Hadrian was a man in whom the most conflicting qualities 198 were

blent. In his youth and through his whole life he was passionately fond

of hunting; hardy, simple in his habits, marching bareheaded with his

legions through German frost and Nubian heat, sharing the food of his

soldiers, and exercising the most rigid military discipline. At the

same time he has aptly been described as 'the most sumptuous character

of antiquity.' He filled the cities of the empire with showy buildings,

and passed his last years in a kind of classic Munich, where he had

constructed imitations of every celebrated monument in Europe. He was

so far fond of nature that, anticipating the most recently developed of

modern tastes, he ascended Mount Ætna and the Mons Casius, in order to

enjoy the spectacle of sunrise. In his villa at Tivoli he indulged a

trivial fancy by christening one garden Tempe and another the Elysian

Fields; and he had his name carved on the statue of the vocal Memnon

with no less gusto than a modern tourist: _audivi voces divinas_. His

memory was prodigious, his eloquence in the Latin language studied and

yet forcible, his knowledge of Greek literature and philosophy far from

contemptible. He enjoyed the society of Sophists and distinguished

rhetoricians, and so far affected authorship as to win the unenviable

title of _Græculus_ in his own lifetime: yet he never neglected state

affairs. Owing to his untiring energy and vast capacity for business,

he not only succeeded in reorganising every department of the empire,

social, political, fiscal, military, and municipal; but he also held in

his own hands the threads of all its complicated machinery. He was

strict in matters of routine, and appears to have been almost a

martinet among his legions: yet in social intercourse he lived on terms

of familiarity with inferiors, combining the graces of elegant

conversation with the _bonhomie_ of boon companionship, displaying a

warm heart to his friends, and using magnificent generosity. He

restored the 199 domestic as well as the military discipline of the

Roman world; and his code of laws lasted till Justinian. Among many of

his useful measures of reform he issued decrees restricting the power

of masters over their slaves, and depriving them of their old capital

jurisdiction. His biographers find little to accuse him of beyond a

singular avidity for fame, addiction to magic arts and luxurious vices:

yet they adduce no proof of his having, at any rate before the date of

his final retirement to his Tiburtine villa, shared the crimes of a

Nero or a Commodus. On the whole, we must recognise in Hadrian a nature

of extraordinary energy, capacity for administrative government, and

mental versatility. A certain superficiality, vulgarity, and

commonplaceness seems to have been forced upon him by the circumstances

of his age, no less than by his special temperament. This quality of

the immitigable commonplace is clearly written on his many portraits.

Their chief interest consists in a fixed expression of fatigue—as

though the man were weary with much seeking and with little finding. In

all things, he was somewhat of a dilettante; and the Nemesis of that

sensibility to impressions which distinguishes the dilettante, came

upon him ere he died. He ended his days in an appalling and persistent

paroxysm of _ennui_, desiring the death which would not come to his

relief.

The whole creative and expansive force of Hadrian's century lay

concealed in the despised Christian sect. Art was expiring in a sunset

blaze of gorgeous imitation, tasteless grandeur, technical elaboration.

Philosophy had become sophistical or mystic; its real life survived

only in the phrase 'entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren' of the

Stoics. Literature was repetitive and scholastic. Tacitus, Suetonius,

Plutarch, and Juvenal indeed were living; but their works formed the

last great literary triumph of the age. Religion 200 had degenerated

under the twofold influences of scepticism and intrusive foreign cults.

It was, in truth, an age in which, for a sound heart and manly

intellect, there lay no proper choice except between the stoicism of

Marcus Aurelius and the Christianity of the Catacombs. All else had

passed into shams, unrealities, and visions. Now Hadrian was neither

stoical nor Christian, though he so far coquetted with Christianity as

to build temples dedicated to no Pagan deity, which passed in after

times for unfinished churches. He was a _Græculus_. In that

contemptuous epithet, stripping it of its opprobrious significance, we

find the real key to his character. In a failing age he lived a

restless-minded, many-sided soldier-prince, whose inner hopes and

highest aspirations were for Hellas. Hellas, her art, her history, her

myths, her literature, her lovers, her young heroes filled him with

enthusiasm. To rebuild her ruined cities, to restore her deities, to

revive her golden life of blended poetry and science, to reconstruct

her spiritual empire as he had re-organised the Roman world, was

Hadrian's dream. It was indeed a dream; one which a far more creative

genius than Hadrian's could not have realised.

But now, returning to the two alternatives regarding his friend's

death: was this philo-Hellenic Emperor the man to have immolated

Antinous for _extispicium_ and then deified him? Probably not. The

discord between this bloody act and subsequent hypocrisy upon the one

hand, and Hadrian's Greek sympathies upon the other, must be reckoned

too strong for even such a dipsychic character as his. There is nothing

in either Spartian or Dion to justify the opinion that he was naturally

cruel or fantastically deceitful. On the other hand, Hadrian's

philo-Hellenic, splendour-loving, somewhat tawdry, fame-desiring nature

was precisely of the sort to jump eagerly at the deification of a

favourite who had either died a 201 natural death or killed himself to

save his master. Hadrian had loved Antinous with a Greek passion in his

lifetime. The Roman Emperor was half a god. He remembered how Zeus had

loved Ganymede, and raised him to Olympus; how Achilles had loved

Patroclus, and performed his funeral rites at Troy; how the demi-god

Alexander had loved Hephæstion, and lifted him into a hero's seat on

high. He, Hadrian, would do the like, now that death had robbed him of

his comrade. The Roman, who surrounded himself at Tivoli with copies of

Greek temples, and who called his garden Tempe, played thus at being

Zeus, Achilles, Alexander; and the civilised world humoured his whim.

Though the Sophists scoffed at his real grief and honourable tears,

they consecrated his lost favourite, found out a star for him, carved

him in breathing brass, and told tales about his sacred flower.

Pancrates was entertained in Alexandria at the public cost for his

fable of the lotos; and the lyrist Mesomedes received so liberal a

pension for his hymn to Antinous that Antoninus Pius found it needful

to curtail it.

After weighing the authorities, considering the circumstances of the

age, and estimating Hadrian's character, I am thus led to reject the

alternative of immolation. Spartian's own words, _quem muliebriter

flevit_, as well as the subsequent acts of the Emperor and the

acquiescence of the whole world in the new deity, prove to my mind that

in the suggestion of _extispicium_ we have one of those covert

calumnies which it is impossible to set aside at this distance of time,

and which render the history of Roman Emperors and Popes almost

impracticable.

The case, then, stands before us thus. Antinous was drowned in the

Nile, near Besa, either by accident or by voluntary suicide to save his

master's life. Hadrian's love for him had been unmeasured, so was his

grief. Both of 202 them were genuine; but in the nature of the man

there was something artificial. He could not be content to love and

grieve alone; he must needs enact the part of Alexander, and realise,

if only by a sort of makebelieve, a portion of his Greek ideal.

Antinous, the beautiful servant, was to take the place of Ganymede, of

Patroclus, of Hephæstion; never mind if Hadrian was a Roman and his

friend a Bithynian, and if the love between them, as between an emperor

of fifty and a boy of nineteen, had been less than heroic. The

opportunity was too fair to be missed; the _rôle_ too fascinating to be

rejected. The world, in spite of covert sneers, lent itself to the

sham, and Antinous became a god.

The uniformly contemptuous tone of antique authorities almost obliges

us to rank this deification of Antinous, together with the Tiburtine

villa and the dream of a Hellenic Renaissance, among the part-shams,

part-enthusiasms of Hadrian's 'sumptuous' character. Spartian's account

of the consecration, and his hint that Hadrian composed the oracles

delivered at his favourite's tomb; Arrian's letter to the Emperor

describing the island Leukè and flattering him by an adroit comparison

with Achilles; the poem by Pancrates mentioned in the 'Deipnosophistæ,'

which furnished the myth of a new lotos dedicated to Antinous; the

invention of the star, and Hadrian's conversations with his courtiers

on this subject—all converge to form the belief that something of

consciously unreal mingled with this act of apotheosis by Imperial

decree. Hadrian sought to assuage his grief by paying his favourite

illustrious honours after death; he also desired to give the memory of

his own love the most congenial and poetical environment, to feed upon

it in the daintiest places, and to deck it with the prettiest flowers

of fancy. He therefore canonised Antinous, and took measures for

disseminating his cult throughout the world, careless of the element of

imposture 203 which might seem to mingle with the consecration of his

true affection. Hadrian's superficial taste was not offended by the

gimcrack quality of the new god; and Antinous was saved from being a

merely pinchbeck saint by his own charming personality.

This will not, however, wholly satisfy the conditions of the problem;

and we are obliged to ask ourselves whether there was not something in

the character of Antinous himself, something divinely inspired and

irradiate with spiritual beauty, apparent to his fellows and remembered

after his mysterious death, which justified his canonisation, and

removed it from the region of Imperial makebelieve. If this was not the

case, if Antinous died like a flower cropped from the seraglio garden

of the court-pages, how should the Emperor in the first place have

bewailed him with 'unhusbanded passion,' and the people afterwards have

received him as a god? May it not have been that he was a youth of more

than ordinary promise, gifted with intellectual enthusiasms

proportioned to his beauty and endowed with something of Phoebean

inspiration, who, had he survived, might have even inaugurated a new

age for the world, or have emulated the heroism of Hypatia in a

hopeless cause? Was the link between him and Hadrian formed less by the

boy's beauty than by his marvellous capacity for apprehending and his

fitness for realising the Emperor's Greek dreams? Did the spirit of

neo-Platonism find in him congenial incarnation? At any rate, was there

not enough in the then current beliefs about the future of the soul, as

abundantly set forth in Plutarch's writings, to justify a conviction

that after death he had already passed into the lunar sphere, awaiting

the final apotheosis of purged spirits in the sun? These questions may

be asked—indeed, they must be asked—for, without suggesting them, we

leave the worship of Antinous an almost 204 inexplicable scandal, an

almost unintelligible blot on human nature. Unless we ask them, we must

be content to echo the coarse and violent diatribes of Clemens

Alexandrinus against the vigils of the deified _exoletus_. But they

cannot be answered, for antiquity is altogether silent about him; only

here and there, in the indignant utterance of a Christian Father, stung

to the quick by Pagan parallels between Antinous and Christ, do we

catch a perverted echo of the popular emotion upon which his cult

reposed, which recognised his godhood or his vicarious self-sacrifice,

and which paid enduring tribute to the sublimity of his young life

untimely quenched.

The _senatus consultum_ required for the apotheosis of an Emperor was

not, so far as we know, obtained in the case of Antinous. Hadrian's

determination to exalt his favourite sufficed; and this is perhaps one

of the earliest instances of those informal deifications which became

common in the later Roman period. Antinous was canonised according to

Greek ritual and by Greek priests: _Græci quidam volente Hadriano eum

consecraverunt_. How this was accomplished we know not; but forms of

canonisation must have been in common usage, seeing that emperors and

members of the Imperial family received the honour in due course. The

star which was supposed to have appeared soon after his death, and

which represented his soul admitted to Olympus, was somewhere near the

constellation Aquila, according to Ptolemy, but not part of it. I

believe the letters η.θ.ι.κ.λ. of Aquila now bear the name of Antinous;

but this appropriation dates only from the time of Tycho Brahe. It was

also asserted that as a new star had appeared in the skies, so a new

flower had blossomed on the earth, at the moment of his death. This was

the lotos, of a peculiar red colour, which the people of Lower Egypt

used to wear in wreaths upon his festival. It received the name

Antinoeian; and the Alexandrian sophist, Pancrates, seeking 205 to pay

a double compliment to Hadrian and his favourite, wrote a poem in which

he pretended that this lily was stained with the blood of a Libyan lion

slain by the Emperor. As Arrian compared his master to Achilles, so

Pancrates flattered him with allusions to Herakles. The lotos, it is

well known, was a sacred flower in Egypt. Both as a symbol of the

all-nourishing moisture of the earth and of the mystic marriage of Isis

and Osiris, and also as an emblem of immortality, it appeared on all

the sacred places of the Egyptians, especially on tombs and funeral

utensils. To dignify Antinous with the lotos emblem was to consecrate

him; to find a new species of the revered blossom and to wear it in his

honour, calling it by his name, was to exalt him to the company of

gods. Nothing, as it seems, had been omitted that could secure for him

the patent of divinity.

He met his death near the city Besa, an ancient Egyptian town upon the

eastern bank of the Nile, almost opposite to Hermopolis. Besa was the

name of a local god, who gave oracles and predicted future events. But

of this Besa we know next to nothing. Hadrian determined to rebuild the

city, change its name, and let his favourite take the place of the old

deity. Accordingly, he raised a splendid new town in the Greek style;

furnished it with temples, agora, hippodrome, gymnasium, and baths;

filled it with Greek citizens; gave it a Greek constitution, and named

it Antinoë;. This new town, whether called Antinoë;, Antinoopolis,

Antinous, Antinoeia, or even Besantinous (for its titles varied),

continued long to flourish, and was mentioned by Ammianus Marcellinus,

together with Copton and Hermopolis, as one of the three most

distinguished cities of the Thebaïd. In the age of Julian these three

cities were perhaps the only still thriving towns of Upper Egypt. It

has even been maintained on Ptolemy's authority that Antinoë; was the

metropolis 206 of a nome, called Antinoeitis; but this is doubtful,

since inscriptions discovered among the ruins of the town record no

name of nomarch or strategus, while they prove the government to have

consisted of a Boulè and a Prytaneus, who was also the Eponymous

Magistrate. Strabo reckons it, together with Ptolemais and Alexandria,

as governed after the Greek municipal system.

In this city Antinous was worshipped as a god. Though a Greek god, and

the eponym of a Greek city, he inherited the place and functions of an

Egyptian deity, and was here represented in the hieratic style of

Ptolemaic sculpture. A fine specimen of this statuary is preserved in

the Vatican, showing how the neo-Hellenic sculptors had succeeded in

maintaining the likeness of Antinous without sacrificing the

traditional manner of Egyptian piety. The sacred emblems of Egyptian

deities were added: we read, for instance, in one passage, that his

shrine contained a boat. This boat, like the mystic egg of Erôs or the

cista of Dionysos, symbolised the embryo of cosmic life. It was

specially appropriated to Osiris, and suggested collateral allusions

doubtless to immortality and the soul's journey in another world.

Antinous had a college of priests appointed to his service; and oracles

were delivered from the cenotaph inside his temple. The people believed

him to be a genius of warning, gracious to his suppliants, but terrible

to evil-doers, combining the qualities of the avenging and protective

deities. Annual games were celebrated in Antinoë; on his festival, with

chariot races and gymnastic contests; and the fashion of keeping his

day seems, from Athenæus's testimony, to have spread through Egypt. An

inscription in Greek characters discovered at Rome upon the Campus

Martius entitles Antinous a colleague of the gods in Egypt—

ΑΝΤΙΝΟΩΙ ΣΥΝΘΡΟΝΩΙ ΤΩΝ ΕΝ ΑΙΓΥΗΤΩΙ ΘΕΩΝ.

207 The worship of Antinous spread rapidly through the Greek and Asian

provinces, especially among the cities which owed debts of gratitude to

Hadrian or expected from him future favours. At Athens, for example,

the Emperor, attended perhaps by Antinous, had presided as Archon

during his last royal progress, had built a suburb called after his

name, and raised a splendid temple to Olympian Jove. The Athenians,

therefore, founded games and a priesthood in honour of the new

divinity. Even now, in the Dionysiac theatre, among the chairs above

the orchestra assigned to priests of elder deities and more august

tradition, may be found one bearing the name of Antinous—ΙΕΡΕΩΣ

ΑΝΤΙΝΟΟΥ. A marble tablet has also been discovered inscribed with the

names of agonothetai for the games celebrated in honour of Antinous;

and a stele exists engraved with the crown of these contests together

with the crowns of Severus, Commodus, and Antoninus. It appears that

the games in honour of Antinous took place both at Eleusis and at

Athens; and that the agonothetai, as also the priest of the new god,

were chosen from the Ephebi. The Corinthians, the Argives, the

Achaians, and the Epirots, as we know from coins issued by the priests

of Antinous, adopted his cult;[95] but the region of Greece proper

where it flourished most was Arcadia, the mother state of his Bithynian

birthplace. Pausanias, who lived contemporaneously with Antinous, and

might have seen him, though he tells us that he had not chanced to meet

the youth alive, mentions the temple of Antinous at Mantinea as the

newest in that city. 'The Mantineans,' he says, 'reckon Antinous among

their gods.' He then describes the yearly festival and mysteries

connected 208 with his cult, the quinquennial games established in his

honour, and his statues. The gymnasium had a cell dedicated to

Antinous, adorned with pictures and fair stone-work. The new god was in

the habit of Dionysus.

[95] For example:

ΟΣΤΙΛΙΟΣ ΜΑΡΚΕΛΛΟΣΟ ΙΕΡΕΥΣΤΟΥ ΑΝΤΙΟΟΥ ΑΝΕΘΗΚΕ ΤΟΙΣ ΑΧΑΙΟΙΣ and a

similar inscription for Corinth.

As was natural, his birthplace paid him special observance. Coins

dedicated by the province of Bithynia, as well as by the town

Bithynium, are common, with the epigraphs, ΑΝΤΙΟΟΥ Η ΠΑΤΡΙΣ and

ΑΝΤΙΝΟΟΝ ΘΕΟΝ Η ΠΑΤΡΙΣ. Among the cities of Asia Minor and the vicinity

the new cult seems to have been widely spread. Adramyttene in Mysia,

Alabanda, Ancyra in Galatia, Chalcedon, Cuma in Æolis, Cyzicum in

Mysia, the Ciani, the Hadrianotheritæ of Bithynia, Hierapolis in

Phrygia, Nicomedia, Philadelphia, Sardis, Smyrna, Tarsus, the Tianians

of Paphlagonia, and a town Rhesæna in Mesopotamia, all furnish their

quota of medals. On the majority of these medals he is entitled Herôs,

but on others he has the higher title of god; and he seems to have been

associated in each place with some deity of local fame.

Being essentially a Greek hero, or divinised man received into the

company of immortals and worshipped with the attributes of god, his

cult took firmer root among the neo-Hellenic provinces of the empire

than in Italy. Yet there are signs that even in Italy he found his

votaries. Among these may first be mentioned the comparative frequency

of his name in Roman inscriptions, which have no immediate reference to

him, but prove that parents gave it to their children. The discovery of

his statues in various cities of the Roman Campagna shows that his cult

was not confined to one or two localities. Naples in particular, which

remained in all essential points a Greek city, seems to have received

him with acclamation. A quarter of the town was called after his name,

and a phratria of priests was founded in connection with his worship.

The Neapolitans owed much to the patronage of Hadrian, and they repaid

him 209 after this fashion. At the beginning of the last century

Raffaello Fabretti discovered an inscription near the Porta S.

Sebastiano at Rome, which throws some light on the matter. It records

the name of a Roman knight, Sufenas, who had held the office of

Lupercus and had been a fellow of the Neapolitan phratria of

Antinous—_fretriaco Neapoli Antinoiton et Eunostidon_. Eunostos was a

hero worshipped at Tanagra in Boeotia, where he had a sacred grove no

female foot might enter; and the wording of the inscription leaves it

doubtful whether the Eunostidæ and Antinoitæ of Naples were two

separate colleges; or whether the heroes were associated as the common

patrons of one brotherhood.

A valuable inscription discovered in 1816 near the Baths at Lanuvium or

Lavigna shows that Antinous was here associated with Diana as the saint

of a benefit club. The rules of the confraternity prescribe the

payments and other contributions of its members, provide for their

assembling on the feast days of their patrons, fix certain fines, and

regulate the ceremonies and expenses of their funerals. This club seems

to have resembled modern burial societies, as known to us in England;

or still more closely to have been formed upon the same model as

Italian confraternitè of the Middle Ages. The Lex, or table of

regulations, was drawn up in the year 133 A.D. It fixes the birthday of

Antinous as v.k. Decembr., and alludes to the temple of

Antinous—_Tetrastylo Antinoi_. Probably we cannot build much on the

birthday as a genuine date, for the same table gives the birthday of

Diana; and what was wanted was not accuracy in such matters, but a

settled anniversary for banquets and pious celebrations. When we come

to consider the divinity of Antinous, it will be of service to remember

that at Lanuvium, together with Diana of the nether world, he was

reckoned among the saints of sepulture. Could this thought have

penetrated the imagination of his worshippers: that since 210 Antinous

had given his life for his friend, since he had faced death and

triumphed over it, winning immortality and godhood for himself by

sacrifice, the souls of his votaries might be committed to his charge

and guidance on their journey through the darkness of the tomb? Could

we venture to infer thus much from his selection by a confraternity

existing for the purpose of securing decent burial or pious funeral

rites, the date of its formation, so soon after his death, would

confirm the hypothesis that he was known to have devoted his life for

Hadrian.

While speaking of Antinous as a divinised man, adscript to the gods of

Egypt, accepted as hero and as god in Hellas, Italy, and Asia Minor, we

have not yet considered the nature of his deity. The question is not so

simple as it seems at first sight: and the next step to take, with a

view to its solution, is to consider the various forms under which he

was adored—the phases of his divinity. The coins already mentioned, and

the numerous works of glyptic art surviving in the galleries of Europe,

will help us to place ourselves at the same point of view as the least

enlightened of his antique votaries. Reasoning upon these data by the

light of classic texts, may afterwards enable us to assign him his true

place in the Pantheon of decadent and uninventive Paganism.

In Egypt, as we have already seen, Antinous was worshipped by the

neo-Hellenes of Antinoopolis as their Eponymous Hero; but he took the

place of an elder native god, and was represented in art according to

the traditions of Egyptian sculpture. The marble statue of the Vatican

is devoid of hieratic emblems. Antinous is attired with the Egyptian

head-dress and waistband: he holds a short truncheon firmly clasped in

each hand; and by his side is a palm-stump, such as one often finds in

statues of the Greek Hermes. Two colossal statues of red granite

discovered in the ruins of Hadrian's villa, at Tivoli, represent him in

like manner with the usual Egyptian 211 head-dress. They seem to have

been designed for pillars supporting the architrave of some huge

portal; and the wands grasped firmly in both hands are supposed to be

symbolical of the genii called Dii Averrunci. Von Levezow, in his

monograph upon Antinous in art, catalogues five statues of a similar

description to the three already mentioned. From the indistinct

character of all of them, it would appear that Antinous was nowhere

identified with any one of the great Egyptian deities, but was treated

as a Dæmon powerful to punish and protect. This designation corresponds

to the contemptuous rebuke addressed by Origen to Celsus, where he

argues that the new saint was only a malignant and vengeful spirit. His

Egyptian medals are few and of questionable genuineness: the majority

of them seem to be purely Hellenic; but on one he bears a crown like

that of Isis, and on another a lotos wreath. The dim records of his

cult in Egypt, and the remnants of Græco-Egyptian art, thus mark him

out as one of the Averruncan deities, associated perhaps with Kneph or

the Agathodæmon of Hellenic mythology, or approximated to Anubis, the

Egyptian Hermes. Neither statues nor coins throw much light upon his

precise place among those gods of Nile whose throne he is said to have

ascended. Egyptian piety may not have been so accommodating as that of

Hellas.

With the Græco-Roman world the case is different. We obtain a clearer

conception of the Antinous divinity, and recognise him always under the

mask of youthful gods already honoured with fixed ritual. To worship

even living men under the names and attributes of well-known deities

was no new thing in Hellas. We may remember the Ithyphallic hymn with

which the Athenians welcomed Demetrius Poliorkêtes, the marriage of

Anthony as Dionysus to Athenè, and the deification of Mithridates as

Bacchus. The Roman Emperors had already been represented in art with

the characteristics 212 of gods—Nero, for example, as Phoebus, and

Hadrian as Mars. Such compliments were freely paid to Antinous. On the

Achaian coins we find his portrait on the obverse, with different types

of Hermes on the reverse, varied in one case by the figure of a ram, in

another by the representation of a temple, in a third by a nude hero

grasping a spear. One Mysian medal, bearing the epigraph 'Antinous

Iacchus,' represents him crowned with ivy, and exhibits Demeter on the

reverse. A single specimen from Ancyra, with the legend 'Antinous

Herôs,' depicts the god Lunus carrying a crescent moon upon his

shoulder. The Bithynian coins generally give youthful portraits of

Antinous upon the obverse, with the title of 'Herôs' or 'Theos;' while

the reverse is stamped with a pastoral figure, sometimes bearing the

talaria, sometimes accompanied by a feeding ox or a boar or a star.

This youth is supposed to be Philesius, the son of Hermes. In one

specimen of the Bithynian series the reverse yields a head of

Proserpine crowned with thorns. A coin of Chalcedon ornaments the

reverse with a griffin seated near a naked figure. Another, from

Corinth, bears the sun-god in a chariot; another, from Cuma, presents

an armed Pallas. Bulls, with the crescent moon, occur in the

Hadrianotheritan medals: a crescent moon in that of Hierapolis: a ram

and star, a female head crowned with towers, a standing bull, and

Harpocrates placing one finger on his lips, in those of Nicomedia; a

horned moon and star in that of Epirot Nicopolis. One Philadelphian

coin is distinguished by Antinous in a temple with four columns;

another by an Aphrodite in her cella. The Sardian coins give Zeus with

the thunderbolt, or Phoebus with the lyre; those of Smyrna are stamped

with a standing ox, a ram, and the caduceus, a female panther and the

thyrsus, or a hero reclining beneath a plane-tree; those of Tarsus with

the Dionysian cista, the Phoebean tripod, the 213 river Cydnus, and the

epigraphs 'Neos Puthios,' 'Neos Iacchos;' those of the Tianians with

Antinous as Bacchus on a panther, or, in one case, as Poseidôn.

It would be unsafe to suppose that the emblems of the reverse in each

case had a necessary relation to Antinous, whose portrait is almost

invariably represented on the obverse. They may refer, as in the case

of the Tarsian river-god, to the locality in which the medal was

struck. Yet the frequent occurrence of the well-known type with the

attributes and sacred animals of various deities, and the epigraphs

'Neos Puthios' or 'Neos Iacchos,' justify us in assuming that he was

associated with divinities in vogue among the people who accepted his

cult—especially Apollo, Dionysus, and Hermes. On more than one coin he

is described as Antinous-Pan, showing that his Arcadian compatriots of

Peloponnese and Bithynia paid him the compliment of placing him beside

their great local deity. In a Latin inscription discovered at Tibur, he

is connected with the sun-god of Noricia, Pannonia and Illyria, who was

worshipped under the title of Belenus:—

Antinoo et Beleno par ætas famaque par est;

Cur non Antinous sit quoque qui Belenus?

This couplet sufficiently explains the ground of his adscription to the

society of gods distinguished for their beauty. Both Belenus and

Antinous are young and beautiful: why, therefore, should not Antinous

be honoured equally with Belenus? The same reasoning would apply to all

his impersonations. The pious imagination or the æsthetic taste tricked

out this favourite of fortune in masquerade costumes, just as a wealthy

lover may amuse himself by dressing his mistress after the similitude

of famous beauties. The analogy of statues confirms this assumption. A

considerable majority represent him as Dionysus Kisseus: in some of the

best he is conceived as Hermes of the Palæstra or a simple hero: in one

he is probably 214 Dionysus Antheus; in another Vertumnus or Aristæus;

yet again he is the Agathos Daimon: while a fine specimen preserved in

England shows him as Ganymede raising a goblet of wine: a little statue

in the Louvre gives him the attributes of youthful Herakles; a

basrelief of somewhat doubtful genuineness in the Villa Albani exhibits

him with Romanised features in the character perhaps of Castor. Again,

I am not sure whether the Endymion in the celebrated basrelief of the

Capitol does not yield a portrait of Antinous.

This rapid enumeration will suffice to show that Antinous was

universally conceived as a young deity in bloom, and that preference

was given to Phoebus and Iacchus, the gods of divination and

enthusiasm, for his associates. In some cases he appears to have been

represented as a simple hero without the attributes of any deity. Many

of his busts, and the fine nude statues of the Capitol and the

Neapolitan Museum, belong to this class, unless we recognise the two

last as Antinous under the form of a young Hercules, or of the

gymnastic Hermes. But when he comes before us with the title of

Puthios, or with the attributes of Dionysus, distinct reference is

probably intended in the one case to his oracular quality, in the other

to the enthusiasm which led to his death. Allusions to Harpocrates,

Lunus, Aristæus, Philesius, Vertumnus, Castor, Herakles, Ganymedes,

show how the divinising fancy played around the beauty of his youth,

and sought to connect him with myths already honoured in the pious

conscience. Lastly, though it would be hazardous to strain this point,

we find in his chief impersonations a Chthonian character, a touch of

the mystery that is shrouded in the world beyond the grave. The double

nature of his Athenian cult may perhaps confirm this view. But, over

and above all these symbolic illustrations, one artistic motive of

immortal loveliness pervades and animates the series.

215 It becomes at this point of some moment to determine what was the

relation of Antinous to the gods with whom he blended, and whose

attributes he shared. It seems tolerably certain that he had no special

legend which could be idealised in art. The mythopoeic fancy invented

no fable for him. His cult was parasitic upon elder cults. He was the

colleague of greater well-established deities, from whom he borrowed a

pale and evanescent lustre. Speaking accurately, he was a hero or

divinised mortal, on the same grade as Helen immortalised for her

beauty, as Achilles for his prowess, or as Herakles for his great

deeds. But having no poet like Homer to sing his achievements, no myth

fertile in emblems, he dwelt beneath the shadow of superior powers, and

crept into a place with them. What was this place worth? What was the

meaning attached by his votaries to the title σύνθρονος or πάρεδρος

θεός? According to the simple meaning of both epithets, he occupied a

seat together with or by the side of the genuine Olympians. In this

sense Pindar called Dionysus the πάρεδρος of Demeter, because the

younger god had been admitted to her worship on equal terms at Eleusis.

In this sense Sophocles spoke of Himeros as πάρεδρος of the eternal

laws, and of Justice as σύνοικος with the Chthonian deities. In this

sense Euripides makes Helen ζύνθακος her brethren, the Dioscuri. In

this sense the three chief Archons at Athens were said to have two

πάρεδροι apiece. In this sense, again, Hephæstion was named a θεος

παρεδρος, and Alexander in his lifetime was voted a thirteenth in the

company of the twelve Olympians. The divinised emperors were πάρεδροι

or σύνθρονοι nor did Virgil hesitate to flatter Augustus by questioning

into which college of the immortals he would be adscript after death—

Tuque adeo, quem mox quæ sint habitura deorum

Concilia, incertum est.

216 Conscript deities of this heroic order were supposed to avert evils

from their votaries, to pursue offenders with calamity, to inspire

prophetic dreams, and to appear, as the phantom of Achilles appeared to

Apollonius of Tyana, and answer questions put to them. They

corresponded very closely and exactly to the saints of mediævalism,

acting as patrons of cities, confraternities, and persons, and

interposing between the supreme powers of heaven and their especial

devotees. As a πάρεδρος of this exalted quality, Antinous was the

associate of Phoebus, Bacchus, and Hermes among the Olympians, and a

colleague with the gods of Nile. The principal difficulty of grasping

his true rank consists in the variety of his emblems and divine

disguises.

It must here be mentioned that the epithet πάρεδρος had a secondary and

inferior signification. It was applied by later authors to the demons

or familiar spirits who attended upon enchanters like Simon Magus or

Apollonius; and such satellites were believed to be supplied by the

souls of innocent young persons violently slain. Whether this secondary

meaning of the title indicates a degeneration of the other, and forms

the first step of the process whereby classic heroes were degraded into

the foul fiends of mediæval fancy, or whether we find in it a wholly

new application of the word, is questionable. I am inclined to believe

that, while πάρεδρος θεος in the one case means an associate of the

Olympian gods, πάοεδρος δαίμων in the other means a fellow-agent and

assessor of the wizard. In other words, however they may afterwards

have been confounded, the two uses of the same epithet were originally

distinct: so that not every πάρεδρος θεος, Achilles, or Hephæstion or

Antinous, was supposed to haunt and serve a sorcerer, but only some

inferior spirit over whom his black art gave him authority. The

πάρεδρος θεος was so called because he sat with the great gods. The

πάρεδρος δαίμον was so 217 called because he sat beside the magician.

At the same time there seems sufficient evidence that the two meanings

came to be confounded; and as the divinities of Hellas, with all their

lustrous train, paled before the growing splendour of Christ, they

gradually fell beneath the necromantic ferule of the witch.

Returning from this excursion, and determining that Antinous was a hero

or divinised mortal, adscript to the college of the greater gods, and

invested with many of their attributes, we may next ask the question,

why this artificial cult, due in the first place to imperial passion

and caprice, and nourished by the adulation of fawning provinces, was

preserved from the rapid dissolution to which the flimsy products of

court-flattery are subject. The mythopoetic faculty was extinct, or in

its last phase of decadent vitality. There was nothing in the life of

Antinous to create a legend or to stimulate the sense of awe; and yet

this worship persisted long after the fear of Hadrian had passed away,

long after the benefits to be derived by humouring a royal fancy had

been exhausted, long after anything could be gained by playing out the

farce. It is clear, from a passage in Clemens Alexandrinus, that the

sacred nights of Antinous were observed, at least a century after the

date of his deification, with an enthusiasm that roused the anger of

the Christian Father. Again, it is worthy of notice that, while many of

the noblest works of antiquity have perished, the statues of Antinous

have descended to us in fair preservation and in very large numbers.

From the contemptuous destruction which erased the monuments of base

men in the Roman Empire they were safe; and the state in which we have

them shows how little they had suffered from neglect. The most rational

conclusion seems to be that Antinous became in truth a popular saint,

and satisfied some new need in Paganism, for which none of the elder

and more respectable deities sufficed. The novelty of his cult had, no

doubt, 218 something to do with the fascination it exercised; and

something may be attributed to the impulse art received from the

introduction of so rare and original a type of beauty into the

exhausted cycle of mythical subjects. The blending of Greek and

Egyptian elements was also attractive to an age remarkable for its

eclecticism. But after allowing for the many adventitious circumstances

which concurred to make Antinous the fashion, it is hardly unreasonable

to assume that the spirit of poetry in the youth's story, the rumour of

his self-devoted death, kept him alive in the memory of the people. It

is just that element of romance in the tale of his last hours, that

preservative association with the pathos of self-sacrifice, which forms

the interest we still feel for him.

The deified Antinous was therefore for the Roman world a charming but

dimly felt and undeveloped personality, made perfect by withdrawal into

an unseen world of mystery. The belief in the value of vicarious

suffering attached itself to his beautiful and melancholy form. His

sorrow borrowed something of the universal world-pain, more pathetic

than the hero-pangs of Herakles, the anguish of Prometheus, or the

passion of Iacchus-Zagreus, because more personal and less suggestive

of a cosmic mystery. The ancient cries of Ah Linus, Ah Adonis, found in

him an echo. For votaries ready to accept a new god as simply as we

accept a new poet, he was the final manifestation of an old-world

mystery, the rejuvenescence of a well-known incarnation, the

semi-Oriental realisation of a recurring Avatar. And if we may venture

on so bold a surmise, this last flower of antique mythology had taken

up into itself a portion of the blood outpoured on Calvary. Planted in

the conservatory of semi-philosophical yearnings, faintly tinctured

with the colours of misapprehended Christianity, without inherent

stamina, without the powerful nutrition which the earlier heroic fables

had derived from the spiritual vigour 219 of a truly mythopoeic age,

the cult of Antinous subsisted as an echo, a reflection, the last

serious effort of deifying but no longer potent Paganism, the last

reverberation of its oracles, an æsthetic rather than a religious

product, viewed even in its origin with sarcasm by the educated, and

yet sufficiently attractive to enthral the minds of simple votaries,

and to survive the circumstances of its first creation. It may be

remembered that the century which witnessed the canonisation of

Antinous, produced the myth of Cupid and Psyche—or, if this be too

sweeping an assertion, gave it final form, and handed it, in its

suggestive beauty, to the modern world. Thus at one and the same moment

the dying spirit of Hellas seized upon those doctrines of self-devotion

and immortality which, through the triumph of Christian teaching, were

gaining novel and incalculable value for the world. According to its

own laws of inspiration, it stamped both legends of Love victorious

over Death, with beautiful form in myth and poem and statuary.

That we are not altogether unjustified in drawing this conclusion may

be gathered from the attitude assumed by the Christian apologists

toward Antinous. There is more than the mere hatred of a Pagan hero,

more than the bare indignation at a public scandal, in their acrimony.

Accepting the calumnious insinuations of Dion Cassius, these gladiators

of the new faith found a terrible rhetorical weapon ready to their

hands in the canonisation of a court favourite. Prudentius, Clemens

Alexandrinus, Tertullian, Eusebius, Justin Martyr, Athanasius,

Tatian—all inveigh, in nearly the same terms, against the Emperor's

Ganymede, exalted to the skies, and worshipped with base fear and

adulation by abject slaves. But in Origen, arguing with Celsus, we find

a somewhat different keynote struck. Celsus, it appears, had told the

story of Antinous, and had compared his cult with that of Christ.

Origen replies justly, that there 220 was nothing in common between the

lives of Antinous and of Christ, and that his supposed divinity is a

fiction. We can discern in this response an echo of the faith which

endeared Antinous to his Pagan votaries. Antinous was hated by the

Christians as a rival; insignificant, it is true, and unworthy, but

still of sufficient force to be regarded and persecuted. If Antinous

had been utterly contemptible, if he had not gained some firm hold upon

the piety of Græco-Roman Paganism, Celsus could hardly have ventured to

rest an argument upon his worship, nor would Origen have chosen to

traverse that argument with solid reasoning, instead of passing it by

in rhetorical silence. Nothing is more difficult than to understand the

conditions of that age or to sympathise with its dominant passions.

Educated as we have been in the traditions of the finally triumphant

Christian faith, warmed through and through as we are by its summer

glow and autumn splendour, believing as we do in the adequacy of its

spirit to satisfy the cravings of the human heart, how can we

comprehend a moment in its growth when the divinised Antinous was not

merely an object offensive to the moral sense, but also a parody

dangerous to the pure form of Christ?

It remains to say somewhat of Antinous as he appears in art. His place

in classic sculpture corresponds to his position in antique mythology.

The Antinous statues and coins are reflections of earlier artistic

masterpieces, executed with admirable skill, but lacking original

faculty for idealisation in the artists. Yet there is so much personal

attraction in his type, his statues are so manifestly faithful

portraits, and we find so great a charm of novelty in his delicately

perfect individuality, that the life-romance which they reveal, as

through a veil of mystery, has force enough to make them rank among the

valuable heirlooms of antiquity. We could almost believe that, while so

many gods and heroes of Greece have perished, 221 Antinous has been

preserved in all his forms and phases for his own most lovely sake; as

though, according to Ghiberti's exquisite suggestion, gentle souls in

the first centuries of Christianity had spared this blameless youth,

and hidden him away with tender hands, in quiet places, from the fury

of iconoclasts. Nor is it impossible that the great vogue of his

worship was due among the Pagan laity to this same fascination of pure

beauty. Could a more graceful temple of the body have been fashioned,

after the Platonic theory, for the habitation of a guileless,

god-inspired, enthusiastic soul? The personality of Antinous, combined

with the suggestion of his self-devoted death, made him triumphant in

art as in the affections of the pious.

It would be an interesting task to compose a _catalogue raisonné_ of

Antinous statues and basreliefs, and to discuss the question of their

mythological references. This is, however, not the place for such an

inquiry. And yet I cannot quit Antinous without some retrospect upon

the most important of his portraits. Among the simple busts, by far the

finest, to my thinking, are the colossal head of the Louvre, and the

ivy-crowned bronze at Naples. The latter is not only flawless in its

execution, but is animated with a pensive beauty of expression. The

former, though praised by Winckelmann, as among the two or three most

precious masterpieces of antique art, must be criticised for a certain

vacancy and lifelessness. Of the heroic statues, the two noblest are

those of the Capitol and Naples. The identity of the Capitoline

Antinous has only once, I think, been seriously questioned; and yet it

may be reckoned more than doubtful. The head is almost certainly not

his. How it came to be placed upon a body presenting so much

resemblance to the type of Antinous I do not know. Careful comparison

of the torso and the arms with an indubitable portrait will even raise

the question whether this fine 222 statue is not a Hermes or a hero of

an earlier age. Its attitude suggests Narcissus or Adonis; and under

either of these forms Antinous may properly have been idealised. The

Neapolitan marble, on the contrary, yields the actual Antinous in all

the exuberant fulness of his beauty. Head, body, pose, alike bring him

vividly before us, forming an undoubtedly authentic portrait. The same

personality, idealised, it is true, but rather suffering than gaining

by the process, is powerfully impressed upon the colossal Dionysus of

the Vatican. What distinguishes this great work is the inbreathed

spirit of divinity, more overpowering here than in any other of the

extant ανδριάντες και αγάλματα The basrelief of the Villa Albani,

restored to suit the conception of a Vertumnus, has even more of florid

beauty; but whether the restoration was wisely made may be doubted. It

is curious to compare this celebrated masterpiece of technical

dexterity with another basrelief in the Villa Albani, representing

Antinous as Castor. He is standing, half clothed with the chlamys, by a

horse. His hair is close-cropped, after the Roman fashion, cut straight

above the forehead, but crowned with a fillet of lotos-buds. The whole

face has a somewhat stern and frowning Roman look of resolution,

contrasting with the mild benignity of the Bacchus statues, and the

almost sulky voluptuousness of the busts. In the Lateran Museum

Antinous appears as a god of flowers, holding in his lap a multitude of

blossoms, and wearing on his head a wreath. The conception of this

statue provokes comparison with the Flora of the Neapolitan Museum. I

should like to recognise in it a Dionysus Antheus, rather than one of

the more prosy Roman gods of horticulture. Not unworthy to rank with

these first-rate portraits of Antinous is a Ganymede, engraved by the

Dilettante Society, which represents him standing alert, in one hand

holding the wine-jug and in the other lifting a cup aloft. It will be

seen from even this brief enumeration of a 223 few among the statues of

Antinous, how many and how various they are. One, however, remains

still to be discussed, which, so far as concerns the story of Antinous,

is by far the most interesting of all. As a work of art, to judge by

photographs, it is inferior to others in execution and design. Yet

could we but understand its meaning clearly, the mystery of Antinous

would be solved: the key to the whole matter probably lies here; but,

alas! we know not how to use it. I speak of the Ildefonso Group at

Madrid.[96]

[96] See Frontispiece.

On one pedestal there are three figures in white marble. To the extreme

right of the spectator stands a little female statue of a goddess, in

archaistic style, crowned with the calathos, and holding a sphere,

probably of pomegranate fruit, to her breast. To the left of this image

are two young men, three times the height of the goddess, quite naked,

standing one on each side of a low altar. Both are crowned with a

wreath of leaves and berries—laurel or myrtle. The youth to the right,

next the image, holds a torch in either hand: with the right he turns

the flaming point downwards, till it lies upon the altar; with the left

he lifts the other torch aloft, and rests it on his shoulder. He has a

beautiful Græco-Roman face, touched with sadness or ineffable

reflection. The second youth leans against his comrade, resting his

left arm across the other's back, and this hand is lightly placed upon

the shoulder, close to the lifted torch. His right arm is bent, and so

placed that the hand just cuts the line of the pelvis a little above

the hip. The weight of his body is thrown principally upon the right

leg; the left foot is drawn back, away from the altar. It is the

attitude of the Apollo Sauroctonos. His beautiful face, bent downward,

is intently gazing with a calm, collected, serious, and yet sad cast of

earnest meditation. His eyes seem fixed on something beyond him and

beneath 224 him—as it were on an inscrutable abyss; and in this

direction also looks his companion. The face is unmistakably the face

of Antinous; yet the figure, and especially the legs, are not

characteristic. They seem modelled after the conventional type of the

Greek Ephebus. Parts of the two torches and the lower half of the right

arm of Antinous are restorations.

Such is the Ildefonso marble; and it may be said that its execution is

hard and rough—the arms of both figures are carelessly designed; the

hands and fingers are especially angular, elongated, and ill-formed.

But there is a noble feeling in the whole group, notwithstanding. F.

Tieck, the sculptor and brother of the poet, was the first to suggest

that we have here Antinous, the Genius of Hadrian, and Persephone.[97]

He also thought that the self-immolation of Antinous was indicated by

the loving, leaning attitude of the younger man, and by his melancholy

look of resolution. The same view, in all substantial points, is taken

by Friedrichs, author of a work on Græco-Roman sculpture. But

Friedrichs, while admitting the identity of the younger figure with

Antinous, and recognising Persephone in the archaic image, is not

prepared to accept the elder as the Genius of Hadrian; and it must be

confessed that this face does not bear any resemblance to the portraits

of the Emperor. According to his interpretation, the Dæmon is kindling

the fire upon the sacrificial altar with the depressed torch; and the

second or lifted torch must be supposed to have been needed for the

performance of some obscure rite of immolation. What Friedrichs fails

to elucidate is the trustful attitude of Antinous, who could scarcely

have been conceived as thus affectionately 225 reclining on the

shoulder of a merely sacrificial dæmon; nor is there anything upon the

altar to kindle. It must, however, be conceded that the imperfection of

the marble at this point leaves the restoration of the altar and the

torch upon it doubtful.

[97] See the article on Antinous, by Victor Rydberg, in the _Svensk

Tidskrift för Litteratur, Politik, och Ekonomi_. 1875, Stockholm. Also

Karl Bötticher, _Königliches Museum, Erklärendes Verzeichniss_.

Berlin, 1871.

Charles Bötticher started a new solution of the principal problem.

According to him, it was executed in the lifetime of Antinous; and it

represents not a sacrifice of death, but a sacrifice of fidelity on the

part of the two friends, Hadrian and Antinous, who have met together

before Persephone to ratify a vow of love till death. He suggests that

the wreaths are of stephanotis, that large-leaved myrtle, which was

sacred to the Chthonian goddesses after the liberation of Semele from

Hades by her son Dionysus. With reference to such ceremonies between

Greek comrades, Bötticher cites a vase upon which Theseus and

Peirithous are sacrificing in the temple of Persephone; and he assumes

that there may have existed Athenian groups in marble representing

similar vows of friendship, from which Hadrian had this marble copied.

He believes that the Genius of Hadrian is kindling one torch at the

sacred fire, which he will reach to Antinous, while he holds the other

in readiness to kindle for himself. This explanation is both ingenious

and beautiful. It has also the great merit of explaining the action of

the right arm of Antinous. Yet it is hardly satisfactory. It throws no

light upon the melancholy and solemnity of both figures, which

irresistibly suggest a funereal rather than a joyous rite. Antinous is

not even looking at the altar, and the meditative curves of his

beautiful reclining form indicate anything rather than the spirited

alacrity with which a friend would respond to his comrade's call at

such a moment. Besides, why should not the likeness of Hadrian have

been preserved as well as that of Antinous, if the group commemorated

an act of their joint 226 will? On the other hand, we must admit that

the altar itself is not dressed for a funereal sacrifice.

It has been pointed out that in the British Museum there exists a

basrelief of Homer's apotheosis where we notice a figure holding two

torches. Is it, then, possible that the Ildefonso marble may express,

not the sacrifice, but the apotheosis of Antinous, and that the Genius

who holds the two torches is conferring on him immortality? The lifted

torch would symbolise his new life, and the depressed torch would stand

for the life he had devoted. According to this explanation, the

sorrowful expression of Antinous must indicate the agony of death

through which he passed into the company of the undying. Against this

interpretation is the fact that we have no precise authority for the

symbolism of the torches, except only the common inversion of the

life-brand by the Genius of Death.

Yet another solution may be suggested. Assuming that we have before us

a sacrificial ceremony, and that the group was executed after the

self-devotion of Antinous had passed into the popular belief, we may

regard the elder youth as either the Genius of the Emperor, separate in

spirit from Hadrian himself and presiding over his destinies, who

accepts the offer of Antinous with solemn calmness suited to so great a

gift; or else as the Genius of the Roman people, witnessing the same

act in the same majestic spirit. This view finds some support in the

abstract ideality of the torch-bearer, who is clearly no historical

personage as Antinous himself is, but rather a power controlling his

fate. The interpretation of the two torches remains very difficult. In

the torch flung down upon the flameless and barren altar we might

recognise a symbol of Hadrian's life upon the point of extinction, but

not yet extinguished; and in the torch lifted aloft we might find a

metaphor of life resuscitated and exalted. Nor is it 227 perhaps

without significance that the arm of the self-immolating youth meets

the upraised torch, as though to touch the life which he will purchase

with his death. There is, however, the objection stated above to this

bold use of symbolism.

In support of any explanation which ascribes this group to a period

later than the canonisation of Antinous, it may be repeated that the

execution is inferior to that of almost all the other statues of the

hero. Is it possible, then, that it belongs to a subsequent date, when

art was further on the wane, but when the self-devotion of Antinous had

become a dogma of his cult?

After all is said, the Ildefonso marble, like the legend of Antinous,

remains a mystery. Only hypotheses, more or less ingenious, more or

less suited to our sympathies, varying between Casaubon's coarse

vilification and Rydberg's roseate vision, are left us.

As a last note on the subject of Antinous let me refer to Raphael's

statue of Jonah in the Chigi Chapel of S. Maria del Popolo at Rome.

Raphael, who handled the myth of Cupid and Psyche so magnificently in

the Villa Farnesina of his patron Agostino Chigi, dedicated a statue of

Antinous—the only statue he ever executed in marble—under the title of

a Hebrew prophet in a Christian sanctuary. The fact is no less

significant than strange. During the early centuries of Christianity,

as is amply proved by the sarcophagi in the Lateran Museum, Jonah

symbolised self-sacrifice and immortality. He was a type of Christ, an

emblem of the Christian's hope beyond the grave. During those same

centuries Antinous represented the same ideas, however inadequately,

however dimly, for the unlettered laity of Paganism. It could scarcely

have been by accident, or by mere admiration for the features of

Antinous, that Raphael, in his marble, blent the Christian 228 and the

Pagan traditions. To unify and to transcend the double views of

Christianity and Paganism in a work of pure art was Raphael's

instinctive, if not his conscious, aim. Nor is there a more striking

instance of this purpose than the youthful Jonah with the head of

Hadrian's favourite. Leonardo's Dionysus-John-the-Baptist seems but a

careless _jeu d'esprit_ compared with this profound and studied symbol

of renascent humanism. Thus to regard the Jonah-Antinous of the

Cappella Chigi as a type of immortality and self-devotion, fusing

Christian and Græco-Roman symbolism in one work of modern art, is the

most natural interpretation; but it would not be impossible to trace in

it a metaphor of the resurgent Pagan spirit also—as though, leaving

Jonah and his Biblical associations in the background, the artist had

determined that from the mouth of the monstrous grave should issue not

a bearded prophet, but the victorious youth who had captivated with his

beauty and his heroism the sunset age of the classic world. At any

rate, whatever may have been Raphael's intention, the legend of

Antinous, that last creation of antique mythology, shines upon us in

this marble, just as the tale of Hero and Leander, that last blossom of

antique literature, flowers afresh in the verses of our Marlowe. It

would appear as though the Renaissance poets, hastening to meet the

classic world with arms of welcome, had embraced its latest saints, as

nearest to them, in the rapture of their first enthusiasm.

Over all these questions, over all that concerns Antinous, there rests

a cloud of darkness and impenetrable doubt. To pierce that cloud is now

impossible. The utmost we can do is to indulge our fancy in dreams of

greater or less probability, and to mark out clearly the limitations of

the subject. It is indeed something to have shown that the stigma of

slavery and disgrace attaching to his name has no solid historical

justification, and something to have suggested plausible reasons 229

for conjecturing that his worship had a genuine spiritual basis. Yet

the sincere critic, at the end of the whole inquiry, will confess that

he has only cast a plummet into the unfathomable sea of ignorance. What

remains, immortal, indestructible, victorious, is Antinous in art.

Against the gloomy background of doubt, calumny, contention, terrible

surmise, his statues are illuminated with the dying glory of the

classic genius—even as the towers and domes of a marble city shine

forth from the purple banks of a thunder-cloud in sunset light. Here

and here only does reality emerge from the chaos of conflicting

phantoms. Front to front with them, it is allowed us to forget all else

but the beauty of one who died young because the gods loved him. But

when we question those wonderful mute features and beg them for their

secret, they return no answer. There is not even a smile upon the

parted lips. So profound is the mystery, so insoluble the enigma, that

from its most importunate interrogation we derive nothing but an

attitude of deeper reverence. This in itself, however, is worth the

pains of study.[98]

[98] I must here express my indebtedness to my friend H.F. Brown for a

large portion of the materials used by me in this essay on Antinous,

which I had no means at Davos Platz of accumulating for myself, and

which he unearthed from the libraries of Florence in the course of his

own work, and generously placed at my disposal.

230

SPRING WANDERINGS

ANA-CAPRI

The storm-clouds at this season, though it is the bloom of May, are

daily piled in sulky or menacing masses over Vesuvius and the Abruzzi,

frothing out their curls of moulded mist across the bay, and climbing

the heavens with toppling castle towers and domes of alabaster.

We made the most of a tranquil afternoon, when there was an armistice

of storm, to climb the bluff of Mount Solaro. A ruined fort caps that

limestone bulwark; and there we lay together, drinking the influences

of sea, sun, and wind. Immeasurably deep beneath us plunged the

precipices, deep, deep descending to a bay where fisher boats were

rocking, diminished to a scale that made the fishermen in them

invisible. Low down above the waters wheeled white gulls, and higher up

the hawks and ospreys of the cliff sailed out of sunlight into shadow.

Immitigable strength is in the moulding of this limestone, and sharp,

clear definiteness marks yon clothing of scant brushwood where the

fearless goats are browsing. The sublime of sculpturesque in crag

structure is here, refined and modulated by the sweetness of sea

distances. For the air came pure and yielding to us over the unfooted

sea; and at the basement of those fortress-cliffs the sea was dreaming

in its caves; and far away, to east and south and west, soft light was

blent with mist upon the surface of the shimmering waters.

231 The distinction between prospects viewed from a mountain

overlooking a great plain, or viewed from heights that, like this,

dominate the sea, principally lies in this: that while the former only

offer cloud shadows cast upon the fields below our feet, in the latter

these shadows are diversified with cloud reflections. This gives

superiority in qualities of colour, variety of tone, and luminous

effect to the sea, compensating in some measure for the lack of those

associations which render the outlook over a wide extent of populated

land so thrilling. The emergence of towered cities into sunlight at the

skirts of moving shadows, the liquid lapse of rivers half disclosed by

windings among woods, the upturned mirrors of unruffled lakes, are

wanting to the sea. For such episodes the white sails of vessels, with

all their wistfulness of going to and fro on the mysterious deep, are

but a poor exchange. Yet the sea-lover may justify his preference by

appealing to the beauty of empurpled shadows, toned by amethyst or

opal, or shining with violet light, reflected from the clouds that

cross and find in those dark shields a mirror. There are suggestions,

too, of immensity, of liberty, of action, presented by the boundless

horizons and the changeful changeless tracts of ocean which no plain

possesses.

It was nigh upon sunset when we descended to Ana-Capri. That evening

the clouds assembled suddenly. The armistice of storm was broken. They

were terribly blue, and the sea grew dark as steel beneath them, till

the moment when the sun's lip reached the last edge of the waters. Then

a courier of rosy flame sent forth from him passed swift across the

gulf, touching, where it trod, the waves with accidental fire. The

messenger reached Naples; and in a moment, as by some diabolical

illumination, the sinful city kindled into light like glowing charcoal.

From Posilippo on the left, along the palaces of the Chiaja, up to S.

Elmo on the hill, past Santa 232 Lucia, down on the Marinella, beyond

Portici, beyond Torre del Greco, where Vesuvius towered up aloof, an

angry mount of amethystine gloom, the conflagration spread and reached

Pompeii, and dwelt on Torre dell' Annunziata. Stationary, lurid, it

smouldered while the day died slowly. The long, densely populated

sea-line from Pozzuoli to Castellammare burned and smoked with

intensest incandescence, sending a glare of fiery mist against the

threatening blue behind, and fringing with pomegranate-coloured blots

the water where no light now lingered. It is difficult to bend words to

the use required. The scene, in spite of natural suavity and grace, had

become like Dante's first glimpse of the City of Dis—like Sodom and

Gomorrah when fire from heaven descended on their towers before they

crumbled into dust.

FROM CAPRI TO ISCHIA

After this, for several days, Libeccio blew harder. No boats could

leave or come to Capri. From the piazza parapet we saw the wind

scooping the surface of the waves, and flinging spray-fleeces in sheets

upon the churning water. As they broke on Cape Campanella, the rollers

climbed in foam—how many feet?—and blotted out the olive-trees above

the headland. The sky was always dark with hanging clouds and masses of

low-lying vapour, very moist, but scarcely raining—lightning without

thunder in the night.

Such weather is unexpected in the middle month of May, especially when

the olives are blackened by December storms, and the orange-trees

despoiled of foliage, and the tendrils of the vines yellow with cold.

The walnut-trees have shown no sign of making leaves. Only the figs

seem to have suffered little.

It had been settled that we should start upon the first 233 seafaring

dawn for Ischia or Sorrento, according as the wind might set; and I was

glad when, early one morning, the captain of the _Serena_ announced a

moderate sirocco. When we reached the little quay we found the surf of

the Libeccio still rolling heavily into the gulf. A gusty south-easter

crossed it, tearing spray-crests from the swell as it went plunging

onward. The sea was rough enough; but we made fast sailing, our captain

steering with a skill which it was beautiful to watch, his five oarsmen

picturesquely grouped beneath the straining sail. The sea slapped and

broke from time to time on our windward quarter, drenching the boat

with brine; and now and then her gunwale scooped into the shoulder of a

wave as she shot sidling up it. Meanwhile enormous masses of

leaden-coloured clouds formed above our heads and on the sea-line; but

these were always shifting in the strife of winds, and the sun shone

through them petulantly. As we climbed the rollers, or sank into their

trough, the outline of the bay appeared in glimpses, shyly revealed,

suddenly withdrawn from sight; the immobility and majesty of mountains

contrasted with the weltering waste of water round us—now blue and

garish where the sunlight fell, now shrouded in squally rain-storms,

and then again sullen beneath a vaporous canopy. Each of these

vignettes was photographed for one brief second on the brain, and

swallowed by the hurling drift of billows. The painter's art could but

ill have rendered that changeful colour in the sea, passing from tawny

cloud-reflections and surfaces of glowing violet to bright blue or

impenetrable purple flecked with boiling foam, according as a

light-illuminated or a shadowed facet of the moving mass was turned to

sight.

Halfway across the gulf the sirocco lulled; the sail was lowered, and

we had to make the rest of the passage by rowing. Under the lee of

Ischia we got into comparatively quiet 234 water; though here the

beautiful Italian sea was yellowish green with churned-up sand, like an

unripe orange. We passed the castle on its rocky island, with the domed

church which has been so often painted in _gouache_ pictures through

the last two centuries, and soon after noon we came to Casamicciola.

LA PICCOLA SENTINELLA

Casamicciola is a village on the north side of the island, in its

centre, where the visitors to the mineral baths of Ischia chiefly

congregate. One of its old-established inns is called La Piccola

Sentinella. The first sight on entrance is an open gallery, with a pink

wall on which bloom magnificent cactuses, sprays of thick-clustering

scarlet and magenta flowers. This is a rambling house, built in

successive stages against a hill, with terraces and verandahs opening

on unexpected gardens to the back and front. Beneath its long irregular

façade there spreads a wilderness of orange-trees and honeysuckles and

roses, verbenas, geraniums and mignonette, snapdragons, gazanias and

stocks, exceeding bright and fragrant, with the green slopes of Monte

Epomeo for a background and Vesuvius for far distance. There are

wonderful bits of detail in this garden. One dark, thick-foliaged

olive, I remember, leaning from the tufa over a lizard-haunted wall,

feathered waist-high in huge acanthus leaves. The whole rich orchard

ground of Casamicciola is dominated by Monte Epomeo, the extinct

volcano which may be called the _raison d'être_ of Ischia; for this

island is nothing but a mountain lifted by the energy of fire from the

sea-basement. Its fantastic peaks and ridges, sulphur-coloured, dusty

grey, and tawny, with brushwood in young leaf upon the cloven flanks,

form a singular pendant to the austere but more artistically modelled

limestone crags of Capri. No two islands that I know, within so 235

short a space of sea, offer two pictures so different in style and

quality of loveliness. The inhabitants are equally distinct in type.

Here, in spite of what De Musset wrote somewhat affectedly about the

peasant girls—

Ischia! c'est là qu'on a des yeux,

C'est là qu'un corsage amoureux

Serre la hanche.

Sur un bas rouge bien tiré

Brille, sous le jupon doré,

La mule blanche—

in spite of these lines I did not find the Ischian women eminent, as

those of Capri are, for beauty. But the young men have fine, loose,

faun-like figures, and faces that would be strikingly handsome but for

too long and prominent noses. They are a singular race, graceful in

movement.

Evening is divine in Ischia. From the topmost garden terrace of the inn

one looks across the sea towards Terracina, Gaeta, and those descending

mountain buttresses, the Phlegræan plains, and the distant snows of the

Abruzzi. Rain-washed and luminous, the sunset sky held Hesper trembling

in a solid green of beryl. Fireflies flashed among the orange blossoms.

Far away in the obscurity of eastern twilight glared the smouldering

cone of Vesuvius—a crimson blot upon the darkness—a Cyclops' eye,

bloodshot and menacing.

The company in the Piccola Sentinella, young and old, were decrepit,

with an odd, rheumatic, shrivelled look upon them. The dining-room

reminded me, as certain rooms are apt to do, of a ship's saloon. I felt

as though I had got into the cabin of the _Flying Dutchman_, and that

all these people had been sitting there at meat a hundred years,

through storm and shine, for ever driving onward over immense waves in

an enchanted calm.

236

ISCHIA AND FORIO

One morning we drove along the shore, up hill, and down, by the Porto

d'Ischia to the town and castle. This country curiously combines the

qualities of Corfu and Catania. The near distance, so richly

cultivated, with the large volcanic slopes of Monte Epomeo rising from

the sea, is like Catania. Then, across the gulf, are the bold outlines

and snowy peaks of the Abruzzi, recalling Albanian ranges. Here, as in

Sicily, the old lava is overgrown with prickly pear and red valerian.

Mesembrianthemums—I must be pardoned this word; for I cannot omit those

fleshy-leaved creepers, with their wealth of gaudy blossoms, shaped

like sea anemones, coloured like strawberry and pineapple

cream-ices—mesembrianthemums, then, tumble in torrents from the walls,

and large-cupped white convolvuluses curl about the hedges. The Castle

Rock, with Capri's refined sky-coloured outline relieving its hard

profile on the horizon, is one of those exceedingly picturesque objects

just too theatrical to be artistic. It seems ready-made for a back

scene in 'Masaniello,' and cries out to the chromo-lithographer, 'Come

and make the most of me!' Yet this morning all things, in sea, earth,

and sky, were so delicately tinted and bathed in pearly light that it

was difficult to be critical.

In the afternoon we took the other side of the island, driving through

Lacca to Forio. One gets right round the bulk of Epomeo, and looks up

into a weird region called Le Falange, where white lava streams have

poured in two broad irregular torrents among broken precipices. Forio

itself is placed at the end of a flat headland, boldly thrust into the

sea; and its furthest promontory bears a pilgrimage church, intensely

white and glaring.

237 There is something arbitrary in the memories we make of places

casually visited, dependent as they are upon our mood at the moment, or

on an accidental interweaving of impressions which the _genius loci_

blends for us. Of Forio two memories abide with me. The one is of a

young woman, with very fair hair, in a light blue dress, standing

beside an older woman in a garden. There was a flourishing

pomegranate-tree above them. The whiteness and the dreamy smile of the

young woman seemed strangely out of tune with her strong-toned southern

surroundings. I could have fancied her a daughter of some moist

north-western isle of Scandinavian seas. My other memory is of a lad,

brown, handsome, powerfully featured, thoughtful, lying curled up in

the sun upon a sort of ladder in his house-court, profoundly

meditating. He had a book in his hand, and his finger still marked the

place where he had read. He looked as though a Columbus or a Campanella

might emerge from his earnest, fervent, steadfast adolescence. Driving

rapidly along, and leaving Forio in all probability for ever, I kept

wondering whether those two lives, discerned as though in vision, would

meet—whether she was destined to be his evil genius, whether posterity

would hear of him and journey to his birthplace in this world-neglected

Forio. Such reveries are futile. Yet who entirely resists them?

MONTE EPOMEO

About three on the morning which divides the month of May into two

equal parts I woke and saw the waning moon right opposite my window,

stayed in her descent upon the slope of Epomeo. Soon afterwards

Christian called me, and we settled to ascend the mountain. Three

horses and a stout black donkey, with their inevitable grooms, were

ordered; 238 and we took for guide a lovely faun-like boy, goat-faced,

goat-footed, with gentle manners and pliant limbs swaying beneath the

breath of impulse. He was called Giuseppe.

The way leads past the mineral baths and then strikes uphill, at first

through lanes cut deep in the black lava. The trees meet almost

overhead. It is like Devonshire, except that one half hopes to see

tropical foxgloves with violet bells and downy leaves sprouting among

the lush grasses and sweet-scented ferns upon those gloomy, damp, warm

walls. After this we skirted a thicket of arbutus, and came upon the

long volcanic ridge, with divinest outlook over Procida and Miseno

toward Vesuvius. Then once more we had to dive into brown sandstone

gullies, extremely steep, where the horses almost burst their girths in

scrambling, and the grooms screamed, exasperating their confusion with

encouragements and curses. Straight or bending as a willow wand,

Giuseppe kept in front. I could have imagined he had stepped to life

from one of Lionardo's fancy-sprighted studies.

After this fashion we gained the spine of mountain which composes

Ischia—the smooth ascending ridge that grows up from those eastern

waves to what was once the apex of fire-vomiting Inarime, and breaks in

precipices westward, a ruin of gulfed lava, tortured by the violence of

pent Typhoeus. Under a vast umbrella pine we dismounted, rested, and

saw Capri. Now the road skirts slanting-wise along the further flank of

Epomeo, rising by muddy earth-heaps and sandstone hollows to the quaint

pinnacles which build the summit. There is no inconsiderable peril in

riding over this broken ground; for the soil crumbles away, and the

ravines open downward, treacherously masked with brushwood.

On Epomeo's topmost cone a chapel dedicated to S. Niccolo da Bari, the

Italian patron of seamen, has been 239 hollowed from the rock. Attached

to it is the dwelling of two hermits, subterranean, with long dark

corridors and windows opening on the western seas. Church and hermitage

alike are scooped, with slight expenditure of mason's skill, from solid

mountain. The windows are but loopholes, leaning from which the town of

Forio is seen, 2500 feet below; and the jagged precipices of the

menacing Falange toss their contorted horror forth to sea and sky.

Through gallery and grotto we wound in twilight under a monk's

guidance, and came at length upon the face of the crags above

Casamicciola. A few steps upward, cut like a ladder in the stone,

brought us to the topmost peak—a slender spire of soft, yellowish tufa.

It reminded me (with differences) of the way one climbs the spire at

Strasburg, and stands upon that temple's final crocket, with nothing

but a lightning conductor to steady swimming senses. Different indeed

are the views unrolled beneath the peak of Epomeo and the pinnacle of

Strasburg! Vesuvius, with the broken lines of Procida, Miseno, and Lago

Fusaro for foreground; the sculpturesque beauty of Capri, buttressed in

everlasting calm upon the waves; the Phlegræan plains and champaign of

Volturno, stretching between smooth seas and shadowy hills; the mighty

sweep of Naples' bay; all merged in blue; aë;rial, translucent,

exquisitely frail. In this ethereal fabric of azure the most real of

realities, the most solid of substances, seem films upon a crystal

sphere.

The hermit produced some flasks of amber-coloured wine from his stores

in the grotto. These we drank, lying full-length upon the tufa in the

morning sunlight. The panorama of sea, sky, and long-drawn lines of

coast, breathless, without a ripple or a taint of cloud, spread far and

wide around us. Our horses and donkey cropped what little grass, blent

with bitter herbage, grew on that barren summit. Their grooms 240

helped us out with the hermit's wine, and turned to sleep face

downward. The whole scene was very quiet, islanded in immeasurable air.

Then we asked the boy, Giuseppe, whether he could guide us on foot down

the cliffs of Monte Epomeo to Casamicciola. This he was willing and

able to do; for he told me that he had spent many months each year upon

the hillside, tending goats. When rough weather came, he wrapped

himself in a blanket from the snow that falls and melts upon the

ledges. In summer time he basked the whole day long, and slept the calm

ambrosial nights away. Something of this free life was in the burning

eyes, long clustering dark hair, and smooth brown bosom of the

faun-like creature. His graceful body had the brusque, unerring

movement of the goats he shepherded. Human thought and emotion seemed

a-slumber in this youth who had grown one with nature. As I watched his

careless incarnate loveliness I remembered lines from an old Italian

poem of romance, describing a dweller of the forest, who

Haunteth the woodland aye 'neath verdurous shade,

Eateth wild fruit, drinketh of running stream;

And such-like is his nature, as 'tis said,

That ever weepeth he when clear skies gleam,

Seeing of storms and rain he then hath dread,

And feareth lest the sun's heat fail for him;

But when on high hurl winds and clouds together,

Full glad is he and waiteth for fair weather.

Giuseppe led us down those curious volcanic _balze_, where the soil is

soft as marl, with tints splashed on it of pale green and rose and

orange, and a faint scent in it of sulphur. They break away into wild

chasms, where rivulets begin; and here the narrow watercourses made for

us plain going. The turf beneath our feet was starred with cyclamens

and wavering anemones. At last we reached the chestnut woods, and so

241 by winding paths descended on the village. Giuseppe told me, as we

walked, that in a short time he would be obliged to join the army. He

contemplated this duty with a dim and undefined dislike. Nor could I,

too, help dreading and misliking it for him. The untamed, gentle

creature, who knew so little but his goats as yet, whose nights had

been passed from childhood _à la belle étoile_, whose limbs had never

been cumbered with broadcloth or belt—for him to be shut up in the

barrack of some Lombard city, packed in white conscript's sacking,

drilled, taught to read and write, and weighted with the knapsack and

the musket! There was something lamentable in the prospect. But such is

the burden of man's life, of modern life especially. United Italy

demands of her children that by this discipline they should be brought

into that harmony which builds a nation out of diverse elements.

FROM ISCHIA TO NAPLES

Ischia showed a new aspect on the morning of our departure. A sea-mist

passed along the skirts of the island, and rolled in heavy masses round

the peaks of Monte Epomeo, slowly condensing into summer clouds, and

softening each outline with a pearly haze, through which shone emerald

glimpses of young vines and fig-trees.

We left in a boat with four oarsmen for Pozzuoli. For about an hour the

breeze carried us well, while Ischia behind grew ever lovelier, soft as

velvet, shaped like a gem. The mist had become a great white luminous

cloud—not dense and alabastrine, like the clouds of thunder; but filmy,

tender, comparable to the atmosphere of Dante's moon. Porpoises and

sea-gulls played and fished about our bows, dividing the 242 dark brine

in spray. The mountain distances were drowned in bluish vapour—Vesuvius

quite invisible. About noon the air grew clearer, and Capri reared her

fortalice of sculptured rock, aë;rially azure, into liquid ether. I

know not what effect of atmosphere or light it is that lifts an island

from the sea by interposing that thin edge of lustrous white between it

and the water. But this phenomenon to-day was perfectly exhibited. Like

a mirage on the wilderness, like Fata Morgana's palace ascending from

the deep, the pure and noble vision stayed suspense 'twixt heaven and

ocean. At the same time the breeze failed, and we rowed slowly between

Procida and Capo Miseno—a space in old-world history athrong with

Cæsar's navies. When we turned the point, and came in sight of Baiæ,

the wind freshened and took us flying into Pozzuoli. The whole of this

coast has been spoiled by the recent upheaval of Monte Nuovo with its

lava floods and cindery deluges. Nothing remains to justify its fame

among the ancient Romans and the Neapolitans of Boccaccio's and

Pontano's age. It is quite wrecked, beyond the power even of

hendecasyllables to bring again its breath of beauty:—

Mecum si sapies, Gravina, mecum

Baias, et placidos coles recessus,

Quos ipsæ et veneres colunt, et illa

Quæ mentes hominum regit voluptas.

Hic vina et choreæ jocique regnant,

Regnant et charites facetiæque.

Has sedes amor, has colit cupido.

His passim juvenes puellulæque

Ludunt, et tepidis aquis lavantur,

Coenantque et dapibus leporibusque

Miscent delitias venustiores:

Miscent gaudia et osculationes,

Atque una sociis toris foventur,

Has te ad delitias vocant camoenæ;

Invitat mare, myrteumque littus;

243 Invitant volueres canoræ, et ipse

Gaurus pampineas parat corollas.[99]

[99] These verses are extracted from the second book of Pontano's

_Hendecasyllabi_ (Aldus, 1513, p. 208). They so vividly paint the

amusements of a watering-place in the fifteenth century that I have

translated them:—

With me, let but the mind be wise, Gravina,

With me haste to the tranquil haunts of Baiæ,

Haunts that pleasure hath made her home, and she who

Sways all hearts, the voluptuous Aphrodite.

Here wine rules, and the dance, and games and laughter;

Graces reign in a round of mirthful madness;

Love hath built, and desire, a palace here too,

Where glad youths and enamoured girls on all sides

Play and bathe in the waves in sunny weather,

Dine and sup, and the merry mirth of banquets

Blend with dearer delights and love's embraces,

Blend with pleasures of youth and honeyed kisses,

Till, sport-tired, in the couch inarmed they slumber.

Thee our Muses invite to these enjoyments;

Thee those billows allure, the myrtled seashore,

Birds allure with a song, and mighty Gaurus

Twines his redolent wreath of vines and ivy.

At Pozzuoli we dined in the Albergo del Ponte di Caligola (Heaven save

the mark!), and drank Falernian wine of modern and indifferent vintage.

Then Christian hired two open carriages for Naples. He and I sat in the

second. In the first we placed the two ladies of our party. They had a

large, fat driver. Just after we had all passed the gate a big fellow

rushed up, dragged the corpulent coachman from his box, pulled out a

knife, and made a savage thrust at the man's stomach. At the same

moment a _guardia-porta_, with drawn cutlass, interposed and struck

between the combatants. They were separated. Their respective friends

assembled in two jabbering crowds, and the whole party, uttering

vociferous objurgations, marched off, as I imagined, to the

watch-house. A very shabby lazzarone, without more ado, 244 sprang on

the empty box, and we made haste for Naples. Being only anxious to get

there, and not at all curious about the squabble which had deprived us

of our fat driver, I relapsed into indifference when I found that

neither of the men to whose lot we had fallen was desirous of

explaining the affair. It was sufficient cause for self-congratulation

that no blood had been shed, and that the Procuratore del Rè would not

require our evidence.

The Grotta di Posilippo was a sight of wonder, with the afternoon sun

slanting on its festoons of creeping plants above the western

entrance—the gas lamps, dust, huge carts, oxen, and _contadini_ in its

subterranean darkness—and then the sudden revelation of the bay and

city as we jingled out into the summery air again by Virgil's tomb.

NIGHT AT POMPEII

On to Pompeii in the clear sunset, falling very lightly upon mountains,

islands, little ports, and indentations of the bay.

From the railway station we walked above half a mile to the Albergo del

Sole under a lucid heaven of aqua-marine colour, with Venus large in it

upon the border line between the tints of green and blue.

The Albergo del Sole is worth commemorating. We stepped, without the

intervention of courtyard or entrance hall, straight from the little

inn garden into an open, vaulted room. This was divided into two

compartments by a stout column supporting round arches. Wooden gates

furnished a kind of fence between the atrium and what an old Pompeian

would have styled the triclinium. For in the further part a table was

laid for supper and lighted with suspended lamps. And here a party of

artists and students drank and talked and 245 smoked. A great live

peacock, half asleep and winking his eyes, sat perched upon a heavy

wardrobe watching them. The outer chamber, where we waited in armchairs

of ample girth, had its _loggia_ windows and doors open to the air.

There were singing-birds in cages; and plants of rosemary, iris, and

arundo sprang carelessly from holes in the floor. A huge vase filled to

overflowing with oranges and lemons, the very symbol of generous

prodigality, stood in the midst, and several dogs were lounging round.

The outer twilight, blending with the dim sheen of the lamps, softened

this pretty scene to picturesqueness. Altogether it was a strange and

unexpected place. Much experienced as the nineteenth-century nomad may

be in inns, he will rarely receive a more powerful and refreshing

impression, entering one at evenfall, than here.

There was no room for us in the inn. We were sent, attended by a boy

with a lantern, through fields of dew-drenched barley and folded

poppies, to a farmhouse overshadowed by four spreading pines.

Exceedingly soft and grey, with rose-tinted weft of steam upon its

summit, stood Vesuvius above us in the twilight. Something in the

recent impression of the dimly lighted supper-room, and in the idyllic

simplicity of this lantern-litten journey through the barley,

suggested, by one of those inexplicable stirrings of association which

affect tired senses, a dim, dreamy thought of Palestine and Bible

stories. The feeling of the _cenacolo_ blent here with feelings of

Ruth's cornfields, and the white square houses with their flat roofs

enforced the illusion. Here we slept in the middle of a _contadino_

colony. Some of the folk had made way for us; and by the wheezing,

coughing, and snoring of several sorts and ages in the chamber next me,

I imagine they must have endured considerable crowding. My bed was

large enough to have 246 contained a family. Over its bead there was a

little shrine, hollowed in the thickness of the wall, with several

sacred emblems and a shallow vase of holy water. On dressers at each

end of the room stood glass shrines, occupied by finely dressed Madonna

dolls and pots of artificial flowers. Above the doors S. Michael and S.

Francis, roughly embossed in low relief and boldly painted, gave

dignity and grandeur to the walls. These showed some sense for art in

the first builders of the house. But the taste of the inhabitants could

not be praised. There were countless gaudy prints of saints, and

exactly five pictures of the Bambino, very big, and sprawling in a

field alone. A crucifix, some old bottles, a gun, old clothes suspended

from pegs, pieces of peasant pottery and china, completed the furniture

of the apartment.

But what a view it showed when Christian next morning opened the door!

From my bed I looked across the red-tiled terrace to the stone-pines

with their velvet roofage and the blue-peaked hills of Stabiæ.

SAN GERMANO

No one need doubt about his quarters in this country town. The Albergo

di Pompeii is a truly sumptuous place. Sofas, tables, and chairs in our

sitting-room are made of buffalo horns, very cleverly pieced together,

but torturing the senses with suggestions of impalement. Sitting or

standing, one felt insecure. When would the points run into us? when

should we begin to break these incrustations off? and would the whole

fabric crumble at a touch into chaotic heaps of horns?

It is market day, and the costumes in the streets are brilliant. The

women wear a white petticoat, a blue skirt made straight and tightly

bound above it, a white richly 247 worked bodice, and the white

square-folded napkin of the Abruzzi on their heads. Their jacket is of

red or green—pure colour. A rug of striped red, blue, yellow, and black

protects the whole dress from the rain. There is a very noble quality

of green—sappy and gemmy—like some of Titian's or Giorgione's—in the

stuffs they use. Their build and carriage are worthy of goddesses.

Rain falls heavily, persistently. We must ride on donkeys, in

waterproofs, to Monte Cassino. Mountain and valley, oak wood and ilex

grove, lentisk thicket and winding river-bed, are drowned alike in

soft-descending, soaking rain. Far and near the landscape swims in

rain, and the hillsides send down torrents through their watercourses.

The monastery is a square, dignified building, of vast extent and

princely solidity. It has a fine inner court, with sumptuous staircases

of slabbed stone leading to the church. This public portion of the

edifice is both impressive and magnificent, without sacrifice of

religious severity to parade. We acknowledge a successful compromise

between the austerity of the order and the grandeur befitting the fame,

wealth, prestige, and power of its parent foundation. The church itself

is a tolerable structure of the Renaissance—costly marble incrustations

and mosaics, meaningless Neapolitan frescoes. One singular episode in

the mediocrity of art adorning it, is the tomb of Pietro de' Medici.

Expelled from Florence in 1494, he never returned, but was drowned in

the Garigliano. Clement VII. ordered, and Duke Cosimo I. erected, this

marble monument—the handicraft, in part at least, of Francesco di San

Gallo—to their relative. It is singularly stiff, ugly, out of place—at

once obtrusive and insignificant.

A gentle old German monk conducted Christian and me over the

convent—boys' school, refectory, printing press, 248 lithographic

workshop, library, archives. We then returned to the church, from which

we passed to visit the most venerable and sacred portion of the

monastery. The cell of S. Benedict is being restored and painted in

fresco by the Austrian Benedictines; a pious but somewhat frigid

process of re-edification. This so-called cell is a many-chambered and

very ancient building, with a tower which is now embedded in the

massive superstructure of the modern monastery. The German artists

adorning it contrive to blend the styles of Giotto, Fra Angelico,

Egypt, and Byzance, not without force and a kind of intense frozen

pietism. S. Mauro's vision of his master's translation to heaven—the

ladder of light issuing between two cypresses, and the angels watching

on the tower walls—might even be styled poetical. But the decorative

angels on the roof and other places, being adapted from Egyptian art,

have a strange, incongruous appearance.

Monasteries are almost invariably disappointing to one who goes in

search of what gives virtue and solidity to human life; and even Monte

Cassino was no exception. This ought not to be otherwise, seeing what a

peculiar sympathy with the monastic institution is required to make

these cloisters comprehensible. The atmosphere of operose indolence,

prolonged through centuries and centuries, stifles; nor can antiquity

and influence impose upon a mind which resents monkery itself as an

essential evil. That Monte Cassino supplied the Church with several

potentates is incontestable. That mediæval learning and morality would

have suffered more without this brotherhood cannot be doubted. Yet it

is difficult to name men of very eminent genius whom the Cassinesi

claim as their alumni; nor, with Boccaccio's testimony to their

carelessness, and with the evidence of their library before our eyes,

can we rate their services to 249 civilised erudition very highly. I

longed to possess the spirit, for one moment, of Montalembert. I longed

for what is called historical imagination, for the indiscriminate

voracity of those men to whom world-famous sites are in themselves

soul-stirring.

250

AMALFI, PÆSTUM, CAPRI

The road between Vietri and Amalfi is justly celebrated as one of the

most lovely pieces of coast scenery in Italy. Its only rivals are the

roads from Castellammare to Sorrento, from Genoa to Sestri, and from

Nice to Mentone. Each of these has its own charm; and yet their

similarity is sufficient to invite comparison: under the spell of each

in turn, we are inclined to say, This then, at all events, is the most

beautiful. On first quitting Vietri, Salerno is left low down upon the

sea-shore, nestling into a little corner of the bay which bears its

name, and backed up by gigantic mountains. With each onward step these

mountain-ranges expand in long aë;rial line, revealing reaches of

fantastic peaks, that stretch away beyond the plain of Pæstum, till

they end at last in mist and sunbeams shimmering on the sea. On the

left hand hangs the cliff above the deep salt water, with here and

there a fig-tree spreading fanlike leaves against the blue beneath. On

the right rises the hillside, clothed with myrtle, lentisk, cistus, and

pale yellow coronilla—a tangle as sweet with scent as it is gay with

blossom. Over the parapet that skirts the precipice lean heavy-foliaged

locust-trees, and the terraces in sunny nooks are set with

lemon-orchards. There are but few olives, and no pines. Meanwhile each

turn in the road brings some change of scene—now a village with its

little beach of grey sand, lapped by clearest sea-waves, where

bare-legged fishermen mend their nets, and naked boys bask like lizards

in the 251 sun—now towering bastions of weird rock, broken into spires

and pinnacles like those of Skye, and coloured with bright hues of red

and orange—then a ravine, where the thin thread of a mountain streamlet

seems to hang suspended upon ferny ledges in the limestone—or a

precipice defined in profile against sea and sky, with a lad, half

dressed in goat-skin, dangling his legs into vacuity and singing—or a

tract of cultivation, where the orange, apricot, and lemon trees nestle

together upon terraces with intermingled pergolas of vines.

Amalfi and Atrani lie close together in two of these ravines, the

mountains almost arching over them, and the sea washing their very

house-walls. Each has its crowning campanile; but that of Amalfi is the

stranger of the two, like a Moorish tower at the top, and coloured with

green and yellow tiles that glitter in the sunlight. The houses are all

dazzling white, plastered against the naked rock, rising on each

other's shoulders to get a glimpse of earth and heaven, jutting out on

coigns of vantage from the toppling cliff, and pierced with staircases

as dark as night at noonday. Some frequented lanes lead through the

basements of these houses; and as the donkeys pick their way from step

to step in the twilight, bare-chested macaroni-makers crowd forth like

ants to see us strangers pass. A myriad of swallows or a swarm of mason

bees might build a town like this.

It is not easy to imagine the time when Amalfi and Atrani were one

town, with docks and arsenals and harbourage for their associated

fleets, and when these little communities were second in importance to

no naval power of Christian Europe. The Byzantine Empire lost its hold

on Italy during the eighth century; and after this time the history of

Calabria is mainly concerned with the republics of Naples and Amalfi,

their conflict with the Lombard dukes of Benevento, their opposition to

the Saracens, and their final subjugation by the 252 Norman conquerors

of Sicily. Between the year 839 A.D., when Amalfi freed itself from the

control of Naples and the yoke of Benevento, and the year 1131, when

Roger of Hauteville incorporated the republic in his kingdom of the Two

Sicilies, this city was the foremost naval and commercial port of

Italy. The burghers of Amalfi elected their own doge; founded the

Hospital of Jerusalem, whence sprang the knightly order of S. John;

gave their name to the richest quarter in Palermo; and owned trading

establishments or factories in all the chief cities of the Levant.

Their gold coinage of _tari_ formed the standard of currency before the

Florentines had stamped the lily and S. John upon the Tuscan florin.

Their shipping regulations supplied Europe with a code of maritime

laws. Their scholars, in the darkest depth of the dark ages, prized and

conned a famous copy of the Pandects of Justinian; and their seamen

deserved the fame of having first used, if they did not actually

invent, the compass.

To modern visitors those glorious centuries of Amalfitan power and

independence cannot but seem fabulous; so difficult is it for us to

imagine the conditions of society in Europe when a tiny city, shut in

between barren mountains and a tideless sea, without a circumjacent

territory, and with no resources but piracy or trade, could develop

maritime supremacy in the Levant and produce the first fine flowers of

liberty and culture.

If the history of Amalfi's early splendour reads like a brilliant

legend, the story of its premature extinction has the interest of a

tragedy. The republic had grown and flourished on the decay of the

Greek Empire. When the hard-handed race of Hauteville absorbed the

heritage of Greeks and Lombards and Saracens in Southern Italy, these

adventurers succeeded in annexing Amalfi. But it was not their interest

to extinguish the state. On the contrary, they relied for 253

assistance upon the navies and the armies of the little commonwealth.

New powers had meanwhile arisen in the North of Italy, who were jealous

of rivalry upon the open seas; and when the Neapolitans resisted King

Roger in 1135, they called Pisa to their aid, and sent her fleet to

destroy Amalfi. The ships of Amalfi were on guard with Roger's navy in

the Bay of Naples. The armed citizens were, under Roger's orders, at

Aversa. Meanwhile the home of the republic lay defenceless on its

mountain-girdled seaboard. The Pisans sailed into the harbour, sacked

the city, and carried off the famous Pandects of Justinian as a trophy.

Two years later they returned, to complete the work of devastation.

Amalfi never recovered from the injuries and the humiliation of these

two attacks. It was ever thus that the Italians, like the children of

the dragon's teeth which Cadmus sowed, consumed each other. Pisa cut

the throat of her sister-port Amalfi, and Genoa gave a mortal wound to

Pisa, when the waters of Meloria were dyed with blood in 1284. Venice

fought a duel to the death with Genoa in the succeeding century; and

what Venice failed to accomplish was completed by Milan and the lords

of the Visconti dynasty, who crippled and enslaved the haughty queen of

the Ligurian Riviera.

The naval and commercial prosperity of Amalfi was thus put an end to by

the Pisans in the twelfth century. But it was not then that the town

assumed its present aspect. What surprises the student of history more

than anything is the total absence of fortifications, docks, arsenals,

and breakwaters, bearing witness to the ancient grandeur of a city

which numbered 50,000 inhabitants, and traded with Alexandria, Syria,

and the far East. Nothing of the sort, with the exception of a single

solitary tower upon the Monte Aureo, is visible. Nor will he fail to

remember that Amalfi and 254 Atrani, which are now divided by a jutting

mountain buttress, were once joined by a tract of sea-beach, where the

galleys of the republic rested after sweeping the Levant, and where the

fishermen drew up their boats upon the smooth grey sand. That also has

disappeared. The violence of man was not enough to reduce Amalfi to its

present state of insignificance. The forces of nature aided—partly by

the gradual subsidence of the land, which caused the lower quarters of

the city to be submerged, and separated Amalfi from her twin-port by

covering the beach with water—partly by a fearful tempest, accompanied

by earthquake, in 1343. Petrarch, then resident at Naples, witnessed

the destructive fury of this great convulsion, and the description he

wrote of it soon after its occurrence is so graphic that some notice

may well be taken of it here.

His letter, addressed to the noble Roman, Giovanni Colonna, begins with

a promise to tell something of a storm which deserved the title of

'poetic,' and in a degree so superlative that no epithet but 'Homeric'

would suffice to do it justice. This exordium is singularly

characteristic of Petrarch, who never forgot that he was a literary

man, and lost no opportunity of dragging the great names of antiquity

into his rhetorical compositions. The catastrophe was hardly

unexpected; for it had been prophesied by an astrological bishop, whom

Petrarch does not name, that Naples would be overwhelmed by a terrible

disaster in December 1343. The people were therefore in a state of wild

anxiety, repenting of their sins, planning a total change of life under

the fear of imminent death, and neglecting their ordinary occupations.

On the day of the predicted calamity women roamed in trembling crowds

through the streets, pressing their babies to their breasts, and

besieging the altars of the saints with prayers. Petrarch, who shared

the general disquietude, kept 255 watching the signs of the weather;

but nothing happened to warrant an extraordinary panic. At sunset the

sky was quieter than usual; and he could discern none of the symptoms

of approaching tempest, to which his familiarity with the mountains of

Vaucluse accustomed him. After dusk he stationed himself at a window to

observe the moon until she went down, before midnight, obscured by

clouds. Then he betook himself to bed; but scarcely had he fallen into

his first sleep when a most horrible noise aroused him. The whole house

shook; the night-light on his table was extinguished; and he was thrown

with violence from his couch. He was lodging in a convent; and soon

after this first intimation of the tempest he heard the monks calling

to each other through the darkness. From cell to cell they hurried, the

ghastly gleams of lightning falling on their terror-stricken faces.

Headed by the Prior, and holding crosses and relics of the saints in

their hands, they now assembled in Petrarch's chamber. Thence they

proceeded in a body to the chapel, where they spent the night in prayer

and expectation of impending ruin. It would be impossible, says the

poet, to relate the terrors of that hellish night—the deluges of rain,

the screaming of the wind, the earthquake, the thunder, the howling of

the sea, and the shrieks of agonising human beings. All these horrors

were prolonged, as though by some magician's spell, for what seemed

twice the duration of a natural night. It was so dark that at last by

conjecture rather than the testimony of their senses they knew that day

had broken. A hurried mass was said. Then, as the noise in the town

above them began to diminish, and a confused clamour from the sea-shore

continually increased, their suspense became unendurable. They mounted

their horses, and descended to the port—to see and perish. A fearful

spectacle awaited them. The ships in the harbour had broken their

moorings, and 256 were crashing helplessly together. The strand was

strewn with mutilated corpses. The breakwaters were submerged, and the

sea seemed gaining momently upon the solid land. A thousand watery

mountains surged up into the sky between the shore and Capri; and these

massive billows were not black or purple, but hoary with a livid foam.

After describing some picturesque episodes—such as the gathering of the

knights of Naples to watch the ruin of their city, the procession of

court ladies headed by the queen to implore the intercession of Mary,

and the wreck of a vessel freighted with 400 convicts bound for

Sicily—Petrarch concludes with a fervent prayer that he may never have

to tempt the sea, of whose fury he had seen so awful an example.

The capital on this occasion escaped the ruin prophesied. But Amalfi

was inundated; and what the waters then gained has never been restored

to man. This is why the once so famous city ranks now upon a level with

quiet little towns whose names are hardly heard in history—with San

Remo, or Rapallo, or Chiavari—and yet it is still as full of life as a

wasp's nest, especially upon the molo, or raised piazza paved with

bricks, in front of the Albergo de' Cappuccini. The changes of scene

upon this tiny square are so frequent as to remind one of a theatre.

Looking down from the inn-balcony, between the glazy green pots gay

with scarlet amaryllis-bloom, we are inclined to fancy that the whole

has been prepared for our amusement. In the morning the corn for the

macaroni-flour, after being washed, is spread out on the bricks to dry.

In the afternoon the fishermen bring their nets for the same purpose.

In the evening the city magnates promenade and whisper. Dark-eyed

women, with orange or crimson kerchiefs for headgear, cross and

re-cross, bearing baskets on their shoulders. Great lazy large-limbed

fellows, girt with scarlet sashes and finished off with dark blue 257

nightcaps (for a contrast to their saffron-coloured shirts, white

breeches, and sunburnt calves), slouch about or sleep face downwards on

the parapets. On either side of this same molo stretches a miniature

beach of sand and pebble, covered with nets, which the fishermen are

always mending, and where the big boats lade or unlade, trimming for

the sardine fishery, or driving in to shore with a whirr of oars and a

jabber of discordant voices. As the land-wind freshens, you may watch

them set off one by one, like pigeons taking flight, till the sea is

flecked with twenty sail, all scudding in the same direction. The

torrent runs beneath the molo, and finds the sea beyond it; so that

here too are the washerwomen, chattering like sparrows; and everywhere

the naked boys, like brown sea-urchins, burrow in the clean warm sand,

or splash the shallow brine. If you like the fun, you may get a score

of them to dive together and scramble for coppers in the deeper places,

their lithe bodies gleaming wan beneath the water in a maze of

interlacing arms and legs.

Over the whole busy scene rise the grey hills, soaring into blueness of

air-distance, turreted here and there with ruined castles, capped with

particoloured campanili and white convents, and tufted through their

whole height with the orange and the emerald of the great tree-spurge,

and with the live gold of the blossoming broom. It is difficult to say

when this picture is most beautiful—whether in the early morning, when

the boats are coming back from their night-toil upon the sea, and along

the headlands in the fresh light lie swathes of fleecy mist, betokening

a still, hot day—or at noontide, when the houses on the hill stand,

tinted pink and yellow, shadowless like gems, and the great

caruba-trees above the tangles of vines and figs are blots upon the

steady glare—or at sunset, when violet and rose, reflected from the

eastern sky, make all these terraces and peaks translucent 258 with a

wondrous glow. The best of all, perhaps, is night, with a full moon

hanging high overhead. Who shall describe the silhouettes of boats upon

the shore or sleeping on the misty sea? On the horizon lies a dusky

film of brownish golden haze, between the moon and the glimmering

water; and here and there a lamp or candle burns with a deep red. Then

is the time to take a boat and row upon the bay, or better, to swim out

into the waves and trouble the reflections from the steady stars. The

mountains, clear and calm, with light-irradiated chasms and hard

shadows cast upon the rock, soar up above a city built of alabaster, or

sea-foam, or summer clouds. The whole is white and wonderful: no

similes suggest an analogue for the lustre, solid and transparent, of

Amalfi nestling in moonlight between the grey-blue sea and lucid hills.

Stars stand on all the peaks, and twinkle, or keep gliding, as the boat

moves, down the craggy sides. Stars are mirrored on the marble of the

sea, until one knows not whether the oar has struck sparks from a star

image or has scattered diamonds of phosphorescent brine.

All this reads like a rhapsody; but indeed it is difficult not to be

rhapsodical when a May night of Amalfi is in the memory, with the echo

of rich baritone voices chanting Neapolitan songs to a mandoline. It is

fashionable to complain that these Italian airs are opera-tunes; but

this is only another way of saying that the Italian opera is the

genuine outgrowth of national melody, and that Weber was not the first,

as some German critics have supposed, to string together Volkslieder

for the stage. Northerners, who have never seen or felt the beauty of

the South, talk sad nonsense about the superiority of German over

Italian music. It is true that much Italian music is out of place in

Northern Europe, where we seem to need more travail of the intellect in

art. But the Italians are rightly satisfied with such facile melody 259

and such simple rhythms as harmonise with sea and sky and boon earth

sensuously beautiful. 'Perchè pensa? Pensando s' invecchia,' expresses

the same habit of mind as another celebrated saying, 'La musica è il

lamento dell' amore o la preghiera agli Dei.' Whatever may be the value

of Italian music, it is in concord with such a scene as Amalfi by

moon-light; and he who does not appreciate this no less than some more

artificial combination of sights and sounds in Wagner's theatre at

Bayreuth, has scarcely learned the first lesson in the lore of beauty.

There is enough and to spare for all tastes at Amalfi. The student of

architecture may spend hours in the Cathedral, pondering over its

high-built western front, and wondering whether there is more of

Moorish or of Gothic in its delicate arcades. The painter may transfer

its campanile, glittering like dragon's scales, to his canvas. The

lover of the picturesque will wander through its aisle at mass-time,

watching the sunlight play upon those upturned Southern faces with

their ardent eyes; and happy is he who sees young men and maidens on

Whit Sunday crowding round the chancel rails, to catch the marigolds

and gillyflowers scattered from baskets which the priest has blessed.

Is this a symbol of the Holy Spirit's gifts, or is it some quaint relic

of Pagan _sparsiones_? This question, with the memory of Pompeian

_graffiti_ in our mind, may well suggest itself in Southern Italy,

where old and new faiths are so singularly blended. Then there is

Ravello on the hills above. The path winds upward between stone walls

tufted with maidenhair; and ever nearer grow the mountains, and the

sea-line soars into the sky. An Englishman has made his home here in a

ruined Moorish villa, with cool colonnaded cloisters and rose-embowered

terraces, lending far prospect over rocky hills and olive-girdled

villages to Pæstum's plain. The churches of Ravello have 260 rare

mosaics, and bronze doors, and marble pulpits, older perhaps than those

of Tuscany, which tempt the archæologist to ask if Nicholas the Pisan

learned his secret here. But who cares to be a sober antiquary at

Amalfi? Far pleasanter is it to climb the staircase to the Capuchins,

and linger in those caverns of the living rock, and pluck the lemons

hanging by the mossy walls; or to row from cove to cove along the

shore, watching the fishes swimming in the deeps beneath, and the

medusas spreading their filmy bells; to land upon smooth slabs of rock,

where corallines wave to and fro; or to rest on samphire-tufted ledges,

when the shadows slant beneath the westering sun.

There is no point in all this landscape which does not make a picture.

Painters might even complain that the pictures are too easy and the

poetry too facile, just as the musicians find the melodies of this fair

land too simple. No effect, carefully sought and strenuously seized,

could enhance the mere beauty of Amalfi bathed in sunlight. You have

only on some average summer day to sit down and paint the scene. Little

scope is afforded for suggestions of far-away weird thoughts, or for

elaborately studied motives. Daubigny and Corot are as alien here as

Blake or Dürer.

What is wanted, and what no modern artist can successfully recapture

from the wasteful past, is the mythopoeic sense—the apprehension of

primeval powers akin to man, growing into shape and substance on the

borderland between the world and the keen human sympathies it stirs in

us. Greek mythology was the proper form of art for scenery like this.

It gave the final touch to all its beauties, and added to its sensuous

charm an inbreathed spiritual life. No exercise of the poetic faculty,

far less that metaphysical mood of the reflective consciousness which

'leads from nature up to nature's God,' can now supply this need. From

sea and earth 261 and sky, in those creative ages when the world was

young, there leaned to greet the men whose fancy made them, forms

imagined and yet real—human, divine—the archetypes and everlasting

patterns of man's deepest sense of what is wonderful in nature. Feeling

them there, for ever there, inalienable, ready to start forth and greet

successive generations—as the Hamadryad greeted Rhaicos from his

father's oak—those mythopoets called them by immortal names. All their

pent-up longings, all passions that consume, all aspirations that

inflame—the desire for the impossible, which is disease, the day-dreams

and visions of the night, which are spontaneous poems—were thus

transferred to nature. And nature, responsive to the soul that loves

her, gave them back transfigured and translated into radiant beings of

like substance with mankind. It was thus, we feel, upon these southern

shores that the gods of Greece came into being. The statues in the

temples were the true fine flower of all this beauty, the culmination

of the poetry which it evoked in hearts that feel and brains that

think.

In Italy, far more than in any other part of Europe, the life of the

present is imposed upon the strata of successive past lives. Greek,

Latin, Moorish, and mediæval civilisations have arisen, flourished, and

decayed on nearly the same soil; and it is common enough to find one

city, which may have perished twenty centuries ago, neighbour to

another that enjoyed its brief prosperity in the middle of our era.

There is not, for example, the least sign of either Greek or Roman at

Amalfi. Whatever may have been the glories of the republic in the early

middle ages, they had no relation to the classic past. Yet a few miles

off along the bay rise the ancient Greek temples of Pæstum, from a

desert—with no trace of any intervening occupants. Poseidonia was

founded in the sixth century before Christ, by colonists from Sybaris.

262 Three centuries later the Hellenic element in this settlement,

which must already have become a town of no little importance, was

submerged by a deluge of recurrent barbarism. Under the Roman rule it

changed its name to Pæstum, and was prosperous. The Saracens destroyed

it in the ninth century of our era; and Robert Guiscard carried some of

the materials of its buildings to adorn his new town of Salerno. Since

then the ancient site has been abandoned to malaria and solitude. The

very existence of Pæstum was unknown, except to wandering herdsmen and

fishers coasting near its ruined colonnades, until the end of the last

century. Yet, strange to relate, after all these revolutions, and in

the midst of this total desolation, the only relics of the antique city

are three Greek temples, those very temples where the Hellenes,

barbarised by their Lucanian neighbours, met to mourn for their lost

liberty. It is almost impossible to trace more than the mere circuit of

the walls of Poseidonia. Its port, if port it had in Roman days, has

disappeared. Its theatre is only just discernible. Still not a column

of the great hypæthral temple, built by the Sybarite colonists two

thousand and five hundred years ago, to be a house for Zeus or for

Poseidon, has been injured. The accidents that erased far greater

cities, like Syracuse, from the surface of the earth—pillage,

earthquake, the fury of fanatics, the slow decay of perishable stone,

or the lust of palace builders in the middle ages—have spared those

three houses of the gods, over whom, in the days of Alexander, the

funeral hymn was chanted by the enslaved Hellenes.

'We do the same,' said Aristoxenus in his Convivial Miscellanies, 'as

the men of Poseidonia, who dwell on the Tyrrhenian Gulf. It befell

them, having been at first true Hellenes, to be utterly barbarised,

changing to Tyrrhenes or Romans, and altering their language, together

with their 263 other customs. Yet they still observe one Hellenic

festival, when they meet together and call to remembrance their old

names and bygone institutions; and having lamented one to the other,

and shed bitter tears, they afterwards depart to their own homes. Even

thus a few of us also, now that our theatres have been barbarised, and

this art of music has gone to ruin and vulgarity, meet together and

remember what once music was.'[100]

[100] _Athenæus_, xiv. 632.

This passage has a strange pathos, considering how it was penned, and

how it has come down to us, tossed by the dark indifferent stream of

time. The Aristoxenus who wrote it was a pupil of the Peripatetic

School, born at Tarentum, and therefore familiar with the vicissitudes

of Magna Græcia. The study of music was his chief preoccupation; and he

used this episode in the agony of an enslaved Greek city, to point his

own conservative disgust for innovations in an art of which we have no

knowledge left. The works of Aristoxenus have perished, and the

fragment I have quoted is embedded in the gossip of Egyptian Athenæus.

In this careless fashion has been opened for us, as it were, a little

window on a grief now buried in the oblivion of a hundred generations.

After reading his words one May morning, beneath the pediment of

Pæstum's noblest ruin, I could not refrain from thinking that if the

spirits of those captive Hellenes were to revisit their old

habitations, they would change their note of wailing into a thin

ghostly pæan, when they found that Romans and Lucanians had passed

away, that Christians and Saracens had left alike no trace behind,

while the houses of their own αντήλιοι θεοι—dawn-facing deities—were

still abiding in the pride of immemorial strength. Who knows whether

buffalo-driver or bandit may not ere now have seen processions of these

Poseidonian phantoms, bearing laurels and chaunting hymns on 264 the

spot where once they fell each on the other's neck to weep? Gathering

his cloak around him and cowering closer to his fire of sticks, the

night-watcher in those empty colonnades may have mistaken the Hellenic

outlines of his shadowy visitants for fevered dreams, and the melody of

their evanished music for the whistling of night winds or the cry of

owls. So abandoned is Pæstum in its solitude that we know not even what

legends may have sprung up round those relics of a mightier age.

The shrine is ruined now; and far away

To east and west stretch olive groves, whose shade

Even at the height of summer noon is grey.

Asphodels sprout upon the plinth decayed

Of these low columns, and the snake hath found

Her haunt 'neath altar-steps with weeds o'erlaid.

Yet this was once a hero's temple, crowned

With myrtle-boughs by lovers, and with palm

By wrestlers, resonant with sweetest sound

Of flute and fife in summer evening's calm,

And odorous with incense all the year,

With nard and spice, and galbanum and balm.

These lines sufficiently express the sense of desolation felt at

Pæstum, except that the scenery is more solemn and mournful, and the

temples are too august to be the shrine of any simple hero. There are

no olives. The sea plunges on its sandy shore within the space of half

a mile to westward. Far and wide on either hand stretch dreary

fever-stricken marshes. The plain is bounded to the north, and east,

and south, with mountains, purple, snow-peaked, serrated, and grandly

broken like the hills of Greece. Driving over this vast level where the

Silarus stagnates, the monotony of the landscape is broken now and then

by a group of buffaloes 265 standing up to their dewlaps in reeds, by

peasants on horseback, with goads in their hands, and muskets slung

athwart their backs, or by patrols of Italian soldiers crossing and

re-crossing on the brigand-haunted roads. Certain portions have been

reclaimed from the swamp, and here may be seen white oxen in herds of

fifty grazing; or gangs of women at field-labour, with a man to oversee

them, cracking a long hunting-whip; or the mares and foals of a famous

stud-farm browsing under spreading pines. There are no villages, and

the few farmhouses are so widely scattered as to make us wonder where

the herdsmen and field-workers, scanty as they are, can possibly be

lodged.

At last the three great temples come in sight. The rich orange of the

central building contrasts with the paler yellow of its two companions,

while the glowing colour of all three is splendidly relieved against

green vegetation and blue mountain-flanks. Their material is

travertine—a calcareous stone formed by the deposit of petrifying

waters, which contains fragments of reeds, spiral shells, and other

substances, embedded in the porous limestone. In the flourishing period

of old Poseidonia these travertine columns were coated with stucco,

worked to a smooth surface, and brilliantly tinted to harmonise with

the gay costumes of a Greek festival. Even now this coating of fine

sand, mingled with slaked lime and water, can be seen in patches on the

huge blocks of the masonry. Thus treated, the travertine lacked little

of the radiance of marble, for it must be remembered that the Greeks

painted even the Pentelic cornice of the Parthenon with red and blue.

Nor can we doubt that the general effect of brightness suited the glad

and genial conditions of Greek life.

All the surroundings are altered now, and the lover of the picturesque

may be truly thankful that the hand of time, by 266 stripping the

buildings of this stucco, without impairing their proportions, has

substituted a new harmony of tone between the native stone and the

surrounding landscape, no less sympathetic to the present solitude than

the old symphony of colours was to the animated circumstances of a

populous Greek city. In this way those critics who defend the

polychrome decorations of the classic architects, and those who contend

that they cannot imagine any alteration from the present toning of

Greek temples for the better, are both right.

In point of colour the Pæstum ruins are very similar to those of

Girgenti; but owing to their position on a level plain, in front of a

scarcely indented sea-shore, we lack the irregularity which adds so

much charm to the row of temples on their broken cliff in the old town

of Agrigentum. In like manner the celebrated _asymmetreia_ of the

buildings of the Athenian Acropolis, which causes so much variety of

light and shade upon the temple-fronts, and offers so many novel points

of view when they are seen in combination, seems to have been due

originally to the exigencies of the ground. At Pæstum, in planning out

the city, there can have been no utilitarian reasons for placing the

temples at odd angles, either to each other or the shore. Therefore we

see them now almost exactly in line and parallel, though at unequal

distances. If something of picturesque effect is thus lost at Pæstum

through the flatness of the ground, something of impressive grandeur on

the other hand is gained by the very regularity with which those

phalanxes of massive Doric columns are drawn up to face the sea.

Poseidonia, as the name betokens, was dedicated to the god of the sea;

and the coins of the city are stamped with his effigy bearing a

trident, and with his sacred animal, the bull. It has therefore been

conjectured that the central of the three temples—which was hypæthral

and had two entrances, 267 east and west—belonged to Poseidon; and

there is something fine in the notion of the god being thus able to

pass to and fro from his cella through those sunny peristyles, down to

his chariot, yoked with sea-horses, in the brine. Yet hypæthral temples

were generally consecrated to Zeus, and it is therefore probable that

the traditional name of this vast edifice is wrong. The names of the

two other temples, _Tempio di Cerere_ and _Basilica_, are wholly

unsupported by any proof or probability. The second is almost certainly

founded on a mistake; and if we assign the largest of the three shrines

to Zeus, one or other of the lesser belonged most likely to Poseidon.

The style of the temples is severe and primitive. In general effect

their Doric architecture is far sterner than that adapted by Ictinus to

the Parthenon. The entablature seems somewhat disproportioned to the

columns and the pediment; and, owing to this cause, there is a general

effect of heaviness. The columns, again, are thick-set; nor is the

effect of solidity removed by their gradual narrowing from the base

upwards. The pillars of the _Neptune_ are narrowed in a straight line;

those of the _Basilica_ and _Ceres_ by a gentle curve. Study of these

buildings, so sublime in their massiveness, so noble in the parsimony

of their decoration, so dignified in their employment of the simplest

means for the attainment of an indestructible effect of harmony,

heightens our admiration for the Attic genius which found in this grand

manner of the elder Doric architects resources as yet undeveloped;

creating, by slight and subtle alterations of outline, proportion, and

rhythm of parts, what may fairly be classed as a style unique, because

exemplified in only one transcendent building.

It is difficult not to return again and again to the beauty of

colouring at Pæstum. Lying basking in the sun upon a flat slab of

stone, and gazing eastward, we overlook a foreground of dappled light

and shadow, across which the lizards run— 268 quick streaks of living

emerald—making the bunches of yellow rue and little white serpyllum in

the fissures of the masonry nod as they hurry past. Then come two

stationary columns, built, it seems, of solid gold, where the sunbeams

strike along their russet surface. Between them lies the landscape, a

medley first of brakefern and asphodel and feathering acanthus and blue

spikes of bugloss; then a white farm in the middle distance, roofed

with the reddest tiles and sheltered by a velvety umbrella pine. Beyond

and above the farm, a glimpse of mountains purple almost to indigo with

cloud shadows, and flecked with snow. Still higher—but for this we have

to raise our head a little—the free heavens enclosed within the

frame-work of the tawny travertine, across which sail hawks and flutter

jackdaws, sharply cut against the solid sky. Down from the architrave,

to make the vignette perfect, hang tufts of crimson snapdragons. Each

opening in the peristyle gives a fresh picture.

The temples are overgrown with snapdragons and mallows, yellow asters

and lilac gillyflowers, white allium and wild fig. When a breeze

passes, the whole of this many-coloured tapestry waves gently to and

fro. The fields around are flowery enough; but where are the roses? I

suppose no one who has read his Virgil at school, crosses the plain

from Salerno to Pæstum without those words of the 'Georgics' ringing in

his ears: _biferique rosaria Pæsti_. They have that wonderful Virgilian

charm which, by a touch, transforms mere daily sights and sounds, and

adds poetic mystery to common things. The poets of ancient Rome seem to

have felt the magic of this phrase; for Ovid has imitated the line in

his 'Metamorphoses,' tamely substituting _tepidi_ for the suggestive

_biferi_, while again in his 'Elegies' he uses the same termination

with _odorati_ for his epithet. Martial sings of _Pæstanæ rosæ_ and

_Pæstani gloria ruris_. Even Ausonius, 269 at the very end of Latin

literature, draws from the rosaries of Pæstum a pretty picture of

beauty doomed to premature decline:—

Vidi Pæstano gaudere rosaria cultu

Exoriente novo roscida Lucifero.

'I have watched the rose-beds that luxuriate on Pæstum's well-tilled

soil, all dewy in the young light of the rising dawn-star.'

What a place indeed was this for a rose-garden, spreading far and wide

along the fertile plain, with its deep loam reclaimed from swamps and

irrigated by the passing of perpetual streams! But where are the roses

now? As well ask, _où sont les neiges d'antan?_

We left Amalfi for Capri in the freshness of an early morning at the

end of May. As we stepped into our six-oared boat the sun rose above

the horizon, flooding the sea with gold and flashing on the terraces

above Amalfi. High up along the mountains hung pearly and empurpled

mists, set like resting-places between a world too beautiful and heaven

too far for mortal feet. Not a breath of any wind was stirring. The

water heaved with a scarcely perceptible swell, and the vapours lifted

gradually as the sun's rays grew in power. Here the hills descend

abruptly on the sea, ending in cliffs where light reflected from the

water dances. Huge caverns open in the limestone; on their edges hang

stalactites like beards, and the sea within sleeps dark as night. For

some of these caves the maidenhair fern makes a shadowy curtain; and

all of them might be the home of Proteus, or of Calypso, by whose side

her mortal lover passed his nights in vain home-sickness:—

εν σπέσσι γλαφυροισι παρ' ουκ εθέλων εθελούση.