shame, but since the great modern changes it is meant to be only the
seat of honour, and upon the slope of the Capitol the Italians, in the
first flush of victorious unity, have begun to raise a great monument to
their greatest idol, King Victor Emmanuel. If it is not the best work of
art of the sort in existence it will probably enjoy the distinction of
being the largest, and it is by no means the worst, for the central
statue of the 'Honest King' has been modelled with marvellous skill and
strength by Chiaradia, whose name is worthy to be remembered; yet the
vastness of the architectural theatre provided for its display betrays
again the giantism of the Latin race, and when in a future century the
broad flood of patriotism shall have subsided within the straight river
bed of sober history, men will wonder why Victor Emmanuel, honest and
brave though he was, received the greater share of praise, and Cavour
and Garibaldi the less, seeing that he got Italy by following the advice
of the one, if not by obeying his dictation, and by accepting the
kingdom which the other had destined for a republic, but was forced to
yield to the monarchy by the superior genius of the statesman.
That day is not far distant. After a period of great and disastrous
activity, the sleepy indifference of 1830 is again settling upon Rome,
the race for imaginary wealth is over, time is a drug in the market,
money is scarce, dwellings are plentiful, the streets are quiet by day
and night, and only those who still have something to lose or who
cherish very modest hopes of gain, still take an interest in financial
affairs. One may dream again, as one dreamed thirty years ago, when all
the clocks were set once a fortnight to follow the sun.
Rome is restoring to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. They are much
bigger and finer things than the symmetrical, stuccoed cubes which have
lately been piled up everywhere in heaven-offending masses, and one is
glad to come back to them after the nightmare that has lasted twenty
years. Moreover, one is surprised to find how little permanent effect
has been produced by the squandering of countless millions during the
building mania, beyond a cruel destruction of trees, and a few
modifications of natural local accidents. To do the moderns justice,
they have done no one act of vandalism as bad as fifty, at least,
committed by the barons of the Middle Age and the Popes of the
Renascence, though they have shown much worse taste in such new things
as they have set up in place of the old.
The charm of Rome has never lain in its architecture, nor in the beauty
of its streets, though the loveliness of its old-fashioned gardens
contributed much which is now in great part lost. Nor can it be said
that the enthralling magic of the city we used to know lay especially in
its historical association, since Rome has been loved to folly by
half-educated girls, by flippant women of the world and by ignorant
idlers without number, as well as by most men of genius who have ever
spent much time there.
[Illustration: COLUMN OF PHOCAS, LOOKING ALONG THE FORUM]
In the Middle Age one man might know all that was to be known. Dante
did; so did Lionardo da Vinci. But times have changed since a mediaeval
scholar wrote a book 'Concerning all things and certain others also.' We
cannot all be archaeologists. Perhaps when we go and stand in the Forum
we have a few general ideas about the relative position of the old
buildings; we know the Portico of the Twelve Gods in Council, the Temple
of Concord, the Basilica Julia, the Court of Vesta, the Temple of Castor
and Pollux; we have a more vague notion of the Senate Hall; the hideous
arch of Septimius Severus stares us in the face; so does the lovely
column of evil Phocas, the monster of the east, the red-handed
centurion-usurper who murdered an Emperor and his five sons to reach the
throne. And perhaps we have been told where the Rostra stood, and the
Rostra Julia, and that the queer fragment of masonry by the arch is
supposed to be the 'Umbilicus,' the centre of the Roman world. There is
no excuse for not knowing these things any more than there is any very
strong reason for knowing them, unless one be a student. There is a plan
of the Forum in every guide book, with a description that changes with
each new edition.
And yet, without much definite knowledge,--with 'little Latin and less
Greek,' perhaps,--many men and women, forgetting for one moment the
guide book in their hands, have leaned upon a block of marble with
half-closed, musing eyes, and breath drawn so slow that it is almost
quite held in day-dream wonder, and they have seen a vision rise of past
things and beings, even in the broad afternoon sunshine, out of stones
that remember Caesar's footsteps, and from walls that have echoed
Antony's speech. There they troop up the Sacred Way, the shock-headed,
wool-draped, beak-nosed Romans; there they stand together in groups at
the corner of Saturn's temple; there the half-naked plebeian children
clamber upon the pedestals of the columns to see the sights, and double
the men's deep tones with a treble of childish chatter; there the noble
boy with his bordered toga, his keen young face, and longing backward
look, is hurried home out of the throng by the tall household slave, who
carries his school tablets and is answerable with his skin for the boy's
safety. The Consul Major goes by, twelve lictors marching in single file
before him--black-browed, square-jawed, relentless men, with their rods
and axes. Then two closed litters are carried past by big, black, oily
fellows, beside whom walk freedmen and Greek slaves, and three or four
curled and scented parasites, the shadows of the great men. Under their
very feet the little street boys play their games of pitching at tiny
pyramids of dried lupins, unless they have filberts, and lupins are
almost as good; and as the dandified hanger-on of Maecenas, straining his
ear for the sound of his patron's voice from within the litter,
heedlessly crushes the little yellow beans under his sandal, the
particular small boy whose stake is smashed clenches his fist, and with
flashing eyes curses the dandy's dead to the fourth generation of
ascendants, and he and his companions turn and scatter like mice as one
of the biggest slaves threateningly raises his hand.
[Illustration: GENERAL VIEW OF THE FORUM]
Absurd details rise in the dream. An old crone is selling roasted
chestnuts in the shadow of the temple of Castor and Pollux; a tipsy
soldier is reeling to his quarters with his helmet stuck on wrong side
foremost; a knot of Hebrew money-changers, with long curls and high
caps, are talking eagerly in their own language, clutching the little
bags they hide in the sleeves of their yellow Eastern gowns--the men who
mourned for Caesar and for Augustus, whose descendants were to burn
Rienzi's body among the thistles by Augustus's tomb, whose offspring
were to breed the Pierleoni; a bright-eyed, skinny woman of the people
boxes her daughter's ears for having smiled at one of the rich men's
parasites, and the girl, already crying, still looks after the
fashionable good-for-nothing, under her mother's upraised arm.
All about stretches the vast humming city of low-built houses covering
the short steep hills and filling all the hollow between. Northeastward
lies the seething Suburra; the yellow river runs beyond the Velabrum and
the cattle market to the west; southward rise the enchanted palaces of
Caesar; due east is the Esquiline of evil fame, redeemed and made lovely
with trees and fountains by Maecenas, but haunted even today, say modern
Romans, by the spectres of murderers and thieves who there died bloody
deaths of quivering torture. All around, as the sun sinks and the cool
shadows quench the hot light on the white pavements, the ever-increasing
crowds of men--always more men than women--move inward, half
unconsciously, out of inborn instinct, to the Forum, the centre of the
Empire, the middle of the world, the boiling-point of the whole earth's
riches and strength and life.
Then as the traveller muses out his short space of rest, the vision
grows confused, and Rome's huge ghosts go stalking, galloping, clanging,
raving through the surging dream-throng,--Caesar, Brutus, Pompey,
Catiline, Cicero, Caligula, Vitellius, Hadrian,--and close upon them
Gauls and Goths and Huns, and all barbarians, till the dream is a medley
of school-learned names, that have suddenly taken shadows of great faces
out of Rome's shadow storehouse, and gorgeous arms and streaming
draperies, and all at once the sight-seer shivers as the sun goes down,
and passes his hand over his eyes, and shakes himself, and goes away
rather hastily, lest he should fall sick of a fever and himself be
gathered to the ghosts he has seen.
It matters very little whether the day-dream much resembles the reality
of ages long ago, whether boys played with lupins or with hazel-nuts
then, or old women roasted chestnuts in the streets, or whether such
unloving spirits should be supposed to visit one man in one vision. The
traveller has had an impression which has not been far removed from
emotion, and his day has not been lost, if it be true that emotion is
the soul's only measure of time. There, if anywhere, lies Rome's secret.
The place, the people, the air, the crystal brightness of winter, the
passion-stirring scirocco of autumn, the loveliness of the long spring,
the deep, still heat of summer, the city, the humanity, the memories of
both, are all distillers of emotion in one way or another.
Above all, the night is beautiful in Rome, when the moon is high and all
is quiet. Go down past the silver Forum to the Colosseum and see what it
is then, and perhaps you will know what it was in the old days. Such
white stillness as this fell then also, by night, on all the broad space
around the amphitheatre of all amphitheatres, the wonder of the world,
the chief monument of Titus, when his hand had left of Jerusalem not one
stone upon another. The same moonbeams fell slanting across the same
huge walls, and whitened the sand of the same broad arena when the great
awning was drawn back at night to air the place of so much death. In the
shadow, the steps are still those up which Dion the Senator went to see
mad Commodus play the gladiator and the public fool. On one of those
lower seats he sat, the grave historian, chewing laurel leaves to steady
his lips and keep down his laughter, lest a smile should cost his head;
and he showed the other Senators that it was a good thing for their
safety, and there they sat, in their rows, throughout the long
afternoon, solemnly chewing laurel leaves for their lives, while the
strong madman raved on the sand below, and slew, and bathed himself in
the blood of man and beast. There is a touch of frightful humour in the
tale.
And one stands there alone in the stillness and remembers how, on that
same night, when all was over, when the corpses had been dragged away,
it may have been almost as it is now. Only, perhaps, far off among the
arches and on the tiers of seats, there might be still a tiny light
moving here and there; the keepers of that terrible place would go their
rounds with their little earthen lamps; they would search everywhere in
the spectators' places for small things that might have been lost in the
press--a shoulder-buckle of gold or silver or bronze, an armlet, a
woman's earring, a purse, perhaps, with something in it. And the fitful
night-breeze blew now and then and made them shade their lights with
their dark hands. By the 'door of the dead' a torch was burning down in
its socket, its glare falling upon a heap of armour, mostly somewhat
battered, and all of it blood-stained; a score of black-browed smiths
were picking it over and distributing it in heaps, according to its
condition. Now and then, from the deep vaults below the arena, came the
distant sound of a clanging gate or of some piece of huge stage
machinery falling into its place, and a muffled calling of men. One of
the keepers, with his light, was singing softly some ancient minor
strain as he searched the tiers. That would be all, and presently even
that would cease.
One thinks of such things naturally enough; and then the dream runs
backward, against the sun, as dreams will, and the moon rays weave a
vision of dim day. Straightway tier upon tier, eighty thousand faces
rise, up to the last high rank beneath the awning's shade. High in the
front, under the silken canopy sits the Emperor of the world,
sodden-faced, ghastly, swine-eyed, robed in purple; all alone, save for
his dwarf, bull-nosed, slit-mouthed, hunch-backed, sly. Next, on the
lowest bench, the Vestals, old and young, the elder looking on with hard
faces and dry eyes, the youngest with wide and startled looks, and
parted lips, and quick-drawn breath that sobs and is caught at sight of
each deadly stab and gash of broadsword and trident, and hands that
twitch and clutch each other as a man's foot slips in a pool of blood,
and the heavy harness clashes in the red, wet sand. Then grey-haired
senators; then curled and perfumed knights of Rome; and then the people,
countless, vast, frenzied, blood-thirsty, stretching out a hundred
thousand hands with thumbs reversed, commanding death to the
fallen--full eighty thousand throats of men and women roaring, yelling,
shrieking over each ended life. A theatre indeed, a stage indeed, a play
wherein every scene of every act ends in sudden death.
And then the wildest, deadliest howl of all on that day; a handful of
men and women in white, and one girl in the midst of them; the clang of
an iron gate thrown suddenly open; a rushing and leaping of great, lithe
bodies of beasts, yellow and black and striped, the sand flying in
clouds behind them; a worrying and crushing of flesh and bone, as of
huge cats worrying little white mice; sharp cries, then blood, then
silence, then a great laughter, and the sodden face of mankind's drunken
master grows almost human for a moment with a very slow smile. The wild
beasts are driven out with brands and red-hot irons, step by step,
dragging backward nameless mangled things in their jaws, and the
bull-nosed dwarf offers the Emperor a cup of rare red wine. It drips
from his mouth while he drinks, as the blood from the tiger's fangs.
"What were they?" he asks.
"Christians," explains the dwarf.
[Illustration]
REGION XI SANT' ANGELO
The Region of Sant' Angelo, as has been already said, takes its name
from the small church famous in Rienzi's story. It encloses all of what
was once the Ghetto, and includes the often-mentioned Theatre of
Marcellus, now the palace of the Orsini, but successively a fortress of
the Pierleoni, appropriately situated close to the Jews' quarter, and
the home of the Savelli. The history of the Region is the history of the
Jews in Rome, from Augustus to the destruction of their dwelling-place,
about 1890. In other words, the Hebrew colony actually lived during
nineteen hundred years at that point of the Tiber, first on one side of
the river, and afterwards on the other.
It is said that the first Jews were brought to Rome by Pompey, as
prisoners of war, and soon afterwards set free, possibly on their paying
a ransom accumulated by half starving themselves, and selling the
greater part of their allowance of corn during a long period. Seventeen
years later, they were a power in Rome; they had lent Julius Caesar
enormous sums, which he repaid with exorbitant interest, and after his
death they mourned him, and kept his funeral pyre burning seven days and
nights in the Forum. A few years after that time, Augustus established
them on the opposite side of the Tiber, over against the bridge of
Cestius and the island. Under Tiberius their numbers had increased to
fifty thousand; they had synagogues in Rome, Genoa and Naples, and it is
noticeable that their places of worship were always built upon the shore
of the sea, or the bank of a river, whence their religious services came
to be termed 'orationes littorales'--which one might roughly translate
as 'alongshore prayers.'
They were alternately despised, hated, feared and flattered. Tacitus
calls them a race of men hated by the gods, yet their kings, Herod and
Agrippa--one asks how the latter came by an ancient Roman name--were
treated with honour and esteem. The latter was in fact brought up with
Drusus, the son of the Emperor Tiberius, his son was on terms of the
greatest intimacy with Claudius, and his daughter or grand-daughter
Berenice was long and truly loved by Titus, who would have made her
Empress had it been possible, to the great scandal of the Emperor's many
detractors, as Suetonius has told. Sabina Poppaea, Nero's lowly and evil
second wife, loved madly one Aliturius, a Jewish comic actor and a
favourite of Nero; and when the younger Agrippa induced Nero to imprison
Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and Josephus came to Pozzuoli, having
suffered shipwreck like the latter, this same Josephus, the historian of
the Jews, got the actor's friendship and by his means moved Poppaea, and
through her, Nero, to a first liberation of those whom he describes as
'certain priests of my acquaintance, very excellent persons, whom on a
small and trifling charge Felix the procurator of Judaea had put in irons
and sent to Rome to plead their cause before Caesar.' It should not be
forgotten that Josephus was himself a pupil of Banus, who, though not a
Christian, is believed to have been a follower of John the Baptist. And
here Saint John Chrysostom, writing about the year 400, takes up the
story and tells how Saint Paul attempted to convert Poppaea and to
persuade her to leave Nero, since she had two other husbands living; and
how Nero turned upon him and accused him of many sins, and imprisoned
him, and when he saw that even in prison the Apostle still worked upon
Poppaea's conscience, he at last condemned him to die. Other historians
have said that Poppaea turned Jewess for the sake of her Jewish actor,
and desired to be buried by the Jewish rite when she was dying of the
savage kick that killed her and her child--the only act of violence Nero
seems to have ever regretted. However that may be, it is sure that she
loved the comedian, and that for a time he had unbounded influence in
Rome. And so great did their power grow that Claudius Rutilius, a Roman
magistrate and poet, a contemporary of Chrysostom, and not a Christian,
expressed the wish that Judaea might never have been conquered by Pompey
and subdued again by Titus, 'since the contagion of the cancer, cut out,
spreads wider, and the conquered nation grinds its conquerors.'
And so, with varying fortune, they survived the empire which they had
seen founded, and the changes of a thousand years, they themselves
inwardly unchanged and unchanging, while following many arts and many
trades besides money-lending, and they outlived persecution and did not
decay in prosperity. In their seven Roman synagogues they set up models
of the temple Titus had destroyed, and of the seven-branched candlestick
and of the holy vessels of Jerusalem which were preserved in the temple
of Peace as trophies of the Jews' subjection; they made candlesticks and
vessels of like shape for their synagogues, nursing their hatred,
praying for deliverance, and because those sacred things were kept in
Rome, it became a holy city for them, and they throve; and by and by
they oppressed their victors. Then came Domitian the Jew-hater, and
turned them out of their houses and laid heavy taxes upon them, and
forced them for a time to live in the caves and wild places and
catacombs of the Aventine, and they became dealers in spells
and amulets and love philtres, which they sold dear to the
ever-superstitious Romans, and Juvenal wrote scornful satires on them.
Presently they returned, under Trajan, to their old dwellings by the
Tiber. Thence they crept along the Cestian bridge to the island, and
from the island by the Fabrician bridge to the other shore, growing rich
again by degrees, and crowding their little houses upon the glorious
portico of Octavia, where Vespasian and Titus had met the Senate at dawn
on the day when they triumphed over the Jews and the fall of Jerusalem,
and the very place of the Jews' greatest humiliation became their
stronghold for ages.
Then all at once, in the twelfth century, they are the masters. The
Pierleoni hold Sant' Angelo, and close to their old quarters fortify the
Theatre of Marcellus, and a Pierleone is antipope in name, but a real
and ruling Pope in political fact, while Innocent the Second wanders
helplessly from town to town, and later, while Lewis the Seventh of
France leads the Second Crusade to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, the
'Vicar of Christ' is an outcast before the race of those by whom Christ
was crucified. That was the highest point of the Jews' greatness in
Rome.
[Illustration: PIAZZA MONTANARA AND THE THEATRE OF MARCELLUS
From a print of the last century]
But it is noticeable that while the Hebrew race possesses in the very
highest degree the financial energy to handle and accumulate money, and
the tenacity to keep it for a long time, it has never shown that sort of
strength which can hold land or political power in adverse
circumstances. In the twelfth century the Pierleoni were the masters of
Rome; in the thirteenth, they had disappeared from history, though they
still held the Theatre of Marcellus; in the fourteenth they seem to have
perished altogether and are never heard of again. And it should not be
argued that this was due to any overwhelming persecution and destruction
of the Jews, since the Pierleoni's first step was an outward, if not a
sincere, conversion to Christianity. In strong contrast with these facts
stands the history of the Colonna. The researches of the learned Coppi
make it almost certain that the Colonna descend from Theodora, the
Senatress of Rome, who flourished in the year 914; Pietro della Colonna
held Palestrina, and is known to have imprisoned there, 'in an empty
cistern,' the governor of Campagna, in the year 1100; like the Orsini,
the Colonna boast that during more than five hundred years no treaty was
drawn up with the princes of Europe in which their two families were not
specifically designated; and at the time of the present writing, in the
last days of the nineteenth century, Colonna is still not only one of
the greatest names in Europe, but the family is numerous and
flourishing, unscathed by the terrible financial disasters which began
to ruin Italy in 1888, not notably wealthy, but still in possession of
its ancestral palace in Rome, and of immense tracts of land in the
hills, in the Campagna, and in the south of Italy--actively engaged,
moreover, in the representative government of Italy, strong, solid and
full of life, as though but lately risen to eminence from a sturdy
country stock--and all this after a career that has certainly lasted
eight hundred years, and very probably nearer a thousand. Nor can any
one pretend that it owes much to the power or protection of any
sovereign, since the Colonna have been in almost constant opposition to
the Popes in history, have been exiled and driven from Italy more than
once, and have again and again suffered confiscation of all they
possessed in the world. There have certainly not been in the same time
so many confiscations proclaimed against the Jews.