Part 2 (1/2)

The ruins of the Flavian basilica in Domitian's house on the Palatine (81-96) affords us a ground plan of such a domestic hall, in this instance placed close to the _triclinium_ of the house and not in a direct line with the _vestibulum_ or entrance as was generally the case. Here a fragment of the _cancellum_ can still be seen _in situ_.

The Christian altar of the earliest churches placed in front of the apse, faced the congregation, and a s.p.a.ce before it, beyond the depressed portion or _confessio_, was reserved for the choir and was surrounded by a marble bal.u.s.trade. The columns supported a horizontal architrave, above it a flat wall pierced with windows and the plain roof of cedar-wood beams.

The floors were paved with a fine mosaic of marble and green serpentine alternating with slabs of white marble or discs of red porphyry. Tribune, arch, and vault, and sometimes other portions of the walls, were decorated with brilliant mosaics and examples of this work, of the fourth, sixth, ninth, and twelfth centuries, and possibly of the second or third, have happily escaped the ravis.h.i.+ng hand of the restorer. In the twelfth century the art of marble working underwent a temporary revival under the influence of a talented family of artists, the Cosmati; and a good deal of their work and that of their school is still to be found in Rome, the carved marble and an inlay of mosaic upon marble being easily recognisable in the decoration of the cloisters of the Lateran and of S. Paul's outside the walls, upon ambones, candelabra, and tombs scattered throughout the churches.

The straight architectural lines of the Christian basilicas and their subdued colouring of floor and apse produce a delicate and harmonious effect, but they were erected during a debased building period and were not designed for strength, and only a few have weathered the storms of the middle ages and escaped destruction beneath the tasteless restorations of the Renaissance.

The new building epoch born in Rome was to be nourished entirely at the expense of the old. Columns and mouldings were transferred bodily from the nearest basilica to furnish the Christian church, and were there arranged haphazard. Simpler still, walls of ancient bricks were quickly run up between the solid columns of a temple; marble casings were torn off to be used as common building stone; statues, carved cornices, and friezes were thrust into lime-kilns which sprang up all over the city wherever the ancient monuments stood thickest; priceless marbles were ground into fragments for making mosaics or were mixed with cement and made into concrete.

When Constantine left Rome to found his new capital the city had already degenerated into a squalid provincial town, and fifty years later Jerome could refer to its gilded squalor and its temples lined with cobweb.

Already the seal had been put upon the old order when Gratian in 383 abolished the privileges of the pagan places of wors.h.i.+p, and quickly disaster followed upon the heels of destruction. Twice Alaric despoiled the city and carried off priceless booty. Vitiges tore the marble from the mausoleum of Hadrian and destroyed the aqueducts; Genseric dismantled the temple of Jupiter; Robert Guiscard laid waste the Campus Martius and other parts of the city by fire. Sieges, sacks, earthquakes, fires, and inundations succeeded each other until the old level of the city was in places buried 50 feet beneath acc.u.mulated ruin and rubbish.

The scene s.h.i.+fts once more; centuries have slipped by and the city of Rome has become a desolation. Marble columns and granite obelisks lie p.r.o.ne upon the ground, and many more have found graves beneath the soil. Enormous mounds of earth and masonry, disfigured with rude battlements, represent all that is left of the great monuments; crumbling ruins and waste land stretch away to the walls, and without the campagna has become a fever-stricken wilderness.

Military fortresses, watch-towers on the walls, and bell-towers of churches are the only buildings kept in repair. Gaunt wolves snarl and fight over the refuse heaps under the walls of S. Peter's. A gibbet crowns the bare summit of the Capitol, goatherds pasture their flocks on its sides and along the green slopes of the Forum, and thus the hill and the tract of land at its foot have returned once more to their primitive pastoral state and their pastoral names, the ”hill of goats” and the ”field of cows.” Over all broods the ominous silence of terror, bloodshed, and pestilence.

Upon this scene of ruin the Renaissance and modern city of Rome was to come into being, and the mediaeval buildings were in their turn to be destroyed or overlaid with a modern garb, leaving only a few churches and convents, a few towers and palaces, a few cloisters to mark the pa.s.sing of the centuries.

The remains of the imperial city are described by a modern writer[2]

lying like a skeleton beneath the modern town, beneath streets, villas, and public buildings; and from the fifteenth century, when Rome, which had only just escaped an extinction as complete as that of her neighbour and ancient rival Tusculum, began once more to rise from the dust, to modern times, all the building materials have been furnished by her ruins. The few monuments that have been preserved owe their safety to their consecration as churches.

[2] Gabelli, _Roma e i Romani_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARCH OF t.i.tUS

Erected to commemorate this Emperor's destruction of Jerusalem, A.D.

70. It is decorated with reliefs of the seven-branched candlestick and other spoils of the Temple which were carried through the city in the Emperor's triumph. See page 31.]

Of all the despoilers to which Rome has fallen a victim, none have been so a.s.siduous in their destruction as her own rulers and people.

Streets have been paved with building stone, churches and palaces built with ancient materials. Monuments of the utmost artistic and historic value have been destroyed for the purpose, the Colosseum alone being robbed of 2522 cart-loads of travertine in the fifteenth century. The inadequate prohibitions issued at rare intervals proved impotent in presence of a practice so deep rooted and time honoured.

Every villa garden and palace staircase is peopled with ancient statues. Fragments of inscriptions, of carved mouldings and cornices, marble pillars and antique fountains, are met with in every courtyard.

Even a humble house or shop will have a marble step or a marble lintel to the front door. To the present day no piece of work is ever undertaken in Rome, no house foundation dug or gas-pipe laid, but the workmen come across some ancient masonry, an aqueduct whose underground course is unknown and unexplored, a branch of one of the great _cloacae_, or the immense concrete vault of a bath or temple whose destruction gives as much trouble as if it were solid rock.

Fortunately for the student and the archaeologist a government official, a ”custodian of excavations,” now watches all such operations, and all ”finds” of importance, fragments of inscriptions and statues, earthenware lamps, bronze or gla.s.s vessels, fragments of mosaic, and gold ornaments, are collected and reported.

CHAPTER III

THE ROMAN CATACOMBS

From the catacombs, the subterranean burial-places of the first Roman Christians, to the basilica of S. Peter's, the greatest ecclesiastical building on earth, there is no break in the drama of history. When you come out from the cemetery of Callistus, on to the fields bordering the Appian Way, and look across to the dome of the great church commemorating Peter, you say to yourself ”That is the interpretation of this”: this may see in its own humble features the lineaments of that; the church which dominates the Roman country--in imperial possession of Rome--may recognise that the silent underground galleries of the Appia had already taken as effective a possession of the capital of the world.

The Roman Church is founded upon three events: the apostolic preaching, the constancy of its martyrs, its position as the heir of Imperial Rome--a position early figured and represented in the persons of its bishops. All these things have their monument in the catacombs; which bear indisputable traces of the sojourn and the preaching of the Apostles, which are the earliest shrines of the Roman martyrs, and which preserve for us in the crypt in the cemetery of Callistus, set apart for the leaders of the Roman Church from Antheros to Eutychian (A.D. 235-275),[3] the veritable nucleus of papal domination. It was the successors of these men who were to fill the role left vacant by Constantine's departure for Byzantium; to be forced into a position of overlords.h.i.+p through the uncertainty of the emperor's government by lieutenants--first in Rome and then in Italy; to consolidate this power by constant accretions of Italian territory, and, finally, to acquire by spiritual conquest a universal suzerainty as real as that of the Roman emperor. If those who inscribed the proud words round the dome of S. Peter's had known that hidden in the catacombs there were frescoes representing Peter as the new Moses striking the rock from which flow forth the saving waters of Christ--the name _Petrus_ clearly written above him--even they must have thrilled with wonder and awe: the upholders of Petrine primacy could not have imagined or devised a parable of the first centuries better fitted to their hand.

[3] The popes from the time of Zephyrinus, the predecessor of Callistus, to Miltiades, who lived on the eve of the ”Peace,” rest in this great cemetery.

The burial-places of the first Christians in Rome were their only certain property. The law allowed to every corporation its _religiosus locus_, its G.o.d's acre, property seldom confiscated even in the worst hours of the great persecutions. It was thus that the Christians, though they never lived in the catacombs, came to regard them as retreats, as places where it was safe to meet for prayer, for mutual encouragement, even for the catechising of neophytes and children.

Round them were their dead, their loved ones, nay, round them were their martyrs, the men and women who were to prove that ”the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”; whose heroic deaths had been witnessed by many; the memory of whose heroism was to prove almost as potent as ocular witness when their burial-places became the nuclei of the first Christian churches, and the abounding reverence felt for them inaugurated the Christian cult of the saints.