Antemnæ.
It is one of the amiable features of the study of historical topography that its votaries are so easily pleased. Two places may have equal charms on utterly opposite grounds. The merit of one city is that it has lived on uninterruptedly from the earliest times till now. The merit of another city is that it ceased to live at all many ages back. One is precious because it contains a series of monuments of all ages. Another is equally precious because all its monuments are of one age. A third is as precious as either because it contains no monuments at all. This last kind of charm may seem paradoxical; but it will be acknowledged by every one who has given himself heartily to this kind of research. At Veii and at Fidenæ the great merit is that there is, speaking roughly, nothing to see there; in truth there is the more to see because there is nothing to see. No doubt Veii and Fidenæ untouched, as they stood under Lars Tolumnius, would be best of all; but we set that aside among the things which it is no use hoping for. And no doubt if we found the sites of Veii and Fidenæ full of Roman and mediæval monuments, we should doubtless be glad to see them; but, as they are not there, we are still more glad that they are away. But we turn from Veii and Fidenæ to a city compared with which Veii and Fidenæ might seem to have a wealth of monuments. It is, after all, an exaggeration to say that nothing is left of Veii or of Fidenæ. The sites are the main things; but there really is something to see beside the sites. But there is a city, at least the site of a city, much nearer to Rome than either of them, of which the great charm is that it does not contain a single monument of any kind or date. Here we can, even more truly than at Veii and at Fidenæ, say that the very ruins have perished; but it is just because the very ruins have perished yet more utterly than elsewhere that the spot has a strong and special attraction of its own.
We took a kind of Pisgah view of Antemnæ both from the road to the White Hens and from the road to Fidenæ. As we before said, it ought to be examined as one of the objects on this last road; only things are not always as they ought to be. We must therefore start afresh from the Flaminian gate and for the third time make our way to the Milvian bridge. This time as our course is to lead us to one of the oldest sites in Roman history, it may be well, by way of contrast, to let the bridge call up thoughts of warfare yet later than that of Constantine. It was on the Roman side of the Milvian bridge, when the bridge itself, which he had fortified, was betrayed to the Gothic enemy, that Belisarius, with another Maxentius at his side, withstood the host which Witigis had led from Narnia. Readers either of Procopius or of Gibbon must remember how every dart was aimed at the bay horse, and how the rider of the bay horse escaped without a wound. This time we keep ourselves, with Belisarius, on the Roman side of the bridge. We are therefore not tempted to have our thoughts carried off into quite another part of the world by the statue of a famous Bohemian saint, who is said by some Bohemian scholars to be a purely imaginary being. Our present business is not with Saint John Nepomuk, not even with Belisarius or with Constantine; we have to do with times before Rome was, when Tiber still parted the free Etruscan from the free Latin. We walk along his left bank, keeping within the bounds of Latium, but with the eye tempted at every moment to look across to the opposite, the Etruscan bank. Both banks are so quiet, both are so nearly forsaken, both come so easily within an ordinary walk from our Roman quarters, that it is hard to call up the days when Tiber was the boundary stream, not merely of separate commonwealths, not merely of distinct and hostile nations, but of nations between which there was no tie of origin, language, or religion. To be sold beyond the Tiber was the most frightful of all dooms which spared life and limb. If the debtor were sold to Ardea or Tusculum, he might win his freedom and become a denizen of a city of his own speech. To sell him beyond the Tiber was like handing him over to bondage among Turks or Moors. But our path keeps us on the Latin side, in a land which, when it was inhabited at all, was inhabited by men of an intelligible speech. We peer under a rocky cliff, the riverward slope of the hill which rises just outside the Flaminian Gate of Rome. On that hill Witigis held his headquarters when Belisarius and Saint Peter between them guarded the Pincian. But, we ask, why did not some city, why did not Rome itself, arise on a site which seems so thoroughly suited for the needs of an ancient settlement? But we have to go further for what we seek; no record tells of any settlement on the Monte Parioli. We pass on by a few tombs in the hill-side, and we more distinctly make out the shape of a grassy hill parted by a wide alluvial plain from the river on the eastern side by which we approach. That is the hill of Antemnæ, a vanished city whose legendary story may be summed up in a few but instructive words. Antemnæ was older than Rome. It was one of the towns whose daughters supplied objects for that great act of what our forefathers called Quenfang, what sociologists called exogamy, which secured that the Roman State should last more than one generation. War follows; Rome prevails; Hersilia, wife of Romulus, but so strangely mother of nobody, pleads for the conquered, and Antemnæ is merged, in Rome. We may be sure that this is the genuine story, rather than others which give Antemnæ a longer life. In sober history its sole record seems to be that in Strabo's day the town had wholly passed away, and that the site was, as now, like Fidenæ, the possession of a single man.
The story in Livy is well imagined. The city whose people Romulus spares at the prayer of his wife has a specially Roman character. Parted as the hill is from the Tiber on three sides, its northern point, the point of a rather long promontory, overhangs the river at the very point of its junction with the Anio. Hence, it would seem, the descriptive name Antemnae, the town before the rivers. Such a site belongs to the same class as the hills of Rome. Less isolated than the Palatine or the Aventine, it is as much isolated as the Capitoline was while it still clave to the Quirinal. Such a site, with a descriptive name, can hardly belong to the earliest times; it marks the same degree of progress as the settlement of Rome itself. Cut off as it was from the oldest Rome by the whole of the high ground within and without the Roman walls, such a settlement on the river, a settlement so like Rome itself, might well be felt to be a special rival, a rival which must cease to exist as a hostile post, but whose people might well be incorporated with their more successful kinsfolk.
Of a tale placed in a time which is purely legendary, the utmost that we can say is that the legend falls in with the appearances of the site. Antemnæ has utterly perished; there is not a scrap of wall; some stones which deceive the eye at a distance prove, on coming near, to be part of the rock peeping out through the sides of the otherwise green hill. We believe that no antiquities have been found there. But the site speaks for itself. It is a manifest fortress; the gates are as plain as if their openings were spanned by arches like those of Perugia or Trier. We look out on Fidenæ and its surroundings, on the old battlefields of kings and consuls and emperors; on the bridge of Narses and Garibaldi, on the line of march which brought the Gaul, the Carthaginian, the Samnite, and the Goth to the gates, and some of them within the gates, of Rome. We can look down on nearly the whole of Roman history from the site where once stood Virgil's "turrigeræ Antemnæ." But we are yet farther from being able to tell the towers thereof than we were at Veii and Fidenæ. At Antemnæ the ruins themselves have perished.