Ruins of Ancient Cities (Vol. 2 of 2)

Poggio Bracciolini gives a melancholy picture of what, in his time, was the state of this celebrated rock. “This Tarpeian rock was a savage and solitary thicket. In the time of the poet it was covered with the golden roofs of a temple; the temple is overthrown, the gold has been pillaged, the wheel of fortune has accomplished her revolution, and the sacred ground is again disfigured with thorns and brambles. The hill of the Capitol, on which we sit, was formerly the head of the Roman empire, the citadel of the earth, the terror of kings; illustrated by the footsteps of so many triumphs, enriched with the spoils and attributes of so many nations. This spectacle of the world, how is it fallen! how changed! how defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines, and the benches of the senators are concealed by a dunghill.”

“Like the modern Tiber, the modern Tarpeian,” says an elegant traveller, “is little able to bear the weight of its ancient reputation.” “The only precipice that remains,” says another traveller (Mathews) “is one about thirty feet from the point of a wall, where you might leap down on the dung, mixed in the fold below, without any fear of breaking your bones.”

The Aqueducts were, beyond all question, some of the noblest designs of the Romans. Frontinus, a Roman author, and a person of consular dignity, who compiled a treatise on this subject, affirms them to be the clearest token of the grandeur of the empire. The first invention of them is attributed to Appius Claudius, A. U. C. 441, who brought water into the city by a channel eleven miles in length. But this was very inconsiderable compared to those that were afterwards carried on by the emperors and other persons; several of which were cut through the mountains, and all other impediments, for above forty miles together; and of such height, that a man on horseback, as Procopius informs us, might ride through them without the least difficulty. This, however, is meant only of the constant course of the channel; for the vaults and arches were, in some places, 109 feet high.

Procopius makes the Aqueducts only fourteen; but Aurelius Victor has enlarged the number to twenty. The Claudian Aqueduct conveyed 800,000 tons of water each day into the city.

The Forums of Rome were of two kinds; one a place of popular assembly, both for business, and pleasure; serving at once the purposes of what we call an Exchange, certain courts of justice, and of hustings for the election of public functionaries: the other consisted of market-places. The chief forum was emphatically called the Roman, or the Great Forum.

The second forum, built in Rome, was erected by Julius Cæsar. The third was called sometimes the Augustan, from its having been formed by Augustus; and sometimes the Forum of Mars from the temple of that god, erected by him. Some remains are still in existence. The fourth forum was begun by Domitian, but being finished by Nerva, it was called after his name. A fifth forum was built by the emperor Trajan; said to have been the most celebrated work of the kind in the city. It was built with the spoils he had taken in his wars. The roof was of brass.

Ammianus Marcellinus, in his description of Constantine’s triumphal entrance into Rome, when he has brought him, with no ordinary admiration, by the Baths, the Pantheon, the Capitol, and other noble structures, as soon as ever he gives him a sight of the Forum of Trajan, he puts him into an ecstacy, and cannot forbear making a harangue upon the matter. We meet in the same place with a very smart repartee, which Constantine received at the time from Ormisdas, a Persian prince. The emperor, as he greatly admired everything belonging to this noble pile, so he had a particular fancy for the statue of Trajan’s horse, which stood on the top of it, and expressed his desire of doing as much for his own beast. “Pray, sir,” says the prince, “before you talk of getting such a horse, will you be pleased to build such a stable to put him in?”

Besides these there was another. This was situated not in the city, but in its neighbourhood. It was called the Forum Populi, which is frequently mentioned in the history of the republic; and which interests us as being the popular and commercial resort of a free people. At stated periods, the Romans, and their friends and allies, used to meet at that spot, and celebrate the Latinæ Feriæ; on which many holidays and religious ceremonies were accompanied by renewals of treaties of amity, by the interchange of commodities, and by manly sports and pastimes. While the Roman citizens came from the Tiber, the free confederates descended from their mountains, or wended their way from the fertile plains beyond the river. Sir William Gell thinks he can fix this interesting spot. The habitations around the temple of Jupiter Latialis, on Mont Albano, are supposed to have constituted the village called Forum Populi. It is probable that the meeting of the Latin confederates upon the mountain, and the fair held there, led to its erection. Here the consuls had a house where they sometimes lodged, which Dio Cassius (lib. iii.) says was struck with lightning.

We now return to the Great Forum.

… It was once,And long the centre of their universe,The Forum, – whence a mandate, eagle-winged,Went to the ends of the earth. Let us descendSlowly. At every step much may be lost.The very dust we tread stirs as with life;And not a breath but from the ground sends upSomething of human grandeur.… We are come: —And now where once the mightiest spirits metIn terrible conflict; this, while Rome was free,The noblest theatre on this side heaven! – Rogers.

The Forum152 was an entirely open space; it had public buildings in it, as well as around it; we even read of streets passing through it. The Curia, or Senate-house, stood near the foot of the Palatine hill, in about the middle of the eastern side of the Forum. It was built originally by Tullus Hostilius, the third king of Rome; and, after having been repaired by Sylla, was destroyed by fire in the year 53 B. C., when the body of Clodius, who had been murdered by Milo, was carried into it by a tumultuous multitude, and there burnt on a funeral pile, formed of benches of the senators, the tables, the archives, and such other materials as the place afforded. Sylla’s son rebuilt it; but under the false pretence of erecting a temple to “Felicity.” It was again restored by Julius Cæsar.

Vitruvius says, that the Greek Forum was square, with ambulatories in the upper story; the Roman was oblong, with porticos, and shops for bankers, and with galleries in the upper floor, adapted for the management of the public revenues. The Roman forum also included many other edifices of a different nature; as the basilicæ, prison, curiæ, and were enriched with colonnades and sculpture. That of Trajan was entered by four triumphal arches, and had his magnificent column in the centre of it.

A few words will describe the present state of this celebrated spot: —

Now all is changed! and here, as in the wild,The day is silent, dreary as the night;None stirring, save the herdsman and his herd,Savage alike; or they that would explore,Discuss and learnedly; or they that come(And there are many who have crossed the earth)That they may give the hours to meditation,And wander, often saying to themselves,“This was the Roman Forum.”

The list of edifices in the Forum would be tedious; nor could even learned antiquaries now make it correct; but among them we may mention the temple of the Penates, or household gods, the temple of Concord, the temple of Jupiter Stator, the temple of Castor and Pollux153, the temple of Vesta, the temple of Victory, the temple of Julius Cæsar, and the arches of Fabian, Tiberius, and Severus. All these, however, and in most cases even the traces of them, have disappeared, – the few objects remaining being a puzzle to such persons as take an interest in them, and examine the matters on the spot.

“The glories of the Forum are now fled forever,” says Mr. Eustace. Its temples are fallen; its sanctuaries are crumbled into dust; its colonnades encumber pavements, now buried under their remains. The walls of the rostra, stripped of their ornaments, and doomed to eternal silence; a few shattered porticos, and here and there an insulated column standing in the midst of broken shafts, vast fragments of marble capitals and cornices heaped together in masses, remind the traveller that the field which he now traverses was once the Roman forum154. It is reduced, indeed, not to the pasture-ground for cattle, which Virgil has described, but to the market-place for pigs, sheep, and oxen; being now the Smithfield of Rome. The hills, the rivers, the roads and bridges, in this mother of cities, mostly go by their ancient Latin names, slightly altered in Italian, but the Forum has not even retained its name; it is now called Campo Vaccino, or the Field of Cows!

This scene155, though now so desolate and degraded, was once the great centre of all the business, power, and splendour of Rome. Here, as long as the Romans were a free people, all the affairs of the state were debated in the most public manner; and from the rostra, elevated in the midst of the square, and with their eyes fixed on the capitol, which immediately faced them, and which was suited to fill their minds with patriotism, whilst the Tarpeian rock reminded them of the fate reserved for treason and corruption, the noblest of orators “wielded at will” the fierce democracy, or filled the souls of gathered thousands with one object, one wish, one passion – the freedom and glory of the Roman race; – a freedom which would have been more enduring had the glory been less.

“Yes; in yon field below,A thousand years of silenced factions sleep —The Forum, where the immortal accents glow,And still the eloquent air breathes, burns, of Cicero!“The field of freedom, faction, fame, and blood.Here a proud people’s passions were exhaled,From the first hour of empire in the bud,To that when further worlds to conquer fail’d;But long before had Freedom’s face been veil’d,And Anarchy assumed her attributes;Till every lawless soldier who assail’dTrod on the trembling senate’s slavish mutes,Or raised the venal voice of baser prostitutes.”

Here the orators of the people brought their accusations against public men, or pronounced eulogies on such as had died for their country; and here, also, were exhibited the bleeding heads or lifeless bodies of traitors, or, as it but too often happened, of men unjustly deemed so by an overbearing faction. The Forum was the court of justice, and in homely days of the early republic, civil and criminal causes were tried and decided by simple laws in the open air, or in very plain sheds built in this square. The humble schools for the republican children (for even these old Romans had places of public instruction for the poor people) stood round the Forum, which seems to have been intermixed with shops, shambles, stalls, lowly temples, and altars.

No object within the walls of Rome, according to Dr. Burton, is so melancholy as the Forum. “We may lament,” says he, “the ruin of a temple or a palace, but our interest in the remaining fragments is frequently diminished by our either not knowing with certainty to what building they belonged, or because history has not stamped them with any peculiar recollections. But standing upon the hill of the Capitol, and looking down upon the Forum, we contemplate a scene with which we fancy ourselves familiar, and we seem suddenly to have quitted the habitations of living men. Not only is its former grandeur utterly annihilated, but the ground has not been applied to any other purpose. When we descend into it, we find that many of the ancient buildings are buried under irregular heaps of soil. A warm imagination might fancy that some spell hung over the spot, forbidding it to be profaned by the ordinary occupations of inhabited cities. What Virgil says of its appearance before the Trojan settlers arrived, is singularly true at the present moment:

“There oxen strolled where palaces are raised,And bellowing herds in the proud Forum grazed156.”

Where the Roman people saw temples erected to perpetuate their exploits; and where the Roman nobles vied with each other in the magnificence of their dwellings, we see now a few isolated pillars standing amongst some broken arches. Or if the curiosity of foreigners has investigated what the natives neither think nor care about, we may, perhaps, see the remnant of a statue, or a column, extracted from the rubbish. Where the Comitia were held, where Cicero harangued, and where the triumphal processions passed, we have now no animated beings, except strangers, attracted by curiosity; the convicts who are employed in excavating, as a punishment, and those more harmless animals, who find a scanty pasture, and a shelter from the sun under a grove of trees. If we look to the boundaries of this desolation, the prospect is equally mournful. At one end we have the hill of the Capitol; on the summit of which, instead of the temple of Jupiter, the wonder of the world, we have the palace of the solitary senator. If we wish to ascend this eminence, we have, on one side, the most ancient structure in Rome, and that a prison; on the other, the ruins of a temple, which seems to have been amongst the finest in the city, and the name of which is not known. If we turn from the capital, we have, on our right, the Palatine hill, which once contained the whole Roman people, and which was afterwards insufficient for the house of one emperor, and is now occupied by a few gardens, and a convent. On the left, there is a range of churches, formed out of ancient temples; and in front, we discover at a considerable distance, through the branches of trees, and the ruins of buildings, the mouldering arches of the Colosseum.

The Mausoleo Adriano was erected by Adrian, in the gardens of Domitian. It is two stories high; the lower square, the upper round. It was formerly covered with Parian marble, and encircled by a concentric portico, and surmounted by a cupola. The Pons Ælius was the approach to it; during the middle ages, it was used as a fortress; and the upper works, of brick, were added to it by Alexander VI.; when it became the citadel of Rome. This castle was of great service to Pope Clement VII., when the city was surprised (A. D. 1527) by the imperial army. The castle was formerly the burial-place of the Roman emperors, which, after Augustus’s mausoleum on the side of the Tiber was filled with arms, Adrian built for himself and his successors; hence it acquired the name of Moles Hadriani. The large round tower in the centre of the edifice was formerly adorned with a considerable number of small pillars and statues; but most of them were broken to pieces by the Romans themselves, who made use of them to defend themselves against the Goths, when they assaulted the city; as may be read at large in Procopius and Baronius. On the top of it stood the Pigna, since in the Belvidere Gardens. It received its name of St. Angelo, from the supposed appearance of an angel, at the time of a pestilence, during the reign of Gregory the Great. It was fortified by Pope Urban VII., with five regular bastions, ramparts, moats, &c. The hall is adorned with gildings, fine paintings, and Adrian’s statue, whose bust, with that of Augustus, is to be seen on the castle wall.

The Mamertine prisons157 are supposed to be the oldest monuments of antiquity in Rome. Livy speaks of them as the work of Ancus Martius. “The state having undergone a vast increase,” says the historian, “and secret villanies being perpetrated, from the distinction between right and wrong being confounded, in so great a multitude of men, a prison was built in the middle of the city, overhanging the Forum, as a terror to the increasing boldness. These prisons are supposed to be called after their founder, Martius. They were enlarged by Servius Tullus; and the part which he added bore the name of Tullian. The front of this prison is open to the street; but above, and resting on it, is built the church of San Giuseppe Falegnani. It has an appearance of great solidity, being composed of immense masses of stone, put together without cement; almost every one of the blocks is upwards of nine feet long, and in height nearly three feet. The length of the front is forty-three feet; but its height does not exceed seventeen; along the upper part runs an inscription, intimating, that Caius Vibius Rufinus and Marcus Cocceius Nerva (who were consuls in the year 23), by a decree of the senate, repaired, enlarged, or did something to the prison. The traveller descends, by the aid of stairs, into the upper cell. Nearly in the middle of the vaulted roof he may perceive an aperture large enough to admit the passage of a man’s body; and directly under it, in the floor of the cell, he will see another opening of a similar character. This affords a direct communication with the lower prison; but he descends at another point by a second flight of steps, modern like the former. The second cell is of much smaller dimensions than the other, being only nineteen feet in length, by nine in breadth, and about six in height.” “It is faced,” says the Rev. Mr. Burgess, “with the same material as the upper one; and it is worthy of remark, as a proof of its high antiquity, that the stones are not disposed with that regularity which the rules of good masonry require; the joinings often coincide, or nearly so, instead of reposing over the middle of the interior block respectively.”

Dr. Burton says, “that a more horrible place for the confinement of a human being than these prisons, can scarcely be imagined. Their condition in ancient times must have been still worse than it now is. The expressions ‘cell of groans,’ ‘house of sadness,’ ‘black prison,’ ‘cave of darkness,’ ‘place darkened with perpetual night;’ and many others, which are to be met with in the pages of the later Latin writers, sufficiently attest the character they bore in ancient times.”

Quintus Pleminius, who had done good service to the republic in the second Punic war, but who afterwards had been sent in chains to Rome, on account of the enormities which he had practised in the government of the town of Locri, was incarcerated in this prison. In the year 194 B. C. certain games were being performed in the city; and while the minds of all were taken up with the sight of them, Quintus Pleminius procured persons to agree to set the city on fire, at night, in several places at once, so that in the consternation of a nocturnal tumult, the prison might be broken open. The matter, however, was disclosed by persons privy thereto, and communicated to the senate; and Pleminius was immediately put to death in the lower cell. The accomplices of Catiline, too, expiated their guilt in this prison. The celebrated African king, Jugurtha, also, in the same place closed his last days. His melancholy end is thus described by Plutarch: —

“Marius, bringing back his army from Africa into Italy, took possession of the consulship the first day of January, and also entered Rome in triumph, showing the Romans what they had never expected to see; this was the king Jugurtha prisoner, who was a man so wary, and who knew so well to accommodate himself to fortune, and who united so much courage to his craft and cunning, that none of his enemies ever thought that they would have him alive. When he had been led in the procession he became deranged, as they say, in his understanding; and, after the triumph, he was thrown into prison; when, as they were stripping him of his tunic by force, and striving in eager haste to take from him his golden ear-ring, they tore it off, together with the lower part of his ear. Being then thrust naked into the deep cavern, he said, full of trouble, and smiling bitterly, ‘Hercules! how cold is this bath of yours!’ Having struggled, however, for six days, with hunger, waiting in suspense till the last hour, from his passionate desire to live, he met with the just rewards of his wicked deeds.” In this prison, also, Perseus, the captive king of Macedonia, lingered many years in hopeless misery; and in one of its cells, also, St. Peter was imprisoned nine years.

Next to the Mamertine prisons, in point of antiquity, but greatly above them as a work of labour and art, was the Cloaca Maxima. The first sewers in Rome were constructed by Tarquinius Priscus. The Cloaca Maxima was the work of Tarquin the Proud.

Pliny says that Agrippa, in his ædileship, made no less than seven streams meet together underground in one main channel, with such a rapid current as to carry all before them that they met with in their passage. Sometimes when they are violently swoln with immoderate rains, they beat with excessive fury against the paving at the bottom and the sides. Sometimes in a flood the Tiber waters oppose them in their course; and then the two streams encounter with great fury; and yet the works preserve their ancient strength, without any sensible damage. Sometimes huge pieces of stone and timber, or such-like materials, are carried down the channel; and yet the fabric receives no detriment. Sometimes the ruin of whole buildings, destroyed by fire or other casualties, presses heavily upon the frame. Sometimes terrible earthquakes shake the very foundations, and yet they still continue impregnable. Such is the testimony of Pliny the Elder.

The Cloaca Maxima still exists. At its outlet in the Tiber, it is said to be thirteen feet high, and as many in breadth. The ancients always regarded this work as a great wonder. Livy speaks of it in terms of admiration; and Pliny equally so; and Dionysius says that the sewers having been once so greatly neglected that sufficient passage was not afforded for the waters, it cost no less a sum than 225,000l. to put them in repair.

The Pyramid of Cestius, one of the most ancient remains, is the only specimen of a pyramid in Rome. It was erected daring the republic, to the memory of Caius Cestius, one of the priests that provided feasts for the gods. It is of great size, being ninety-seven feet in the base, and one hundred and twenty-four in height; and was erected, according to the inscription, in three hundred and thirty days.

This ancient monument remains entire158. It is formed, externally, of white marble. At each corner on the outside was a pillar, once surmounted with a statue. Its form is graceful, and its appearance very picturesque; supported on either side by the ancient wall of Rome, with their towers and galleries venerable in decay, half shaded by a few scattered trees; and, looking down upon a hundred humble tents interspersed in the neighbouring groves, it rises in lonely pomp, and seems to preside over these fields of silence and mortality.

This structure was repaired by order of Pope Alexander VII. in 1663; it having been greatly dilapidated; no less than fifteen feet of rubbish have accumulated above the base. “It is curious,” says Simond, “to see how Nature, disappointed of her usual means of destruction by the pyramidal shape, goes to work another way. That very shape affording a better hold for plants, their roots have penetrated between the stones, and acting like wedges, have lifted and thrown wide large blocks, in such a manner, as to threaten the disjoined assemblage with entire destruction. In Egypt, the extreme heat and want of moisture, during a certain part of the year, hinder the growth of plants in such situations; and in Africa alone are pyramids eternal.” – Close to this is the Protestant burial-ground. “When I am inclined to be serious,” says Mr. Rogers, “I love to wander up and down before the tomb of Caius Cestius. The Protestant burial-ground is there; and most of the little monuments are erected to the young; young men of promise, cut off when on their travels, full of enthusiasm, full of enjoyment; brides in the bloom of their beauty, on their first journey; or children borne from home in search of health. This stone was placed by his fellow-travellers, young as himself, who will return to the house of his parents without him; that by a husband or a father, now in his native country. His heart is buried in that grave. It is a quiet and sheltered nook, covered in the winter with violets; and the pyramid that overshadows it gives a classical and singularly solemn air. You feel an interest there, a sympathy you were not prepared for. You are yourself in a foreign land; and they are for the most part your countrymen. They call upon you in your mother tongue – in English – in words unknown to a native; known only to yourselves: and the tomb of Cestius, that old majestic pile has this also in common with them, – it is itself a stranger among strangers. It has stood there till the language, spoken round about it, has changed; and the shepherd, born at the foot, can read its inscription no longer.”