The truth is that half a dozen capitols have been built on the hill, destroyed, forgotten, and replaced, each one in turn, during successive ages. It is said that certain Indian jugglers allow themselves to be buried alive in a state of trance, and are taken from the tomb after many months not dead; and it is said that the body, before it is brought to life again, is quite cold, as though the man were dead, excepting that there is a very little warmth just where the back of the skull joins the neck. Yet there is enough left to reanimate the whole being in a little time, so that life goes on as before. So in Rome's darkest and most dead days, the Capitol has always held within it a spark of vitality, ready to break out with little warning and violent effect.



For the Capitol, not yet the Capitol, but already the sacred fortress of Rome, was made strong in the days of Romulus, and it was in his time, when he and his men had carried off the Sabine girls and were at war with their fathers and brothers, that Tarpeia came down the narrow path, her earthen jar balanced on her graceful head, to fetch spring water for a household sacrifice. Her father kept the castle. She came down, a straight brown girl with eager eyes and red lips, clad in the grey woollen tunic that left her strong round arms bare to the shoulder. Often she had seen the golden bracelets which the Sabine men wore on their left wrists, and some of them had a jewel or two set in the gold; but the Roman men wore none, and the Roman women had none to wear, and Tarpeia's eyes were eager. Because she came to get water for holy things she was safe, and she went down to the spring, and there was Tatius, of the Sabines, drinking. When he saw how her eyes were gold-struck by his bracelet, he asked her if she should like to wear it, and the blood came to her brown face, as she looked back quickly to the castle where her father was. 'If you Sabines will give me what you wear on your left arms,' she said—for she did not know the name of gold—'you shall have the fortress tonight, for I will open the gate for you.' The Sabine looked at her, and then he smiled quickly, and promised for himself and all his companions. So that night they went up stealthily, for there was no moon, and the gate was open, and Tarpeia was standing there. Tatius could see her greedy eyes in the starlight; but instead of his bracelet, he took his shield from his left arm and struck her down with it for a betrayer, and all the Sabine men threw their shields upon her as they passed. So she died, but her name remains to the rock, to this day.

It was long before the temple planned by the first Tarquin was solemnly dedicated by the first consuls of the Republic, and the earthen image of Jupiter, splendidly dressed and painted red, was set up between Juno and Minerva. Many hundred years later, in the terrible times of Marius and Sylla, the ancient sanctuary took fire and was burned, and Sylla rebuilt it. That temple was destroyed also, and another, built by Vespasian, was burned too, and from the last building Genseric stole the gilt bronze tiles in the year 455, when Christianity was the fact and Jupiter the myth, one and twenty years before the final end of Rome's empire; and the last of what remained was perhaps burned by Robert Guiscard after serving as a fortress for the enemies of Gregory the Seventh.



But we know, at last, that the fortress of the old city stood where the Church of Aracoeli stands, and that the temple was on the other side, over against the Palatine, and standing back a little from the Tarpeian rock, so that the open square of today is just between the places of the two. And when one goes up the steps on the right, behind the right-hand building, one comes to a quiet lane, where German students of archaeology live in a little colony by themselves and have their Institute at the end of it, and a hospital of their own; and there, in a wall, is a small green door leading into a quiet garden, with a pretty view. Along the outer edge runs a low stone wall, and there are seats where one may rest and dream under the trees, a place where one might fancy lovers meeting in the moonlight, or old men sunning themselves of an autumn afternoon, or children playing among the flowers on a spring morning.

But it is a place of fear and dread, ever since Tarpeia died there for her betrayal, and one may dream other dreams there than those of peace and love. The vision of a pale, strong man rises at the edge, bound and helpless, lifted from the ground by savage hands and hurled from the brink to the death below,—Manlius, who saved the Capitol and loved the people, and was murdered by the nobles,—and many others after him, just and unjust, whirled through the clear air to violent destruction for their bad or their good deeds, as justice or injustice chanced to be in the ascendant of the hour. And then, in the Middle Age, the sweet-scented garden was the place of terrible executions, and the gallows stood there permanently for many years, and men were hanged and drawn and quartered there, week by week, month by month, all the year round, the chief magistrate of Rome looking on from the window of the Senator's palace, as a duty; till one of them sickened at the sight of blood, and ordained that justice should be done at the Bridge of Sant' Angelo, and at Tor di Nona, and in the castle itself, and the summit of the fatal rock was left to the birds, the wild flowers, and the merciful purity of nature. And that happened four hundred years ago.

Until our own time there were prisons deep down in the old Roman vaults. At first, as in old days, the place of confinement was in the Mamertine prison, on the southeastern slope, beneath which was the hideous Tullianum, deepest and darkest of all, whence no captive ever came out alive to the upper air again. In the Middle Age, the prison was below the vaults of the Roman Tabularium on the side of the Forum, but it is said that the windows looked inward upon a deep court of the Senator's palace. As civilization advanced, it was transferred a story higher, to a more healthy region of the building, but the Capitoline prison was not finally given up till the reign of Pius the Ninth, at which time it had become a place of confinement for debtors only.

Institutions and parties in Rome have always had a tendency to cling to places more than in other cities. It is thus that during so many centuries the Lateran was the headquarters of the Popes, the Capitol the rallying-place of the ever-smouldering republicanism of the people, and the Castle of Sant' Angelo the seat of actual military power as contrasted with spiritual dominion and popular aspiration. So far as the latter is concerned its vitality is often forgotten and its vigour underestimated.

One must consider the enormous odds against which the spirit of popular emancipation had to struggle in order to appreciate the strength it developed. A book has been written called 'The One Hundred and Sixty-one rebellions of papal subjects between 896 and 1859'—a title which gives an average of about sixteen to a century; and though the furious partiality of the writer calls them all rebellions against the popes, whereas a very large proportion were revolts against the nobles, and Rienzi's attempt was to bring the Pope back to Rome, yet there can be no question as to the vitality which could produce even half of such a result; and it may be remembered that in almost every rising of the Roman people the rabble first made a rush for the Capitol, and, if successful, seized other points afterwards. In the darkest ages the words 'Senate' and 'Republic' were never quite forgotten and were never dissociated from the sacred place. The names of four leaders, Arnold of Brescia, Stefaneschi, Rienzi and Porcari, recall the four greatest efforts of the Middle Age; the first partially succeeded and left its mark, the second was fruitless because permanent success was then impossible against such odds, the third miscarried because Rienzi was a madman and Cardinal Albornoz a man of genius, and the fourth, because the people were contented and wanted no revolution at all. The first three of those men seized the Capitol at once, the fourth intended to do so. It was always the immediate object of every revolt, and the power to ring the great Patarina, the ancient bell stolen by the Romans from Viterbo, had for centuries a directing influence in Roman brawls. Its solemn knell announced the death of a Pope, or tolled the last hour of condemned criminals, and men crossed themselves as it echoed through the streets; but at the tremendous sound of its alarm, rung backward till the tower rocked, the Romans ran to arms, the captains of the Regions buckled on their breastplates and displayed their banners, and the people flocked together to do deeds of sudden violence and shortlived fury. In a few hours Stefaneschi of Trastevere swept the nobles from the city; between noon and night Rienzi was master of Rome, and it was from the Capitol that the fierce edicts of both threatened destruction to the unready barons. They fled to their mountain dens like wolves at sunrise, but the night was never slow to descend upon liberty's short day, and with the next dawn the ruined towers began to rise again; the people looked with dazed indifference upon the fall of their leader, and presently they were again slaves, as they had been—Arnold was hanged and burned, Stefaneschi languished in a dungeon, Rienzi wandered over Europe a homeless exile, the straight, stiff corpse of brave Stephen Porcari hung, clad in black, from the battlement of Sant' Angelo. It was always the same story. The Barons were the Sabines, the Latins and the AEquians of Mediaeval Rome; but there was neither a Romulus nor a Cincinnatus to lead the Roman people against steel-clad masters trained to fighting from boyhood, bold by inheritance, and sure of a power which they took every day by violence and held year after year by force.

In imagination one would willingly sweep away the three stiff buildings on the Capitol, the bronze Emperor and his horse, the marble Castor and Pollux, the proper arcades, the architectural staircase, and the even pavement, and see the place as it used to be five hundred years ago. It was wild then. Out of broken and rocky ground rose the ancient Church of Aracoeli, the Church of the Altar of Heaven, built upon that altar which the Sibyl of Tivoli bade Augustus raise to the Firstborn of God. To the right a rude fortress, grounded in the great ruins of Rome's Archive House, flanked by rough towers, approached only by that old triumphal way, where old women slowly roasted beans in iron chafing-dishes over little fires that were sheltered from the north wind by the vast wall. Before the fortress a few steps led to the main door, and over that was a great window and a balcony with a rusty iron balustrade—the one upon which Rienzi came out at the last, with the standard in his hand. The castle itself not high, but strong, brown and battered. Beyond it, the gallows, and the place of death. Below it, a desolation of tumbling rock and ruin, where wild flowers struggled for a holding in spring, and the sharp cactus sent out ever-green points between the stones. Far down, a confusion of low, brown houses, with many dark towers standing straight up from them like charred trees above underbrush in a fire-blasted forest. Beyond all, the still loneliness of far mountains. That was the scene, and those were the surroundings, in which the Roman people reinstituted a Roman Senate, after a lapse of nearly six hundred years, in consequence of the agitation begun and long continued by Arnold of Brescia.

Muratori, in his annals, begins his short account of the year 1141 by saying that the history of Italy during that period is almost entirely hidden in darkness, because there are neither writers nor chroniclers of the time, and he goes on to say that no one knows why the town of Tivoli had so long rebelled against the Popes. The fact remains, astonishing and ridiculous,—in the middle of the twelfth century imperial Rome was at war with suburban Tivoli, and Tivoli was the stronger; for when the Romans persuaded Pope Innocent the Second to lay siege to the town, the inhabitants sallied out furiously, cut their assailants to pieces, seized all their arms and provisions, and drove the survivors to ignominious flight. Hence the implacable hatred between Tivoli and Rome; and Tivoli became an element in the struggles that followed.

Now for many years, Rome had been in the hands of a family of converted Jews, known as the Pierleoni, from Pietro Leone, first spoken of in the chronicles as an iniquitous usurer of enormous wealth. They became prefects of Rome; they took possession of Sant' Angelo and were the tyrants of the city, and finally they became the Pope's great enemies, the allies of Roger of Apulia, and makers of antipopes, of whom the first was either Pietro's son or his grandson. They had on their side possession, wealth, the support of a race which never looks upon apostasy from its creed as final, the alliance of King Roger and of Duke Roger, his son, and the countenance, if not the friendship, of Arnold of Brescia, the excommunicated monk of northern Italy, and the pupil of the romantic Abelard. And the Pierleoni had against them the Popes, the great Frangipani family with most of the nobles, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who has been called the Bismarck of the Church. Arnold of Brescia was no ordinary fanatic. He was as brave as Stefaneschi, as pure-hearted as Stephen Porcari, as daring and eloquent as Rienzi in his best days. The violent deeds of his followers have been imputed to him, and brought him to his end; but it was his great adversary, Saint Bernard, who expressed a regretful wish 'that his teachings might have been as irreproachable as his life.' The doctrine for which he died at last was political, rather than spiritual, human rather than theological. In all but his monk's habit he was a layman in his later years, as he had been when he first wandered to France and sat at the feet of the gentle Abelard; but few Churchmen of that day were as spotless in their private lives.

He was an agitator, a would-be reformer, a revolutionary; and the times craved change. The trumpet call of the first Crusade had roused the peoples of Europe, and the distracted forces of the western world had been momentarily concentrated in a general and migratory movement of religious conquest; forty years later the fortunes of the Latins in the East were already waning, and Saint Bernard was meditating the inspiring words that sent four hundred thousand warriors to the rescue of the Holy Places. What Bernard was about to attempt for Palestine, Arnold dreamed of accomplishing for Rome. In his eyes she was holy, too, her ruins were the sepulchre of a divine freedom, worthy to be redeemed from tyranny even at the price of blood, and he would have called from the tomb the spirit of murdered liberty to save and illuminate mankind. Where Bernard was a Christian, Arnold was a Roman in soul; where Bernard was an inspired monk, Arnold was in heart a Christian, of that first Apostolic republic which had all things in common.

At such a time such a man could do much. Rome was in the utmost distress. At the election of Innocent the Second, the Jewish Pierleoni had set up one of themselves as antipope, and Innocent had been obliged to escape in spite of the protection of the still powerful Frangipani, leaving the Israelitish antipope to rule Rome, in spite of the Emperor, and in alliance with King Roger for nine years, until his death, when it required Saint Bernard's own presence and all the strength of his fiery words to dissuade the Romans from accepting another spiritual and temporal ruler imposed upon them by the masterful Pierleoni. So Innocent returned at last, a good man, much tried by misfortune, but neither wise nor a leader of men. At that time the soldiers of Rome were beaten in open battle by the people of Tivoli, a humiliation which it was not easy to forget. And it is more than probable that the Pierleoni looked on at the Pope's failure in scornful inaction from their stronghold of Sant' Angelo, which they had only nominally surrendered to Innocent's authority.

From a distance, Arnold of Brescia sadly contemplated Rome's disgrace and the evil state of the Roman people. The yet unwritten words of Saint Bernard were already more than true. They are worth repeating here, in Gibbon's strong translation, for they perfect the picture of the times.

'Who,' asks Bernard, 'is ignorant of the vanity and arrogance of the Romans? a nation nursed in sedition, untractable, and scorning to obey, unless they are too feeble to resist. When they promise to serve, they aspire to reign; if they swear allegiance, they watch the opportunity of revolt; yet they vent their discontent in loud clamours, if your doors, or your counsels, are shut against them. Dexterous in mischief, they have never learnt the science of doing good. Odious to earth and heaven, impious to God, seditious among themselves, jealous of their neighbours, inhuman to strangers, they love no one, by no one are they beloved; and while they wish to inspire fear, they live in base and continual apprehension. They will not submit; they know not how to govern; faithless to their superiors, intolerable to their equals, ungrateful to their benefactors, and alike impudent in their demands and their refusals. Lofty in promise, poor in execution: adulation and calumny, perfidy and treason, are the familiar arts of their policy.'

Fearless and in earnest, Arnold came to Rome, and began to preach a great change, a great reform, a great revival, and many heard him and followed him; and it was not in the Pope's power to silence him, nor bring him to any trial. The Pierleoni would support any sedition against Innocent; the Roman people were weary of masters, they listened with delight to Arnold's fierce condemnation of all temporal power, that of the Pope and that of the Emperor alike, and the old words, Republic, Senate, Consul, had not lost their life in the slumber of five hundred years. The Capitol was there, for a Senate house, and there were men in Rome to be citizens and Senators. Revolution was stirring, and Innocent had recourse to the only weapon left him in his weakness. Arnold was preaching as a Christian and a Catholic. The Pope excommunicated him in a general Council. In the days of the Crusades the Major Interdiction was not an empty form of words; to applaud a revolutionary was one thing, to attend the sermons of a man condemned to hell was a graver matter; Arnold's disciples deserted him, his friends no longer dared to protect him under the penalty of eternal damnation, and he went out from Rome a fugitive and an outcast.

Wandering from Italy to France, from France to Germany, and at last to Switzerland, he preached his doctrines without fear, though he had upon him the mark of Cain; but if the temporal sovereignty against which he spoke could not directly harm him, the spiritual power pursued him hither and thither, like a sword of flame. A weaker man would have renounced his beliefs, or would have disappeared in a distant obscurity; but Arnold was not made to yield. Goaded by persecution, divinely confident of right, he faced danger and death and came back to Rome.

He arrived at a moment when the people were at once elated by the submission of Tivoli, and exasperated against Innocent because he refused to raze that city to the ground. The Pierleoni were ever ready to encourage rebellion. The Romans, at the words Liberty and Republic, rose in a body, rushed to the Capitol, proclaimed the Commonwealth, and forthwith elected a Senate which assumed absolute sovereignty of the city, and renewed the war with Tivoli. The institution then refounded was not wholly abolished until, under the Italian kings, a representative government took its place.

The success and long supremacy of Arnold's teaching have been unfairly called his 'reign'; yet he neither caused himself to be elected a Senator, nor at any time, so far as we can learn, occupied any office whatsoever; neither did he profit in fortune by the changes he had wrought, and to the last he wore the garb of poverty and led the simple life which had extorted the reluctant admiration of his noblest adversary. But he could not impose upon others the virtues he practised himself, nor was it in his power to direct the force his teachings had called into life. For the time being the Popes were powerless against the new order. Innocent is said to have died of grief and humiliation, almost before the revolution was complete. His successor, Celestin the Second, reigned but five months and a half, busy in a quarrel with King Roger, and still the new Senate ruled the city.



But saving that it endured, it left no mark of good in Rome; the nobles saw that a new weapon was placed in their hands, they easily elected themselves to office, and the people, deluded by the name of a Republic, had exchanged the sovereignty of the Pope, or the allegiance of the Emperor, for the far more ruthless tyranny of the barons. The Jewish Pierleoni were rich and powerful still, but since Rome was strong enough to resist the Vatican, the Pontificate was no longer a prize worth seizing, and they took instead, by bribery or force, the Consulship or the Presidency of the Senate. Jordan, the brother of the antipope Anacletus, obtained the office, and the violent death of the next Pope, Lucius the Second, was one of the first events of his domination.

Lucius refused to bear any longer the humiliation to which his predecessors had tamely submitted. Himself in arms, and accompanied by such followers as he could collect, the Pope made a desperate attempt to dislodge the Senate and their guards from the Capitol, and at the head of the storming party he endeavoured to ascend the old road, known then as Fabatosta. But the Pierleoni and their men were well prepared for the assault, and made a desperate and successful resistance. The Pope fell at the head of his soldiers, struck by a stone on the temple, mortally wounded, but not dead. In hasty retreat, the dying man was borne by his routed soldiers to the monastery of Saint Gregory on the Coelian, under the safe protection of the trusty Frangipani, who held the Palatine, the Circus Maximus, and the Colosseum. Of all the many Popes who died untimely deaths he was the only one, I believe, who fell in battle. And he got his deathblow on the slope of that same Capitol where Gracchus and Manlius had died before him, each in good cause.

It has been wrongly said that he had all the nobles with him, and that the revolution was of the people alone, aided by the Pierleoni. This is not true. So far as can be known, the Frangipani were his only faithful friends, but it is possible that the Count of Tusculum, seventh in descent from Theodora, and nephew of the first Colonna, at that time holding a part of the Aventine, may have also been the Pope's ally. Be that as it may, the force that Lucius led was very small, and the garrison of the Capitol was overwhelmingly strong.

Some say also that Arnold of Brescia was not actually in Rome at that time, that the first revolution was the result of his unforgotten teachings, bearing fruit in the hearts of the nobles and the people, and that he did not come to the city till Pope Lucius was dead. However that may be, from that time forward, till the coming of Barbarossa, Arnold was the idol of the Romans, and their vanity and arrogance knew no bounds. Pope Eugenius the Third was enthroned in the Lateran under the protection of the Frangipani, but within the week he was forced to escape by night to the mountains. The Pierleoni held Sant' Angelo; the people seized and fortified the Vatican, deprived the Pope's Prefect of his office, and forced the few nobles who resisted them to swear allegiance to Jordan Pierleone, making him in fact dictator, and in name their 'Patrician.' The Pope retorted by excommunicating him, and allying himself with Tivoli, but was forced to a compromise whereby he acknowledged the Senate and the supremacy of the Roman people, who, already tired of their dictator, agreed to restore the Prefect to office, and to express some sort of obedience, more spiritual than temporal, to the Pope's authority. But Arnold was still supreme, and after a short stay in the city Eugenius was again a fugitive.

It was then that he passed into France, when Lewis the Seventh was ready armed to lead the Second Crusade to the Holy Land; and through that stirring time Rome is dark and sullen, dwelling aloof from Church and Empire in the new-found illusion of an unreal and impossible greatness. Seven hundred years later an Italian patriot exclaimed, 'We have an Italy, but we have no Italians.' And so Arnold of Brescia must many times have longed for Romans to people a free Rome. He had made a republic, but he could not make free men; he had called up a vision, but he could not give it reality; like Rienzi and the rest, he had 'mistaken memories for hopes,' and he was fore-destined to pay for his belief in his country's life with the sacrifice of his own. He had dreamed of a liberty serene and high, but he had produced only a dismal confusion: in place of peace he had brought senseless strife; instead of a wise and simple consul, he had given the Romans the keen and rapacious son of a Jewish usurer for a dictator; where he had hoped to destroy the temporal power of Pope and Emperor, he had driven the greatest forces of his age, and two of the greatest men, to an alliance against him.

So he perished. Eugenius died in Tivoli, Anastasius reigned a few months, and sturdy Nicholas Breakspeare was Adrian the Fourth. Conrad the Emperor also died, poisoned by the physicians King Roger sent him from famous Salerno, and Frederick Barbarossa of Hohenstauffen, his nephew, reigned in his stead. Adrian and Frederick quarrelled at their first meeting in the sight of all their followers in the field, for the young Emperor would not hold the Englishman's stirrup on the first day. On the second he yielded, and Pope and Emperor together were invincible. Then the Roman Senate and people sent out ambassadors, who spoke hugely boasting words to the red-haired soldier, and would have set conditions on his crowning, so that he laughed aloud at them; and he and Adrian went into the Leonine city, but not into Rome itself, and the Englishman crowned the German. Yet the Romans would fight, and in the heat of the summer noon they crossed the bridge and killed such straggling guards as they could find; then the Germans turned and mowed them down, and killed a thousand of the best, while the Pierleoni, as often before, looked on in sullen neutrality from Sant' Angelo, waiting to take the side of the winner. Then the Emperor and the Pope departed together, leaving Rome to its factions and its parties.

Suddenly Arnold of Brescia is with them, a prisoner, but how taken no man can surely tell. And with them also, by Soracte, far out in the northern Campagna, is Di Vico, the Prefect, to judge the leader of the people. The Pope and the Emperor may have looked on, while Di Vico judged the heretic and the rebel; but they did not themselves judge him. The Prefect, Lord of Viterbo, had been long at war with the new-formed Senate and the city, and owed Arnold bitter hatred and grudge.

The end was short. Arnold told them all boldly that his teaching was just, and that he would die for it. He knelt down, lifted up his hands to heaven, and commended his soul to God. Then they hanged him, and when he was dead they burnt his body and scattered the ashes in the river, lest any relics of him should be taken to Rome to work new miracles of revolution. No one knows just where he died, but only that it was most surely far out in the Campagna, in the hot summer days, in the year 1155, and not within the city, as has been so often asserted.

He was a martyr—whether in a good cause or a foolish one, let those judge who call themselves wise; there was no taint of selfishness in him, no thought of ambition for his own name, and there was no spot upon his life in an age of which the evils cannot be written down, and are better not guessed. He died for something in which he believed enough to die for it, and belief cannot be truer to itself than that. So far as the Church of today may speak, all Churchmen know that his heresies of faith, if they were real, were neither great nor vital, and that he was put to death, not for them, but because he was become the idol and the prophet of a rebellious city. His doctrine had spread over Italy, his words had set the country aflame, his mere existence was a lasting cause of bloody strife between city and city, princes and people, nobles and vassals. The times were not ripe, and in the inevitable course of fate it was foreordained that he must perish, condemned by Popes and Emperors, Kings and Princes; but of all whole-souled reformers, of all patriot leaders, of all preachers of liberty, past and living, it is not too much to say that Arnold of Brescia was the truest, the bravest and the simplest.

* * * * *

To them all, the Capitol has been the central object of dreams, and upon its walls the story of their failure has often been told in grotesque figures of themselves. When Rienzi was first driven out, his effigy was painted, hanged by the heels upon one of the towers, and many another 'enemy of the state' was pictured there—Giuliano Cesarini, for one, and the great Sforza, himself, with a scornful and insulting epigraph; as Andrea del Castagno, justly surnamed the 'Assassin,' painted upon the walls of the Signoria in Florence the likeness of all those who had joined in the great conspiracy of the Pazzi, hung up by the feet, as may be seen to this day.

It has ever been a place of glory, a place of death and a place of shame, but since the great modern changes it is meant to be only the seat of honour, and upon the slope of the Capitol the Italians, in the first flush of victorious unity, have begun to raise a great monument to their greatest idol, King Victor Emmanuel. If it is not the best work of art of the sort in existence it will probably enjoy the distinction of being the largest, and it is by no means the worst, for the central statue of the 'Honest King' has been modelled with marvellous skill and strength by Chiaradia, whose name is worthy to be remembered; yet the vastness of the architectural theatre provided for its display betrays again the giantism of the Latin race, and when in a future century the broad flood of patriotism shall have subsided within the straight river bed of sober history, men will wonder why Victor Emmanuel, honest and brave though he was, received the greater share of praise, and Cavour and Garibaldi the less, seeing that he got Italy by following the advice of the one, if not by obeying his dictation, and by accepting the kingdom which the other had destined for a republic, but was forced to yield to the monarchy by the superior genius of the statesman.

That day is not far distant. After a period of great and disastrous activity, the sleepy indifference of 1830 is again settling upon Rome, the race for imaginary wealth is over, time is a drug in the market, money is scarce, dwellings are plentiful, the streets are quiet by day and night, and only those who still have something to lose or who cherish very modest hopes of gain, still take an interest in financial affairs. One may dream again, as one dreamed thirty years ago, when all the clocks were set once a fortnight to follow the sun.

Rome is restoring to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. They are much bigger and finer things than the symmetrical, stuccoed cubes which have lately been piled up everywhere in heaven-offending masses, and one is glad to come back to them after the nightmare that has lasted twenty years. Moreover, one is surprised to find how little permanent effect has been produced by the squandering of countless millions during the building mania, beyond a cruel destruction of trees, and a few modifications of natural local accidents. To do the moderns justice, they have done no one act of vandalism as bad as fifty, at least, committed by the barons of the Middle Age and the Popes of the Renascence, though they have shown much worse taste in such new things as they have set up in place of the old.

The charm of Rome has never lain in its architecture, nor in the beauty of its streets, though the loveliness of its old-fashioned gardens contributed much which is now in great part lost. Nor can it be said that the enthralling magic of the city we used to know lay especially in its historical association, since Rome has been loved to folly by half-educated girls, by flippant women of the world and by ignorant idlers without number, as well as by most men of genius who have ever spent much time there.



In the Middle Age one man might know all that was to be known. Dante did; so did Lionardo da Vinci. But times have changed since a mediaeval scholar wrote a book 'Concerning all things and certain others also.' We cannot all be archaeologists. Perhaps when we go and stand in the Forum we have a few general ideas about the relative position of the old buildings; we know the Portico of the Twelve Gods in Council, the Temple of Concord, the Basilica Julia, the Court of Vesta, the Temple of Castor and Pollux; we have a more vague notion of the Senate Hall; the hideous arch of Septimius Severus stares us in the face; so does the lovely column of evil Phocas, the monster of the east, the red-handed centurion-usurper who murdered an Emperor and his five sons to reach the throne. And perhaps we have been told where the Rostra stood, and the Rostra Julia, and that the queer fragment of masonry by the arch is supposed to be the 'Umbilicus,' the centre of the Roman world. There is no excuse for not knowing these things any more than there is any very strong reason for knowing them, unless one be a student. There is a plan of the Forum in every guide book, with a description that changes with each new edition.

And yet, without much definite knowledge,—with 'little Latin and less Greek,' perhaps,—many men and women, forgetting for one moment the guide book in their hands, have leaned upon a block of marble with half-closed, musing eyes, and breath drawn so slow that it is almost quite held in day-dream wonder, and they have seen a vision rise of past things and beings, even in the broad afternoon sunshine, out of stones that remember Caesar's footsteps, and from walls that have echoed Antony's speech. There they troop up the Sacred Way, the shock-headed, wool-draped, beak-nosed Romans; there they stand together in groups at the corner of Saturn's temple; there the half-naked plebeian children clamber upon the pedestals of the columns to see the sights, and double the men's deep tones with a treble of childish chatter; there the noble boy with his bordered toga, his keen young face, and longing backward look, is hurried home out of the throng by the tall household slave, who carries his school tablets and is answerable with his skin for the boy's safety. The Consul Major goes by, twelve lictors marching in single file before him—black-browed, square-jawed, relentless men, with their rods and axes. Then two closed litters are carried past by big, black, oily fellows, beside whom walk freedmen and Greek slaves, and three or four curled and scented parasites, the shadows of the great men. Under their very feet the little street boys play their games of pitching at tiny pyramids of dried lupins, unless they have filberts, and lupins are almost as good; and as the dandified hanger-on of Maecenas, straining his ear for the sound of his patron's voice from within the litter, heedlessly crushes the little yellow beans under his sandal, the particular small boy whose stake is smashed clenches his fist, and with flashing eyes curses the dandy's dead to the fourth generation of ascendants, and he and his companions turn and scatter like mice as one of the biggest slaves threateningly raises his hand.



Absurd details rise in the dream. An old crone is selling roasted chestnuts in the shadow of the temple of Castor and Pollux; a tipsy soldier is reeling to his quarters with his helmet stuck on wrong side foremost; a knot of Hebrew money-changers, with long curls and high caps, are talking eagerly in their own language, clutching the little bags they hide in the sleeves of their yellow Eastern gowns—the men who mourned for Caesar and for Augustus, whose descendants were to burn Rienzi's body among the thistles by Augustus's tomb, whose offspring were to breed the Pierleoni; a bright-eyed, skinny woman of the people boxes her daughter's ears for having smiled at one of the rich men's parasites, and the girl, already crying, still looks after the fashionable good-for-nothing, under her mother's upraised arm.

All about stretches the vast humming city of low-built houses covering the short steep hills and filling all the hollow between. Northeastward lies the seething Suburra; the yellow river runs beyond the Velabrum and the cattle market to the west; southward rise the enchanted palaces of Caesar; due east is the Esquiline of evil fame, redeemed and made lovely with trees and fountains by Maecenas, but haunted even today, say modern Romans, by the spectres of murderers and thieves who there died bloody deaths of quivering torture. All around, as the sun sinks and the cool shadows quench the hot light on the white pavements, the ever-increasing crowds of men—always more men than women—move inward, half unconsciously, out of inborn instinct, to the Forum, the centre of the Empire, the middle of the world, the boiling-point of the whole earth's riches and strength and life.

Then as the traveller muses out his short space of rest, the vision grows confused, and Rome's huge ghosts go stalking, galloping, clanging, raving through the surging dream-throng,—Caesar, Brutus, Pompey, Catiline, Cicero, Caligula, Vitellius, Hadrian,—and close upon them Gauls and Goths and Huns, and all barbarians, till the dream is a medley of school-learned names, that have suddenly taken shadows of great faces out of Rome's shadow storehouse, and gorgeous arms and streaming draperies, and all at once the sight-seer shivers as the sun goes down, and passes his hand over his eyes, and shakes himself, and goes away rather hastily, lest he should fall sick of a fever and himself be gathered to the ghosts he has seen.

It matters very little whether the day-dream much resembles the reality of ages long ago, whether boys played with lupins or with hazel-nuts then, or old women roasted chestnuts in the streets, or whether such unloving spirits should be supposed to visit one man in one vision. The traveller has had an impression which has not been far removed from emotion, and his day has not been lost, if it be true that emotion is the soul's only measure of time. There, if anywhere, lies Rome's secret. The place, the people, the air, the crystal brightness of winter, the passion-stirring scirocco of autumn, the loveliness of the long spring, the deep, still heat of summer, the city, the humanity, the memories of both, are all distillers of emotion in one way or another.

Above all, the night is beautiful in Rome, when the moon is high and all is quiet. Go down past the silver Forum to the Colosseum and see what it is then, and perhaps you will know what it was in the old days. Such white stillness as this fell then also, by night, on all the broad space around the amphitheatre of all amphitheatres, the wonder of the world, the chief monument of Titus, when his hand had left of Jerusalem not one stone upon another. The same moonbeams fell slanting across the same huge walls, and whitened the sand of the same broad arena when the great awning was drawn back at night to air the place of so much death. In the shadow, the steps are still those up which Dion the Senator went to see mad Commodus play the gladiator and the public fool. On one of those lower seats he sat, the grave historian, chewing laurel leaves to steady his lips and keep down his laughter, lest a smile should cost his head; and he showed the other Senators that it was a good thing for their safety, and there they sat, in their rows, throughout the long afternoon, solemnly chewing laurel leaves for their lives, while the strong madman raved on the sand below, and slew, and bathed himself in the blood of man and beast. There is a touch of frightful humour in the tale.

And one stands there alone in the stillness and remembers how, on that same night, when all was over, when the corpses had been dragged away, it may have been almost as it is now. Only, perhaps, far off among the arches and on the tiers of seats, there might be still a tiny light moving here and there; the keepers of that terrible place would go their rounds with their little earthen lamps; they would search everywhere in the spectators' places for small things that might have been lost in the press—a shoulder-buckle of gold or silver or bronze, an armlet, a woman's earring, a purse, perhaps, with something in it. And the fitful night-breeze blew now and then and made them shade their lights with their dark hands. By the 'door of the dead' a torch was burning down in its socket, its glare falling upon a heap of armour, mostly somewhat battered, and all of it blood-stained; a score of black-browed smiths were picking it over and distributing it in heaps, according to its condition. Now and then, from the deep vaults below the arena, came the distant sound of a clanging gate or of some piece of huge stage machinery falling into its place, and a muffled calling of men. One of the keepers, with his light, was singing softly some ancient minor strain as he searched the tiers. That would be all, and presently even that would cease.

One thinks of such things naturally enough; and then the dream runs backward, against the sun, as dreams will, and the moon rays weave a vision of dim day. Straightway tier upon tier, eighty thousand faces rise, up to the last high rank beneath the awning's shade. High in the front, under the silken canopy sits the Emperor of the world, sodden-faced, ghastly, swine-eyed, robed in purple; all alone, save for his dwarf, bull-nosed, slit-mouthed, hunch-backed, sly. Next, on the lowest bench, the Vestals, old and young, the elder looking on with hard faces and dry eyes, the youngest with wide and startled looks, and parted lips, and quick-drawn breath that sobs and is caught at sight of each deadly stab and gash of broadsword and trident, and hands that twitch and clutch each other as a man's foot slips in a pool of blood, and the heavy harness clashes in the red, wet sand. Then grey-haired senators; then curled and perfumed knights of Rome; and then the people, countless, vast, frenzied, blood-thirsty, stretching out a hundred thousand hands with thumbs reversed, commanding death to the fallen—full eighty thousand throats of men and women roaring, yelling, shrieking over each ended life. A theatre indeed, a stage indeed, a play wherein every scene of every act ends in sudden death.

And then the wildest, deadliest howl of all on that day; a handful of men and women in white, and one girl in the midst of them; the clang of an iron gate thrown suddenly open; a rushing and leaping of great, lithe bodies of beasts, yellow and black and striped, the sand flying in clouds behind them; a worrying and crushing of flesh and bone, as of huge cats worrying little white mice; sharp cries, then blood, then silence, then a great laughter, and the sodden face of mankind's drunken master grows almost human for a moment with a very slow smile. The wild beasts are driven out with brands and red-hot irons, step by step, dragging backward nameless mangled things in their jaws, and the bull-nosed dwarf offers the Emperor a cup of rare red wine. It drips from his mouth while he drinks, as the blood from the tiger's fangs.

"What were they?" he asks.

"Christians," explains the dwarf.



REGION XI SANT' ANGELO

The Region of Sant' Angelo, as has been already said, takes its name from the small church famous in Rienzi's story. It encloses all of what was once the Ghetto, and includes the often-mentioned Theatre of Marcellus, now the palace of the Orsini, but successively a fortress of the Pierleoni, appropriately situated close to the Jews' quarter, and the home of the Savelli. The history of the Region is the history of the Jews in Rome, from Augustus to the destruction of their dwelling-place, about 1890. In other words, the Hebrew colony actually lived during nineteen hundred years at that point of the Tiber, first on one side of the river, and afterwards on the other.

It is said that the first Jews were brought to Rome by Pompey, as prisoners of war, and soon afterwards set free, possibly on their paying a ransom accumulated by half starving themselves, and selling the greater part of their allowance of corn during a long period. Seventeen years later, they were a power in Rome; they had lent Julius Caesar enormous sums, which he repaid with exorbitant interest, and after his death they mourned him, and kept his funeral pyre burning seven days and nights in the Forum. A few years after that time, Augustus established them on the opposite side of the Tiber, over against the bridge of Cestius and the island. Under Tiberius their numbers had increased to fifty thousand; they had synagogues in Rome, Genoa and Naples, and it is noticeable that their places of worship were always built upon the shore of the sea, or the bank of a river, whence their religious services came to be termed 'orationes littorales'—which one might roughly translate as 'alongshore prayers.'

They were alternately despised, hated, feared and flattered. Tacitus calls them a race of men hated by the gods, yet their kings, Herod and Agrippa—one asks how the latter came by an ancient Roman name—were treated with honour and esteem. The latter was in fact brought up with Drusus, the son of the Emperor Tiberius, his son was on terms of the greatest intimacy with Claudius, and his daughter or grand-daughter Berenice was long and truly loved by Titus, who would have made her Empress had it been possible, to the great scandal of the Emperor's many detractors, as Suetonius has told. Sabina Poppaea, Nero's lowly and evil second wife, loved madly one Aliturius, a Jewish comic actor and a favourite of Nero; and when the younger Agrippa induced Nero to imprison Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and Josephus came to Pozzuoli, having suffered shipwreck like the latter, this same Josephus, the historian of the Jews, got the actor's friendship and by his means moved Poppaea, and through her, Nero, to a first liberation of those whom he describes as 'certain priests of my acquaintance, very excellent persons, whom on a small and trifling charge Felix the procurator of Judaea had put in irons and sent to Rome to plead their cause before Caesar.' It should not be forgotten that Josephus was himself a pupil of Banus, who, though not a Christian, is believed to have been a follower of John the Baptist. And here Saint John Chrysostom, writing about the year 400, takes up the story and tells how Saint Paul attempted to convert Poppaea and to persuade her to leave Nero, since she had two other husbands living; and how Nero turned upon him and accused him of many sins, and imprisoned him, and when he saw that even in prison the Apostle still worked upon Poppaea's conscience, he at last condemned him to die. Other historians have said that Poppaea turned Jewess for the sake of her Jewish actor, and desired to be buried by the Jewish rite when she was dying of the savage kick that killed her and her child—the only act of violence Nero seems to have ever regretted. However that may be, it is sure that she loved the comedian, and that for a time he had unbounded influence in Rome. And so great did their power grow that Claudius Rutilius, a Roman magistrate and poet, a contemporary of Chrysostom, and not a Christian, expressed the wish that Judaea might never have been conquered by Pompey and subdued again by Titus, 'since the contagion of the cancer, cut out, spreads wider, and the conquered nation grinds its conquerors.'

And so, with varying fortune, they survived the empire which they had seen founded, and the changes of a thousand years, they themselves inwardly unchanged and unchanging, while following many arts and many trades besides money-lending, and they outlived persecution and did not decay in prosperity. In their seven Roman synagogues they set up models of the temple Titus had destroyed, and of the seven-branched candlestick and of the holy vessels of Jerusalem which were preserved in the temple of Peace as trophies of the Jews' subjection; they made candlesticks and vessels of like shape for their synagogues, nursing their hatred, praying for deliverance, and because those sacred things were kept in Rome, it became a holy city for them, and they throve; and by and by they oppressed their victors. Then came Domitian the Jew-hater, and turned them out of their houses and laid heavy taxes upon them, and forced them for a time to live in the caves and wild places and catacombs of the Aventine, and they became dealers in spells and amulets and love philtres, which they sold dear to the ever-superstitious Romans, and Juvenal wrote scornful satires on them. Presently they returned, under Trajan, to their old dwellings by the Tiber. Thence they crept along the Cestian bridge to the island, and from the island by the Fabrician bridge to the other shore, growing rich again by degrees, and crowding their little houses upon the glorious portico of Octavia, where Vespasian and Titus had met the Senate at dawn on the day when they triumphed over the Jews and the fall of Jerusalem, and the very place of the Jews' greatest humiliation became their stronghold for ages.

Then all at once, in the twelfth century, they are the masters. The Pierleoni hold Sant' Angelo, and close to their old quarters fortify the Theatre of Marcellus, and a Pierleone is antipope in name, but a real and ruling Pope in political fact, while Innocent the Second wanders helplessly from town to town, and later, while Lewis the Seventh of France leads the Second Crusade to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, the 'Vicar of Christ' is an outcast before the race of those by whom Christ was crucified. That was the highest point of the Jews' greatness in Rome.



But it is noticeable that while the Hebrew race possesses in the very highest degree the financial energy to handle and accumulate money, and the tenacity to keep it for a long time, it has never shown that sort of strength which can hold land or political power in adverse circumstances. In the twelfth century the Pierleoni were the masters of Rome; in the thirteenth, they had disappeared from history, though they still held the Theatre of Marcellus; in the fourteenth they seem to have perished altogether and are never heard of again. And it should not be argued that this was due to any overwhelming persecution and destruction of the Jews, since the Pierleoni's first step was an outward, if not a sincere, conversion to Christianity. In strong contrast with these facts stands the history of the Colonna. The researches of the learned Coppi make it almost certain that the Colonna descend from Theodora, the Senatress of Rome, who flourished in the year 914; Pietro della Colonna held Palestrina, and is known to have imprisoned there, 'in an empty cistern,' the governor of Campagna, in the year 1100; like the Orsini, the Colonna boast that during more than five hundred years no treaty was drawn up with the princes of Europe in which their two families were not specifically designated; and at the time of the present writing, in the last days of the nineteenth century, Colonna is still not only one of the greatest names in Europe, but the family is numerous and flourishing, unscathed by the terrible financial disasters which began to ruin Italy in 1888, not notably wealthy, but still in possession of its ancestral palace in Rome, and of immense tracts of land in the hills, in the Campagna, and in the south of Italy—actively engaged, moreover, in the representative government of Italy, strong, solid and full of life, as though but lately risen to eminence from a sturdy country stock—and all this after a career that has certainly lasted eight hundred years, and very probably nearer a thousand. Nor can any one pretend that it owes much to the power or protection of any sovereign, since the Colonna have been in almost constant opposition to the Popes in history, have been exiled and driven from Italy more than once, and have again and again suffered confiscation of all they possessed in the world. There have certainly not been in the same time so many confiscations proclaimed against the Jews.

The question presents itself: why has a prolific race which, as a whole, has survived the fall of kingdoms and empires without end, with singular integrity of original faith and most extraordinary tenacity of tradition and custom, together with the most unbounded ambition and very superior mental gifts, never produced a single family of powerful men able to maintain their position more than a century or two, when the nations of Europe have produced at least half a dozen that have lasted a thousand years? If there be any answer to such a question, it is that the pursuit and care of money have a tendency to destroy the balance and produce degeneration by over-stimulating the mind in one direction, and that not a noble one, at the expense of the other talents; whereas the struggle for political power sharpens most of the faculties, and the acquisition and preservation of landed property during many generations bring men necessarily into a closer contact with nature, and therefore induce a healthier life, tending to increase the vitality of a race rather than to diminish it. Whether this be true or not, it is safe to say that no great family has ever maintained its power long by the possession of money, without great lands; and by 'long' we understand at least three hundred years.

With regard to the Jews in Rome it is a singular fact that they have generally been better treated by the religious than by the civil authorities. They were required to do homage to the latter every year in the Capitol, and on this occasion the Senator of Rome placed his foot upon the heads of the prostrate delegates, by way of accentuating their humiliation and disgrace, but the service they were required to do on the accession of a new Pope was of a different and less degrading nature. The Israelite School awaited the Pope's passage, on his return from taking possession of the Lateran, standing up in a richly hung temporary balcony, before which he passed on his way. They then presented him with a copy of the Pentateuch, which he blessed on the spot, and took away with him. That was all, and it amounted to a sanction, or permission, accorded to the Jewish religion.

As for the sumptuary laws, the first one was decreed in 1215, after the fall of the Pierleoni, and it imposed upon all Jews, and other heretics whomsoever, the wearing of a large circle of yellow cloth sewn upon the breast. In the following century, according to Baracconi, this mark was abolished by the statutes of the city and the Jews were made to wear a scarlet mantle in public; but all licensed Jewish physicians, being regarded as public benefactors, were exempted from the rule. For the profession of medicine is one which the Hebrews have always followed with deserved success, and it frequently happened in Rome that the Pope's private physician, who lived in the Vatican and was a personage of confidence and importance, was a professed Israelite from the Ghetto, who worshipped in the synagogue on Saturdays and looked with contempt and disgust upon his pontifical patient as an eater of unclean food. There was undoubtedly a law compelling a certain number of the Jews to hear sermons once a week, first in the Trinita dei Pellegrini, and afterwards in the Church of Sant' Angelo in the Fishmarket, and it was from time to time rigorously enforced; it was renewed in the present century under Leo the Twelfth, and only finally abolished, together with all other oppressive measures, by Pius the Ninth at the beginning of his reign. But when one considers the frightful persecution suffered by the race in Spain, it must be conceded that they were relatively well treated in Rome by the Popes. Their bitterest enemies and oppressors were the lower classes of the people, who were always ready to attack and rifle the Ghetto on the slightest pretext, and against whose outrageous deeds the Jews had no redress.



It was their treatment by the people, rather than the matter itself, which made the carnival races, in which they were forced to run after a hearty meal, together with a great number of Christians, an intolerable tyranny; and when Clement the Ninth exempted them from it, he did not abolish the races of Christian boys and old men. The people detested the Jews, hooted them, hissed them, and maltreated them with and without provocation. Moses Mendelssohn, the father of the composer, wrote to a friend from Berlin late in the eighteenth century, complaining bitterly that in that self-styled city of toleration, the cry of 'Jew' was raised against him when he ventured into the streets with his little children by daylight, and that the boys threw stones at them, as they passed, so that he only went out late in the evening. Things were no better in Rome under Paul the Fourth, but they were distinctly better in Rome than in Berlin at the time of Mendelssohn's writing.

Paul the Fourth, the Carafa Pope, and the friend of the Inquisition, confined the Jews to the Ghetto. There can be no doubt but that the act was intended as a measure of severity against heretics, and as such Pius the Ninth considered it indefensible and abolished it. In actual fact it must have been of enormous advantage to the Jews, who were thus provided with a stronghold against the persecutions and robberies of the rabble. The little quarter was enclosed by strong walls with gates, and if the Jews were required to be within them at night, on pain of a fine, they and their property were at least in safety. This fact has never been noticed, and accounts for the serenity with which they bore their nightly imprisonment for three centuries. Once within the walls of the Ghetto they were alone, and could go about the little streets in perfect security; they were free from the contamination as well as safe from the depredations of Christians, and within their own precincts they were not forced to wear the hated orange-coloured cap or net which Paul the Fourth imposed upon the Jewish men and women. To a great extent, too, such isolation was already in the traditions of the race. A hundred years earlier Venice had created its Ghetto; so had Prague, and other European cities were not long in following. Morally speaking their confinement may have been a humiliation; in sober fact it was an immense advantage; moreover, a special law of 'emphyteusis' made the leases of their homes inalienable, so long as they paid rent, and forbade the raising of the rent under any circumstances, while leaving the tenant absolute freedom to alter and improve his house as he would, together with the right to sublet it, or to sell the lease itself to any other Hebrew; and these leases became very valuable. Furthermore, though under the jurisdiction of criminal courts, the Jews had their own police in the Ghetto, whom they chose among themselves half yearly.

It has been stated by at least one writer that the church and square of Santa Maria del Pianto—Our Lady of Tears—bears witness to the grief of the people when they were first forced into the Ghetto in the year 1556. But this is an error. The church received the name from a tragedy and a miracle which are said to have taken place before it ten years earlier. It was formerly called San Salvatore in Cacaberis, the Church of the 'Saviour in the district of the kettle-makers.' An image of the Blessed Virgin stood over the door of a house close by; a frightful murder was done in broad day, and at the sight tears streamed from the statue's eyes; the image was taken into the church, which was soon afterwards dedicated to 'Our Lady of Tears,' and the name remained forever to commemorate the miraculous event.

Besides mobbing the Jews in the streets and plundering them when they could, the Roman populace invented means of insulting them which must have been especially galling. They ridiculed them in the popular open-air theatres, and made blasphemous jests upon their most sacred things in Carnival. It is not improbable that 'Punch and Judy' may have had their origin in something of this sort, and 'Judy' certainly suggests 'Giudea,' a Jewess. What the Roman rabble had done against Christians in heathen days, the Christian rabble did against the Jews in the Middle Age and the Renascence. They were robbed, ridiculed, outraged, and sometimes killed; after the fall of the Pierleoni, they appear to have had no civil rights worth mentioning; they were taxed more heavily than the Christian citizens, in proportion as they were believed to be more wealthy, and were less able to resent the tax-gatherer; their daughters were stolen away for their beauty, less consenting than Jessica, and with more violence, and the Merchant of Venice is not a mere fiction of the master playwright. All these things were done to them and more, yet they stayed in Rome, and multiplied, and grew rich, being then, as when Tacitus wrote of them, 'scrupulously faithful and ever actively charitable to each other, and filled with invincible hatred against all other men.'



The old Roman Ghetto has been often described, but no description can give any true impression of it; the place where it stood is a vast open lot, waiting for new buildings which will perhaps never rise, and the memory of it is relegated to the many fast-fading pictures of old Rome. Persius tells how, on Herod's birthday, the Jews adorned their doors with bunches of violets and set out rows of little smoky lamps upon the greasy window-sills, and feasted on the tails of tunny fish—the meanest part—pickled, and eaten off rough red earthen-ware plates with draughts of poor white wine. The picture was a true one ten years ago, for the manners of the Ghetto had not changed in that absolute isolation. The name itself, 'Ghetto,' is generally derived from a Hebrew root meaning 'cut off'—and cut off the Jews' quarter was, by walls, by religion, by tradition, by mutual hatred between Hebrews and other men. It has been compared to a beehive, to an anthill, to an old house-beam riddled and traversed in all directions by miniature labyrinths of worm-holes, crossing, intercommunicating, turning to right and left, upwards and downwards, but hardly ever coming out to the surface. It has been described by almost every writer who ever put words together about Rome, but no words, no similes, no comparisons, can make those see it who were never there. In a low-lying space enclosed within a circuit of five hundred yards, and little, if at all, larger than the Palazzo Doria, between four and five thousand human beings were permanently crowded together in dwellings centuries old, built upon ancient drains and vaults that were constantly exposed to the inundations of the river and always reeking with its undried slime; a little, pale-faced, crooked-legged, eager-eyed people, grubbing and grovelling in masses of foul rags for some tiny scrap richer than the rest and worthy to be sold apart; a people whose many women, haggard, low-speaking, dishevelled, toiled half doubled together upon the darning and piecing and smoothing of old clothes, whose many little children huddled themselves into corners, to teach one another to count; a people of sellers who sold nothing that was not old or damaged, and who had nothing that they would not sell; a people clothed in rags, living among rags, thriving on rags; a people strangely proof against pestilence, gathering rags from the city to their dens, when the cholera was raging outside the Ghetto's gates, and rags were cheap, yet never sickening of the plague themselves; a people never idle, sleeping little, eating sparingly, labouring for small gain amid dirt and stench and dampness, till Friday night came at last, and the old crier's melancholy voice ran through the darkening alleys—'The Sabbath has begun.'

And all at once the rags were gone, the ghostly old clothes that swung like hanged men, by the neck, in the doorways of the cavernous shops, flitted away into the utter darkness within; the old bits of iron and brass went rattling out of sight, like spectres' chains; the hook-nosed antiquary drew in his cracked old show-case; the greasy frier of fish and artichokes extinguished his little charcoal fire of coals; the slipshod darning-women, half-blind with six days' work, folded the half-patched coats and trousers, and took their rickety old rush-bottomed chairs indoors with them.

Then, on the morrow, in the rich synagogue with its tapestries, its gold, and its gilding, the thin, dark men were together in their hats and long coats, and the sealed books of Moses were borne before their eyes and held up to the North and South and East and West, and all the men together lifted up their arms and cried aloud to the God of their fathers. But when the Sabbath was over, they went back to their rags and their patched clothes and to their old iron and their junk and their antiquities, and toiled on patiently again, looking for the coming of the Messiah.

And there were astrologers and diviners and magicians and witches and crystal-gazers among them to whom great ladies came on foot, thickly veiled, and walking delicately amidst the rags, and men, too, who were more ashamed of themselves, and slunk in at nightfall to ask the Jews concerning the future—even in our time as in Juvenal's, and in Juvenal's day as in Saul's of old. Nor did the papal laws against witchcraft have force against Jews, since the object of the laws was to save Christian souls from the hell which no Jew could escape save by conversion. And the diviners and seers and astrologers of the Ghetto were long in high esteem, and sometimes earned fortunes when they hit the truth, and when the truth was pleasant in the realization.

They are gone now, with the Ghetto and all that belonged to it. The Jews who lived there are either becoming absorbed in the population of Rome, or have transferred themselves and their rags to other places, where lodgings are cheap, but where they no longer enjoy the privilege of irrevocable leases at rents fixed for all time. A part of them are living between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Lateran, a part in Trastevere, and they exercise their ancient industries in their new homes, and have new synagogues instead of the old ones. But one can no longer see them all together in one place. Little by little, too, the old prejudices against them are disappearing, even among the poorer Romans, whose hatred was most tenacious, and by and by, at no very distant date, the Jews in Rome will cease to be an isolated and peculiar people. Then, when they live as other men, amongst other folks, as in many cities of the world, they will get the power in Rome, as they have begun to get it already, and as they have it already in more than one great capital. But a change has come over the Jewish race within the last fifty years, greater than any that has affected their destinies since Titus destroyed the Temple and brought thousands of them, in the train of Pompey's thousands, to build the Colosseum; and the wisest among them, if they be faithful and believing Jews, as many are, ask themselves whether this great change, which looks so like improvement, is really for good, or whether it is the beginning of the end of the oldest nation of us all.



REGION XII RIPA

In Italian, as in Latin, Ripa means the bank of a river, and the Twelfth Region took its name from being bounded by the river bank, from just below the island all the way to the Aurelian walls, which continue the boundary of the triangle on the south of Saint Sebastian's gate; the third side runs at first irregularly from the theatre of Marcellus to the foot of the Palatine, skirts the hill to the gas works at the north corner of the Circus Maximus, takes in the latter, and thence runs straight to the gate before mentioned. The Region includes the Aventine, Monte Testaccio, and the baths of Caracalla. The origin of the device, like that of several others, seems to be lost.

The Aventine, ever since the auguries of Remus, has been especially the refuge of opposition, and more especially, perhaps, of religious opposition. In very early times it was especially the hill of the plebeians, who frequently retired to its heights in their difficulties with the patricians, as they had once withdrawn to the more distant Mons Sacer in the Campagna. The temple of Ceres stood in the immediate neighbourhood of the Circus, on the line of approach to the Aventine, and contained the archives of the plebeian AEdiles. In the times of the Decemvirs, much of the land on the hill was distributed among the people, who probably lived within the city, but went out daily to cultivate their little farms, just as the inhabitants of the hill villages do today.

If this were not the case, it would be hard to explain how the Aventine could have been a solitude at night, as it was in the time of the Bacchic orgies, of which the discovery convulsed the republic, and ended in a religious persecution. That was when Scipio of Asia had been accused and not acquitted of having taken a bribe of six thousand pounds of gold and four hundred and eighty pounds of silver to favour Antiochus. It was in the first days of Rome's corruption, when the brilliant army of Asia first brought the love of foreign luxury to Rome; when the soldiers, enriched with booty, began to have brass bedsteads, rich coverlets and curtains, and other things of woven stuff in their magnificent furniture, and little Oriental tables with one foot, and decorated sideboards; when people first had singing-girls, and lute-players, and players on the sharp-strung 'triangle,' and actors, to amuse them at their feasts; when the feasts themselves began to be extravagant, and the office of a cook, once mean and despised, rose to be one of high estimation and rich emolument, so that what had been a slave's work came to be regarded as an art. It was no wonder that such changes came about in Rome, when every triumph brought hundreds and thousands of pounds of gold and silver to the city, when Marcus Fulvius brought back hundreds of crowns of gold, and two hundred and eighty-five bronze statues, and two hundred and thirty statues of marble, with other vast spoils, and when Cnaeus Manlius brought home wealth in bullion and in coin, which even in these days, when the value of money is far less, would be worth any nation's having.

And with it all came Greek corruption, Greek worship, Greek vice. For years the mysteries of Dionysus and the orgies of the Maenads were celebrated on the slopes of the Aventine and in those deep caves that riddle its sides, less than a mile from the Forum, from the Capitol, from the house of the rigid Cato, who found fault with Scipio of Africa for shaving every day and liking Greek verses. The evil had first come to Rome from Etruria, and had then turned Greek, as it were, in the days of the Asian triumphs; and first it was an orgy of drunken women only, as in most ancient times, but soon men were admitted, and presently a rule was made that no one should be initiated who was over twenty years of age, and that those who refused to submit to the horrid rites after being received should perish in the deepest cave of the hill, while the noise of drums and clashing cymbals and of shouting drowned their screams. And many boys and girls were thus done to death; and the conspiracy of the orgies was widespread in Rome, yet the secret was well kept.

Now there was a certain youth at that time, whose father had died, and whose mother was one of the Maenads and had married a man as bad as herself. He and she were guardians of her son's fortune, and they had squandered it, and knew that when he came of age they should not be able to give an account of their guardianship. They therefore determined to initiate him at the Bacchic orgy, for he was of a brave temper, and they knew that he would not submit to the rites, and so would be torn to pieces by the Maenads, and they might escape the law in their fraud. His mother called him, and told him that once, when he had been ill, she had promised the gods that she would initiate him in the Bacchanalia if he recovered, and that it was now time to perform her vow. And doubtless she delighted his ignorance with an account of a beautiful and solemn ceremony.

But this youth was dearly loved by a woman whose faith to him covered many sins. She had been a slave when a girl, and with her mistress had been initiated, and knew what the rites were, and how evil and terrible; and since she had been freed she had never gone to them. So when her lover told her he was to go, thinking it good news, she was terrified, and told him that it were better that both he and she should die that night, than that he should be so contaminated. When he knew the truth, he went home and told his mother and his stepfather boldly that he would not go; and they, being beside themselves with anger and disappointment, called four slaves and threw him out into the street. For which deed they died. For the young man went to his father's sister, and told all; and she sent him to the Consul to tell his story, who called the woman that loved him, and promised her protection, so that at last she told the truth, and he brought the matter before the Senate. Then there was great horror at what was told, and the people who had been initiated fled in haste by thousands, and the city was in a turmoil, while the Senate made new and terrible laws against the rites. Many persons were put to death, and a few were taken and imprisoned on suspicion, and many, being guilty, killed themselves. For it was found that more than seven thousand men and women had conspired in the orgies, and the contamination had spread throughout Italy.

As for the youth, and the woman who had saved the State out of love for him, the Senate and the people made a noble and generous decree. For him, he received a sum of money from the public treasury in place of the fortune his mother had stolen from him, and he was exempted from military service, unless he chose to be a soldier, and from ever furnishing a horse to the State. But for the woman, whose life had been evil, it was publicly decreed that her sins should be blotted out, that she should have all rights of holding, transferring and selling property, of marrying into another gens and of choosing a guardian, as if she had received all from a husband by will; that she should be at liberty to marry a man of free descent, and that he who should marry her was to incur no degradation, and that all consuls and praetors in the future should watch over her and see that no harm came to her, as long as she lived. Her people made her an honourable Roman matron, and perhaps the stern old senators thus rewarded her in order that the man she had saved might marry her without shame. But whether he did or not, no one knows.



This is the first instance in which a religion, and the orgies were so called by the Romans, was practised upon the Aventine in opposition to that of the State. It was not the last. Under Domitian, Juvenal found a host of Jews established there, on the eastern slope and about the fountain of Egeria, and thirty years before him Saint Paul lived on the Aventine in the Jewish house of Aquila and Priscilla where Santa Prisca stands today. It is worth noting that Aquila, an eagle, the German Adler, was already then a Jewish name. Little by little, however, the Jews went back to the Tiber, and the Aventine became the stronghold of the Christians; there they built many of their oldest churches, and thence they carried out their dead to the near catacombs of Saint Petronilla, the church better known as that of Saint Nereus and Saint Achillaeus. And there are many other ancient churches on the hill, and on the road that leads to Saint Sebastian's gate, and beyond the walls, on the Appian Way as far as Saint Callixtus; lonely, peaceful shrines, beautiful with the sculptures and pavements and mosaics of the Cosmas family who lived and worked between six and seven hundred years ago. On the other side of the hill, near the Circus, Saint Augustine taught rhetoric for a living, though he knew no Greek and was perhaps no great Latin scholar either—still an unbeliever then, an astrologer and a follower after strange doctrines, one whom no man could have taken for a future bishop and Father of the Church, who was to be author of two hundred and thirty-two theological treatises, as well as of an exposition of the Psalms and the Gospels. Here Saint Gregory the Great, once Prefect of Rome, preached and prayed, and here the fierce Hildebrand lived when he was young, and called himself Gregory when he was Pope, perhaps, because he had so often meditated here upon the life and acts of the wise Saint, in the places hallowed by his footsteps.

Later, the Aventine was held by the Savelli, who dwelt in castles long since destroyed, even to the foundations, by the fury of their enemies; and there the two Popes of the house, Honorius the Third—a famous chronicler in his day—and Honorius the Fourth, found refuge when the restless Romans 'annoyed them,' as Muratori mildly puts it. They were brave men in their day, mostly Guelphs, and faithful friends of the Colonna, and it is told how one of them died in a great fight between Colonna and Orsini.

It was in that same struggle which culminated in the execution of Lorenzo Colonna, the Protonotary, that Pope Sixtus the Fourth destroyed the last remains of the Sublician Bridge, at the foot of the Aventine. So, at least, tradition says. From that bridge the Roman pontiffs had taken their title, 'Pontifex,' a bridge-maker, because it was one of their chief duties to keep it in repair, when it was the only means of crossing the Tiber, and the safety of the city might depend upon it at any time; and for many centuries the bridge was built of oak, and without nails or bolts of iron, in memory of the first bridge which Horatius had kept. Now those who love to ponder on coincidences may see one in this, that the last remnant of the once oaken bridge, kept whole by the heathen Pontifex, was destroyed by the Christian Pontifex, whose name was 'of the oak'—for so 'della Rovere' may be translated if one please.

Years ago, one might still distinctly see in the Tiber the remains of piers, when the water was low, at the foot of the Aventine, a little above the Ripa Grande; and those who saw them looked on the very last vestige of the Sublician Bridge, that is to say, of the stone structure which in later times took the place of the wooden one; and that last trace has been destroyed to deepen the little harbour. In older days there were strange superstitions and ceremonies connected with the bridge that had meant so much to Rome. Strangest of all was the procession on the Ides of May,—the fifteenth of that month,—when the Pontiffs and the Vestals came to the bridge in solemn state, with men who bore thirty effigies made of bulrushes in likeness to men's bodies, and threw them into the river, one after the other, with prayers and hymns; but what the images meant no man knows. Most generally it was believed in Rome that they took the place of human beings, once sacrificed to the river in the spring. Ovid protests against the mere thought, but the industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to prove that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber for one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise sacrificed until the year of the city 657, when, Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a law that no man should be sacrificed thereafter. The question is one for scholars; but considering the savage temper of the Romans, their dark superstitions, the abundance of victims always at hand, and the frequency of human sacrifices among nations only one degree more barbarous, there is no reason for considering the story very improbable.



Within the limits of this region the ancient Brotherhood of Saint John Beheaded have had their church and place of meeting for centuries. It was their chief function to help and comfort condemned criminals from the midnight preceding their death until the end. To this confraternity belonged Michelangelo, among other famous men whose names stand on the rolls to this day; and doubtless the great master, hooded in black and unrecognizable among the rest, and chanting the penitential psalms in the voice that could speak so sharply, must have spent dark hours in gloomy prisons, from midnight to dawn, beside pale-faced men who were not to see the sun go down again; and in the morning, he must have stood upon the very scaffold with the others, and seen the bright axe smite out the poor life. But neither he nor any others of the brethren spoke of these things except among themselves, and they alone knew who had been of the band, when they bore the dead man to his rest at last, by their little church, when they laid Beatrice Cenci before the altar in Saint Peter's on the Janiculum, and Lucrezia in the quiet church of Saint Gregory by the Aventine. They wrote down in their journal the day, the hour, the name, the death; no more than that. And they went back to their daily life in silence.

But for their good deeds they obtained the right of saving one man from death each year, conceded them by Paul the Third, the Farnese Pope, while Michelangelo was painting the Last Judgment—a right perhaps asked for by him, as one of the brothers, and granted for his sake. Baracconi has discovered an account of the ceremony. At the first meeting in August, the governor of the confraternity appointed three brethren to visit all the prisons of Rome and note the names of the prisoners condemned to death, drawing up a precise account of each case, but ascertaining especially which ones had obtained the forgiveness of those whom they had injured. At the second meeting in August, the reports were read, and the brethren chose the fortunate man by ballot.



Then the whole dark company went in procession to the prison. The beadle of the order marched first, bearing his black wand in one hand, and in the other a robe of scarlet silk and a torch for the pardoned man; two brothers followed with staves, others with lanterns, more with lighted torches, and after them was borne the crucifix, the sacred figure's arms hanging down, perhaps supposed to be in the act of receiving the pardoned man, and a crown of silvered olive hung at its feet—then more brothers, and last of all the Governor and the chaplain. The prison doors were draped with tapestries, box and myrtle strewed the ground, and the Governor received the condemned person and signed a receipt for his body. The happy man prostrated himself before the crucifix, was crowned with the olive garland, the Te Deum was intoned, and he was led away to the brotherhood's church, where he heard high mass in sight of all the people. Last, and not least, if he was a pauper, the brethren provided him with a little money and obtained him some occupation; if a stranger, they paid his journey home.

But the Roman rabble, says the writer, far preferred an execution to a pardon, and would follow a condemned man to the scaffold in thousands. If he was to be hanged, the person who touched the halter was the most fortunate, and much money was often paid for bits of the rope; and at night, when the wretched corpse was carried away to the church by the brethren, the crowd followed in long procession, mumbling prayers, to kneel on the church steps at last and implore the dead man's liberated spirit to suggest to them, by some accident, numbers to be played at the lottery—custom which recalls the incantations of the witches by the crosses of executed slaves on the Esquiline.



REGION XIII TRASTEVERE

All that part of Rome which lies on the right bank of the Tiber is divided into two Regions; namely, Trastevere and Borgo. The first of these is included between the river and the walls of Urban the Eighth from Porta Portese and the new bridge opposite the Aventine to the bastions and the gate of San Spirito; and Trastevere was the last of the thirteen Regions until the end of the sixteenth century, when the so-called Leonine City was made the fourteenth and granted a captain and a standard of its own.

The men of Trastevere boast that they are of better blood than the other Romans, and they may be right. In many parts of Italy just such small ancient tribes have kept alive, never intermarrying with their neighbours nor losing their original speech. There are villages in the south where Greek is spoken, and others where Albanian is the language. There is one in Calabria where the people speak nothing but Piedmontese, which is as different from the Southern dialects as German is from French. Italy has always been a land of individualities rather than of amalgamations, and a country of great men, rather than a great country.

It is true that the Trasteverines have preserved their individuality, cut off as they have been by the river from the modernizing influences which spread like a fever through the length and breadth of Rome. Their quarter is full of crooked little streets and irregularly shaped open places, the houses are not high, the windows are small and old fashioned, and the entrances dark and low. There are but few palaces and not many public buildings. Yet Trastevere is not a dirty quarter; on the contrary, to eyes that understand Italians, there is a certain dignity in its poverty, which used to be in strong contrast with the slipshod publicity of household dirt in the inhabited parts of Monti. The contrast is, in a way, even more vivid now, for Monti, the first Region, has suffered most in the great crisis, and Trastevere least of all. Rome is one of the poorest cities in the civilized world, and when she was trying to seem rich, the element of sham was enormous in everything. In the architecture of the so-called new quarters the very gifts of the Italians turned against them; for they are born engineers and mathematicians, and by a really marvellous refinement of calculation they have worked miracles in the construction of big buildings out of altogether insufficient material, while the Italian workman's traditional skill in modelling stucco has covered vast surfaces of unsafe masonry with elaborately tasteless ornamentation. One result of all this has been a series of catastrophes of which a detailed account would appal grave men in other countries; another consequence is the existence of a quantity of grotesquely bad street decoration, much of which is already beginning to crumble under the action of the weather. It is sadder still, in many parts of Monti to see the modern ruins of houses which were not even finished when the crash put an end to the building mania, roofless, windowless, plasterless, falling to pieces and never to be inhabited—landmarks of bankruptcy, whole streets of dwellings built to lodge an imaginary population, and which will have fallen to dust long before they are ever needed, stuccoed palaces meant to be the homes of a rich middle class, and given over at derisory rents to be the refuge of the very poor. In the Monti, ruin stares one in the face, and poverty has battened upon ruin, as flies upon garbage.