RAVENNA
A STUDY
BY
EDWARD HUTTON
ILLUSTRATED IN COLOUR AND LINE
BY
HARALD SUND
1913
TO MY FRIEND
ARTHUR SYMONS
IN AFFECTIONATE HOMAGE
PREFACE
My intention in writing this book has been to demonstrate the unique
importance of Ravenna in the history of Italy and of Europe, especially
during the Dark Age from the time of Alaric's first descent into the
Cisalpine plain to the coming of Charlemagne. That importance, as it seems
to me, has been wholly or almost wholly misunderstood, and certainly, as I
understand it, has never been explained. In this book, which is offered to
the public not without a keen sense of its inadequacy, I have tried to show
in as clear a manner as was at my command, what Ravenna really was in the
political geography of the empire, and to explain the part that position
allowed her to play in the great tragedy of the decline and fall of the
Roman administration. If I have succeeded in this I am amply repaid for all
the labour the book has cost me.
The principal sources, both ancient and modern, which I have consulted in
the preparation of this volume have been cited, but I must here acknowledge
the special debt I owe to the late Dr. Hodgkin, to Professor Diehl, to
Dr. Corrado Ricci, and to the many contributors to the various Italian
Bollettini which I have ransacked.
E.H.
_March_ 1913.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL POSITION OF RAVENNA
II. JULIUS CAESAR IN RAVENNA
III. RAVENNA IN THE TIME OF THE EMPIRE
IV. THE RETREAT UPON RAVENNA Honorius and Galla Placidia
V. THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE IN THE WEST
VI. THEODORIC
VII. THE RECONQUEST Vitiges, Belisarius, Totila, Narses
VIII. MODICA QUIES The Pragmatic Sanction and the Settlement of Italy
IX. THE CITADEL OF THE EMPIRE IN ITALY The Lombard Invasion
X. THE PAPAL STATE Pepin and Charlemagne
XI. THE CATHOLIC CHURCHES OF THE FIFTH CENTURY The Cathedral, Baptistery,
Arcivescovado, S. Agata, S. Pietro Maggiore, S. Giovanni Evangelista, S.
Giovanni Battista, and the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia
XII. THE ARIAN CHURCHES OF THE SIXTH CENTURY The Palace of Theodoric,
S. Apollinare Nuovo, S. Spirito, S. Maria in Cosmedin, the Mausoleum of
Theodoric
XII. THE BYZANTINE CHURCHES S. Vitale and S. Apollinare in Classe
XIV. RAVENNA IN THE MIDDLE AGE
XV. DANTE IN RAVENNA
XVI. MEDIAEVAL RAVENNA The Churches
XVII. RAVENNA IN THE RENAISSANCE The Battle of 1512
XVIII. RENAISSANCE RAVENNA Churches and Palaces
XIX. THE GALLERY AND THE MUSEUM
XX. THE PINETA
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
COLOURED PLATES
S. APOLLINARE NUOVO
S. AGATA
THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC
S. VITALE: THE GALLERY
S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA
S. VITALE: THE PRESBYTERY
S. GIOVANNI BATTISTA
S. MARIA IN PORTO
PORTA SERRATA
LINE DRAWINGS
SKETCH MAP
SKETCH MAP
SKETCH MAP
GREEK RELIEF FROM A TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE
SARCOPHAGUS OF THE EMPEROR HONORIUS
THE APSE OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA
CAPITAL FROM THE COLONNADE IN PIAZZA MAGGIORE
S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE
CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE
CAPITAL FROM SANTO SPIRITO
SKETCH MAP
SKETCH MAP OF CITIES IN IMPERIAL HANDS
SKETCH MAP SHOWING NARSES' MARCH TO MEET TOTILA
SKETCH MAP
THE SARCOPHAGUS OF THE EXARCH ISAAC
GUARDHOUSE OF THE PALACE OF THEODORIC
THE CATHEDRAL (_Basilica Ursiana_)
THE BAPTISTERY AND CAMPANILE OF THE CATHEDRAL
THE CAMPANILE OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
S. VITALE
CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE
INTERIOR OF S. APOLLINARE IN CLASSE
CAPITAL FROM S. VITALE
THE CAMPANILE OF S. APOLLINARE
CASA POLENTANA
DANTE'S TOMB
CAMPANILE OF S. FRANCESCO
INTERIOR OF S. MARIA IN PORTO FUORI
TORRE DEL COMUNE
PORTAL OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
ROCCA VENIZIANA
MONUMENT OF GASTON DE FOIX
THE CLOISTER OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA
THE PINETA
THE PINETA
TO PORTO CORSINI
PLAN OF RAVENNA _see front end paper_
[Illustration: Colour Plate S. APOLLINARE NUOVO]
RAVENNA
A STUDY
I
THE GEOGRAPHICAL AND POLITICAL POSITION OF RAVENNA
Upon the loneliest and most desolate shore of Italy, where the vast
monotony of the Emilian plain fades away at last, almost
imperceptibly, into the Adrian Sea, there stands, half abandoned in
that soundless place, and often wrapt in a white shroud of mist, a
city like a marvellous reliquary, richly wrought, as is meet,
beautiful with many fading colours, and encrusted with precious
stones: its name is Ravenna.
It stands there laden with the mysterious centuries as with half
barbaric jewels, weighed down with the ornaments of Byzantium, rigid,
hieratic, constrained; and however you come to it, whether from Rimini
by the lost and forgotten towns of Classis and Caesarea, or from
Ferrara through all the bitter desolation of Comacchio, or across the
endless marsh from Bologna or Faenza, its wide and empty horizons, its
astonishing silence, and the difficulty of every approach will seem to
you but a fitting environment for a place so solitary and so
imperious.
For this city of mute and closed churches, where imperishable mosaics
glisten in the awful damp, and beautiful pillars of most precious
marbles gleam through a humid mist, of mausoleums empty but
indestructible, of tottering _campanili_, of sumptuous splendour and
incredible decay, is the sepulchre of the great civilisation which
Christianity failed to save alive, but to which we owe everything and
out of which we are come; the only monument that remains to us of
those confused and half barbaric centuries which lie between Antiquity
and the Middle Age.
Mysteriously secured by nature and doubly so after the failure of the
Roman administration, Ravenna was the death-bed of the empire and its
tomb. To her the emperor Honorius fled from Milan in the first years
of the fifth century; within her walls Odoacer dethroned the last
emperor of the West, founded a kingdom, and was in his turn supplanted
by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. It was from her almost impregnable
isolation that the attempt was made by Byzantium--it seemed and
perhaps it was our only hope--to reconquer Italy and the West for
civilisation; while her fall before the appalling Lombard onset in the
eighth century brought Pepin into Italy in 754, to lay the foundation
of a new Christendom, to establish the temporal power of the papacy,
and to prophesy of the resurrection of the empire, of the unity of
Europe.
But though it is as the imperishable monument of those tragic
centuries that we rightly look upon Ravenna: before the empire was
founded she was already famous. It was from her silence that Caesar
emerged to cross the Rubicon and all unknowing to found what, when all
is said, was the most beneficent, as it was the most universal,
government that Europe has ever known. In the first years of that
government Ravenna became, and through the four hundred years of its
unhampered life she remained, one of its greatest bulwarks. While upon
its failure, as I have said, she suddenly assumed a position which for
some three hundred and fifty years was unique not only in Italy but in
Europe. And when with the re-establishment of an universal government
her importance declined and at length passed away, she yet lived on in
the minds and the memory of men as something fabulous and still,
curiously enough, as a refuge, the refuge of the great poet of the new
age; so that to-day, beside the empty tombs of Galla Placidia and
Theodoric, there stands the great sarcophagus which holds the dust of
Dante Alighieri.
We may well ask how it was that a city so solitary, so inaccessible,
and so remote should have played so great a part in the history of
Europe. It is to answer this question that I have set myself to write
this book, which is rather an essay _in memoriam_ of her greatness,
her beauty, and her forlorn hope, than a history properly so called of
Ravenna. But if we are to come to any real understanding of what she
stood for, of what she meant to us once upon a time, we must first of
all decide for ourselves what was the fundamental reason of her great
renown. I shall maintain in this book that the cause of her greatness,
of her opportunity for greatness, was always the same, namely, her
geographical position in relation to the peninsula of Italy, the
Cisalpine plain, and the sea. Let us then consider these things.
Italy, the country we know as Italy, properly understood, is
fundamentally divided into two absolutely different parts by a great
range of mountains, the Apennines, which stretches roughly from sea to
sea, from Genoa almost but not quite to Rimini.
The country which lies to the south of that line of mountains is Italy
proper, and it consists as we know of a long narrow mountainous
peninsula, while its history throughout antiquity may be said to be
altogether Roman.
What lies to the north of the Apennines is not Italy at all, but
Cisalpine Gaul.
In its nature this country is altogether continental. It consists for
the most part of a vast plain divided from west to east by a great
river, the Po, and everywhere it is watered and nourished by its two
hundred tributaries.
Shut off as it is on the south from Italy proper by the Apennines,
this plain is defended from Gaul and the Germanics, on the west and
the north, by the mightiest mountains in Europe, the Alps, which here
enclose it in a vast concave rampart that stretches from the
Mediterranean to the Adriatic. On the east it is contained by the sea.
[Illustration: Sketch Map of northern Italy]
The history of this vast country before the Roman Conquest is, as is
history everywhere in the West before that event, vague and obscure.
But this at least may be said: it was first in the occupation of the
Etruscans, who in time were turned out, destroyed, or enslaved by the
Gauls, those invaders who crossed the Alps from the west and who
during nearly two hundred years, continually, though never with an
enduring success, invaded Italy, and in 388 B.C. actually captured the
City. Rome, however, had by the year 223 B.C. succeeded in planting
her fortresses at Placentia and Cremona and in fortifying Mutina
(Modena), when suddenly in 218 B.C. Hannibal unexpectedly descended
into the Cisalpine plain and destroyed all she had achieved. With his
defeat, however, the conquest of Cisalpine Gaul was undertaken anew,
and at some time after 183 B.C.--we do not know exactly when--the
whole of this vast lowland country passed into Roman administration,
to become the chief province of Caesar's great triple command, and one
of the most valuable parts of the empire.
What, then, is the relation of this vast lowland country between the
Alps and the Apennines to Italy proper? It stands as it has always
stood to her as a great defence. For if, as we must, we consider Italy
as the shrine, the sanctuary, and the citadel of Europe, a place apart
and separate--and because of this she has been able to do her work
both secular and religious--what has secured her but Cisalpine Gaul?
The valley of the Po, all this vast plain, appears in history as the
cockpit of Europe, the battlefield of the Celt, the Phoenician, the
Latin, and the Teuton, of Catholic and Arian, strewn with victories,
littered with defeats, the theatre of those great wars which have
built up Europe and the modern world. If the Gauls had not been broken
by the plain, they would perhaps have overwhelmed Italy and Rome; if
Hannibal had found there enemies instead of friends, the Oriental
would not so nearly have overthrown Europe. It broke the Gothic
invasion, Attila never crossed it, it absorbed the worst of the
appalling Lombard flood; Italy remains to us because of it.
Now since Cisalpine Gaul thus secured Italy, the entry from the one to
the other, the road between them must always have been of an immense
importance. That entry and that road, whenever they were in dispute,
Ravenna commanded, and a good half of her importance lies in this.
I say whenever they were in dispute: in time of peace that road and
that entry were not in the keeping of Ravenna but of Rimini.
A study of the map will show us that though the Apennines shut off
Italy proper from Cisalpine Gaul along a line roughly from Genoa to
Rimini, actually that difficult and barren range just fails to reach
the Adriatic as it curves southward to divide the peninsula in its
entire length into two not unequal parts. This failure of the
mountains quite to reach the sea leaves at this corner a narrow strip
of lowland, of marshy plain in fact, between them. Therefore the
Romans, though they were compelled to cross the Apennines, for Rome
lay upon their western side, were able to do so where they chose and
not of necessity to make the difficult passage at a crucial point.
[Illustration: Sketch Map of Ravenna region]
The road they planned and laid out, the Flaminian Way, the great north
road of the Romans, was built by Caius Flaminius the Censor about 220
B.C.[1], that is to say, immediately after the first subjection of the
Gauls south of the Po which had been largely his achievement, and for
military and political business which that achievement entailed. This
road ran from Rome directly to Ariminum (Rimini) and it crossed the
Apennines near the modern Scheggia and by the great pass of the
Furlo.[2]
[Footnote 1: It is, of course, certain that a road was in existence
long before; but not as a constructed, permanent, and military Way.]
[Footnote 2: The Furlo was to be held in the time of Aurelius Victor,
if not of Vespasian, by the fortress of Petra Pertusa.]
The first act of the Romans after the defeat of Hannibal was the
re-establishment of their fortresses at Placentia, Cremona, and Mutina
(Modena), the second was the construction of a great highway which
connected Placentia through Mutina with the Via Flaminia at Rimini.
This was the work of the Consul Aemilius Lepidus in 187 B.C. and the
road still bears his name.
It is obvious then that the command of the way from Italy into
Cisalpine Gaul, or _vice versa_, lay in the hands of Rimini, and it is
significant that the political boundary between them was here marked
by a little river, the Rubicon, a few miles to the north of that city.
The command which Rimini thus held was purely political; it passed
from her to Ravenna automatically whenever that entry was threatened.
Why?
The answer is very simple: because Rimini could not easily be
defended, while Ravenna was impregnable.
Ravenna stood from fifteen to eighteen miles north and east of the
Aemilian Way and some thirty-one miles north and a little west of
Rimini. Its extraordinary situation was almost unique in antiquity and
is only matched by one city of later times--Venice. It was built as
Venice is literally upon the waters. Strabo thus describes it:
"Situated in the marshes is the great Ravenna, built entirely on
piles, and traversed by canals which you cross by bridges or
ferry-boats. At the full tides it is washed by a considerable quantity
of sea water, as well as by the river, and thus the sewage is carried
off and the air purified; in fact, the district is considered so
salubrious that the (Roman) governors have selected it as a spot in
which to bring up and exercise the gladiators. It is a remarkable
peculiarity of this place that, though situated in the midst of a
marsh, the air is perfectly innocuous."[1]
[Footnote 1: Strabo, v. i. 7, tells us Altinum was similarly
situated.]
[Illustration: Sketch Map or Ravenna region in more detail]
Ravenna must always have been impregnable to any save a modern army,
so long as it was able to hold the road in and out and was not taken
from the sea. The one account we have of an attack upon it before the
fall of the empire is given us by Appian and recounts a raid from the
sea. It is but an incident in the civil wars of Marius and Sulla when
Ravenna, we learn, was occupied for the latter by Metellus his
lieutenant. In the year 82 B.C., says Appian, "Sulla overcame a
detachment of his enemies near Saturnia, and Metellus sailed round
toward Ravenna and took possession of the level wheat-growing country
of Uritanus."
This impregnable city, the most southern of Cisalpine Gaul,
immediately commanded the pass between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy
directly that pass was threatened, and to this I say was due a good
half of its fame. The rest must be equally divided between the fact
that the city was impregnable, and therefore a secure refuge or _point
d'appui_, and its situation upon the sea.
Strabo in his account of Ravenna, which I have quoted above,
emphasises the fact rather of its situation among the marshes than of
its position with regard to the sea. This is perhaps natural. The
society to which he belonged (though indeed he was of Greek descent)
loathed and feared the sea with an unappeasable horror. No journey was
too long to make if thereby the sea passage might be avoided, no road
too rough and rude if to take it was to escape the unstable winds and
waters. That too was a part of Ravenna's strength. She was as much a
city of the sea as Venice is; but of what a sea?
The Adriatic, upon whose western shore she stood at the gate of Italy
and Cisalpine Gaul, was--and this partly because of the Roman horror
of the sea--the fault between Greek and Latin, East and West. To this
great fact she owes much of her later splendour, much of her unique
importance in those centuries we call the Dark Age.
Even to-day as one stands upon the height of the republic of S. Marino
and catches, faintly at dawn, the sunlight upon the Dalmatian hills,
one instinctively feels it is the Orient one sees.
This, then, is the cause of the greatness, of the opportunity for
greatness, of Ravenna: her geographical position in regard to the
peninsula of Italy, the Cisalpine plain, and the sea. Each of these
exalt her in turn and all together give her the unique and almost
fabulous position she holds in the history of Europe.
Because she held the gateway between Italy and the Cisalpine plain,
Caesar repaired to her when he was treating with the Senate for the
consulship, and from her he set out to possess himself of all that
great government.
Because she was impregnable, and held both the plain where the enemy
must be met and the peninsula with Rome within it, Honorius retreated
to her from Milan when Alaric crossed the Alps.
Because she was set upon the sea, and that sea was the fault between
East and West, and because she held the key as it were of all Italy
and through Italy of the West, Justinian there established his
government when the great attempt was made by Byzantium to reconquer
us from the barbarian.
"_Ravenna Felix_" we read on many an old coin of that time, and
whatever we may think of that title or prophecy, which indeed might
seem never to have come true for her, this at least we must
acknowledge, that she was happy in her situation which offered such
opportunities for greatness and so certain an immortality.
II
JULIUS CAESAR IN RAVENNA
When we first come upon Ravenna in the pages of Strabo, its origin is
already obscured; but this at least seems certain, that it was never a
Gaulish city. Strabo tells us that "Ravenna is reputed to have been
founded by Thessalians, who, not being able to sustain the violence of
the Tyrrheni, welcomed into their city some of the Umbri who still
possess it, while they themselves returned home."[1] The Thessalians
were probably Pelasgi, but apart from that Strabo's statement would
seem to be reasonably accurate. At any rate he continually repeats it,
for he goes on to tell us that "Ariminum (Rimini), like Ravenna, is an
ancient colony of the Umbri, but both of them received also Roman
colonies." Again, in the same book of his Geography, he tells us: "The
Umbri lie between the country of the Sabini and the Tyrrheni, but
extend beyond the mountains as far as Ariminum and Ravenna." And again
he says: "Umbria lies along the eastern boundary of Tyrrhenia and
beginning from the Apennines, or rather beyond these mountains
(extends) as far as the Adriatic. For commencing from Ravenna the
Umbri inhabit the neighbouring country ... all allow that Umbria
extends as far as Ravenna, as the inhabitants are Umbri."
[Footnote 1: Strabo _ut supra_.]
We may take it, then, that when Rome annexed Ravenna it was a city of
the Umbri, and we may dismiss Pliny's statement[1] that it was a
Sabine city altogether for it is both improbable and inexplicable.
[Footnote 1: Pliny, III. 15; v. 20.]
When Ravenna received a Roman colony we do not know, for though Strabo
states this fact, he does not tell us when it occurred and we have no
other means of knowing. All we can be reasonably sure of is that this
Umbrian city on the verge of Cisalpine Gaul, hemmed in on the west by
the Lingonian Gauls, received a Roman colony certainly not before 268
B.C. when Ariminum was occupied. The name of Ravenna, however, does
not occur in history till a late period of the Roman republic, and the
first incident in which we hear of Ravenna having any part occurs in
82 B.C., when, as I have already related, Metellus, the lieutenant of
Sulla, landed there or thereabouts from his ships and seems to have
made the city, already a place of some importance, the centre of his
operations.
Ravenna really entered history--and surely gloriously enough--when
Julius Caesar chose it, the last great town of his command towards
Italy, as his headquarters while he treated with the senate before he
crossed the Rubicon.
"Caesar," says Appian, "had lately recrossed the straits from Britain,
and, after traversing the Gallic country along the Rhine, had passed
the Alps with 5000 foot and 300 horse, and arrived at Ravenna which
was contiguous to Italy and the last town in his government." This was
in 50 B.C. The state of affairs which that act was meant to elucidate
may be briefly stated as follows.
The Roman republic, still in the midst of the political, social, and
economic revolution whose first phase was the awful civil wars of
Marius and Sulla, had long been at the mercy of Pompey the
opportunist, Crassus the plutocrat, and Julius Caesar--the first
Triumvirate. Crassus had always leaned towards Caesar and the
_entente_ between Caesar and Pompey had been strengthened by the
marriage of the latter with Caesar's daughter Julia, who was to die in
the midst of the crisis 54 B.C. In 58 B.C., the year following this
marriage, Caesar went to take up his great command in the Gauls, but
Pompey remained in Rome, where every day his influence and popularity
were failing while the astonishing successes of Caesar made him the
idol of the populace. In 55 B.C. Pompey was consul for the second time
with Crassus. He received as his provinces the two Spains, but he
governed them by his legates and remained in the neighbourhood of the
City. Crassus received the province of Syria, and the appalling
disasters of the Parthian war, in which he most miserably lost life
and honour, seemed to give Pompey the opportunity for which he had
long been waiting. He encouraged the growing civil discord which was
tearing the state in pieces, and with such success that the senate was
compelled to call for his assistance. In 52 B.C. he became sole
consul, restored order, and placed himself at the head of the
aristocratic party which he had deserted to become the great popular
hero when he was consul with Crassus in 70 B.C.
Now Caesar had long watched the astonishing actions of Pompey, and had
no intention of leaving the fate of the republic to him and the
aristocracy. He does not seem to have wished to break altogether with
Pompey, but only to hold him in check. At his meeting with Pompey at
Luca (Lucca) in 56 B.C. he had been promised the consulship for 48
B.C. when his governorship came to an end, and he now determined to
insure the fulfilment of this promise which would place him upon a
legal equality with his rival. For the rest he knew that he was as
superior to Pompey as a statesman as he was as a soldier, and he did
not apparently anticipate any difficulty in out-manoeuvring him in the
senate and in the forum. Caesar, then, claimed no more than an
equality with Pompey and the fulfilment of his promise; but these he
determined to have. All through the winter of 52-51 B.C. he was
arming. Well served by his friends, among whom were Mark Antony and
Curio the tribunes, in 50 B.C., "having gone the circuit for the
administration of justice," as Suetonius tells us, "he made a halt at
Ravenna resolved to have recourse to arms if the senate should proceed
to extremity against the tribunes of the people, who had espoused his
cause." But first he determined for many reasons to send ambassadors
to Rome, to request the fulfilment of the promise made to him at Luca.
Pompey, who was not yet at open enmity with him, determined, although
he had made the promise, neither to aid him by his influence nor
openly to oppose him on this occasion. But the consuls Lentulus and
Marcellus, who had always been his enemies, resolved to use all means
in their power to prevent him gaining his object.
At this juncture Caius Curio, tribune of the people, came to Caesar in
Ravenna. Curio had made many energetic struggles in behalf of the
republic and Caesar's cause; but at last, when he perceived that all
his efforts were in vain, he fled through fear of his enemies and
Caesar's to Ravenna and told Caesar all that had taken place; and,
seeing that war was openly being prepared against Caesar, advised him
to bring up his army and to rescue the republic.
Now Caesar was not ignorant of the real state of affairs, but he was
perhaps not yet ready to act, or he hoped in fact to save the ancient
state; at any rate, he gave it as his opinion that particular regard
should be had to the tranquillity of the republic, lest any one should
assert that he was the originator of civil war. Therefore he sent
again to his friends, making through them this very moderate request,
that two legions and the provinces of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum
should be left him. No one could openly quarrel with such a reasonable
demand and the patience with which it was more than once put forward;
for when Caesar could not obtain a favourable answer from the consuls,
he wrote a letter to the senate in which he briefly recounted his
exploits and public services, and entreated that he should not be
deprived of the favour of the people who had ordered that he, although
absent, should be considered a candidate for the consulship at the
next election. He stated also that he would disband his army if the
senate and the Roman people desired it, provided that Pompey would do
the same. But he stated also that, as long as Pompey retained the
command of his army, there could be no just reason why Caesar should
disband his troops and expose himself to the power of his enemies.
This was Caesar's third offer to his opponents. He entrusted the
letter to Curio, who travelled one hundred and sixty miles in three
days and reached the City early in January. He did not, however,
deliver the letter until there was a crowded meeting of the senate and
the tribunes of the people were present; for he was afraid lest, if he
gave it up without the utmost publicity, the consuls would suppress
it. A sort of debate followed the reading of the letter, but when
Scipio, Pompey's mouthpiece, spoke and declared, among other things,
that Pompey was resolved to take up the cause of the senate now or
never, and that he would drop it if a decision were delayed, the
majority, overawed, decreed that Caesar should "at a definite and not
distant day give up Transalpine Gaul to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus,
and Cisalpine Gaul to Marcus Servilius Nonianus and should dismiss his
army, failing which he should be esteemed a traitor. When the
tribunes, of Caesar's party, made use of their right of veto against
this resolution not only were they, as they at least asserted,
threatened in the senate house itself by the swords of Pompeian
soldiers and forced, in order to save their lives, to flee in slaves'
clothing from the capital, but the senate, now sufficiently overawed,
treated their interference as an attempt at revolution, declared the
country in danger, and in the usual form called the burgesses to take
up arms, and all the magistrates faithful to the constitution to place
themselves at the head of the armed."
That was on January 7th. Five days later Caesar was on his way at the
head of his troops to invade Italy and, without knowing it, to found
the empire, that universal government out of which we are come.
It was with one legion[1] that Caesar undertook his great adventure.
That legion, the Thirteenth, had been stationed near Tergeste
(Trieste), but at Caesar's orders it had marched into Ravenna in the
first days of January. Upon the fateful twelfth, with some secrecy,
while Caesar himself attended a public spectacle, examined the model
of a fencing school, which he proposed to build, and, as usual, sat
down to table with a numerous party of friends,[2] the first companies
of this legion left Ravenna by the Rimini gate, to be followed after
sunset by its great commander; still with all possible secrecy it
seems, for mules were put to his carriage, a hired one, at a mill
outside Ravenna and he went almost alone.
[Footnote 1: Plutarch says "Caesar had not then with him more than 300
horse and 5000 foot. The rest of his forces were left on the other
side of the Alps."]
[Footnote 2: So Suetonius; but Plutarch says "As for himself, he spent
the day at a public show of gladiators, and a little before evening
bathed, and then went into the apartment, where he entertained
company. When it was growing dark, he left the company, having desired
them to make merry till his return, which they would not have long to
wait for."]
The road he travelled was not the great way to Rimini, but a by-way
across the marshes, and it would seem to have been in a wretched
state. At any rate Caesar lost his way, the lights of his little
company were extinguished, his carriage had to be abandoned, and it
was only after wandering about for a long time that, with the help of
a peasant whom he found towards daybreak, he was able to get on, afoot
now, and at last to reach the great highway. That night must have
tried even the iron nerves and dauntless courage of the greatest
soldier of all time.
Caesar came up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, the sacred
boundary of Italy and Cisalpine Gaul in the narrow pass between the
mountains and the sea. "There," says Suetonius, whose account I have
followed, "he halted for a while revolving in his mind the importance
of the step he was about to take. At last turning to those about him,
he said: 'We may still retreat; but if we pass this little bridge
nothing is left us but to fight it out in arms.'"
Now while he was thus hesitating, staggered, even he, by the greatness
of what he would attempt, doubtless resolving in silence arguments for
and against it, and, if we may believe Plutarch, "many times changing
his opinion," the following strange incident is said to have happened.
A person, remarkable, says Suetonius, for his noble aspect and
graceful mien, appeared close at hand sitting by the wayside playing
upon a pipe. When not only the shepherds herding their flocks
thereabout, but a number of the legionaries also gathered round to
hear this fellow play, and there happened to be among them some
trumpeters, the piper suddenly snatched a trumpet from one of these,
ran to the river, and, sounding the advance with a piercing blast,
crossed to the other side. Upon which Caesar on a sudden impulse
exclaimed: "Let us go whither the omens of the gods and the iniquity
of our enemies call us. The die is cast." And immediately at the head
of his troops he crossed the river and found awaiting him the tribunes
of the people who, having fled from Rome, had come to meet him. There
in their presence he called upon the troops to pledge him their
fidelity, with tears in his eyes, Suetonius assures us, and his
garments rent from his bosom. And when he had received their oath he
set out, and with his legion marched so fast the rest of the way that
he reached Ariminum before morning and took it.
The fall of Ariminum was but a presage, as we know, of Caesar's
triumph. In three months he was master of all Italy. From Ravenna he
had emerged to seize the lordship of the world, and out of a misery of
chaos to create Europe.
III
RAVENNA IN THE TIME OF THE EMPIRE
That great revolutionary act of Julius Caesar's may be said to have
made manifest, and for the first time, the unique position of Ravenna
in relation to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. In the years which followed,
that position remained always unchanged, and is, indeed, more
prominent than ever in the civil wars between Antony and Octavianus
which followed Caesar's murder; but with the establishment of the
empire by Octavianus and the universal peace, the _pax romana_, which
it ensured, this position of Ravenna in relation to Italy and to
Cisalpine Gaul sank into insignificance in comparison with her other
unique advantage, her position upon the sea. For Octavianus, as we
shall see, established her as the great naval port of Italy upon the
east, and as such she chiefly appears to us during all the years of
the unhampered government of the empire.
In the civil wars between Antony and Octavianus, however, she appears
still as the key to the narrow pass between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul.
Let us consider this for a moment.
Antony, as we know, after that great scene in the senate house when
the supporters of Pompey and the aristocrats had succeeded in denying
Caesar everything, had fled to Caesar at Ravenna. In the war which
followed he had been Caesar's chief lieutenant and friend. At the
crucial battle of Pharsalus in 48 B.C. he had commanded, and with
great success, the left wing. In 44 B.C. he had been consul with
Caesar and had then offered him the crown at the festival of the
_Lupercalia_. After Caesar's murder he had attempted, and not without
a sort of right, to succeed to his power. It was he who pronounced the
speech over Caesar's body and read his will to the people. It was he
who obtained Caesar's papers and his private property. It cannot then
have been without resentment and surprise that he found presently a
rival in the young Octavianus, the great-nephew and adopted son of the
dictator, who joined the senate with the express purpose of crushing
him.
Now Antony, perhaps remembering his master, had obtained from the
senate the promise of Cisalpine Gaul, then in the hands of Decimus
Brutus, who, encouraged by Octavianus, refused to surrender it to him.
Antony proceeded to Ariminum (Rimini), but Octavianus seized Ravenna
and supplied it both with stores and money.[1] Antony was beaten and
compelled to retreat across the Alps. In these acts we may see which
of the two rivals understood the reality of things, and from this
alone we might perhaps foresee the victor.
[Footnote 1: Appian, III. 42.]
That was in 44 B.C. A reconciliation between the rivals followed and
the government was vested in them and in Lepidus under the title of
_Triumviri Reipublicae Constituendae_ for five years. In 42 B.C.
Brutus and Cassius and the aristocratic party were crushed by Antony
and Octavianus at Philippi; and Antony received Asia as his share of
the Roman world. Proceeding to his government in Cilicia, Antony met
Cleopatra and followed her to Egypt. Meanwhile Fulvia, his wife, and
L. Antonius, his brother, made war upon Octavianus in Italy, for they
like Antony hoped for the lordship of the world. In the war which
followed, Ravenna played a considerable part. In 41 B.C., for
instance, the year in which the war opened, the Antonine party secured
themselves in Ravenna, not only because of its strategical importance
in regard to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, but also because as a seaport
it allowed of their communication with Antony in Egypt from whom they
expected support. All this exposed and demonstrated more and more the
importance of Ravenna, and we may be sure that the wise and astute
Octavianus marked it.
But it was the war with Sextus Pompeius which clearly showed what the
future of Ravenna was to be. In that affair we find Ravenna already
established as a naval port apparently subsidiary, on that coast, to
Brundusium, as Misenum was upon the Tyrrhene sea to Puteoli; and there
Octavianus built ships.
It was not, however, till Octavianus, his enemies one and all disposed
of, had made himself emperor at last, that, on the establishment and
general regulation of his great government, he chose Ravenna as the
major naval port of Italy upon the east, even as he chose Misenum upon
the west.
Octavianus had learned two things, certainly, in the wars he had
fought to establish himself in the monarchy his great-uncle had
founded. He had learned the necessity and the value of sea power, and
he had understood the unique position of Ravenna in relation to the
East and the West. That he had been able to appreciate both these
facts is enough to mark him as the great man he was.
Julius Caesar, for all his mighty grasp of reality, had not perceived
the enormous value, nay the necessity, of sea power, and because of
this failure his career had been twice nearly cut short; at Ilerda,
where the naval victory of Decimus Brutus over the Massiliots alone
saved him; and at Alexandria. Both the liberators and Antony had
possessed ships; but both had failed to use them with any real effect.
It was Sextus Pompeius who forced Octavianus to turn to the sea, and
when Octavianus became Augustus he did not forget the lesson. Sole
master of the Mediterranean and of all its ships of war, he understood
at once how great a support sea power offered him and his principate.
Nor was the empire, while it was vigorous, though always fearful of
and averse from the sea, ever to forget the power that lay in that
command.
Thus it was that among the first acts of Augustus was the
establishment of two fleets, as we might say, "in being" in the
Mediterranean; the fleet of Misenum and the fleet of Ravenna; the
latter with stations probably at Aquileia, Brundusium, the Piraeus,
and probably elsewhere.
The fleet of Ravenna was, certainly after A.D. 70, probably about A.D.
127, entitled _Praetoria_. The origin of this title is unknown, but it
was also borne by the fleet of Misenum and it distinguishes the
Italian from the later Provincial fleets, the former being in closer
relation to the emperor, just as the Praetorian cohorts were
distinguished from the legions.
The emperor was, of course, head of all the fleets, which were, each
of them, commanded by a prefect and sub-prefect appointed by him; and
if we may judge from the recorded promotions we have, it would seem
that the Misenate prefect ranked before the Ravennate and both before
the Provincial. But in the general military system the navy stood
lowest in respect of pay and position. The fleets were manned by freed
men and foreigners who could not obtain citizenship until after
twenty-six years' service. We find Claudius employing the marines of
the _Classis Ravennas_ to drain lake Fucinus, and it was probably
Vespasian who formed the Legion II. _Adjutrix_ from the Ravennate,
even as Nero had formed Legion I. _Adjutrix_ from the Misenate
marines.
The Ravenna that Augustus thus chose to be the great base and port of
his fleet in the eastern sea was, as we have seen, a place built upon
piles in the midst of the marshes, impregnable from the land, and,
because impregnable, able, whenever it was in dispute, to command the
narrow pass between the mountains and the sea that was the gate of
Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. Such a place, situated as it was upon the
western shore of that sea which was the fault between East and West,
was eminently suitable for the great purpose of the emperor. Pliny[1]
indeed would seem to tell us that from time immemorial Ravenna had
possessed a small port; but such a place, well enough for the small
traders of those days, could not serve usefully the requirements of a
great fleet. Therefore the first act of Augustus, when he had chosen
Ravenna as his naval base, was the construction of a proper port and
harbour, and these came to be named, after the fleet they served and
accommodated, Classis. Classis was situated some two and a half miles
from the town of Ravenna to the east-south-east. We may perhaps have
some idea both of its situation and of its relation to Ravenna if we
say that it was to that city what the Porto di Lido is to Venice.
[Footnote 1: Pliny, iii. 20; cf. also Strabo, v. 7.]
It is very difficult, in looking upon Ravenna as we see it to-day, to
reconstruct it, even in the imagination, as it was when Augustus had
done with it. To begin with, the sea has retreated several miles from
the city, which is no longer within sight of it, while all that is
left of Classis, which is also now out of sight of the sea, is a
single decayed and deserted church, S. Apollinare in Classe. Strabo,
however, who wrote his _Geography_ a few years after Augustus had
chosen Ravenna for his port upon the Adriatic, has left us a
description both of it and the country in which it stood, from which
must be drawn any picture we would possess of so changed a place. He
speaks of it, as we have seen, as "a great city" situated in the
marshes, built entirely upon piles, and traversed by canals which were
everywhere crossed by bridges or ferry-boats. While at the full tide
he tells us it was swept by the sea and always by the river, and thus
the sewage was carried off and the air purified, and this so
thoroughly, that even before its establishment by Augustus the
district was considered so healthy that the Roman governors had chosen
it as a spot in which to train gladiators.[1] That river we know from
Pliny[2] was called the Bedesis; and the same writer tells us that
Augustus built a canal which brought the water of the Po to Ravenna.
[Footnote 1: Strabo, v. 7.]
[Footnote 2: Pliny, iii. 20.]
Tacitus in his _Annals_[1] merely tells us that Italy was guarded on
both sides by fleets at Misenum and Ravenna, and in his _Histories_[2]
speaks of these places as the well known naval stations without
stopping to describe them. While Suetonius,[3] though he mentions the
great achievement of Augustus, does not emphasise it and does not
attempt to tell us what these ports were like.
[Footnote 1: Tacitus, Ann. iv. 5.]
[Footnote 2: Tacitus, Hist. ii. 100; iii. 6, 40.]
[Footnote 3: Suetonius, _Augustus_.]
Perhaps the best description we have of Augustan Ravenna comes to us
from a writer who certainly never saw the port in its great Roman
days, but who probably followed a well established tradition in his
description of it. This is Jornandes, who was born about A.D. 500 and
was first a notary at the Ostrogothic court and later became a monk
and finally bishop of Crotona. In his _De Getarum Origins et Rebus
Gestis_ he thus describes Ravenna:
"This city (says he) between the marshes, the sea, and the Po is only
accessible on one side. Situated beside the Ionian Sea it is
surrounded and almost submerged by lagoons. On the east is the sea, on
the west it is defended by marshes across which there remains a narrow
passage, a kind of gate. The city is encircled on the north by a
branch of the Po, called the Fossa Asconis, and on the south by the Po
itself, which is called the Eridanus, and which is there known as the
King of Rivers. Augustus deepened its bed and made it larger; it
flowed quite through the city, and its mouth formed an excellent port
where once, as Dion reports [this passage of Dion Cassius is lost], a
fleet of 250 ships could be stationed in all security.... The city has
three names with which she glorifies herself and she is divided into
three parts to which they correspond; the first is Ravenna, the last
Classis, that in the midst is Caesarea between Ravenna and the sea.
Built on a sandy soil this quarter is easily approached and is
commodiously situated for trade and transport."
We thus have a picture of Ravenna as a triune city, consisting of
Ravenna proper, the port Classis, and the long suburb between them,
Caesarea, connected by a great causeway and everywhere watered by
canals, the greatest of which was the Fossa Augusta by which a part of
the waters of the Po were carried to Ravenna and thence to Classis and
the sea; a city very much, we may suppose, what we know Venice to be,
if we think of her in connection with the Riva, the great suburb of
the Marina, and the Porto di Lido. At Classis we must understand there
was room for a fleet of two hundred and fifty ships and accommodation
for arsenals, magazines, barracks, and so forth, while there is one
other thing we know of this port, and that from Pliny,[1] who tells us
that it had a Pharos like the famous one of Alexandria. "There is
another building (says he) that is highly celebrated, the tower that
was built by a king of Egypt on the island of Pharos at the entrance
to the harbour of Alexandria.... At present there are similar fires
lighted up in numerous places, Ostia and Ravenna for example. The only
danger is that when these fires are thus kept burning without
intermission they may be mistaken for stars."
[Footnote 1: Pliny xxx. vi. 18]
Such was the splendour of Ravenna in the time of Augustus. His
achievement so far as Ravenna was concerned was to understand her
importance not only in regard to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, an
importance already discounted by the universal peace he had
established, but in regard to the sea. He turned Ravenna into a
first-class naval port and based his eastern fleet upon her; and this
was so wise an act that, so long as the empire remained strong and
unhampered, Ravenna appears as the great base of its sea power in the
East.
In that long peace which Italy enjoyed under the empire we hear little
of Ravenna. We know Claudius built a great gate called Porta Aurea,
which was only destroyed in 1582; and we know that the great sea port
had one weakness, the scarcity of good water for drinking purposes.
Martial writes
"I'd rather at Ravenna have a cistern than a vine
Since I could sell my water there much better than my wine,"
and again:
"That landlord at Ravenna is plainly but a cheat
I paid for wine and water, but he served wine to me neat"[1]
[Footnote 1: Martial, _Fp_ iii. 56, 57. Trs Hodgkin]
This weakness would seem, however, to have been overcome by Trajan,
who built an aqueduct nearly twenty miles long, which Theodoric
restored, after the fall of the empire, in 524. This aqueduct, of
which some arches remain in the bed of the Bedesis (Ronco), seems to
have run, following the course of the river, from near Forli, where
there still remains a village called S. Maria in Acquedotto, to
Ravenna.
[Illustration: GREEK RELIEF FROM A TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE]
The great city-port thus became one of the most important and
considerable of the cities of Italy, at a time when the whole of the
West was rapidly increasing in wealth and population, and especially
the old province of Cisapline Gaul, which had indeed become, during
the _pax romana_, the richest part of the new Italy. Always an
important military port it was often occupied by the emperors as their
headquarters from which to watch and to oppose the advance of their
enemies into Italy, and the possessor of it, for the reasons I have
set forth, was always in a commanding position. Thus in A.D. 193 it
was the surrender of Ravenna without resistance that gave the empire
to Septimius Severus, when, scarcely allowing himself time for sleep
or food, marching on foot and in complete armour, he crossed the Alps
at the head of his columns to punish the wretched Didius Julianus and
to avenge Pertinax. It was there in 238 that Pupienus was busy
assembling his army to oppose Maximin when he received the news of the
death of his enemy before Aquileia.
And because it was impregnable and secluded it was often chosen too as
a place of imprisonment for important prisoners.