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would seem to have been satisfied the old intense ambition of his people,

the ambition which it had pursued through centuries of patient conquest,

to become the people-king. The blood of Rome, the blood of Augustus, at

last coruscated in the sunlight, in the purple of empire. And the blood

of Augustus, of the divine, triumphant, absolute sovereign of bodies and

souls, of the man in whom seven centuries of national pride had

culminated, was to descend through the ages, through an innumerable

posterity with a heritage of boundless pride and ambition. For it was

fatal: the blood of Augustus was bound to spring into life once more and

pulsate in the veins of all the successive masters of Rome, ever haunting

them with the dream of ruling the whole world. And later on, after the

decline and fall, when power had once more become divided between the

king and the priest, the popes--their hearts burning with the red,

devouring blood of their great forerunner--had no other passion, no other

policy, through the centuries, than that of attaining to civil dominion,

to the totality of human power.

But Augustus being dead, his palace having been closed and consecrated,

Pierre saw that of Tiberius spring up from the soil. It had stood where

his feet now rested, where the beautiful evergreen oaks sheltered him. He

pictured it with courts, porticoes, and halls, both substantial and

grand, despite the gloomy bent of the emperor who betook himself far from

Rome to live amongst informers and debauchees, with his heart and brain

poisoned by power to the point of crime and most extraordinary insanity.

Then the palace of Caligula followed, an enlargement of that of Tiberius,

with arcades set up to increase its extent, and a bridge thrown over the

Forum to the Capitol, in order that the prince might go thither at his

ease to converse with Jove, whose son he claimed to be. And sovereignty

also rendered this one ferocious--a madman with omnipotence to do as he

listed! Then, after Claudius, Nero, not finding the Palatine large

enough, seized upon the delightful gardens climbing the Esquiline in

order to set up his Golden House, a dream of sumptuous immensity which he

could not complete and the ruins of which disappeared in the troubles

following the death of this monster whom pride demented. Next, in

eighteen months, Galba, Otho, and Vitellius fell one upon the other, in

mire and in blood, the purple converting them also into imbeciles and

monsters, gorged like unclean beasts at the trough of imperial enjoyment.

And afterwards came the Flavians, at first a respite, with commonsense

and human kindness: Vespasian; next Titus, who built but little on the

Palatine; but then Domitian, in whom the sombre madness of omnipotence

burst forth anew amidst a _regime_ of fear and spying, idiotic atrocities

and crimes, debauchery contrary to nature, and building enterprises born

of insane vanity instinct with a desire to outvie the temples of the

gods. The palace of Domitian, parted by a lane from that of Tiberius,

arose colossal-like--a palace of fairyland. There was the hall of

audience, with its throne of gold, its sixteen columns of Phrygian and

Numidian marble and its eight niches containing colossal statues; there

were the hall of justice, the vast dining-room, the peristylium, the

sleeping apartments, where granite, porphyry, and alabaster overflowed,

carved and decorated by the most famous artists, and lavished on all

sides in order to dazzle the world. And finally, many years later, a last

palace was added to all the others--that of Septimius Severus: again a

building of pride, with arches supporting lofty halls, terraced storeys,

towers o'er-topping the roofs, a perfect Babylonian pile, rising up at

the extreme point of the mount in view of the Appian Way, so that the

emperor's compatriots--those from the province of Africa, where he was

born--might, on reaching the horizon, marvel at his fortune and worship

him in his glory.

And now Pierre beheld all those palaces which he had conjured up around

him, resuscitated, resplendent in the full sunlight. They were as if

linked together, parted merely by the narrowest of passages. In order

that not an inch of that precious summit might be lost, they had sprouted

thickly like the monstrous florescence of strength, power, and unbridled

pride which satisfied itself at the cost of millions, bleeding the whole

world for the enjoyment of one man. And in truth there was but one palace

altogether, a palace enlarged as soon as one emperor died and was placed

among the deities, and another, shunning the consecrated pile where

possibly the shadow of death frightened him, experienced an imperious

need to build a house of his own and perpetuate in everlasting stone the

memory of his reign. All the emperors were seized with this building

craze; it was like a disease which the very throne seemed to carry from

one occupant to another with growing intensity, a consuming desire to

excel all predecessors by thicker and higher walls, by a more and more

wonderful profusion of marbles, columns, and statues. And among all these

princes there was the idea of a glorious survival, of leaving a testimony

of their greatness to dazzled and stupefied generations, of perpetuating

themselves by marvels which would not perish but for ever weigh heavily

upon the earth, when their own light ashes should long since have been

swept away by the winds. And thus the Palatine became but the venerable

base of a monstrous edifice, a thick vegetation of adjoining buildings,

each new pile being like a fresh eruption of feverish pride; while the

whole, now showing the snowy brightness of white marble and now the

glowing hues of coloured marble, ended by crowning Rome and the

world with the most extraordinary and most insolent abode of

sovereignty--whether palace, temple, basilica, or cathedral--that

omnipotence and dominion have ever reared under the heavens.

But death lurked beneath this excess of strength and glory. Seven hundred

and thirty years of monarchy and republic had sufficed to make Rome

great; and in five centuries of imperial sway the people-king was to be

devoured down to its last muscles. There was the immensity of the

territory, the more distant provinces gradually pillaged and exhausted;

there was the fisc consuming everything, digging the pit of fatal

bankruptcy; and there was the degeneration of the people, poisoned by the

scenes of the circus and the arena, fallen to the sloth and debauchery of

their masters, the Caesars, while mercenaries fought the foe and tilled

the soil. Already at the time of Constantine, Rome had a rival,

Byzantium; disruption followed with Honorius; and then some ten emperors

sufficed for decomposition to be complete, for the bones of the dying

prey to be picked clean, the end coming with Romulus Augustulus, the

sorry creature whose name is, so to say, a mockery of the whole glorious

history, a buffet for both the founder of Rome and the founder of the

empire.

The palaces, the colossal assemblage of walls, storeys, terraces, and

gaping roofs, still remained on the deserted Palatine; many ornaments and

statues, however, had already been removed to Byzantium. And the empire,

having become Christian, had afterwards closed the temples and

extinguished the fire of Vesta, whilst yet respecting the ancient

Palladium. But in the fifth century the barbarians rush upon Rome, sack

and burn it, and carry the spoils spared by the flames away in their

chariots. As long as the city was dependent on Byzantium a custodian of

the imperial palaces remained there watching over the Palatine. Then all

fades and crumbles in the night of the middle ages. It would really seem

that the popes then slowly took the place of the Caesars, succeeding them

both in their abandoned marble halls and their ever-subsisting passion

for domination. Some of them assuredly dwelt in the palace of Septimius

Severus; a council of the Church was held in the Septizonium; and, later

on, Gelasius II was elected in a neighbouring monastery on the sacred

mount. It was as if Augustus were again rising from the tomb, once more

master of the world, with a Sacred College of Cardinals resuscitating the

Roman Senate. In the twelfth century the Septizonium belonged to some

Benedictine monks, and was sold by them to the powerful Frangipani

family, who fortified it as they had already fortified the Colosseum and

the arches of Constantine and Titus, thus forming a vast fortress round

about the venerable cradle of the city. And the violent deeds of civil

war and the ravages of invasion swept by like whirlwinds, throwing down

the walls, razing the palaces and towers. And afterwards successive

generations invaded the ruins, installed themselves in them by right of

trover and conquest, turned them into cellars, store-places for forage,

and stables for mules. Kitchen gardens were formed, vines were planted on

the spots where fallen soil had covered the mosaics of the imperial

halls. All around nettles and brambles grew up, and ivy preyed on the

overturned porticoes, till there came a day when the colossal assemblage

of palaces and temples, which marble was to have rendered eternal, seemed

to dive beneath the dust, to disappear under the surging soil and

vegetation which impassive Nature threw over it. And then, in the hot

sunlight, among the wild flowerets, only big, buzzing flies remained,

whilst herds of goats strayed in freedom through the throne-room of

Domitian and the fallen sanctuary of Apollo.

A great shudder passed through Pierre. To think of so much strength,

pride, and grandeur, and such rapid ruin--a world for ever swept away! He

wondered how entire palaces, yet peopled by admirable statuary, could

thus have been gradually buried without any one thinking of protecting

them. It was no sudden catastrophe which had swallowed up those

masterpieces, subsequently to be disinterred with exclamations of

admiring wonder; they had been drowned, as it were--caught progressively

by the legs, the waist, and the neck, till at last the head had sunk

beneath the rising tide. And how could one explain that generations had

heedlessly witnessed such things without thought of putting forth a

helping hand? It would seem as if, at a given moment, a black curtain

were suddenly drawn across the world, as if mankind began afresh, with a

new and empty brain which needed moulding and furnishing. Rome had become

depopulated; men ceased to repair the ruins left by fire and sword; the

edifices which by their very immensity had become useless were utterly

neglected, allowed to crumble and fall. And then, too, the new religion

everywhere hunted down the old one, stole its temples, overturned its

gods. Earthly deposits probably completed the disaster--there were, it is

said, both earthquakes and inundations--and the soil was ever rising, the

alluvia of the young Christian world buried the ancient pagan society.

And after the pillaging of the temples, the theft of the bronze roofs and

marble columns, the climax came with the filching of the stones torn from

the Colosseum and the Theatre of Marcellus, with the pounding of the

statuary and sculpture-work, thrown into kilns to procure the lime needed

for the new monuments of Catholic Rome.

It was nearly one o'clock, and Pierre awoke as from a dream. The sun-rays

were streaming in a golden rain between the shiny leaves of the

ever-green oaks above him, and down below Rome lay dozing, overcome by

the great heat. Then he made up his mind to leave the garden, and went

stumbling over the rough pavement of the Clivus Victoriae, his mind still

haunted by blinding visions. To complete his day, he had resolved to

visit the old Appian Way during the afternoon, and, unwilling to return

to the Via Giulia, he lunched at a suburban tavern, in a large, dim room,

where, alone with the buzzing flies, he lingered for more than two hours,

awaiting the sinking of the sun.

Ah! that Appian Way, that ancient queen of the high roads, crossing the

Campagna in a long straight line with rows of proud tombs on either

hand--to Pierre it seemed like a triumphant prolongation of the Palatine.

He there found the same passion for splendour and domination, the same

craving to eternise the memory of Roman greatness in marble and daylight.

Oblivion was vanquished; the dead refused to rest, and remained for ever

erect among the living, on either side of that road which was traversed

by multitudes from the entire world. The deified images of those who were

now but dust still gazed on the passers-by with empty eyes; the

inscriptions still spoke, proclaiming names and titles. In former times

the rows of sepulchres must have extended without interruption along all

the straight, level miles between the tomb of Caecilia Metella and that

of Casale Rotondo, forming an elongated cemetery where the powerful and

wealthy competed as to who should leave the most colossal and lavishly

decorated mausoleum: such, indeed, was the craving for survival, the

passion for pompous immortality, the desire to deify death by lodging it

in temples; whereof the present-day monumental splendour of the Genoese

Campo Santo and the Roman Campo Verano is, so to say, a remote

inheritance. And what a vision it was to picture all the tremendous tombs

on the right and left of the glorious pavement which the legions trod on

their return from the conquest of the world! That tomb of Caecilia

Metella, with its bond-stones so huge, its walls so thick that the middle

ages transformed it into the battlemented keep of a fortress! And then

all the tombs which follow, the modern structures erected in order that

the marble fragments discovered might be set in place, the old blocks of

brick and concrete, despoiled of their sculptured-work and rising up like

seared rocks, yet still suggesting their original shapes as shrines,

_cippi_, and _sarcophagi_. There is a wondrous succession of high reliefs

figuring the dead in groups of three and five; statues in which the dead

live deified, erect; seats contrived in niches in order that wayfarers

may rest and bless the hospitality of the dead; laudatory epitaphs