CHAPTER I



ROME



About seven hundred and fifty years before the Christian era some
Latian settlers founded a town on the banks of the Tiber and became
the Roman people. Were did they come from? Had they come across what
was later to be known as the ager romanus from the Latin stronghold
of Alba Longa, or were they a mixed people, partly composed of those
men from Etruria who were already settled in the country round? In
the confused pictures which tradition has handed down to us we see
Latins in conflict with Etruscans, and Romulus relegating the latter
to a special quarter of the city; but we also see one of the three
tribes into which he divided the people bearing an Etruscan name, an
Etruscan chief as his ally, and we know that while two at least of
her six kings belonged to this race, the religion, the art, and the
political institutions of early Rome were borrowed from that Etruscan
civilisation which was at this epoch the most advanced on Latin soil.

However this may be, four legends cling round the mighty founders of
Rome-the Latian, the Aenean, the Arcadian, the Etruscan. The Arcadian
Evander had brought with him a colony of the indigenous people of
Greece, and founded a town at the foot of the Palatine sixty years
before the Trojan war. But at Alba Longa there also reigned kings
descended from Aeneas, who had come to Latium after the capture of
Troy bringing with him the Palladium, the sacred image of Pallas. His
descendant, the vestal Rhea Silvia, becomes the mother of the twins
Romulus and Remus by Mars. The babes of the guilty priestess are cast
adrift, but their cradle is carried down the Tiber to the foot of the
Palatine, where they are suckled by a wolf, and brought up by the
shepherd community already established there.

In the dim twilight of origins we recognise that Romulus is the type
of the Roman people, whom he symbolises, who are found fighting the
Sabine, the Etruscan, even the Latin, for existence as a nation. In
the dim twilight we see all Roman things coming down the Tiber to the
foot of the Palatine-the original Roma Quadrata-and we see that the
nucleus of the settlement there was the cave of Lupercus, the Italian
shepherds' god, identified later with the Arcadian Pan. This cave was
just above the site of the present church of Santa Anastasia; here
grew the wild fig-tree in whose roots the cradle of Rhea Silvia's
babes became entangled, and here was the hut of Faustulus their
foster-father.

The Grotto of Lupercus is the oldest sanctuary of kingly Rome. For
the people were shepherds. Other nations had risen under shepherd
kings who led their people to war, but no other people had become
world conquerors; no other people had been equally skilled in the
arts of war and the arts of peace, the arts of the plough and the
arts of the spear, in the self-discipline, the heroic devotion, the
unity of purpose, of the men who once carried in their breast the
destinies of the known world.

The story is aptly figured in the person of the god Mars, who was the
reputed father of Romulus and Remus. The Roman god was at first an
agricultural divinity-the "spears of Mars" were the rods with which
the shepherd owner marked his boundaries. When, under the influence
of Greece, Mars became the god of battles, the boundary marker of the
fields became his war weapons. But if the Roman knew how to beat his
ploughshare into a sword, he also knew how to return from the sword
to the plough. The one was never far from the other-they put him in
possession of those two ways of inheriting the earth, multiplying and
subduing, producing and combating. Thus the pastoral legend never
died out from the land of Saturn, and in the proudest flush of
victory, when the relics of the hastae martis were shown to the
triumphant followers of Mars, there was present to the soul of the
Roman the image of the father of Romulus covering the land with
gigantic strides to strike these same hastae into the soil as a sign
of possession, the emblem of primitive law.

Two hills in Central Italy and a swamp between them provided the
theatre of perhaps the greatest millennium in human history. On the
one hill were the Latins-or let us call them the Roman people-the
site of Roma Quadrata, the foster-land of Romulus, the birthplace of
Augustus, the hill which has given its name to the imperial palaces
of the earth. On the other were the Quirites and the site of the
Sabine arx, that Capitolium so-called, says Montfaucon, "because it
was the head of the world, from which the consuls and senators
governed the universe." Whenever the marshy ground between them was
passable, the Latins and Sabines descended the steep declivities of
their hills and transformed it into a battlefield. But even in these
early days they felt the need of a comitium where the rival chiefs
could meet to decide upon terms; and in no long space this battle-
ground became the nucleus and pledge of the political greatness of Rome.

For the Forum symbolises all human civilisation. It is the symbol of
the common meeting ground-the common sentiments and needs-of human
beings, where rancours are laid aside for the business of life its
common but its noblest business, civic, "civilised, " pursuits. It is
the symbol of human greatness also, for the Roman never suffered the
common necessities to force upon him an ignoble peace. The battle-
ground became the centre of civic life, but only on condition that
the interests for which men should combat were never sacrificed to
the interests for which men should co-operate. Through the symbolic
trait d' union of the Forum, two fortresses of barbarians became the
nucleus of the coty which ruled the world, and their people the
imperial people of history.

The city on the Palatine had been extended so as to include the town
of the Sabines or Quorites on the neighbouring Quirinal hill, before
the first king, who was born in the Sabine country, was called to
rule the Roamns. The Capitol at this time was a spur of the Quirinal,
and so remained until Trajan dug away a part of the latter to lay the
foundations of his forum. The Etruscans lived on the Caelian and the
two horns of the Esquiline hills; the former was incorporated in the
primitive city, but the Esquiline and Viminal were not enclosed until
the time of Servius Tullius when Rome first became “the city on Seven
Hills.” The Aventine where Remus had wished to build the city was
colonized by the conquered Latin towns in the reign of Ancus Martius,
and this isolated hill, overlooking the Tiber on one side and the
campagna on the other, still haunts the imagination with its
melancholy beauty, its pariah history as though it embodied the
undying protest of Remus, an unceasing claim upon Roman justice. The
varied and interesting Christian memories here, which begin with the
titulus of Priscilla and Aquila, are continued in the Priory of the
once international Order of the Knights of Malta, recording the
noblest effort of the lay world during the middle ages-the
institution of chivalry; and in the modern Benedictine house of Saint
Anselm-our English Anselm.

The Janiculum, the site of a fortress built by Ancus Martius against
the Etruscans, was not enclosed within the city walls till the time
of Aurelian; the Vatican hill was only enclosed in the ninth century
by Leo IV. All these hills were once steep defences against enemies
in the surrounding country; now that there are no longer any enemies
the Romans appear bent on abolishing the hills, and the mania for
planing and razing is carried to an extent which must seem nothing
less than childish to the visitor. The Viminal has become almost
indistinguishable since the Villa Massimo was pulled down, and only
the name Via Viminale, which replaces the older Via Strozzi,
indicates the hill which lay between the Quirinal and the Esquiline.
Some idea may be gained of the original steepness of the hills when
we realise that in the memory of the Romans the road past Palazzo
Aldobrandini-on a slope of the Quirinal-used to be at the level of
the top of the high wall which now surrounds it. The Capitol was only
approachable from the Forum, and was never connected with the city on
the hither side until the construction of the historic steps of Ara
Coeli, one of the rare works undertaken by the Romans during the
absence of the popes in Avignon.

The Tiber is now but a narrow stream in the midst of its ancient bed.
The Romans had never embanked the swift-flowing river, and the
enormous deposits of the yellow sand which give it its traditional
colour, and which threaten to completely dam the river by the island
of the Tiber, may afford the explanation. The inundations of 1900 in
fact reached the same level as those of 1872, as we may see recorded
in the neighbouring church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin. Few spots in
Rome exceed in varied interest the isola sacra which with its two
historic bridges the pons Fabricius and the pons Cestius spans the
Tiber at the heart of the city. Here was the temple to Aesculapius,
whose worship had been introduced into Rome during a time of
pestilence in obedience to the Sibylline oracles. The island itself
thereafter assumed the form of a huge stone ship, faced with
travertine, the prow with the sculptured staff and serpent of the god
being still clearly visible; and here Greece and Rome met a
civilisation and an art still older than their own, for the mast of
this great ship is formed by an Egyptian obelisk. Hard by is the
district where the Romans, who had borrowed from them their gods and
their cult, compelled the "turba impia "C" the impious crowd") of
Etruscans to dwell; while the walled enclosure in which, from the
eleventh century onwards, Christian Rome obliged the Jews to live, is
approached by the Fabrician bridge, as we may gather from the
inscription in Hebrew and Latin on the little church of San Giovanni
Calibita, beneath a painting of the Crucifixion, which says: "I have
spread forth my hands all the day to an unbelieving people, who walk
in a way that is not good."

In the early twelfth century Otho III. brought, as he believed, the
body of the Hebrew apostle Saint Bartholomew to this island, as 1400
years earlier the cult of Aesculapius had been brought there from
Greece. The city of Beneventum had, however, it is supposed, palmed
off on the emperor the body of Saint Paulinus of Nola which rests in
the church dedicated to the apostle by the side of that of Saint
Adelbert the apostle of the Slavs. The Franciscans came to the isola
sacra in the sixteenth century, and one of the friars of Saint
Bartholomew's is the popular dentist of the poor from all quarters.

Here, then, in the midst of the river which determined the site of
the cosmopolitan city, is a spot to whose history Egypt, Greece,
Etruria, Palestine have contributed-Aesculapius, "one of the Twelve,"
the Christian Slavs, the Saxon Otho, Francis of Assisi. In Paulin us
of Nola we are reminded of the earliest Western monasteries, and the
Franciscan friars represent for us the thirteenth-century revival of
the religious spirit in Italy. What more? In the red-gowned
confraternity of the island we are put in touch with an institution
which seems to be as old as human history, with those burial guilds,
sanctioned by Roman law, under shelter of which the first Christians
obtained a legal footing for themselves and their cemeteries long
before their religion was tolerated.

The vicissitudes of the city have made certain features of its life
as eternal as itself. Through the middle ages it was the sanctuary
and since the renascence of classical learning it has been the museum
of Europe. Long before there were any kind of facilities for
travelling everyone came to Rome. A procession of people from every
race under heaven, in every varietyevery excess and defect-of
costume, has passed along the streets under the observant but
unastonished eyes of the blasé Roman ; and when a lay pilgrim in a
brown tunic, hung with rosaries, and carrying a crucifix taller than
himself, walked last year out of Saint Peter's among the Easter
crowd, no one noticed him. The modern city in 'becoming the hostess
of the other provinces of Italy is approximating in size to the Rome
of the early empire; but the Rome of the popes made no sort of
provision for the influx of Europe. The Inn of the Bear, in the
street of that name leading to Ponte Sant' Angelo,
provided the best accommodation; and here, it is said, Dante himself
had lodged. It is but a hundred years ago that a pavement was placed
for pedestrians, and then only one side of the Corso boasted a narrow
footpath. The streets were encumbered with hucksters' stalls, with
refuse, dirt, and stones; the nights were dark as pitch, and hygiene
was only hinted at in the marble afficlzes which may still be seen at
certain old street corners anouncing that monsignore the way warden
would visit with a fine of 25 scudi and divers bodily pains the
practice of emptying every kind of refuse into the side streets.
Now that the city is emerging from the chrysalis of the middle ages
the cry of "Vandals!" goes up on all sides. But Rome has always been
destroyed. Not even her moral vicissitudes give her a greater right
to be called “the eternal city" than her survival of the material
ruin to which she has over and over again been subjected. That Goth
and Vandal have not wrought more havoc than emperors, people, and
popes is recorded in the pasquinade on Urban VIII. (Barberini), who
stripped the bronze off the Pantheon to adorn the baldacchino of
Saint Peter's:-Quod nonfecerunt Barbari, fecerunt Barberini. It is a
curious coincidence that the inscription commemorating the victories
of Claudius in Britain, in which our kings are irreverently spoken of
as "barbarians," should now grace the garden of the Barberini palace
in Rome. Tempora mutantur nos et J17utamur in illis.

One factor only has been constant in the vicissitudes of Rome-
barbarian invaders, rescuers of popes, foreign intruders, internecine
brawlers, the flights and elections of popes, have each brought the
opportunity for wholesale pillage. To the Roman love of destruction
must be added the love of the large and superfluous: from the time of
the emperors to the present hour when sites and buildings are doomed
on all hands in order that the colossal monument of Victor Emmanuel
II. may dominate the centre of the Roman tramway system-while the
House of Augustus is unexcavated and his tomb is dishonoured-the
Romans have proved themselves to be the sons of those who killed the
prophets, by building or desecrating their sepulchres. But when "new
Rome" is condemned let us not forget that it has given us what the
learning and the riches of the most munificent popes never compassed--
an excavated Forum.

There is no Mayfair and no Seven Dials in Rome. The poor live, and
have always lived, cheek by jowl with the rich: a palace in the
Ghetto and a hovel in the Corso have each existed without offence.
This brings us to another permanent feature of Roman life--the
beggars. Rome has always lived on the foreigner, and it has always
had troops of beggars patrolling its streets, in the time of the
Antonines as in that of Gregory the Great, or as in that of the
latest of the Sovereign pontiffs, Pius IX.; and the cheerful-faced
beggar who was licensed by this pope to sit by the statue of Saint
Peter lived to the closing years of the century and gave a dowry of
200,000 francs to his daughter on her marriage. The difficulties
which met the Roman of the era of Gregory the Great when pest and the
transition to the agricultural system of coloni threw the serfs upon
the streets, met the government of Italy when after September 1870
the whole motley crowd which had been the recipient of the Christian
system of alms-giving was in its turn suddenly thrown upon the
streets of the city. Those who remember the ‘seventies" or the"
eighties" in Rome remember the menacing manner in which" alms" were"
asked," how near together were blessing and cursing, and how
unfrequented roads and hills were beset by sturdy beggars, lineal
descendants of the brigand who placing his hat in the roadway
levelled his gun at you as he proffered the request: "For the love of
God put something in that hat."

Papal charity pauperised a whole people: notices in the streets on
wet days announced the free distribution of bread in the Colosseum;
doles of bread were given by all the parish clergy to the practising
members of their congregations. The men women and children who had
passed their time doing odd jobs in churches, following viaticum and
funeral processions, and providing a church crowd on all occasions,
were suddenly called upon to make some concession to the modern
spirit--hawking a bunch of crumpled flowers, a box of matches or a
couple of bootlaces up and down the streets, in and out of the
restaurants, these latest recruits to the 'commercial spirit
exchanged the atmosphere of the sacristy for the busy whirl of trade
without ceasing to be what they had always been, beggars pure and
simple. Successful attempts are now being made to put down begging.
The great and real distress which exists in the city is mainly due to
the excessive rents and the terrible overcrowding-in the San Lorenzo
quarter the modern poor of Rome may be found herded together with
five, six, and even seven families living in one room. The mania for
building in the "eighties" led to the " building crisis"; streets of
unfinished houses mock the houseless poor and the" improvements" of
the city are gradually demolishing the poorer dwellings. Amidst this
misery it is still the old Roman population which receives most help;
they are known in their parishes, and the old established subsidies
and dowries come their way.

The population of Rome has varied as much as its fortunes. The
maximum was reached in the time of the Flavian emperors - 2 millions,
but even in the time of Augustus the inhabitants probably numbered
1,300,000. A period of three hundred and fifty years, which brings us
to the date of the "Peace of the Church," sufficed to decrease this
number by more than a million (A.D. 335), After a thousand years of
Christian domination the population of the city had sunk to its
minimum, 17,000 (A.D. 1377). Even in the reign of the n13.gnificent
Leo X, it was not more than 30 or 40 thousand. From the beginning of
the seventeenth century when it exceeded 100,000, it steadily
increased, till in 1800 the population numbered 153,000. But during
the “empire,” 1812, it fell to 118,000. Ten years after “ the
Italians” entered Rome it had increased by 79,000 to 305,000. The
last census, 1900, shows a resident population of 450,000—not a third
of its classical total—and Naples is still the most densely populated
city of Italy.

The Greek tradition in Rome seems summed in the Palatine, the hill of
“Pallas”; but the Capitol, the hill of Saturn, sums Italy itself. The
one represents the Roman Empire, the other the Roman Commune--those
liberties and that self-government which began with the entry of the
gentes and the formation from among them of the Roman Senate, and
which were never to be abolished. The Palatine has not been inhabited
since the officials of the Exarchate abandoned it in the eighth
century; but the life of the Capitol has never been intermitted; it
has never ceased to represent all the moments in the life of the
Roman people. This distinction is sharply drawn to-day: the Palatine
is a hill of majestic ruins visited only by the tourist, the Capitol
is still the seat of the municipality of Rome, ascended by every
couple for the celebration of their marriage, and its registers
signalise every young life born to the city.

The municipal franchises of Italy have played a large part in her
history, and that of Rome is no exception. Moreover the Senate of
Rome, the heads of each gens from among the original settlers, and
the Populus, who be it remembered were the gentes and were never
synonymous with the plebs, represented two constant facts and factors-
a free Senate and free municipal government by the Populus Romanus.
These flourished in the middle ages as they had flourished in the
classical city, and it was thus easy for Cola di Rienzo to restore
them when the popes had abandoned the city to its fate. Papal letters
to Charlemagne's predecessors were indited in the name of the Senate
and people of Rome-a custom which influenced the early government of
the Roman Church herself, for her letters to other Christian Churches
were written in the name of "the Roman Church," even when, as in the
case of Clement's epistle, they were the actual handiwork of the then
head of the Christian community. Again, when Pepin obliged the
Lombard king to cede the exarchate of Ravenna not to the emperor but
to Rome, the words employed were: "to the Holy Church and the Roman
Republic." Even in the time of the proud Innocent III. the city was
still governed "by the Senate and people of Rome," and when the
Romans again tired of their Senate-as tradition says they had done
when they made Numa king-they created in its place a supreme
magistrate who was designated" the Senator," one of whose duties was
to maintain the pontiff in his See, and to provide conveniently for
his safe conduct and that of the Sacred College when journeying
within his jurisdiction. The extent of this jurisdiction is perhaps
all that now remains of the power once held by the Senate and Roman
people. The municipality of Rome is the largest in the world; it is
conterminous with the whole Roman agro, so that its history is
inseparably linked with that of the Roman boundries as well as with
the life of the Roman people.

The outward and visible sign of these primaeval Roman liberties is
the tetragram S.P.Q.R.—Senatus Populus Que Romanus (the Roamn Senate
and People), which took the place of the earlier formula Populus
Romanus et Quirites, and it is of the Sabines, not of the humble
conjunction, that that Q still reminds us. Al down the centuries we
may recognize those four letters—surmounted in impereal times by an
eagle—crowning the standard of the Romans, carried far and wide not
only through the streets of the city and to the uttermost ends of the
earth, but in that religious perlustration of the ager when the
ambarvalia rites were celebrated at the Cluilian Trench which
separated Rome from the Alba Longa, the site of the combat between
the Alban Curatii and the Roman Horatii. One of finest remains in the
Forum is the marble relief which represents the suovetaurilia, the
sow, sheep, and the bull sacrificed on this occasion. That Roman
greatness came to be synonymous with confines as large - known world,
had risen with the recognition of these sacred limits, limits which
still define the Roman municipality--the symbol of Roman liberties.

The Pragmatic Sanction and the world power of Rome! Can two things be
more disparate? Yet the version which renders S.P.Q.R. into Si Feu
Que Rien must surely be laid at the door of "Gallicanism "-it points
to an ecclesiastical not a political dimillutio capitis. The tract of
the city which we see from the terrace on the Pincian hill, looking
towards the Janiculum, has been called the most historic plot of land
in the world. Is it without reason that the furthest point of this
unequalled panorama is the dome which Michael Angelo erected over the
tomb of S. Peter? Three mighty civilisations--the Etruscan, the
Roman, the Christian -resulted in the foundation of two world
empires. Rome is now entering on a third existence, its existence as
the capital of Italy, but has it suffered thereby no dimillutio
capitis? Is it not a fact that the classical and the ecclesiastical
represented her only world-wide destinies, the only life of Rome
which penetrated as truly beyond the city as within its classic
confines? Has not the papacy, with all its faults, been the actual
link connecting ancient and modern Rome, preserving unbroken the
tradition which gave her, beyond her ritua1 boundaries, the
government of the world with out?

Rome painted by
Alberto Pisa

Author: Alberto Pisa, Text by M.A.R. Tuker
Editor:Adam Charles Black
Published: 1905