ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
BOOK V
.
CHAPTER IV.
BELISARIUS IN ROME
The events described in the preceding chapter occupied the summer and
autumn of 536. How Belisarius was occupied during this interval it is not easy
to say. The notes of time given us by Procopius in this part of his narrative
are indistinct; nor have we between the siege of Neapolis and the siege of Rome
any of those little personal touches which indicate the presence of an
eyewitness. Possibly the historian was still at Carthage, attached to the staff
of the African army. If in Italy, he was perhaps engaged in administrative work
in some one of the towns of Southern Italy, such as Beneventum, of which he
gives at this point of his narrative a short account full of archaeological
information. The name of the place, at first Maleventum, from the fierce winds
which rage there as well as in Dalmatia, but afterwards changed to Beneventum,
to avoid the ill sound of the other (for the Latins call wind ventus in their language)—the traditions of Diomed
the founder of the city—the grinning tusks of the Calydonian boar slain by his uncle Meleager, still preserved down to the days of
Procopius— the legend of the Palladium stolen by Diomed and Ulysses from the
temple of Athene at Troy and handed on by the former to Aeneas—the doubt where
this Palladium was then preserved, whether at Rome or Constantinople—all this
archaeological gossip flows from the Herodotean pen of our historian with a
fullness which suggests that to him the autumn of 536 was in after days chiefly
memorable as the time of his sojourn at Beneventum.
It seems likely that Belisarius devoted the summer and autumn months of
536 to the consolidation of his conquests in Southern Italy. Cumae, that town
by Lake Avernus of old Sibylline fame, which was the only fortress besides
Neapolis in the province of Campania, was occupied by him with a sufficient
garrison. Calabria and Apulia, as has been already said, offered themselves as
willing subjects to the Byzantine Emperor. A hardy and martial people like the
Goths, holding the central Apennine chain, might have given Belisarius some
trouble by separating Apulia from Campania and intercepting the communications
between the Adriatic and Tyrrhene seas; but this
danger was removed by the convenient treachery of Pitzas the Goth, probably the same person as the Pitzias who
was victor in the war of Sirmium. He now commanded in
the province of Samnium, and brought over with him not only his personal
followers, but at least half of the province, to the allegiance of the Emperor.
Thus, with scarcely a stroke struck, had nearly the whole of that fair
territory which modern geography knows as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies been lost to the Goths and recovered by the
commonwealth of Rome. Belisarius might well pause for a few months to secure
these conquests and to await the result of the negotiations which Witigis,
evidently somewhat half-hearted about his resistance, had opened up with
Constantinople. Besides, he had reason to expect that he would soon receive an
important communication from the Bishop of Rome himself; and before the winter
had fairly commenced that communication came. To understand its full importance
we must rapidly turn over a few pages of Papal history.
It has been already said that, after the death of the unfortunate Pope
John in the prison of Theodoric a succession of somewhat inconspicuous Popes
filled the chair of St. Peter. Neither Felix III, Boniface II, nor John II did
anything to recall the stirring times of the previous Felix or of Hormisdas:
but the long duel with Constantinople had ended in the glorious triumph of
Rome: and the hard fate of John I had warned the pontiffs that their time was
not yet come for an open rupture with ‘Dominus Noster’ the King of the Goths
and Romans, in his palace by the Hadriatic. A cordial
theological alliance therefore with Byzantium, and trembling lip-loyalty to
Ravenna, was the attitude of the Popes during these years of transition. There
were the customary disputes and disturbances at the election of each Pontiff,
varied by stringent decrees of the Roman Senate against bribery, by attempts on
the part of the King's counsellors to magnify his share in the nomination to
the vacant see, and by one yet stranger attempt on the part of Pope Boniface to
acquire the power of nominating his successor to the Pontificate—a power such
as a servile parliament of the sixteenth century conferred on Henry VIII with
reference to the English crown. This scheme, however, was too audacious to
succeed. Boniface was forced, probably by the pressure of public opinion, to
revoke and even to burn the decree of nomination. The chief interest of this event
for posterity lies in the fact that the person who was to have been benefited
by the decree was the adroit but restless and unprincipled deacon Vigilius, of
whose later intrigues for the acquisition of the Papal throne, and sorrows when
he had obtained the coveted dignity, we shall hear abundantly in the future
course of this history.
Theologically this uneventful period has a conspicuous interest of its
own, as being one of the great battle-fields of the assertors and impugners of
the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. One of the usual childish logomachies of
the East was imported into Rome by certain Scythian monks, who pressed, as a
matter of life and death, the orthodoxy of the formula “One of the Trinity
suffered in the flesh” as against the heretical “One person of the Trinity
suffered in the flesh”. Hormisdas, before whom the matter was at first brought,
had showed the usual good sense of Rome by trying simply to crush out the
unintelligible and unprofitable discussion. In doing so, however, he used words
which certainly seemed to convey to the non-theological mind the idea that he
regarded the phrase “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh” as heretical.
That phrase a later Pope, John II, under some pressure from Justinian that he
might not seem to countenance Nestorianism, adopted, as agreeing with the
apostolic teaching; and it has consequently ever since been considered strictly
orthodox to use it. Here are obviously the materials for a discussion, very
interesting to theologians. The literature of the Hormisdas controversy is
already considerable, and it is quite possible that the last word has not yet
been spoken regarding it.
The successor of John II, Pope Agapetus, during his short episcopate of
ten months, saw, more of the world than many of his predecessors in much longer
pontificates. After the mission of Peter and Rusticus had failed, through his
own treachery and vacillation, King Theodahad determined to make one more
attempt to assuage the just resentment of Justinian. Knowing the great
influence which since the reunion of the Churches the Roman pontiff exerted
over the Eastern Caesar, he decided that Agapetus should be sent to
Constantinople on an embassy of peace. To overcome the natural reluctance of a
person of advanced age, and in a position of such high dignity, to act as his
letter-carrier on a long and toilsome winter journey, Theodahad sent a message
to him and to the Roman Senate informing them that, unless they succeeded in
making his peace with Justinian, the senators, their wives, their sons, and
their daughters should all be put to the sword. Truly the instincts of
self-preservation in the coward are cruel.
The Pope Agapetus entered Constantinople on the 20th February, 536, and was received with great demonstrations of respect by the
Emperor and the citizens. In the fulfilment of Theodahad’s commission, as we know, he met with no success. The Emperor replied,—and his
reply is characteristic of the huckstering spirit in which he made war,—that
after the great expenses to which his treasury had been put in preparing the
expedition for Italy he could not now draw back, leaving its object unattained.
But if Agapetus could not or would not effect anything on behalf of his Gothic
sovereign he effected much for the advancement of his own and his successors'
dignity; and this visit of his is a memorable step in the progress of the
Papacy towards an Universal Patriarchate. The see of Constantinople was at this
time filled by Anthimus, recently translated thither from Trebizond by the
influence of Theodora, and strongly suspected of sharing the Eutychian views of
his patroness. Agapetus sternly refused to recognize Anthimus as lawful
Patriarch of Constantinople, on the double ground of the ecclesiastical canon
against translations and of his suspected heresy. Justinian tried the effect,
so powerful on all others, of the thunder of the imperial voice and the frown
on the imperial brow. “Either comply with my request or I will cause thee to be
carried away into banishment”. Quite unmoved, the noble old man replied in
these memorable words : “I who am but a sinner came with eager longing to gaze
upon the most Christian Emperor Justinian. In his place I find a Diocletian,
whose threats do not one whit terrify me”. It must be recorded, for the credit
of Justinian, that this bold language moved his admiration rather than his
anger. He allowed the Bishop of Rome to question the Patriarch of
Constantinople whether he admitted the two natures in Christ; and when the
faltering answers of Anthimus proclaimed him a secret Monophysite, Justinian,
who always assumed in public the attitude of an opponent of his wife's heresy,
at once drove him from the see and from the city. A new prelate, Mennas, of undoubted Chalcedonian orthodoxy was consecrated
by Agapetus. Technically the rights of the see of Constantinople may have been
saved, but there was certainly something in the whole proceeding which
suggested the idea that, after all, the so-called Patriarch of New Rome was
only a suffragan bishop in the presence of the successor of St. Peter.
Much had Agapetus done, and more was he doing, to repress the reviving Eutychianism of the East—encouraged though it was by the favour
of Theodora—when death ended his career. He died on the 21st of April, 536
(when Belisarius was on the point of returning from Carthage to Sicily), and
his body, enclosed in a leaden coffin, was brought from Constantinople to Rome
and buried in the Basilica of St. Peter. The new Pope, Silverius, is said to
have been intruded into the see by the mere will of “the tyrant Theodahad”,
who, moved himself by a bribe, brought terror to bear on the minds of the
clergy to prevent any resistance to his will. It is, however, strongly
suspected that this suggestion of an election vitiated by duress is a mere
afterthought in order to excuse the highly irregular proceedings which, as we
shall hereafter see, were connected with his deposition. One fact, rare if not
unique in the history of the Papacy, distinguishes the personal history of
Silverius. A Pope himself, he was also the son of a Pope. He was the offspring,
born in lawful wedlock, of the sainted and strong-willed Hormisdas, who of
course must have been a widower when he entered the service of the Church. We
fail, however, to find in the gentle and peace-loving Silverius any trace of
the adamantine character of his dictatorial father. Not of a noble or
independent nature, he appears to be pushed about by ruder men and women,
Gothic and Roman, according to their own needs and caprices, and is at last
hustled out of the way more ignominiously than any of his predecessors.
Domineering fathers make not infrequently timorous and abject sons.
Such, then, was the Pope Silverius—for we now return to contemplate the
progress of the imperial army—who, having sworn a solemn oath of fealty to
Witigis, now, near the end of 536, sent messengers to Belisarius to offer the
peaceful surrender of the city of Rome. It was not, however, with any
chivalrous intention of throwing themselves into the breach, and doing battle
for the commonwealth of Rome that this invitation was sent. Silverius and the
citizens had heard, of course, full particulars of the siege and sack of
Naples, and wished to avoid similar calamities falling upon them. Weighing one
danger against another, they thought that they should run less risk from the
wrath of the Goths than from that of the Byzantines, and therefore sent
Fidelius, the late Quaestor of Athalaric, to invite Belisarius to Rome, and to
promise that the City should be surrendered to him without a struggle.
Belisarius gladly accepted the invitation, and leaving Herodian with a garrison
of 300 foot-soldiers in charge of Naples, he marched by the Latin Way from
Campania to Rome. While the Via Appia was the great sea-coast road to Rome, the
Via Latina took a more inland course by the valley of the Liris and along the
base of the Volscian hills, a course in fact very nearly coinciding with that
of the modern railway between Rome and Naples. Belisarius and his army passed
therefore through the town of Casinum, and
immediately under its steep hill, upon the summit of which a man who was to
attain even wider fame than Belisarius had reared, amid the ruins of Apollo's
temple, the mother-edifice of a thousand European convents. It was Benedict of Nursia, who, little heeding the clash of opposing races,
and scarce hearing the tramp of invading armies, was making for Monte Cassino
an imperishable name in the history of humanity.
When the Gothic garrison of Rome learned that evacuate Belisarius was at
hand, and that the Romans were disposed to surrender the City, they came to the
conclusion that against such a general, aided by the good-will of the citizens,
they should never be able to prevail, and that they would therefore withdraw
peaceably from Rome. Leuderis alone, their brave old
general, refused to quit the post which had been assigned to him, but was
unable to command the obedience of his soldiers, or to recall them to some resolution
more worthy of the Gothic name. They therefore marched quietly out by the
Flaminian Gate (on the site of the modern Porta del Popolo), while Belisarius
and his host entered by the Porta Asinaria, that
stately gate flanked by two semi-circular towers which, though walled up, still
stands near the Porta San Giovanni and behind the great Lateran Basilica. Leuderis was quietly taken prisoner, and sent with the keys
of the city to Justinian. So much for the infallible precautions which Witigis
assured the Goths he had taken against the surrender of the city, the “numerous
men and highly intelligent officer who would never allow it to fall into the
hands of Belisarius”.
The entry of the Byzantine troops into Rome took place on the 9th of
December, 536. Thus, as Procopius remarks, after sixty years of barbarian
domination, was the city recovered for the Empire.
Belisarius seems not to have taken up his abode in any of the imperial
residences on the Palatine Hill, where the representative of the Byzantine
Caesar might naturally have been expected to dwell, but, prescient of the
coming struggle, to have at once fixed his quarters on the Pincian Hill. This ridge on the north of Rome, so well-known by every visitor to the
modern city, who, however short his stay, is sure to have seen the long train
of carriages climbing to or returning from the fashionable drive, and who has
probably stood upon its height in order to obtain the splendid view which it
affords of the dome of St. Peters, was not one of the original seven hills of
the city, nor formed, strictly speaking, a part even of imperial Rome. Known in
earlier times as the Collis Hortulorum, or Hill of
Gardens, it occupied too commanding a position to be safely left outside the defenses, and had therefore been included within the
circuit of the walls of Honorius, some of the great retaining walls of the
gardens of M. Q. Acilius Glabrio having been
incorporated with the new defenses. Here then, in the
Domus Pinciana, the imperial General took up his
abode. Albeit probably somewhat dismantled, it was doubtless still a stately
and spacious palace, though it has now disappeared and left no trace behind. It
was admirably adapted for his purpose, being in fact a watch-tower commanding a
view all-round the northern horizon, from the Vatican to the Mons Sacer. From this point a ride of a few minutes on his swift
charger would bring him to the next great vantage-ground, the Castra Praetoria,
whose square enclosure, projecting beyond the ordinary line of the Honorian walls, made a tempting object of attack, but also
a splendid watch-tower for defence, carrying on the general's view to the Praenestine Gate (Porta Maggiore) on the south-east of the
city. Thus, from these two points, about a third of the whole circuit of the
walls, and nearly all of that part which was actually attacked by the Goths,
was visible.
That the city would have to be defended, and that it would tax all his
powers to defend it successfully, was a matter that was perfectly clear to the
mind of Belisarius, though the Romans, dwelling in a fool's paradise of false
security, deemed that all their troubles were over when the 4000 Goths marched
forth by the Flaminian Gate. They thought that the war would inevitably be
decided elsewhere by some great pitched battle. It seemed to them obvious that
so skilful a general as Belisarius would never consent to be besieged in a city
so little defended by nature as was the wide circuit of imperial Rome, nor
undertake the almost superhuman task of providing for the sustenance of that
vast population in addition to his own army. Such, however, was the scheme of
Belisarius, who knew that behind the walls of Rome his little army could offer
a more effectual resistance to the enemy than in any pitched battle on the
Campanian plains. Slowly and sadly the citizens awoke to the fact that their
hasty defection from the Gothic cause was by no means to relieve them from the
hardships of a siege. Possibly some of them, in the year of misery that lay
before them, even envied the short and sharp agony of Neapolis.
The commissariat of the city was naturally one of the chief objects of
the General's solicitude. From Sicily, still the granary of the State, his
ships had brought and were daily bringing large supplies of grain. These were
carried into the great warehouses (horrea publica),
which were under the care of the Praefectus Annonae.
At the same time the citizens, sorely grumbling, were set busily to work to
bring into the city the corn and provisions of all kinds that were stored in
the surrounding country.
Side by side with this great work went on the repair of the walls, which
Belisarius found in many places somewhat ruinous. Two hundred and sixty years
had elapsed since they were erected by Aurelian and Probus, one hundred and
thirty since they were renewed by Honorius, and in the latter interval they may
have suffered not only from the slow foot of time, but from the destroying
hands of the soldiers of Alaric, of Gaiseric, and of Ricimer. Theodoric's
steady and persevering labours had effected something, but much still remained
to be done. Belisarius repaired the rents which still existed, drew a deep and
wide fosse round the outer side of the wall, and supplied what he considered to
be a deficiency in the battlements by adding a crosswall to each, on the left hand, so that the soldier might dispense with the use of a
shield, being guarded against arrows and javelins hurled against him from that
quarter.
The walls and gates of imperial Rome, substantially the same walls which
Belisarius defended, and many of the same gates at which the Goths battered,
are still visible; and few historical monuments surpass them in interest. No
survey of them has yet been made sufficiently minute to enable us to say with
certainty to what date each portion of them belongs: but some general
conclusions may be safely drawn even by the superficial observer. Here you may
see the opus reticulatum, that cross-hatched
brickwork which marks a building of the Julian or Flavian age; there the fine
and regular brickwork of Aurelian; there again the poor debased work of the
time of Honorius. A little further on, you come to a place where layers of bricks
regularly laid cease altogether. Mere rubble-work thrust in anyhow, blocks of
marble, fragments of columns; such is the material with which the fatal holes
in the walls have been darned and patched; and here antiquaries are generally
disposed to see the 'tumultuary' restorations of Belisarius working in hot
haste to complete his repairs before Witigis or the later Totila should appear
before the walls. In a few places the gap in the brickwork is supplied by
different and more massive materials. Great square blocks of the black volcanic
stone called tufa, of which the wall of Servius Tullius was composed, are the
sign of this intrusive formation. Are these also due to the rapid restorations
of Belisarius, or was it part of the original plan to make the now superseded
wall of the King do duty, after nine centuries, in the rampart of the Emperor?
We turn an angle of the walls, and we see the mighty arches of the interlacing
aqueducts by which Rome was fed with water from the Tiburtine and the Alban
hills, with admirable skill made available for the defence of the city.
We move onward, we come to Christian monograms, to mediaeval
inscriptions, to the armorial bearings of Popes. At the south of the city we
look upon the grand Bastion, which marks the restoring hand of the great
Farnese Pope, Paul III, employing the genius of Sangallo.
We pass the great gate of Ostia, that gate through which St. Paul is
believed to have been led forth to martyrdom, and which now bears his name. The
wall runs down sharply to the Tiber, at the foot of that strange artificial
hill the Monte Testaccio; for half a mile it lines
the left bank of the stream; then at the gate of Porto it reappears on the
opposite side of the Tiber. Here it changes its character, and the change is
itself a compendium of mediaeval history. The wall which on the eastern shore
was Imperial, with only some marks of Papal repair, now becomes purely Papal;
the turrets give place to bastions; Urban VIII, as name-giver to the rampart,
takes the place of Aurelian. We see at once how dear 'the Leonine city' was to
the Pontifical heart; we discern that St. Peter's and the Vatican have taken
the place which in imperial Rome was occupied by the Palatine, in Republican
Rome by the Forum, the Capitol, and the Temple of Concord.
As everywhere in Rome, so pre-eminently in our circuit of the wall, the
oldest and the newest ages are constantly jostling against one another. At the
east of the city we were looking at the tufa blocks hewn by the masons of
Servius Tullius. Now on the west we see the walls by the Porta Aurelia showing
everywhere the dints of French bullets hurled against them when Oudinot in 1849 crushed out the little life of the Roman
Republic of Mazzini. For yet more recent history we turn again to our northern
starting-point, and there, almost under the palace of Belisarius, we see the
stretch of absolutely new wall which marks the extent of the practicable breach
through which the troops of Victor Emmanuel entered Rome in September, 1870.
A first and even a second perambulation of the walls of Rome, especially
on the outside, may hardly give the observer an adequate conception of their
original completeness as a work of defence. It has been well pointed out by one
of our German authorities that Aurelian’s object in constructing it cannot have
been merely to furnish cover for the comparatively small numbers of the cohortes urbanae,
the ordinary city-guard, but that he must have contemplated the necessity of a
whole army garrisoning the city and defending his work. For this reason we have
in Aurelian's original line of circumvallation, and to some extent, but less
perfectly, in the Honorian restoration of it, a
complete gallery or covered way carried all-round the inside of the wall.
Nowhere can this original idea of the wall be better studied than on the
south-east of the city, in the portion between the Amphitheatrum Castrense and the Porta Asinaria,
or, in ecclesiastical language, between the Church of Santa Croce and that of
St. John Lateran. Here, if we walk outside, we see the kind of work with which
the rest of our tour of inspection has already made us familiar, that is, a
wall from 50 to 60 feet high, with square towers some 20 feet higher than the
rest of the work, projecting from the circuit of the wall at regular intervals
of 33 yards. If we now pass in, not by the Porta Asinaria,
which is closed, but by its representative the modern Porta San Giovanni, we
find ourselves looking upon a structure greatly resembling one of the great
Roman aqueducts, and probably often taken for such by travellers. We can see of
course the backs of the square towers, but between every two of these there are
seven tall arches about 33 feet high. A window through the wall near the bottom
of each of these corresponds with an opening outside about half-way up the face
of the wall, and thus lets us see that the level of the ground inside is from
20 to 30 feet higher than outside, the apparent height of the wall inside being
of course reduced by the same amount. In the wall behind the arches we can see
the holes marking the places where the ends of two sets of rafters, one above
the other, have rested. Moreover, the piers which separate the arches are
pierced by another set of tall thin arches at right angles to the others. A
glance at the accompanying engravings will give a clearer idea of the
construction of the walls than a page of description. The meaning of all these
indications evidently is that a corridor or covered way ran round the whole
inner circuit of the wall of Aurelian, where that was finished according to the
design of the imperial builder. This gallery was two stories high between the
towers; a third story would be added where these gave the needful height.
Besides these covered galleries, which were used for the rapid transfer of
troops from one part of the circuit to another, there was the regular path at
the top of the walls, partially protected by battlements, on which the
defenders were doubtless mustered when actual fighting was going forward.
For our knowledge of the fortifications of the state of the city we are
not entirely dependent on our present the eighth observation of the walls,
battered as they have been by the storms of the Middle Ages, and still more
grievously as they have suffered at the hands of restorers and modernizers in
the last three centuries. The ‘Pilgrim of Einsiedeln’, as he is conventionally
termed, a visitor to Rome in the eighth or ninth century, recorded the most
noteworthy objects of the Eternal City in a MS. which is preserved in the
monastery of Einsiedeln in Switzerland. Among other information, he gives us the
precise number of the towers, the battlements, and the loopholes in each
section of the wall, including even the sanitary arrangements rendered
necessary by the permanent presence of a large body of troops. It has been
generally supposed that the Einsiedeln Pilgrim himself counted the towers of
the sacred city of St. Peter; but one of our best German authorities suggests,
with great probability, that he is really transcribing some much earlier
official document, possibly that drawn up by the architects of Honorius at the
beginning of the fifth century.
While Belisarius is repairing the mouldering walls and assigning to the
rude cohorts of his many-nationed army their various
duties in the anticipated siege, we may allow ourselves to cast a hasty glance
over the city which he has set himself to defend. A hasty glance, for this is
not the time nor the place for minute antiquarian discussion; yet a glance of
some sad and earnest interest, since we know that this is the last time that
Rome in her glory will be seen by mortal man. The things which have befallen
her up to this time have been only slight and transitory shocks, which have
left no lasting dint upon her armour—Alarics burning
of the palace of Sallust, Gaiserics half-accomplished
spoliation of the golden roof of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, some havoc
wrought in the insolence of their triumph by the foederati of Ricimer. More
destructive, no doubt, was the slow process of denudation already commenced by
the unpatriotic hands of the Romans themselves, and only partially checked by
the decrees of Majorian and Theodoric. Still, as a whole, Rome the Golden City,
the City of Consuls and Emperors, the City of Cicero's orations, of Horace's
idle perambulations, of Trajan's magnificent constructions, yet stood when the
Gothic war began. In the squalid, battered, depopulated, cluster of ruins, over
which twenty-eight years later sounded the heralds' trumpets proclaiming that
the Gothic war was ended, it would have been hard for Cicero, Horace, or Trajan
to recognize his home. Classical Rome we are looking on for the last time; the
Rome of the Middle Ages, the city of sacred shrines and relics and pilgrimages,
is about to take her place.
It is impossible not to regret that Procopius has allowed himself to say
so little as to the impression made on him by Rome. He must have entered the
city soon after his chief, travelling by the Appian Way, the smooth and durable
construction of which moved him to great admiration. But of the city itself,
except of its gates and walls in so far as these require description in order
to illustrate the siege, he has very little to say. It is easy to understand
his silence. Most authors shrink from writing about the obvious and well-known.
It would perhaps be easier to meet with ten vivid descriptions of the Island of
Skye than one of the Strand or Cheapside. But not the less is it a loss for us
that that quick and accurate observer, the Herodotus of the Post-Christian age,
has not recorded more of his impressions of the streets, the buildings, and the
people of Rome. Let us endeavour, however, to put ourselves in his place, and
to reconstruct the city, at least in general outline, as he must have beheld
it.
Journeying, as it is most probable that Procopius did, by the Appian
Way, he would enter Rome by the gate then called the Porta Appia, but now the
Porta di San Sebastiano, one of the finest of the still remaining entrances
through the wall of Aurelian, with two noble towers, square within and
semicircular without, the upper part of which, according to a careful English
observer, bears traces of the restoring hand of Theodoric. Immediately after
entering the city, Procopius would find himself passing under the
still-preserved Arch of Drusus; and those of Trajan and Verus, spanning the
intra-mural portion of the Appian Way, would before long attract his notice.
This portion of the city, now so desolate and empty of inhabitants, was then
probably thickly sown with the houses of the lower order of citizens.
High on his left, when he had proceeded somewhat more than half-a-mile,
rose the mighty pile known to the ancients as the Thermae Antoninianae,
and to the moderns as the Baths of Caracalla. Even in its ruins this building
gives to the spectator an almost overwhelming idea of vastness and solidity.
But when Procopius first saw it, the 1600 marble seats for bathers were
probably all occupied, the gigantic swimming-bath was filled with clear cold
water from the Marcian aqueduct, the great circular Caldarium, 160 feet in
diameter, showed dimly through the steam the forms of hundreds of bathing
Romans. Men were wrestling in the Palaestra and walking up and down in the
Peristyle connected with the baths. Polished marble and deftly wrought mosaics
lined the walls and covered the floors. At every turn one came upon some
priceless work of art, like the Farnese Bull, the Hercules, the Flora, those
statues the remnants of which, dug out of these ruins as from an unfailing
quarry, have immortalized the names of Papal Nephews and made the fortunes of
the museums of Bourbon Kings.
And now, as the traveller moved on, there rose more and more proudly
above him the hill which has become for all later ages synonymous with regal
power and magnificence, the imperial Palatine. Not as now, with only a villa
and a convent standing erect upon it, the rest, grass and wild-flowers, and
ruins for the most part not rising above the level of the ground, the whole
hill was crowded with vast palaces, in which each successive dynasty had endeavoured
to outshine its predecessor in magnificence. Here, first, rose the tall but
perhaps somewhat barbarous edifice with which Severus had determined to arrest
the attention of his fellow provincials from Africa travelling along the
Appian Way, in order that their first question about Rome might be answered by
his name. Just below it was the mysterious Septizonium,
the work of the same Emperor, the porch of his palace and the counterpart of
his tomb, of whose seven sets of columns, rising tier above tier, three were
yet remaining only three centuries ago, when the remorseless Sixtus V
transported them to the Vatican. Behind the palace of Severus, on the summit of
the Palatine, were visible the immense banqueting halls of the Flavian
Emperors, Vespasian and Domitian; behind them again the more modest house of
Tiberius, and the labyrinth of apartments reared by the crazy Caligula.
In what condition are we to suppose that all these imperial dwellings
were maintained when the troops of the Eastern Caesar came to reclaim them for
their lord? Certainly not with all that untarnished magnificence which they
possessed before the troubles of the third century commenced; hardly even with
the show of affluence which they may still have worn when Constantius visited
Rome in 357. Two centuries had elapsed since then—two centuries of more evil
than good fortune—centuries in which the struggle for mere existence had left
the rulers of the State little money or time to spare for repairs or
decorations. But nothing, it may fairly be argued, had yet occurred to bring
these massive piles into an obviously ruinous condition. If the comparison may
be allowed, these dwellings on the Palatine probably presented in the state
apartments that dingy appearance of faded greatness which one sees in the
country-house of a noble family long resident abroad, but externally they had
lost nothing of the stateliness with which they were meant to impress the mind
of the beholder.
If Procopius ascended to the summit of the Palatine he may perchance
have seen from thence, in the valley of the Circus Maximus, between the
Palatine and Aventine hills, a chariot race exhibited by the General to keep
the populace in good-humour. Here the Byzantine official would feel himself to
be at once at home. Whether he favoured the Blue or the Green faction we know
not (though his animosity against Theodora makes us inclined to suspect him of
sympathy with the Greens), but to whichsoever he belonged he could see his own
faction striving for victory, and would hear, from at any rate a large portion
of the crowd, the shouts with which they hailed the triumph, or the groans with
which they lamented the defeat, of their favourite colour.
Continuing his journey, the historian passed under the eastern summit of
the Palatine, and then beneath the Arch of Constantine, that Arch which stands
at this day comparatively undefaced, showing how the first Christian emperor
purloined the work of the holier heathen Trajan to commemorate his own less
worthy victories. Emerging from the shadow of the Arch he stood before the
Flavian Amphitheatre and looked up to the immense Colossus of Nero, that statue
of the Sun-god 120 feet in height, towering almost as high as the mighty
edifice itself, to which it gave its best-known name, the Colosseum. It is
generally felt that the Colosseum is one of those buildings which has gained by
ruin. The topmost story, consisting, not of arches like the three below it, but
of mere blank wall-spaces divided by pilasters, must have had when unbroken a
somewhat heavy appearance; while, on the other hand, no beholder of the still
perfect building could derive that impression of massive strength which we gain
by looking, through the very chasms and rents in its outer shell, at the
gigantic circuit of its concentric ellipses, at the massive walls radiating
upwards and outwards upon which the seats of its 87,000 spectators rested.
Altogether there is a pathetic majesty in the ruined Colosseum which can hardly
have belonged to it in its days of prosperity, and, as one is almost inclined
to say, of vulgar self-assertion.
But if this be true of the Colosseum itself, it is not true of the
surrounding objects. The great Colossus has already been referred to. It is now
represented only by a shapeless and unsightly heap of stones which once formed
part of its pedestal. The ugly conical mass of brickwork near the same spot,
and known as the Meta Sudans, was a beautiful
upspringing fountain thirty or forty feet high when Procopius passed that way.
Eastwards, on the Oppian hill, stretched the
long line of the Thermae Titi, the baths reared by Titus above the vast ruins
of the Golden House of Nero. Immediately in front of the Colosseum (on the
north-west) was the double temple reared by Hadrian in honour of Venus and
Rome, perhaps one of the most beautiful edifices in the whole enclosure of the
city. It was composed of two temples placed back to back. In one was the statue
of Venus the Prosperous (Venus Felix), looking towards the Colosseum, in the
other Roma Eterna sat gazing towards her own Capitol. In the curvilinear
pediment of the latter was a frieze, according to the opinion of some
archaeologists representing Mars caressing Rhea Sylvia, and the wolf suckling
their heroic offspring. Around the whole structure ran a low colonnade
containing four hundred pillars.
The famous Sacred Way, where once Horace loitered, a well-marked street,
not as now a mere track through the midst of desolation, led the historian up
to the marble arch of Titus. Here he doubtless looked, as we may yet look, upon
the representation of the seven-branched candlestick and the other spoils of
Jerusalem, the strange story of whose wanderings he has himself recorded for us
in his history of the Vandalic War.
Descending the slope of the Via Sacra, and having on his right the lofty
Basilica of Constantine, whose gigantic arches (long but erroneously called the
Temple of Peace) stand on their hill over against the Palatine, and seem to
assert a predominance over its yet remaining ruins, Procopius now with each
downward step saw the glories of the Roman Forum more fully revealed. On his
left the temple of the Great Twin Brethren, three of whose graceful Corinthian
columns still survive, a well-known object to all visitors to the Forum. Hard
by, the fountain from which the celestial horsemen gave their horses to drink
after the battle of Lake Regillus. Further on, the
long colonnades of the Basilica of Julius, four law-courts under the same roof.
On his right, the tall columns of the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, perhaps
already supporting the roof of a Christian shrine, though not the unsightly edifice
which at present clings to and defaces them; the chapel of the great Julius,
the magnificent Basilica of Emilius; and, lastly, those two venerable objects, centers for so many ages of all the political life of Rome,
the Senate-house and the Rostra. The Senate was still a living body, though its
limbs had long been shaken by the palsies of a timid old age; but the days when
impassioned orators thundered to the Roman people from the lofty Rostra had
long passed away. Yet we may be permitted to conjecture that Procopius, with
that awe-struck admiration which he had for “the Romans of old time” gazed upon
those weatherworn trophies of the sea and mused on the strange
contradictoriness of Fate, which had used all the harangues of those impetuous
orators as instruments to fashion the serene and silent despotism of Justinian.
At the end of the Forum, with an embarrassment of wealth which perplexes
us even in their ruins, rise the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Temple of
Concord, the Temple of Vespasian, the ill-restored Temple of Saturn. Between
them penetrated the Clivus Capitolinus, up which once slowly mounted the car of
many a triumphing general. Behind all stretched the magnificent background of
the Capitoline Hill, on the left-hand summit of which stood the superb mass of
the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, robbed by Gaiseric of half its golden tiles,
but still resplendent under the western sun Then came the saddle-shaped
depression faced by the long Tabularium: and then the
right-hand summit of the Capitoline, crowned by the Temple of Juno Moneta.
We have supposed our historian to deviate a little from the straight
path in order to explore to the uttermost the buildings of the Republican
Forum; but as his business lies at the northern extremity of the city, he must
retrace a few of his steps and avail himself of the line of communication
between the Via Sacra and the Via Flaminia which was opened up by the
beneficent despotism of the Emperors. That is to say, he must leave the Forum
of the Republic and traverse the long line of the spacious and well-planned
Fora of the Caesars. In no part is the contrast between ancient and modern Rome
more humiliating than here. In our day, a complex of mean and irregular streets
almost entirely destitute of classical interest or mediaeval picturesqueness,
fills up the interval between the Capitoline and the Quirinal hills. The deeply
cut entablature of the Temple of Minerva resting upon the two half-buried 'Colonnacce' in front of the baker's shop, the three pillars
of the Temple of Mars Ultor, the great feudal fortress
of the Tor de Conti, and that most precious historical monument the Column of
Trajan, alone redeem this region from utter wearisomeness. But this space, now
so crowded and so irregular, was once the finest bit of architectural
landscape-gardening in Rome. The Forum of Vespasian, the Forum of Nerva, the
Forum of Augustus, the Forum of Julius, the Forum of Trajan, a series of
magnificent squares and arcades, opening one into the other, occupying a space
some 600 yards long by 100 wide and terminating in the mighty granite pillars
of the Temple of Trajan, produced on the mind of the beholder the same kind of
effect, but on a far grander scale, which is wrought by Trafalgar Square in
London or the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Let not the modern traveller, who,
passing from the Corso to the Colosseum, is accosted by his driver with the
glibly uttered words Foro Trajano suppose that the
little oblong space, with a few pillar-bases which he beholds at the foot of
the memorable Column, is indeed even in ruin the entire Forum of the greatest
of the Emperors. The column is Trajan's column doubtless, though
‘Apostolic statues climb
The imperial urn whose ashes slept sublime
Buried in air, the deep blue sky of Rome,
And looking to the stars'.
But the so-called Foro Trajano is only a small
transverse section of one member of the Trajanic series, the Basilica Ulpia. The column, as is known, measured the height of
earth which had to be dug away from a spur of the Capitoline hill in order to
form the Forum. Between it and the Basilica Ulpia rose the two celebrated
libraries of Greek and Latin authors, and between these two buildings stood
once, and probably yet stood in the days of Procopius, that' everlasting statue
of brass which by the Senate's orders was erected in honour of Sidonius,
Poet-laureate and son-in-law of an Emperor. In those Libraries Procopius, in
the intervals of the business and peril of the siege, may often have wandered
in order to increase his acquaintance with the doings of the Romans of old.
What treasures of knowledge, now for ever lost to the world, were still
enshrined in those apartments! There all the rays of classical Art and Science
were gathered into a focus. More important perhaps for us, all that the Greeks
and Romans knew (and it was not a little, though carelessly recorded)
concerning the Oriental civilization which preceded theirs, and concerning the
Teutonic barbarism which encompassed it, was still contained in those
magnificent literary collections. There was the Chaldean history of Berosus, there were the authentic Egyptian king-lists of
Manetho, there was Livy's story of the last days of the Republic and the first
days of the Empire, there was Tacitus's full history of the conquest of
Britain, all that Ammianus could tell about the troubles of the third century
and the conversion of Constantine, all that Cassiodorus had written about the
royal Amals and the dim original of the Goths. All this perished, apparently in
those twenty years of desolating war which now lie before us. It may be doubted
whether for us the loss of the Bibliothecae Ulpiae is not even more to be regretted than that of the
Library of Alexandria.
Ammianus tells us that when the Emperor Constantius visited Rome he
gazed with admiration on the Capitol, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the
Theatre of Pompey, but still with admiration which could express itself in
words. “But when”, says the historian, “he came to the Forum of Trajan, that
structure unique in all the world, and, as I cannot but think, marvellous in
the eyes of the Divinity himself, he beheld with silent amazement those
gigantic interfacings of stones which it is past the power of speech to
describe, and which no mortal must in future hope to imitate. Hopeless of ever
attempting any such work himself, he would only look at the horse of Trajan,
placed in the middle of the vestibule and bearing the statue of the Emperor.
‘That', said Constantius, ‘I can imitate, and I will’. Hormisdas, a royal
refugee from the court of Persia, replied, with his nation's quickness of
repartee: But first, 0 Emperor, if you can do so, order a stable to be built as
fair as that before us, that your horse may have as fine an exercising ground
as the one we are now looking upon.”
Emerging from the imperial Fora, Procopius would now enter upon the Via
Lata, broad as its name denotes, one of the longest streets, if not the
longest, in Rome, and very nearly corresponding to the modern Corso. The Subura, which lay a little to the east of the Forum of
Augustus, was once at any rate one of the most thickly peopled districts of
Rome, and we shall perhaps not be wrong in assuming that in the regions east of
the Via Lata, upon the Quirinal, Viminal, and Esquiline Hills, where the tall
buildings of the Fourth Rome, the Rome of Victor Emmanuel and United Italy, are
now arising, the humbler classes of the Second or Imperial Rome had chiefly
fixed their abodes.
On the left side of the Via Lata, where the Third or Papal Rome has spun
its web of streets thickest, all or nearly all was yet given up to pleasure.
This was the true West End of Rome, the region in which her parks and theatres
were chiefly placed. Here were the great open spaces of the Campus Martius and
Campus Flaminius; here two racecourses, those of Flaminius and Domitian; here
the great theatres of Pompey, of Balbus, and of Marcelus, and the Porticoes of
the Argonauts and of Octavia. Altogether it was a region devoted to pleasure
and idleness by the side of the tawny Tiber, and most unlike the closely-built
and somewhat dingy quarters of the city which now occupy it.
As Procopius moved along the straight course of the Via Lata his eye
would probably be caught by the airy dome of the Pantheon of Agrippa, hovering
over the buildings on his left. He would thread the Arch of Claudius, would
stand at the foot of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and then pass beneath that
Emperors Arch of Triumph. Two mighty sepulchres could then arrest his
attention: the Tomb of Hadrian seeming by its massive bulk almost close at
hand, though on the other bank of the Tiber; and the Mausoleum of Augustus
rising immediately on his left, a rotunda of white marble below, a green and
shady pleasance above, recalling, by its wonderful admixture of Nature and Art,
the far-famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
And now at length his never-to-be-forgotten first view of Rome was
drawing to a close. The soon-sinking sun of late autumn warned him, perchance,
to quicken his pace. He bore off to the right: by some steep steps where the
receivers of the public alimony were wont to cluster, he climbed the high
garden-decked Pincian. He entered the palace, bowed
low before Belisarius, lower yet before the imperious Antonina, and received
the General's orders as to the share of work that he was to undertake in
connection with the provisionment of the city. Such
is an account, imaginary indeed, but not improbable, of the circumstances in
which the soldier secretary first entered and first beheld Rome reunited to
the Roman Empire.
It remains for us briefly to notice the rising Christian importance of
the Christian buildings of Rome, of though we will here dispense with the
imaginary companionship of Procopius, whose somewhat skeptical temper, well acquainted with the subjects in dispute among Christians, but
determined to say as little as possible about them, holding it to be proof of a
madman's folly to enquire into the nature of God, would make him an uncongenial
guest at the sacred shrines. Of the five great patriarchal churches of Rome,
three were beyond the walls of the city, and one was on its extreme verge. The
last, and at the period that we have now reached still the foremost in dignity,
is St. John Lateran, or the Basilica of Constantine, the so- called
Mother-Church of Christendom. It stands near the Asinarian Gate, on the Property which Fausta, the unhappy wife of Constantine, inherited
from her father Maximian, and which had once belonged to the senatorial family
of the Laterani; and it formed the subject of that
real and considerable donation of the first Christian Emperor to the Bishops of
Rome which later ages distorted into a quasi-feudal investiture of the Imperial
City.
Upon the Vatican Hill, outside the walls of St. Peters, Aurelian,
looking down upon the Tiber and the Tomb of Hadrian, rose the five long aisles,
the semicircular apse, and the nearly square entrance-Atrium of the Basilica of
St. Peter. The region immediately surrounding it was perhaps still called the
Gardens of Nero. It is certain that the reason for placing the Basilica on that
spot was that there was the traditional site of the martyrdom of the Apostle,
as well as of the sufferings of the nameless Christian crowd who, dressed in
cloaks covered with pitch and set on fire, served as living torches to light
that throned Satan to his revels and his chariot-races on the Vatican-mount.
Outside the gate of Ostia, and also near the traditional scene of the
martyrdom of the Apostle to whom it was dedicated, stood the noble Basilica of
St. Paul. This edifice, commenced by Theodosius, completed by Honorius, and
having received the finishing touches to its decorations at the hand of
Placidia under the guidance of Pope Leo, subsisted with but little change to
the days of our fathers. The lamentable fire of 1823, by which the greater part
of it was destroyed, took from us the most interesting relic of Christian
Imperial Rome. Happily the restoration, though it cannot give us back the
undiminished interest of the earlier building, has been carried on with
admirable fidelity to the original design.
This cannot be said of the Liberian Basilica, the great church now known
as S. Maria Maggiore, which, standing high on the Esquiline Hill, looked down
westwards on the crowded Subura, and northwards
towards the palatial Baths of Diocletian. The outside of the building has
sustained the extremity of insult and wrong at the hands of the tasteless
pseudo-classical restorers of the eighteenth century; and the inside, though
not absolutely ruined by them, though its mosaics are still visible and much of
its long colonnade still remains, shows too plainly how unsafe were the
treasures of Christian antiquity in the hands of the conceited architects of
the Renaissance.
The last of the great Basilicas, that of the martyred S. Lawrence, one
mile outside the Tiburtine Gate, has suffered less ravage at the hands of
restorers. It was in the thirteenth century singularly re-arranged and
transformed, its apse being pulled down and turned into a nave, and its
original vestibule being turned into a choir: still we have substantially
before us the same church which was surrounded by the Gothic armies in their
siege of Rome. With that blending of the old and of the very new which at once
charms and bewilders the visitor to Rome, we have here again an inscription
recording the work of ‘the pious mind of Placidia' under the guidance of
Attila's Pope Leo, and in the crypt the just erected tomb of Pio Nono. The
latter is so placed as to command a view of the slab of marble dyed red with
the blood of the deacon Laurentius, martyr for the faith under the Emperor
Claudius Gothicus. This marble slab was a favourite relic with the late
Pontiff.
Besides these live great patriarchal churches there were twenty-eight
parish churches, known by the technical name of Tituli, from which the
Cardinal-presbyters of a later age took their ecclesiastical designations. Some
of these which have been preserved to this day are more interesting than the
churches of greater dignity, having by reason of their comparative
insignificance escaped the hand of the Renaissance destroyer.
The main features, which were evidently common to all the Christian
edifices of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries, were (1) a long line of
columns, not by any means always uniform or of the same order of architecture,
and generally taken from the outside of some heathen temple; (2) a semicircular
apse at the eastern end, in which the bishop or presbyter sat surrounded by his
inferior clergy, as the Roman magistrate in the original Basilica sat
surrounded by the various members of his ‘officium'; (3) an arch in front of
the apse, the idea of which was probably borrowed from the triumphal arches of
the Emperors; (4) upon the arch, upon the apse, on the flat wall-space above
the arches, in fact wherever they could conveniently be introduced, a blaze of
bright mosaics, like those still preserved to us at Ravenna and in a very few
of these Roman churches. The subjects represented are the Savior, the symbols
of the four Evangelists, the twelve Apostles under the guise of sheep, the
mystic cities Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the Jordan and the four rivers of
Paradise, and other emblems of the same character.
The fact that the columns of these churches were as a rule taken from
heathen temples must of course qualify to some extent the statement that the splendour
of the city was undiminished when Procopius entered it. Temples, not merely
abandoned to silence and solitude, but rudely stripped of their pillared
magnificence, must in many places have offended the eye of a beholder more
sensitive to beauty than to religious enthusiasm. Still upon the whole, and
with this abatement, we may repeat our proposition that it was the stately Rome
of Consuls and Emperors which men then looked upon, and which after the middle
of the sixth century they never beheld again.
Alas, for Earth, for never shall we see
That brightness in her eye she bore when Rome was free.
