaded that He would keep that

which they had committed to Him against the great day. They made their

family ties so loyal and sacred, that their human love, in the higher

love of Christ Jesus, endured for evermore. In many of the crypts, the

emblems of martyrdom are roughly denoted by a sword, an axe, or by

faggots and fire. What sorrowful scenes must have taken place in

these dreary passages, as the mangled forms of parent, child, brother,

or friend were stealthily brought in from the bloody games in the

Flavian amphitheatre, or from the cruel tortures of the prison-house,

to their last dark, narrow home along the very path I was now

treading!

A number of rude paintings ornament the walls of the chapels, which

repeat over and over again the simple symbols of the Christian faith,

and the touching stories of the Bible. The ark of Noah; Daniel in the

lions' den; the miracle of Cana; the raising of Lazarus--are among the

most common of these frescoes. And they are deeply interesting, as

showing that down in these dim and dreary vaults, which presented such

a remarkable contrast to the lovely violet sky and the grand

architectural magnificence above ground, among men who cared little

for the things of time and sense, because life itself had not a

moment's security, were nevertheless nourished thoughts of ideal

beauty and unearthly grandeur, which afterwards yielded such glorious

fruit in the Christian art of Italy. The frescoes of the Catacombs are

the feeble beginnings of an artistic inspiration which culminated in

the "Last Supper" of Leonardo da Vinci, and the "Transfiguration" of

Raphael.

The anchor of hope, the olive-branch of peace, and the palm-branch as

the sign of victory and martyrdom, were seen everywhere. The fish,

whose Greek name is formed by the initial letters of the titles of our

Lord, was carved on the marble tablets and sarcophagi as the anagram

of the Saviour; and an Orante, or female figure praying, was

represented as the symbol of the Church. The most common of all the

figures, however, was that of the Good Shepherd carrying the lost

sheep on His shoulders, or leaning on His staff while the sheep were

feeding around Him. And a most touching figure it is, when we think of

the circumstances of those who carved or painted it in these gloomy

aisles. It was into no green pastures, and beside no still waters,

that the Good Shepherd led His flock in those awful days, but into

waste and howling wildernesses, where their feet were bruised by the

hard stones, and their flesh torn by the sharp thorns, and all the

storms of the world beat fiercely upon them. But still He was their

Good Shepherd, and in the wilderness He spread a table for them, and

in the valley of the shadow of death they feared no evil, for He was

with them, and His rod and staff comforted them.

I wish I could express adequately the emotions which filled my breast

while wandering through these Catacombs. Save for the feeble glimmer

of my own and the guide's lamp, I was in total darkness,--a darkness

that might be felt. Not a sound broke the awful silence except the

echo of our footsteps in the hollow passages. Not a trace or a

recollection of life recalled me from the thought of absolute

impenetrable death around. Each passage seemed so like the other, and

the ramifications were so endless and bewildering, that but for the

presence of my guide I should inevitably have lost myself. Horrible

stories of persons who had gone astray in the inextricable maze, and

wandering about in the empty gloom till they perished of exhaustion

and starvation, recurred to my mind; and my imagination, intensified

by the silence and darkness, vividly realised their sufferings. There

is indeed no chill or damp in these labyrinths, and the atmosphere is

mild and pleasant, but still the gloom was most oppressive. And yet a

deep gratitude fills the soul; for the light there shone in darkness,

and it was this very darkness that preserved our religion, when it ran

the risk of being extinguished. These fearful subterranean passages

were the furrows in which were planted the first germs of the

Christian religion,--in which they were long guarded in persecution as

the seed-corn under the frost-bound earth in winter, to spring up

afterwards when summer smiled upon the world, and yield a glorious

harvest to all nations.

On the opposite side of the Appian Way, in a vineyard, is the Catacomb

of Pretextatus, which is almost as extensive as that of St. Calixtus,

and hardly less interesting. It is especially remarkable for a large

square crypt, inlaid with brick and plaster, and covered with very

fine frescoes and arabesques of birds and foliage. The bodies of St.

Januarius, Agapetus, and Felicissimus, who suffered martyrdom in the

year 162, were interred in this Catacomb; and two churches, at a

subsequent period, were erected over it in honour of the three saints

who suffered martyrdom with St. Cæcilia. Recent explorations have

brought to light, in a separate part of this Catacomb, curious

paintings and inscriptions which have been referred to the mysteries

of Mithras--an Oriental worship of the Sun--introduced into Rome about

a century before Christ, and which was celebrated in caves. When

Christianity became popular, and was threatening the overthrow of

polytheism, an attempt was made to counteract its influence in the

reign of Alexander Severus, who himself came from the East, by

organising this worship. The two systems of religion became,

therefore, mixed up together for a while; and hence it is not uncommon

to find in pagan sepulchres symbols and arrangements of a Christian

character, and in Christian Catacombs Mithraic features. The funeral

monuments of those who were converted to Christianity in the earliest

ages of the Church indicated the transition between the two religions.

We find upon their tombs pagan symbols, which ceased to be identified

with pagan worship, and became mere conventional ornaments. We have

other evidences along the Appian Way of the eclectic revival of

paganism at this time. When alluding to the classic stream of the

Almo, I spoke of the associations of the worship of Cybele. This

naturalistic cult was introduced from Phrygia, and its orgiastic rites

and nameless infamies had a horrible fascination for an age of

decaying faith. And not far from the mounds of the Horatii and

Curiatii there is a monument, probably of the age of Trajan, with a

bas-relief portrait, dedicated to the memory of one _Usia Prima_, a

priestess of Isis; this worship, with its painful initiations and

splendid ritual, being imported from Egypt in the second century. But

although this Neo-paganism appealed more to the passions of men than

the sunny humanistic worship of older times, and for a time inspired

the most frenzied enthusiasm, it failed utterly to resuscitate the

decaying corpse of the old religion. Great Pan was hopelessly dead!

At a short distance on the same side of the road is the Catacomb of

Sts. Nereus and Achilles, which contained the remains of these saints,

and are interesting to us as the most ancient Christian cemetery in

the world. The masonry of the vestibule is in the best style of Roman

brickwork; and the frescoes on its walls, representing Christ and His

apostles, the Good Shepherd, Orpheus, Elijah, etc., indicate a period

of high artistic taste. This Catacomb contains the oldest

representation extant of the Virgin and Child receiving the homage of

the Wise men from the East, supposed to date from the end of the

second century, and was often made use of in support of Roman

Mariolatry. Several days might be profitably spent by the antiquarian

in investigating the contents of the different tiers of galleries;

while the geologist would find matter for interesting speculation in

the partial intrusion of the older lithoid tufa here and there into

the softer and more recent volcanic deposits in which the passages are

excavated, and in which numerous decomposing crystals of leucite may

be observed. On the same side of the way, farther on, is the Jewish

Catacomb, the tombs of which bear Jewish symbols, especially the

seven-branched golden candlestick, and are inscribed, not with the

secular names and occupations of the occupants, but with their sacred

names, as office-bearers of the synagogue, rulers, scribes, etc. The

inscriptions are not in Hebrew, but in Greek letters. It is supposed

that in this Catacomb were interred the bodies of the Jews who were

banished to the valley of Egeria by Domitian.

About a quarter of a mile beyond the Catacombs you come to a descent,

where there is a wide open space with a pillar in the centre, and

behind it the natural rock of a peculiarly glowing red colour,

overgrown with masses of ivy, wall-flower, and hawthorn just coming

into blossom. Below the road, on the right, is a kind of piazza,

shaded by a grove of funereal cypresses; and here is the church of St.

Sebastian, one of the seven great basilicas which pilgrims visited to

obtain the remission of their sins. It was founded by Constantine, on

the site of the house and garden of the pious widow Lucina, who buried

there the body of St. Sebastian after his martyrdom. This saint was a

Gaulish soldier in the Roman army, who, professing Christianity, was

put to death by order of Diocletian. The body of the saint is said to

repose under one of the altars, marked by a marble statue of him lying

dead, pierced with silver arrows, designed by Bernini. The present

edifice was entirely rebuilt by Cardinal Scipio Borghese; and nothing

remains of the ancient basilica save the six granite columns of the

portico, which were in all likelihood taken from some old pagan

temple. It was from the nave of this church that the only Catacomb

which used to be visited by pilgrims was entered; all the other

Catacombs which have since been opened being at that time blocked up

and unknown. Indeed it was to the subterranean galleries under this

church that the name of Catacomb was originally applied.

In the valley beneath St. Sebastian, on the left, is a large

enclosure, covered with the greenest turf, and reminding one more, by

its softness and compactness, of an English park than anything I had

seen about Rome. Here are the magnificent ruins of what was long known

as the Circus of Caracalla; but later investigations have proved that

the circus was erected in honour of Romulus, the son of the Emperor

Maxentius, in the year 311. It is the best preserved of all the

ancient Roman circuses, and affords an excellent clue to the

arrangements of such places for chariot races and the accommodation of

the spectators. The external walls run on unbroken for about a

quarter of a mile. In many places the vaults supporting the seats

still remain. The spina in the centre marking the course of the races,

on either end of which stood the two Egyptian obelisks which now adorn

the Piazza Navona and the Piazza del Popolo, though grass-grown, can

be easily defined; and the towers flanking the extremities, where the

judges sat, and the triumphal gate through which the victors passed,

are almost entire. It would not be difficult, with such aids to the

imagination, to conjure up the splendid games that used to take place

within that vast enclosure; the chariots of green, blue, white, and

red driving furiously seven times round the course, the emperor and

all his nobles sitting in the places of honour, looking on with

enthusiasm, and the victor coming in at the goal, and the shouts and

exclamations of the excited multitude. On the elevated ground behind

the circus is a fringe of olive-trees, with a line of feathery elms

beyond; and rising over all, the purple background of the Sabine and

Alban hills. It is a lonely enough spot now; and the gentle hand of

spring clothes the naked walls with a perfect garden of wild flowers,

and softens with the greenest and tenderest turf the spots trodden by

the feet of so many thousands. In the immediate vicinity of the circus

are extensive ruins, visible and prominent objects from the road,

consisting of large fragments of walls and apses, dispersed among the

vineyards and enclosures.

By far the best-known monument on the Appian Way is the Tomb of

Cæcilia Metella. It is a conspicuous landmark in the wide waste, and

catches the eye at a long distance from many points of view. It is as

familiar a feature in paintings of the Campagna almost as the Claudian

Aqueduct. This celebrity it owes to its immense size, its wonderful

state of preservation, and above all to the genius of Lord Byron, who

has made it the theme of some of the most elegant and touching stanzas

in _Childe Harold_. Nothing can be finer than the appearance of this

circular tower in the afternoon, when the red level light of sunset,

striking full upon it, brings out the rich warm glow of its yellow

travertine stones in striking relief against the monotonous green of

the Campagna. It is built on a portion of rising ground caused by a

current of lava which descended from the Alban volcano during some

prehistoric eruption, and stopped short here, forming the quarries on

the left side of the road which supply most of the paving-stone of

modern Rome. The Appian Way was here lowered several feet below the

original level, in order to diminish the acclivity; and the mausoleum

was consequently raised upon a substructure of unequal height

corresponding with the inclination of the plane of ascent. It was

originally cased with marble slabs, but these were stripped off during

the middle ages for making lime; and Pope Clement XII. completed the

devastation by removing large blocks which formed the basement, in

order to construct the picturesque fountain of Trevi. A large portion

of the Doric marble frieze, however, still remains, on which are

sculptured bas-reliefs of rams' heads, festooned with garlands of

flowers. Usually the bas-reliefs are supposed to represent bulls'

heads; and the name of Capo de Bove (the "head of the ox"), by which

the monument has long been known to the common people, is said to be

derived from these ornaments. But a careful examination will convince

any one that they are in reality rams' heads; and the vulgar name of

the tomb was obviously borrowed from the armorial bearings of the

Gaetani family, consisting of an ox's head, affixed prominently upon

it when it served them as a fortress in the thirteenth century. Pope

Boniface VIII., a member of this family, added the curious battlements

at the top, which seem so slight and airy in comparison with the

severe solidity of the rest of the structure, and are but a poor

substitute for the massive conical roof which originally covered the

tomb. Nature has done her utmost for nigh two thousand years to bring

back this monument to her own bosom, but she has been foiled in all

her attempts,--the travertine blocks of its exterior, though fitted to

each other without cement, being as smooth and even in their courses

of masonry as when first constructed, and almost as free from

weather-stains as if they had newly been taken from the quarry. Only

on the broad summit, where medieval Vandals broke down the noble pile

and desecrated it by their own inferior workmanship, has nature been

able to effect a lodgment; and in the breaches of this fortress, which

is but a thing of yesterday as compared with the monument, and yet is

far more ruinous, she has planted bushes, trees, and thick festoons of

ivy, as if laying her quiet finger upon the angry passions of man, and

obliterating the memory of his evil deeds by her own fair and smiling

growth.

The sepulchral vault in the interior was not opened till the time of

Paul III., about 1540, when a beautiful marble sarcophagus, adorned

with bas-reliefs of the chase, was found in it, which is supposed to

be that which stands at the present day in the court of the Palazzo

Farnese. This is likely to be true, for it is well known that this

Pope, who was a member of the Farnese family, unscrupulously despoiled

ancient Rome of many of its finest works of art in order to build and

adorn his new palace. A golden urn containing ashes is said to have

been discovered at the same time; but if so, it has long since

disappeared. On a marble panel below the frieze an inscription in bold

letters informs us that this is the tomb of Cæcilia Metella, daughter

of Quintus Metellus,--who obtained the sobriquet of _Creticus_ for his

conquest of Crete,--and wife of Crassus. She belonged to one of the

most haughty aristocratic families of ancient Rome, whose members at

successive intervals occupied the highest positions in the state, and

several of whom were decreed triumphs by the senate on account of

their success in war. Her husband was surnamed _Dives_ on account of

his enormous wealth. He is said to have possessed a fortune equal to a

million and a half pounds sterling; and to have given an

entertainment to the whole Roman people in a time of scarcity, besides

distributing to each family a quantity of corn sufficient to last

three months. Along with Julius Cæsar and Pompey, he formed the famous

first Triumvirate. While the richest, he seems, notwithstanding the

above-mentioned act of munificence, to have been one of the meanest of

the Romans. He had no steady political principle; he was actuated by

bitter jealousy towards his colleagues and rivals; and that

unsuccessful expedition which he undertook against the Parthians, in

flagrant violation of a treaty made with them by Sulla and renewed by

Pompey, and which has stamped his memory with incapacity and shame,

was prompted by an insatiable greed for the riches of the East. On the

field he occupied himself entirely in amassing fresh treasures, while

his troops were neglected. The manner of his death, after the defeat

and loss of the greater part of his army, was characteristic of his

ruling passion. Tempted to seek an interview with the Parthian general

by the offer of the present of a horse with splendid trappings, he was

cut down when in the act of mounting into the saddle. His body was

contemptuously buried in some obscure spot by the enemy, and his hands

and head were sent to the king, who received the ghastly trophies

while seated at the nuptial feast of his daughter, and ordered in

savage irony molten gold to be poured down the severed throat,

exclaiming, "Sate thyself now with the metal of which in life thou

wert so fond."

There is one incident connected with this most disastrous campaign

upon which the imagination loves to dwell. Publius, the younger son of

Crassus, born of the woman who lay in this tomb before us, after

earning great distinction in Gaul as Cæsar's legate, accompanied his

father to the East, and was much beloved on account of his noble

qualities and his feats of bravery against the enemy. While

endeavouring to repulse the last fierce charge of the Parthians, he

was wounded severely by an arrow, and finding himself unable to

extricate his troops, rather than desert them he ordered his

sword-bearer to slay him. When the news of his son's fall reached the

aged father, the old Roman spirit blazed up for a moment in him, and

he exhorted his soldiers "not to be disheartened by a loss that

concerned himself only." In this last triumph of a nobler nature he

disappears from our view; and he who built this magnificent monument

to the mother of his gallant son had himself no monument. More

fortunate than her husband, whose evil manners live in brass,--less

fortunate than her son, whose virtues have been handed down for the

admiration of posterity,--Cæcilia Metella has left no record of her

existence beyond her name. All else has been swallowed up by the

oblivion of ages. Whether her husband raised this colossal trophy of

the dust to commemorate his own pride of wealth, or his devoted love

for her, we know not. He achieved his object; but he has given to his

wife only the mockery of immortality. The substance has gone beyond

recall, and but the shadow, the mere empty name, remains.

Built up against this monument are the remains of the castle in which

the Gaetani family long maintained their feudal warfare, with

fragments of marble sculpture taken from the tomb incorporated into

the plain brick walls. And on the other side of the road, in a

beautiful meadow, covered with soft green grass, are the ruins of a

roofless Gothic chapel, showing little more than a few bare walls and

gables built of dark lava stones, with traces of pointed windows in

them, and the spring of the groined arches of the roof. Like the

fortress, the chapel has few or no architectural features of interest.

It is very unlike any other church in Italy, and reminds one of the

country churches of England. What led the Gaetanis to adopt this

foreign style of ecclesiastical architecture is a circumstance

unexplained. Altogether it is a most incongruous group of objects that

are here clustered together--a tomb, a fortress, and a church--and

affords a curious illustration of the bizarre condition of society at

the time. An extraordinary echo repeats here every sound entrusted to

it with the utmost distinctness. It doubtless multiplied the wailings

of the mourners who brought to this spot two thousand years ago the

ashes of the dead; it sent back the rude sounds of warfare which

disturbed the peace of the tomb in the middle ages; and now it haunts

the spot like the voice of the past, "informing the solitude," and

giving a response to each new-comer according to his mood.

Beyond the tomb of Cæcilia Metella the Appian Way becomes more

interesting and beautiful. The high walls which previously shut in the

road on either side now disappear, and nothing separates it from the

Campagna but a low dyke of loose stones. The traveller obtains an

uninterrupted view of the immense melancholy plain, which stretches

away to the horizon with hardly a single tree to relieve the

desolation. Here and there on the waste surface are fragments of ruins

which speak to the heart, by their very muteness, more suggestively

than if their historical associations were fully known. The mystic

light from a sky which over this place seems ever to brood with a sad

smile more touching than tears, falls upon the endless arches of the

Claudian Aqueduct that remind one, as Ruskin has finely said, of a

funeral procession departing from a nation's grave. The afternoon sun

paints them with ruby splendours, and gleams vividly upon the

picturesque vegetation which a thousand springs have sown upon their

crumbling sides. They lead the eye on to the Alban Hills, which form

on the horizon a fitting frame to the great picture, tender-toned,

with delicate pearly and purple shadows clothing every cliff and

hollow, like "harmonies of music turned to shape."

I shall never forget my first walk over this enchanted ground. The day

was warm and bright, though a little breeze, like the murmur of a

child's sleep, occasionally stirred the languid calm. April had just

come in; but in this Southern clime spring, having no storms or

frosts to fear, lingers in a strange way and unfolds, with slow,

patient tenderness, her beauties; not like our Northern spring, which

rushes to verdure and bloom as soon as the winter snows have

disappeared. And hence, though the few trees along the road had only

put forth their first leaves, tender and flaccid as butterfly's wings,

the grass was ready to be cut down and was thickly starred with wild

flowers. Horace of old said that one could not travel rapidly along

the Appian Way, on account of the number and variety of its objects of

interest; and the same remark holds good at the present day. It would

take months to go over in detail all its wonderful relics of the past.

At every step you are arrested by something that opens up a

fascinating vista into the old family life of the imperial city. At

every step you "set your foot upon some reverend history." From

morning to sunset I lingered on this haunted path, and tried to enter

into sympathy with old-world sorrows that have left behind no

chronicles save these silent stones. It is indeed a path sacred to

meditation! One has there an overpowering sense of waste--a depressing

feeling of vanity. On every side are innumerable tokens of a vast

expenditure of human toil, and love, and sorrow; and it seems as if it

had been all thrown away. For two miles and a half from the tomb of

Cæcilia Metella I counted fifty-three tombs on the right and

forty-eight on the left. The margin of the road on either side is

strewn with fragments of hewn marble, travertine, and peperino. Broken

tablets, retaining a few letters of the epitaphs of the dead;

mutilated statues and alto-relievos; drums and capitals of pillars; a

hand or a foot, or a fold of marble drapery,--every form and variety

of sculpture, the mere crumbs that had fallen from a profuse feast of

artistic beauty, which nobody considers it worth while to pick up, lie

mouldering among the grass. At frequent intervals, facing the road,

you see with mournful interest the exposed interiors of tombs, showing

that beautiful and curious _opus reticulatum_, or reticulated

arrangement of bricks or tufa blocks, which is so characteristic of

the imperial period, and rows upon rows of neat pigeon-holes in the

brickwork, which contained the cinerary urns, all robbed of their

treasures, their tear-bottles, and even their bones. Ruthless popes

and princes have done their best during all the intervening ages to

destroy the monuments by taking away for their own uses the marble and

hewn stone which encased them, leaving behind only the inner core of

brick and small stones imbedded in mortar which was never meant to be

seen. Pitying hands have lately endeavoured to atone for this

desecration by lifting here and there out of the rubbish heap on which

they were thrown some affecting group of family portraits, some choice

specimens of delicate architecture, some mutilated panel on which the

stern hard features of a Roman senator look out upon you, and placing

them in a prominent position to attract attention. But though they

have endeavoured to build up the fragments of the tombs into some

semblance of their former appearance, the resuscitation is even more

melancholy than was the former ruin. Their efforts at restoration are

only the very graves of graves. In some places a side path leading off

the main road to a tomb has been uncovered, paved with the original

lava-blocks as fresh as when the last mourner retired from it, casting

"a lingering look behind;" but it leads now only to a shapeless heap

of brick, or to the empty site of a monument that has been razed to

the very foundations.

One piece of marble sculpture especially arrests the eye, and awakens

a chord of feeling in the most callous heart. It represents one of

those _Imagines Clipeatæ_ which the ancient Romans were so fond of

sculpturing in their temples or upon their tombs; a clam shell or

shield with the bust of a man and a woman carved in relief within it,

the hand of the one fondly embracing the neck of the other. Below is a

long Latin inscription, telling that this is the tomb of a brother

and sister who were devotedly attached to each other. Who this soror

and frater were, there is no record to tell. All subsidiary details of

their lives have been allowed to pass away with the other decorations

of the tomb, leaving behind this beautiful expression of household

affection in full and lasting relief. I felt drawn more closely to the

distant ages by this little carving than by anything else. The huge

monuments around weighed down my spirit to the earth. The very effort

to secure immortality by the massiveness of these tombs defeated its

own object. They spoke only of dust to dust and ashes to ashes; but

that little glimpse into the simple love of simple hearts in the

far-off past lifted me above all the decays of the sepulchre. It

assured me that our deepest heart-affections are the helpers of our

highest hopes, and the instinctive guarantees of a life to come. Love

creates its own immortality; for "love is love for evermore."

Along this avenue of death nothing can be more striking than the

profusion of life. It seems as if all the vitality of the many buried

generations had there passed into the fuller life of nature. You can

trace the street of tombs into the far distance, not only by the ruins

that line it on both sides, but also by its borders of grass of a

darker green and greater luxuriance than the pale, short, sickly

verdure of the Campagna; just as you can trace the course of a

moorland stream along the heather by the brighter vegetation which its

own waters have created. Myriads of flowers gleam in their own

atmosphere of living light, like jewels among the rich herbage, so

that the feet can hardly be set down without crushing scores of them:

the _Orchis rubra_ with its splendid spike of crimson blossoms, the

bee and spider orchises in great variety, whose flowers mimic the

insects after whom they are named, sweet-scented alyssum, golden

buttercups and hawkweeds, Roman daisies, larger and taller than the

English ones, with the bold wide-eyed gaze you see in the Roman

peasant-girls, scarlet poppies glowing in a sunshine of their own,

like flames in the heart of a furnace, vetches bright azure and pale

yellow, dark blue hyacinths, pink geraniums, and "moonlit spires of

asphodel," suggestive of the flowery fields of the immortals. My

footsteps along the dusty road continually disturbed serpents that

wriggled away in long ripples of motion among the tall spears of the

grass; while green and golden lizards, sunning themselves on the hot

stones, disappeared into their holes with a quick rustling sound at my

approach. The air was musical with a perfect chorus of larks, whose

jubilant song soared above all sorrow and death to heaven's own gate;

and now and then a tawny hawk sailed swiftly across the horizon. Huge

plants of gray mullein towered here and there above the sward, whose

flannel-like leaves afforded a snug shelter to great quantities of

wasps just recovering from their winter torpor. On the very tombs

themselves there was a lavish adornment of vegetable life: snow-white

drifts of hawthorn and honeysuckle wreaths waved on the summits of

those on which a sufficient depth of soil had lodged; the wild

dog-rose spread its thorny bushes and passionate-coloured crimson

blooms as a fence around others; and even on the barest of them

nothing could exceed the wealth of orange lichens that redeemed their

poverty and gilded their nakedness with frescoes of fadeless beauty.

On some of the rugged masses of masonry grew large hoary tufts of the

strange roccella or orchil-weed, which yields the famous purple

dye--with which, in all likelihood, the robes of the Cæsars were

coloured--and which gave wealth, rank, and name to one princely

Italian family, the Rucellai. Over the desolate tombs of those who

wore the imperial purple, this humble lichen, that yielded the

splendid hue, spread its gray hoar-frost of vegetation.

I have already spoken of the solitude of the Campagna; but this part

of the Appian Way, leading through it, is exceptionally lonely. It

might as well have led over an American prairie or Asiatic steppe on

which the foot of man had never intruded. You see along the white

reaches of the road at a little distance what looks like a cluster of

houses overshadowed by some tall umbrella pine, with all the signs of

human life apparently about them; but, as you come near, the sight

resolves itself into a mere mass of ruins. The mirage of life turns

out to be a tomb--nay, the ruin of a tomb! A carriage full of visitors

may, perhaps, be seen at long intervals, their spirits sobered by the

melancholy that broods over the scene; or a lumbering cart, laden with

wine-casks from Ariccia or Albano, drawn by the soft-eyed

mouse-coloured oxen of the Campagna, startles the echoes, and betrays

its course by the clouds of dust which it raises. There are no sights

or sounds of rural toil in the fields on either side of the way. Only

a solitary shepherd, with his picturesque cloak, accompanied by two or

three vicious-looking dogs, meets you; or, perhaps, you come

unexpectedly upon an artist seated on a tomb and busy sketching the

landscape. For hours you may have the scene all to yourself. Even

Rome, from this distance, looks like a city of dreams! Its walls and

domes have disappeared behind the misty green veil of the horizon; and

only the colossal statues of the apostles on the top of the church of

S. John Lateran stand out in a halo of golden light, and seem to

stretch forth their hands to welcome the approaching pilgrim.

It is well known to historians that the villa of Seneca, in which he

put himself to death by command of Nero, stood near the fourth

milestone on the Appian Way. The circumstances of his death are

exceedingly sad. Wishing to get rid of his former tutor, who had

become obnoxious to him, the bloodthirsty emperor first attempted to

poison him; and when this failed, he accused him, along with his

nephew the poet Lucan and several others, of being concerned in a

conspiracy against his life. This accusation was false; but it served

the purpose of bringing Seneca within reach of his vengeance, under a

colour of justice. A tribune with a cohort of soldiers was sent to

intimate his fate to the philosopher; allowing him to execute the

sentence of death upon himself by whatever means he preferred. Seneca

was at supper with his wife Paulina and two friends when the fatal

message came. Without any sign of alarm he rose and opened the veins

of his arms and legs, having bade farewell to his friends and embraced

his wife; and while the blood, impoverished by old age, ebbed slowly

from him, he continued to comfort his friends and exhort them to a

life of integrity. The last words of one so justly renowned were taken

down, and in the time of Tacitus the record was still extant. We

should value much these interesting memorials; but they are now

irrecoverably lost. His wife, refusing to live without him, also

endeavoured to bleed herself to death; but she was recovered by order

of Nero almost at the last moment. She remained pale and emaciated

ever after from having followed her husband more than half-way on the

road to death.

No trace of the villa where this pathetic tragedy took place can now

be seen; but near the spot where it must have stood, close beside the

road, is a marble bas-relief of the death of Atys, the son of Croesus,

killed in the chase by Adrastus, placed upon a modern pedestal; and

this is supposed to have formed part of the tomb of Seneca. There is

no inscription; probably none would be allowed during the lifetime of

Nero; and we know that his body was burned privately without any of

the usual ceremonies. But if this fragment of sculpture be genuine,

the well-known classic story which it tells was an appropriate

memorial of one who perished in the midst of the greatest prosperity.

No one who is familiar with the history of this "seeker after God,"

this philosopher who was a pagan John the Baptist in the severity and

purity of his mode of life, and in the position which he occupied on

the border-line between paganism and Christianity, and who left behind

him some of the noblest utterances of antiquity, can gaze upon this

interesting bas-relief without being deeply moved. It speaks

eloquently of the little dependence to be placed upon the favour of

princes; and it points a powerful moral that has been repeatedly

enforced in sacred as well as profane history, that he who becomes the

accomplice of another in crime, strikes, by that complicity, the

death-blow of friendship, and makes himself more hated than even the

victim of the crime had been. When Seneca sanctioned, and then

defended on political grounds, the matricide of Nero, from that moment

his own doom was sealed. Over the former "guide, philosopher, and

friend," the shadow of this guilty secret rested, and it deepened and

darkened until the pupil embrued his hands in the blood of his

teacher. This touching fragment of sculpture is all that now remains

of the earthly pomp of one who at one time stood on the very highest

summit of human wisdom. There is no likelihood that he ever met the

Apostle Paul during his residence in the imperial city, or learned

from him any of those precepts that are so wonderfully Christian in

their spirit and even words; although an early Christian forger

thought it worth while to fabricate a supposititious correspondence

between them. The only link of connection between them was the

problematical one that St. Paul, with his wide sympathies, may have

gazed with interest upon Seneca's villa, as it was pointed out to him

on his journey to Rome; and that he was on one occasion dragged as a

prisoner into the presence of Seneca's elder brother, that Gallio who

dismissed the charge and the accusers with contempt.

Passing two massive fragments of a wall, which are supposed to have

formed part of a small temple of Jupiter, beside which numerous

Christians suffered martyrdom, we come, at the fifth milestone, to a

spot associated with one of those poetical legends which occur in the

early annals of all nations, and whose hold upon the minds of men is

itself an historic truth. Here was the boundary between the territory

of Rome and that of Alba. Here was situated the entrenchment called

the Cluilian Dyke, where Hannibal encamped, and where previously the

Roman and Alban armies were drawn up in battle array, when it was

agreed that the quarrel between them should be settled by three

champions chosen from each side. Every one knows the story of the

Horatii and the Curiatii: how these hapless brothers and cousins

fought in sight of both armies with a bravery worthy of the stake; and

how, at length, when two of the Roman heroes were slain, and all the

Albans were wounded, the third Roman, who was unhurt, feigned to fly,

and thus separating his enemies, who followed him as well as their

failing strength would permit, easily despatched them one after the

other, and thus gained the victory for the Roman cause. This terrible

tragedy, which terminated the independent existence of the Alban

power, took place in the fields around here; and on the right-hand

side of the road are three huge circular mounds, overgrown with long

rich grass, planted with tall cypress and ilex trees, and surrounded

at the foot with a wall of huge peperino blocks, which antiquarians

have determined to be the tombs of the five slaughtered

combatants--the farther mound being that of the two Horatii, the

second that of one of the Curiatii, and the third that of the other

two Curiatii. These tombs are situated exactly where we should have

expected to find them from the description of Livy; and they are

evidently of far older date than any of the neighbouring tombs of the

imperial period. Their form and construction carry us back in

imagination to the earliest days of Rome, when Etruscan architecture

was universally adopted as a model. For more than twenty-five

centuries the huge tent-like mounds have stood, so strikingly

different in character from all the other sepulchral monuments of the

Appian Way; preserved by the reverential care of successive

generations. The modern Romans have not been behind the ancient in the

pride with which they have regarded these monuments. They have

planted them with the splendid cypress-trees which now add so much to

their picturesqueness, and annually repair the ravages of time. I

climbed up the steep sides through the long slippery grass to the

summits of two of the mounds, and had a grand view of the whole scene

of the tragic story, bathed in the dim misty light which always broods

over the melancholy Campagna like the spectral presence of the past.

The sunshine strove in vain to gild the dark shadows which the

cypresses threw over the mound at my feet, and the lonely wind wailed

wildly through their closely-huddled shivering branches around me.

On the opposite side of the road, beyond the earthen mounds of the

Horatii and Curiatii, a large mass of picturesque ruins covers the

Campagna for a considerable distance. The peasants persist in calling

this spot _Roma Vecchia_, under the idea that ancient Rome stood

there, and that these ruins are the remains of the city. Antiquarians,

however, are agreed that the ruins belong to the large suburban villa

of the Quintilii, one of the noblest and most virtuous families of

ancient Rome. One member, the celebrated rhetorician Quintilian, was

the first who enjoyed the regular salary allotted by Vespasian to

those who provided a solid education for the upper classes. In the

time of the Emperor Commodus the villa was owned by two brothers of

the Quintilian family, Maximus and Condianus, whose fraternal love is

as well known almost as the friendship of Damon and Pythias. They were

inseparable in all their pursuits and pleasures; they shared this

villa and the surrounding property together; they composed a treatise

in common, some fragments of which still survive. They were raised

together to the consular dignity by Marcus Aurelius, who greatly

valued their virtue and their mutual attachment, and were entrusted

together with the civil government of Greece. They were both falsely

accused of taking part in a plot against the emperor's life; and

Commodus, who coveted their property, had them both put to death

together. The tyrant then took possession of their villa, which became

as notorious for the evil deeds done in it as it was famous before for

the virtuous life of its owners. Here Commodus, the base son of a

heroic father, practised those lusts and brutalities which have

branded his name as that of one of the most unmitigated monsters that

ever stained the pages of history. It was here that the

people--exasperated by their sufferings through fire and famine, by

the open sale of justice and all public offices, and by the blood shed

in the streets by the prætorian cavalry--surrounded the villa, and

demanded the head of Cleander, a Phrygian slave whom Commodus had

placed at the helm of state because he pandered to his master's vices,

and gratified him with rich presents obtained by the vilest means. At

the entreaties of his sister and his favourite concubine, the emperor

sacrificed his minister, who was with him at the time, sharing in his

guilty pleasures; and threw out, from one of the windows of the villa,

the bloody head among the crowd, who gratified their vengeance by

tossing it about like a football. Here, too, the wretched emperor

himself was first poisoned by a cup of wine given to him by his

favourite mistress Marcia, on his return weary and thirsty from the

Colosseum; and then, as the poison operated too slowly, was strangled

in his heavy drugged sleep by his favourite gladiator Narcissus. One

could not look upon the bare masses of ruins around without thinking

of the terrible orgies that took place there, and of the shout of

enthusiastic joy when the news reached Rome that the detested tyrant

was no more, and the empire was free to breathe again. The fate of

Ahab, who coveted the vineyard of Naboth, overtook him; and but for

the interference of his successor, the maddened populace would have

dragged his corpse through the streets and flung it into the Tiber.

A very extraordinary tomb arrests the attention near the ruins of this

villa. It looks like an inverted pyramid, or a huge architectural

mushroom. This appearance has been given to the monument by the

removal of the large blocks of stone which formed the basement,

leaving the massive superincumbent weight to be supported on a very

narrow stalk of conglomerate masonry. It is a striking proof of the

extraordinary solidity and tenacity of Roman architecture, defying the

laws of gravitation. It is called the sepulchre of the Metelli, the

family of Cæcilia Metella; but this is a mere guess, as there is no

record or inscription to identify it. Next to this singular monument

are the remains of a tomb which must be exceedingly interesting to

every classical scholar. The inscription indicates that it is the tomb

of Quintus Cæcilius, whose nephew and adopted son, Titus Pomponius

Atticus, as Cornelius Nepos tells us, was buried in it. This

celebrated Roman knight was descended in a direct line from Numa

Pompilius. Withdrawing from the civil discords of Rome, he took up his

abode in Athens, where he devoted himself to literary and philosophic

pursuits and acquired a knowledge of the Greek language so perfect

that he could not be distinguished from a native. At the Greek

capital, the then university of the world, he secured the devoted

friendship of his fellow-student Cicero, whose brother was afterwards

married to his sister; and to this intimacy we owe the largest portion

of Cicero's unrivalled letters, in which he describes his inmost

feelings, as well as the events going on around him. The uncle of

Atticus, the brother of his mother, whose family tomb we are now

examining, left him at his death an enormous fortune, which he had

amassed by usury. Atticus added greatly to it by acting as a kind of

publisher to the authors of the day--that is, by employing his

numerous slaves in copying and multiplying their manuscripts. He kept

himself free from all the political factions of the times, and thus

managed to preserve the mutual regard of parties who were hostile to

each other,--such as Cæsar and Pompey, Brutus and Antony. He reached

the age of seventy-seven years without having had a day's illness;

and when at last stricken with an incurable disease, in the spirit of

the Epicurean philosophy, since he could enjoy life no longer he

starved himself to death, and was interred in his uncle's tomb on the

Appian Way. Almost side by side with this ruin is the sepulchre of the

family of Cicero's wife, the Terentii, who were related to Pomponius

Atticus by the mother's side. In all likelihood Terentia herself,

Cicero's brave and devoted but ill-used wife, was interred here with

her own friends, for her husband had divorced her in order to marry a

beautiful and rich young heiress, whose guardian he had been.

Passing on the same side of the road two or three tombs of obscure

persons whose names alone are known, we come at the sixth milestone to

one of the most extraordinary sepulchral monuments of the Appian Way,

called the _Casale Rotondo_. This monument marks the limit to which

most visitors extend their explorations. It is circular, like the tomb

of Cæcilia Metella; but it is of far larger dimensions, being nearly

three hundred and fifty feet in diameter. In the fifteenth century

this colossal ruin was converted into a fortress by the Orsini family;

and of the remains of this fortification a farmhouse and other

buildings were constructed, and these now stand on the summit,

surrounded by a tolerably-sized oliveyard and garden, with a sloping

grass-grown stair leading up to them on the outside. Notwithstanding

their dislike of death and their horror of dead bodies, the modern

Romans have no more repugnance to the proximity of tombs than their

ancestors had. Shepherds fold their sheep and goats in the interior of

the old tombs, whose walls are blackened with the smoke of the fires,

and retain an odour of human and animal occupancy more disagreeable

than any which the original tenants could have exhaled; and it is by

no means unfrequent to find a wine-shop, with a noisy company of

wayfarers regaling themselves, in a sepulchre that happens to be

conveniently situated by the wayside. So far as can be ascertained,

the original appearance of the _Casale Rotondo_ seems to have been

that of an enormous circular tower, cased with large blocks of

travertine, covered with a pyramidal roof of the same material carved

into the semblance of tiles, and surmounted with appropriate

sculpture. It was surrounded with a wall of peperino, supporting at

intervals vases and statues; and on the outside were semicircular

stone seats for the benefit of weary wayfarers. This wall is now grown

over with turf, but it can be distinctly traced all round; and the

hollow space between it and the tomb is covered with thick grass, and

is sometimes filled with water like a fosse. Numerous altars,

pedestals, and fine specimens of sculpture in marble and peperino,

have been disinterred in this spot, and they are now arranged to

advantage at the foot of the huge pile fronting the road. Some of

these bear inscriptions which would indicate that the tomb was erected

to Messalla Corvinus, the friend of Horace and Augustus, and himself a

distinguished historian and poet as well as one of the most

influential senators of Rome, by his son Marcus Aurelius Corvinus

Cotta, who was consul some years after his father's death. Corvinus

died in the eleventh year of our era, so that the tomb has stood for

upwards of eighteen centuries and a half; and it is as likely to stand

as many more, for what remains of it is as firm and enduring as a

rock. In the farmhouse built on its massive platform several

generations have lived and died. They have eaten and drunk, they have

married and been given in marriage, they have cultivated their vines

and olives and consumed their products. And all the time their home

and their field of labour have been on a tomb! I did not see the

tenants of this curious dwelling during my visit; but if the skeleton

at the Egyptian feast was a useful reminder of human mortality to the

revellers, one would suppose that the thought of the peculiar

character of their home would be sufficient to impart a soberer hue

to their lives. What is our earth itself but, on a vaster scale, a

_Casale Rotondo_--a garden in a sepulchre--where the dust we tread on

was once alive; and we reap our daily bread from human mould--

"Earth builds on the earth castles and towers,

Earth says to the earth--All shall be ours."

At a distance of about seven minutes' walk is an enormous circular

tomb, with a medieval tower of lava stones erected upon it, called the

_Torre di Selce_; but there is nothing to indicate who was interred in

it, though it must have been a person of some celebrity at the time.

An inscription upon a tomb beside it naively tells the passer-by to

respect the last resting-place of one who had a shop on the _Via

Sacra_, where he sold jewellery and millinery, and was held in much

estimation by his customers. Beyond this point there is nothing of any

special interest to arrest our attention, till we come to a

considerable mass of ruins, consisting of broken Doric columns of

peperino, part of a rough mosaic floor and brick pavement, and

fragments of walls lined with tufa squares in the _opus reticulatum_

pattern. These remains are supposed to mark the spot on which stood

the Temple of Hercules, erected by Domitian, and alluded to in one of

the epigrams of the poet Martial. Near this spot are the tomb of the

consul Quintus Veranius, who died in Britain in the year 55 of our

era; a lofty circular tomb, to some one unknown, with a rude

shepherd's hut on the top of it, to which the peasants have given the

name of Torraccio; and the tomb of a marble contractor. It may be

remarked, in connection with this last mentioned tomb, that a Roman

statuary had his workshops for the manufacture of sepulchral monuments

and sarcophagi on the Appian Way, which were of great extent, judging

from the quantity of sculpture, finished and unfinished, found on the

spot. All the sculpture was manifestly copied from Greek originals,

for it is hardly conceivable that such groupings and expressions as

we see in these bad copies could have been first executed by such

inferior artists. In this neighbourhood were the villa and farm of the

poet Persius, and portions of the wall are still standing. At the

ninth milestone are the tomb and the remains of the villa of the

Emperor Gallienus, slain by a conspiracy among his officers at the

siege of Milan in the year 268. This emperor has left nothing behind

but the memory of his luxury and his vices. When the site of the villa

was excavated by an English artist, Gavin Hamilton, at the end of last

century, the famous statue of the Discobolus and several other

specimens of ancient sculpture were discovered, which are now in the

Vatican Gallery. The ground hereabouts produces a whitish

efflorescence, and emits a most offensive sulphurous smell. It

exhibits the same evidences of recent volcanic activity as the

neighbourhood of Lakes Tartarus and Solfatara on the way to Tivoli.

The road after this descends into a valley, through which the stream

of the Ponticello flows, passing a most massive circular tomb,

reminding one of the mounds of the Horatii and Curiatii; and as it

ascends gradually on the opposite side, two huge sepulchres of the

Imperial period--one on the right hand and the other on the

left--attract notice, and are the last on this part of the route. The

railway to Naples passes across the road at the eleventh milestone,

and disturbs the solemn silence three or four times a day by its

incongruous noise. Beyond this is the osteria and village of

Frattocchie, where the old Appian Way merges into the new, and ascends

continuously to Albano. This neighbourhood is full of historical

associations. It was at Frattocchie that the body of Clodius was left

lying on the road after his fatal encounter with Milo. This fray

furnished the occasion for one of Cicero's most eloquent

speeches,--that in defence of Milo,--which was written, but owing to

the disturbances in the Forum at the time was not delivered. On the

left of the village, near a railway bridge and several quarries of

very old hard lava, is the site of Appiolæ, one of the cities of the

Latin League, destroyed by Tarquinius Priscus. All the male population

were killed, and the women and children transferred to Rome; and with

the spoils the Capitolium was completed. The remains of the old city

are very slight, consisting of a wall, a few vestiges of a temple, and

some foundations on a cliff surrounded by a stream, which could be

dammed up and flooded so as to form a fosse. On the right of

Frattocchie are the ruins of _Bovillæ_, taken and plundered by

Coriolanus, and deserted in the time of Cicero. Some arches of the

corridor of an amphitheatre, a reservoir for water, tolerably perfect,

and a circus, are still visible. There are also the ruins of a forum.

The view, looking back from this elevated position upon the long

course of the Appian Way, is exceedingly striking. One feels, when

gazing on the long perspective of rugged and mouldering sepulchres,

the full force of the name _Strada del Diavolo_ which the peasants

give to this street of tombs; and can sympathise with the sentiment

that made Charles Dickens say, when standing here at sunset, after

having walked all the way from Rome, "I almost felt as if the sun

would never rise again, but look its last that night upon a ruined

world."

We can picture St. Paul's memorable journey from Puteoli to Rome by

this route. The thought that the eye of the great apostle must have

rested upon the same features of the landscape, and many of the same

objects, though now in ruins, that we still behold, invests them with

an indescribable charm. From beyond the gates of Albano, near which

stood the lofty tomb of Pompey, whose ashes had only recently been

brought from the scene of his murder in Egypt, by his devoted wife

Cornelia, he would obtain his first glimpse of Rome. And if now it is

the most thrilling moment in a man's life to see Rome in its ruin,

what must it have been to see it then in its glory! We can imagine

that, with the profound emotion of his Master when gazing upon the

splendour of Jerusalem from the slope of Olivet, St. Paul would look

down from that spot on the capital of the world, and see before him

the signs of a magnificence never before or since equalled; but alas!

as he knew well, a magnificence that was only the iridescence of

social and spiritual corruption, as the pomp of the sepulchres of the

Appian Way was but the shroud of death. Doubtless with a sad and

pitying heart, he would be led by the cohort of soldiers along the

street of tombs, then the most crowded approach to a city of nearly

two millions of souls; tombs whose massiveness and solidity were but a

vain craving for immortality, and whose epitaphs were the most deeply

touching of all epitaphs, on account of the profound despair with

which they bade their eternal farewell. Entering into Rome through the

Porta Capena; and winding through the valley between the Coelian and

Aventine hills, crowded with temples and palaces, he would be brought

to the Forum, then a scene of indescribable grandeur; and from thence

he would be finally transferred to the charge of Burrus, the prefect

of the imperial guards, at the prætorium of Nero's palace, on the

Palatine. And here he disappears from our view. We only know of a

certainty that for two whole years "he dwelt in his own hired house,

and received all that came in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God,

and teaching those things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, with all

confidence, no man forbidding him."

Of all the splendid associations of the Appian Way, along which

history may be said to have marched exclusively for nigh six hundred

years, the most splendid by far is its connection with this

ever-memorable journey of the great Apostle of the Gentiles. We can

trace the influence of the scenes and objects along the route in all

his subsequent writings. He had a deeper yearning for the Gentiles,

because he thus beheld with his own eyes the places associated with

the darkest aspects of paganism; the scenes that gave rise to the

pagan ideas of heaven and hell; the splendid temples in which the

human soul had debased itself to objects beneath the dignity of its

own nature, and thus prepared itself for all moral corruption; and the

massive sepulchral monuments in which the hopeless despair of

heathenism had, as it were, become petrified by the Gorgon gaze of

death. That Appian Way should be to us the most interesting of all the

roads of the world; for by it came to us our civilisation and

Christianity--the divine principles and hopes that redeem the soul,

retrieve the vanity of existence, open up the path of life through the

dark valley of death, and disclose the glorious vista of immortality

beyond the tomb. And as we gaze upon the remains of that road, and

feel how much we owe to it as the material channel of God's grace to

us who were far off, we can say with deepest gratitude of those

apostles and martyrs who once walked on this lava pavement, but are

now standing on the sea of glass before the throne, "How beautiful are

the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad

tidings of good things!"