第 27 页

with her. "Good-evening, Monsieur l'Abbe," he said; "you can go down by

way of Caligula's palace."

Delightful was Pierre's relief when he was at last able to rest for a

moment on one of the marble seats in the garden. There were but few

clumps of trees, cypresses, box-trees, palms, and some fine evergreen

oaks; but the latter, sheltering the seat, cast a dark shade of exquisite

freshness around. The charm of the spot was also largely due to its

dreamy solitude, to the low rustle which seemed to come from that ancient

soil saturated with resounding history. Here formerly had been the

pleasure grounds of the Villa Farnese which still exists though greatly

damaged, and the grace of the Renascence seems to linger here, its breath

passing caressingly through the shiny foliage of the old evergreen oaks.

You are, as it were, enveloped by the soul of the past, an ethereal

conglomeration of visions, and overhead is wafted the straying breath of

innumerable generations buried beneath the sod.

After a time, however, Pierre could no longer remain seated, so powerful

was the attraction of Rome, scattered all around that august summit. So

he rose and approached the balustrade of a terrace; and beneath him

appeared the Forum, and beyond it the Capitoline hill. To the eye the

latter now only presented a commingling of grey buildings, lacking both

grandeur and beauty. On the summit one saw the rear of the Palace of the

Senator, flat, with little windows, and surmounted by a high, square

campanile. The large, bare, rusty-looking walls hid the church of Santa

Maria in Ara Coeli and the spot where the temple of Capitoline Jove had

formerly stood, radiant in all its royalty. On the left, some ugly houses

rose terrace-wise upon the slope of Monte Caprino, where goats were

pastured in the middle ages; while the few fine trees in the grounds of

the Caffarelli palace, the present German embassy, set some greenery

above the ancient Tarpeian rock now scarcely to be found, lost, hidden as

it is, by buttress walls. Yet this was the Mount of the Capitol, the most

glorious of the seven hills, with its citadel and its temple, the temple

to which universal dominion was promised, the St. Peter's of pagan Rome;

this indeed was the hill--steep on the side of the Forum, and a precipice

on that of the Campus Martius--where the thunder of Jupiter fell, where

in the dimmest of the far-off ages the Asylum of Romulus rose with its

sacred oaks, a spot of infinite savage mystery. Here, later, were

preserved the public documents of Roman grandeur inscribed on tablets of

brass; hither climbed the heroes of the triumphs; and here the emperors

became gods, erect in statues of marble. And nowadays the eye inquires

wonderingly how so much history and so much glory can have had for their

scene so small a space, such a rugged, jumbled pile of paltry buildings,

a mole-hill, looking no bigger, no loftier than a hamlet perched between

two valleys.

Then another surprise for Pierre was the Forum, starting from the Capitol

and stretching out below the Palatine: a narrow square, close pressed by

the neighbouring hills, a hollow where Rome in growing had been compelled

to rear edifice close to edifice till all stifled for lack of breathing

space. It was necessary to dig very deep--some fifty feet--to find the

venerable republican soil, and now all you see is a long, clean, livid

trench, cleared of ivy and bramble, where the fragments of paving, the

bases of columns, and the piles of foundations appear like bits of bone.

Level with the ground the Basilica Julia, entirely mapped out, looks like

an architect's ground plan. On that side the arch of Septimius Severus

alone rears itself aloft, virtually intact, whilst of the temple of

Vespasian only a few isolated columns remain still standing, as if by

miracle, amidst the general downfall, soaring with a proud elegance, with

sovereign audacity of equilibrium, so slender and so gilded, into the

blue heavens. The column of Phocas is also erect; and you see some

portions of the Rostra fitted together out of fragments discovered near

by. But if the eye seeks a sensation of extraordinary vastness, it must

travel beyond the three columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux,

beyond the vestiges of the house of the Vestals, beyond the temple of

Faustina, in which the Christian Church of San Lorenzo has so composedly

installed itself, and even beyond the round temple of Romulus, to light

upon the Basilica of Constantine with its three colossal, gaping

archways. From the Palatine they look like porches built for a nation of

giants, so massive that a fallen fragment resembles some huge rock hurled

by a whirlwind from a mountain summit. And there, in that illustrious,

narrow, overflowing Forum the history of the greatest of nations held for

centuries, from the legendary time of the Sabine women, reconciling their

relatives and their ravishers, to that of the proclamation of public

liberty, so slowly wrung from the patricians by the plebeians. Was not

the Forum at once the market, the exchange, the tribunal, the open-air

hall of public meeting? The Gracchi there defended the cause of the

humble; Sylla there set up the lists of those whom he proscribed; Cicero

there spoke, and there, against the rostra, his bleeding head was hung.

Then, under the emperors, the old renown was dimmed, the centuries buried

the monuments and temples with such piles of dust that all that the

middle ages could do was to turn the spot into a cattle market! Respect

has come back once more, a respect which violates tombs, which is full of

feverish curiosity and science, which is dissatisfied with mere

hypotheses, which loses itself amidst this historical soil where

generations rise one above the other, and hesitates between the fifteen

or twenty restorations of the Forum that have been planned on paper, each

of them as plausible as the other. But to the mere passer-by, who is not

a professional scholar and has not recently re-perused the history of

Rome, the details have no significance. All he sees on this searched and

scoured spot is a city's cemetery where old exhumed stones are whitening,

and whence rises the intense sadness that envelops dead nations. Pierre,

however, noting here and there fragments of the Sacred Way, now turning,

now running down, and now ascending with their pavement of silex indented

by the chariot-wheels, thought of the triumphs, of the ascent of the

triumpher, so sorely shaken as his chariot jolted over that rough

pavement of glory.

But the horizon expanded towards the southeast, and beyond the arches of

Titus and Constantine he perceived the Colosseum. Ah! that colossus, only

one-half or so of which has been destroyed by time as with the stroke of

a mighty scythe, it rises in its enormity and majesty like a stone

lace-work with hundreds of empty bays agape against the blue of heaven!

There is a world of halls, stairs, landings, and passages, a world where

one loses oneself amidst death-like silence and solitude. The furrowed

tiers of seats, eaten into by the atmosphere, are like shapeless steps

leading down into some old extinct crater, some natural circus excavated

by the force of the elements in indestructible rock. The hot suns of

eighteen hundred years have baked and scorched this ruin, which has

reverted to a state of nature, bare and golden-brown like a

mountain-side, since it has been stripped of its vegetation, the flora

which once made it like a virgin forest. And what an evocation when the

mind sets flesh and blood and life again on all that dead osseous

framework, fills the circus with the 90,000 spectators which it could

hold, marshals the games and the combats of the arena, gathers a whole

civilisation together, from the emperor and the dignitaries to the

surging plebeian sea, all aglow with the agitation and brilliancy of an

impassioned people, assembled under the ruddy reflection of the giant

purple velum. And then, yet further, on the horizon, were other cyclopean

ruins, the baths of Caracalla, standing there like relics of a race of

giants long since vanished from the world: halls extravagantly and

inexplicably spacious and lofty; vestibules large enough for an entire

population; a _frigidarium_ where five hundred people could swim

together; a _tepidarium_ and a _calidarium_* on the same proportions,

born of a wild craving for the huge; and then the terrific massiveness of

the structures, the thickness of the piles of brick-work, such as no

feudal castle ever knew; and, in addition, the general immensity which

makes passing visitors look like lost ants; such an extraordinary riot of

the great and the mighty that one wonders for what men, for what

multitudes, this monstrous edifice was reared. To-day, you would say a

mass of rocks in the rough, thrown from some height for building the

abode of Titans.

* Tepidarium, warm bath; calidarium, vapour bath.--Trans.

And as Pierre gazed, he became more and more immersed in the limitless

past which encompassed him. On all sides history rose up like a surging

sea. Those bluey plains on the north and west were ancient Etruria; those

jagged crests on the east were the Sabine Mountains; while southward, the

Alban Mountains and Latium spread out in the streaming gold of the

sunshine. Alba Longa was there, and so was Monte Cavo, with its crown of

old trees, and the convent which has taken the place of the ancient

temple of Jupiter. Then beyond the Forum, beyond the Capitol, the greater

part of Rome stretched out, whilst behind Pierre, on the margin of the

Tiber, was the Janiculum. And a voice seemed to come from the whole city,

a voice which told him of Rome's eternal life, resplendent with past

greatness. He remembered just enough of what he had been taught at school

to realise where he was; he knew just what every one knows of Rome with

no pretension to scholarship, and it was more particularly his artistic

temperament which awoke within him and gathered warmth from the flame of

memory. The present had disappeared, and the ocean of the past was still

rising, buoying him up, carrying him away.

And then his mind involuntarily pictured a resurrection instinct with

life. The grey, dismal Palatine, razed like some accursed city, suddenly

became animated, peopled, crowned with palaces and temples. There had

been the cradle of the Eternal City, founded by Romulus on that summit

overlooking the Tiber. There assuredly the seven kings of its two and a

half centuries of monarchical rule had dwelt, enclosed within high,

strong walls, which had but three gateways. Then the five centuries of

republican sway spread out, the greatest, the most glorious of all the

centuries, those which brought the Italic peninsula and finally the known

world under Roman dominion. During those victorious years of social and

war-like struggle, Rome grew and peopled the seven hills, and the

Palatine became but a venerable cradle with legendary temples, and was

even gradually invaded by private residences. But at last Caesar, the

incarnation of the power of his race, after Gaul and after Pharsalia

triumphed in the name of the whole Roman people, having completed the

colossal task by which the five following centuries of imperialism were

to profit, with a pompous splendour and a rush of every appetite. And

then Augustus could ascend to power; glory had reached its climax;

millions of gold were waiting to be filched from the depths of the

provinces; and the imperial gala was to begin in the world's capital,

before the eyes of the dazzled and subjected nations. Augustus had been

born on the Palatine, and after Actium had given him the empire, he set

his pride in reigning from the summit of that sacred mount, venerated by

the people. He bought up private houses and there built his palace with

luxurious splendour: an atrium upheld by four pilasters and eight

columns; a peristylium encompassed by fifty-six Ionic columns; private

apartments all around, and all in marble; a profusion of marble, brought

at great cost from foreign lands, and of the brightest hues, resplendent

like gems. And he lodged himself with the gods, building near his own

abode a large temple of Apollo and a shrine of Vesta in order to ensure

himself divine and eternal sovereignty. And then the seed of the imperial

palaces was sown; they were to spring up, grow and swarm, and cover the

entire mount.

Ah! the all-powerfulness of Augustus, his four and forty years of total,

absolute, superhuman power, such as no despot has known even in his

dreams! He had taken to himself every title, united every magistracy in

his person. Imperator and consul, he commanded the armies and exercised

executive power; pro-consul, he was supreme in the provinces; perpetual

censor and princeps, he reigned over the senate; tribune, he was the

master of the people. And, formerly called Octavius, he had caused

himself to be declared Augustus, sacred, god among men, having his

temples and his priests, worshipped in his lifetime like a divinity

deigning to visit the earth. And finally he had resolved to be supreme

pontiff, annexing religious to civil power, and thus by a stroke of

genius attaining to the most complete dominion to which man can climb. As

the supreme pontiff could not reside in a private house, he declared his

abode to be State property. As the supreme pontiff could not leave the

vicinity of the temple of Vesta, he built a temple to that goddess near

his own dwelling, leaving the guardianship of the ancient altar below the

Palatine to the Vestal virgins. He spared no effort, for he well realised

that human omnipotence, the mastery of mankind and the world, lay in that

reunion of sovereignty, in being both king and priest, emperor and pope.

All the sap of a mighty race, all the victories achieved, and all the

favours of fortune yet to be garnered, blossomed forth in Augustus, in a

unique splendour which was never again to shed such brilliant radiance.

He was really the master of the world, amidst the conquered and pacified

nations, encompassed by immortal glory in literature and in art. In him