II. Ferentino.
Italy contains two places bearing the name of Ferentinum or Ferentino, as England contains two places—perhaps more—bearing the several names of Leeds, Stafford, Birmingham, Hereford, Cambridge, Washington, Rochester, and others more obvious. And as the Northumbrian Rochester is also very conveniently written Rutchester, so the Etruscan Ferentinum is also conveniently written Ferentia. On an iter ad Brundisium we cannot possibly have anything to do with Etruscan Ferentia; our business lies with that Ferentinum which, according to the Itineraries, was to be found on the Via Latina between Anagnia and Frusino, and which is to be found there still. But if the name of the southern Ferentinum is more certain than that of its fellow, its ancient nationality is less certain. Its historical position is Hernican; it lies between Hernican Anagnia and Hernican Frusino; yet it is also spoken of as Volscian, as it may well have become in the endless warfare of those ever-shifting nations. Yet it is in other company that we should be best pleased to find it. Our earliest remembrance of the name places "Ferentinum of the rock" among the Thirty Cities, and gives it no mean place among them. We go to the spot with the lines ringing in our ears which place its warriors under the rule of proud Tarquin himself, on the spot where—
... in the centre thickest
Were ranged the shields of foes,
And from the centre loudest
The cry of battle rose.
Yet, even without book, we may have been a little surprised both to find a Thirty-city so far in the heart of the Volscian and Hernican hills, and to find its warriors marshalled along with such distant comrades as Tibur and Pedum and "Gabii of the pool." And, when we come back to our books, a horrible thought presses itself upon us more and more, a thought that Ferentinum may have no right to any place in that list at all. The name seems to be Lord Macaulay's guess—among a hundred other guesses—at the manifestly corrupt name which comes next before Gabii in Dionysios' list of the Latin cities. Some read as near to our mark as Fortinei; so we may hope for the best; but remembering where Ferentinum stands, very far from Gabii, we confess that our hopes are small.
In obedience to the Itinerary, it is from Anagni that we make our way to Ferentino. And as we go from Anagni to Ferentino, we better take in the special position of Anagni on the top of its isolated hill. Till we have gone some little distance, we are hardly conscious that Anagni is there at all; gradually the bell-tower rises into view, and the rest of the city follows. A few miles only lead us from the hill of Anagni to the hill of Ferentino. At the first glance it may be that the spot which we have reached does not specially strike as "Ferentinum of the rock." It does not seem to stand on such steep cliffs as many other hill-fortresses, Norba pre-eminently among them. But, when we begin to follow the line of the walls, we find out that, whether Lord Macaulay is right or wrong in speaking of Ferentinum at all, he has at least chosen his epithet wisely. Ferentinum is Ferentinum of the rock. Large parts of the wall stand directly on vast masses of rock, and sometimes rock and wall almost lose themselves in one another. And the walls of Ferentino certainly yield in interest to none of our series. They are still standing through the greater part of their ancient circuit, and for the most part they are of two manifest dates, differing in material and construction. There is an original lower part of the wall, built of huge blocks of lias which we may describe as rude, but less rude than the rudest work at Cori. The height to which this earliest construction of all reaches differs in different parts, but it has in most parts been patched and raised, not only by later repairs of all manner of dates, but long before then by a construction of very respectable antiquity, which would seem venerable if it were not for the elder and more massive stones beneath it. The later work has a general likeness to the walls of Anagnia both in construction and material, and it is distinguished from the more primitive work by the same mark. The pilers of the elder stones had no notion of the arch; the builders of the later wall were perfectly familiar with it. The only complete opening of the earlier work is a small postern with merely inclined sides; but in one of the ancient gates, not far from the modern gate by which the visitor is most likely to enter, stones of the earlier date support an arch of the second date. This ancient entrance is, as usual, warily placed; the giants, or whoever they were, from the days of Tiryns onwards, knew perfectly well how to take a military advantage of any enemy who might attack their strongholds. Another gate, now known as Porta Maggiore, is a much more elaborate work, with its inner and outer arch still remaining. Here the gate is placed with great skill, advanced in front at a point where the wall turns at an angle. The wall may be followed, and followed to great advantage, through the more part of its circuit. One hardly knows whether to count it gain or loss that the path becomes most difficult just at the point where, through large later repairs, the wall becomes least interesting. When we have to scramble—all at least save Alpine climbers—with constant thoughts for the safety of our legs and feet, we are less able to take in the differences in the various forms of construction, or to consider the dates to which we may be inclined to refer each. In the more instructive parts of the walls of Ferentino no such necessity is laid upon us; they may be studied with perfect ease, and the outlook from the various points of their circuit may be enjoyed at the same time. And at one point, not far from the Porta Maggiore, it will be well to go down the hill a little way to study the long inscription cut in the rock in honour of a local worthy and magistrate, Aulus Quinctilius by name, who seems to have played much the same part at Ferentinum in pagan days which Sir William Harpur played ages later at Bedford. He founded everything that, according to the notions of his day, could be founded. Among other things he ordained that thirty bushels of nuts should be yearly given to be scrambled for by the boys of Ferentinum, without distinction of bond or free. Now is the will of this pious founder carried out? Are there any Italian Charity Commissioners to look into these matters, and to see that the boys get their nuts? Or, if the scrambling for nuts be deemed a nuisance—yet many well-remembered scraps of Latin plead on its behalf—will they devise a scheme for the better employment of the funds? Or has the benefaction of the benevolent Quinctilius, like some benefactions nearer home, been lost altogether? Two or three years ago the Times was filled with letters complaining how a charitable foundation in Somerset had vanished altogether, and how the founder's monument, once standing in the church, had been buried under a neighbouring barn. In one point at least the benevolent Aulus of Ferentinum has been more lucky. When Ferentinum had quatuorviri, they did not bury people in their temples, still less did they set up monuments in their temples to people who were not buried in them. So the monument which commemorates the bounty of Aulus Quinctilius stands in the open air clear enough to be seen, well fenced in withal, which the visitor may perhaps regret, as a little time may be wasted in searching for the key. But do his benefactions go on? We will not hint at their having been alienated by Goths or Vandals, by East-Roman exarchs or Lombard princes. Can we trust the really dangerous characters in these parts of the world, Popes, Popes' nephews, Roman princes, and Roman cardinals, who pull down buildings and steal their columns to make their own palaces and villas? Perhaps some of them may have swallowed up the funds which should go in nuts to the boys of Ferentinum.
We have been writing as we dreamed on the spot. As at Anagni, we wish—we must confess the weakness—to see independent Hernicans wherever we can. It gives us therefore a little shock when we come back and turn to our books, and find the walls of Hernican Ferentinum spoken of, without any special emotion, as "Roman." We look up again in a moment, and ask, What is Roman? At Ferentinum the word certainly means something quite different from what it commonly means in Britain and Northern Gaul. There we are happy if we light on anything earlier than the third century A.D. Here no one asks us to accept any date later than Sulla; some will allow us to go as far back as the middle of the second century B.C. We are allowed to think that the walls of Ferentinum were in being when old Carthage and old Corinth were still standing. But we have not yet got to our great piece of evidence. Ferentino contains inscriptions much older and more important—though about the comparative importance some might raise a doubt—than Aulus Quinctilius and his nuts. But we must get to them by the proper road; we must get into what once was the arx, what is now the ecclesiastical quarter. Now, at places like Ferentino, ecclesiastical and domestic buildings seem like something kindly thrown into the bargain. We go to look at walls, not at churches or houses; so we get something more than we asked for when we find that Ferentino contains many houses which are worth at least a glance, and several churches which are worth much more than a glance. Indeed at Ferentino the study of walls and that of churches cannot be kept asunder. That some of the great stones have been taken to build the small and now disused church of Saint Lawrence is a slight matter. The most striking feature of Ferentino in any distant view consists of the mass of buildings which is formed by piling the cathedral church, the bell-tower, and the Bishop's palace, on the walls of the arx, as a mighty sub-structure. The walls of the arx show the same two dates as the walls of the tower. In one part we have only the vast rude stones of the first period; at another part they support the upper range of the second. The first no one will refuse to our Hernicans, to Hernicans older than Spurius Cassius; but how about the second, the "Roman" date? This is claimed in several inscriptions as the work of the censors Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius—censors, that is, not of Rome but of Ferentinum. The inscription may be seen in the first volume of the great Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, p. 238, and its closer likeness is given at fol. lxvii., lxviii. of the Priscae Latinitatis Monumenta Epigraphica. Now Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius are names of a frightfully modern sound, suggesting well-known persons of the days of Divus Julius and Divus Augustus. But no one asks us to think of them here, though we may likely enough have got hold of the Hernican forefathers of those better-known Romans. They had no such need to change their names and the alphabet in which they are written, as when the son of the Etruscan Avle Felimne became the Roman Publius Volumnius. Now our Hirtius and Lollius claim to have built what they built from the foundation; but they must at the outside only mean that they built the later work on the top of the primæval wall. And to a zealous eye even the work of Hirtius and Lollius has an archaic look about it. There are no columns against the wall, as in the Tabularium of Catulus at Rome; the work is finished with a row of triglyphs, not unlike those on the tomb of "Cornelius Lucius Scipio Gnaivod patre prognatus." But we need not go back quite so far as his day. The further back we can go the better, but any time before Sulla will do. The history of Ferentinum allows us to carry our Hernicans of Ferentinum, like our Etruscans of Perusia, down to the Social War. Ferentinum, it must be remembered, was one of those Hernican towns which were true to Rome when Anagnia fought against her. What follows is most instructive. The men of Ferentinum, steady allies of Rome, refused the proffered reward of Roman citizenship, and chose rather to remain a distinct, even if a dependent, community. That is to say, the old Hernican city went on, as long doubtless as to the days of the Social War, a self-ordering commonwealth, with its own laws and magistrates—Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius among them—subject only to the demands of military service which were needed in the wars of Rome, and sometimes perhaps to the unlawful excesses of powerful Romans.
This last fact comes out in a strange story told by Aulus Gellius (x. 3). It is an extract from a speech of Gaius Gracchus, setting forth the wrongs of the Italian allies. The wife of a Roman prætor suddenly wished the public baths of Ferentinum to be cleared and made ready for herself. The thing was not done so fast as the great lady wished; so her husband bade the two quæstors of the town to be seized; one was scourged, the other threw himself over the wall. This tale, told in the words of Gracchus, proves a good deal as to the arbitrary way in which Roman magistrates are not ashamed to deal with the dependent cities even of Italy, whatever might be their formal relation to Rome.
It is of less importance that Gellius casually speaks of the town as a municipium, while Livy also casually implies its possession of the Latin franchise. Such obiter dicta do not go for very much. Scholars sometimes get astray in these times from forgetting that, not only casual sayings, but even formal documents, may sometimes err. Thus not long ago we saw a solemn paper in which a public officer, bound to accuracy, a clerk of the peace, had to describe several towns in the West of England. We here read of "the county of the city of Bristol," the "borough of Gloucester," the "borough of Bath," and the "borough of Taunton." An inquirer some ages hence might be misled into forgetting that Bath is a "city" and Gloucester even a "county of a city." May we not sometimes get wrong about municipia and Latin colonies from the same kind of cause? Ferentinum was not, in the strict sense, a municipium, but an allied Hernican commonwealth. In the like sort, we once saw an official document from a high sheriff calling on the electors of a county to elect, not a "knight of the shire," as they had done for six hundred years, but a hitherto unheard-of being called a "member of Parliament." Is it not possible then that Livy, and even Cicero, may sometimes use a wrong phrase in talking of tribes, curiae, and centuries, in ages long before their own day?
The walls then, though called "Roman" in a vague sense—that is, it would seem, simply not primæval, like those of Cori and Segni—are doubtless Hernican in the sense of being built while Ferentinum was still a separate Hernican community. The walls that we see are most likely the walls over which the unlucky quæstor threw himself. The walls of the arx, where we read the legend of Hirtius and Lollius, connect the Hernican town with later times. Just at the point where the inscription is they are carried up to form the Bishop's palace, and from the middle of one side rises the bell-tower of the cathedral—a very good example of the usual Romanesque type of such buildings. The church of Ferentino is small and unpretending, and a good deal damaged within, but it still keeps its main features, not only its bell-tower, but its west front, its apses, its ranges of windows. A little restoration, in the true sense of the word, would soon make it into as good a specimen of its own class as could be needed. But, unless we altogether misunderstood the words of one of its own clergy, antiquity and simplicity are not esteemed at Ferentino. The little minster is convicted of the crime of being old, a charge which, except by comparison with the walls beneath it, cannot be denied. Only, if the church be an offender on this score, how fearful must be the crime of the walls? Unless we misunderstood in the most amazing way what we heard with our own ears, the church of Ferentino, convicted of the crime of old age, is sentenced to destruction. A new church is actually begun; when it is finished the old one is to go. Happily the new one as yet stands still for want of funds; let us hope that funds may refuse to drop in till a wiser Bishop and Chapter shall rule at Ferentino.
The church at Ferentino is dedicated to Saint Ambrose, who may be seen there in the worldly garb of the unbaptized prefect, before the infant voice greeted him as Bishop of Milan. And in the inner buildings of the arx—buildings most worthy of a visit on their own account—strange tales lurk of the sufferings of the saint, which seem to find no place either in history or in received legend. Among other things he was thrown into a boiling caldron. Down below is another church Santa Maria Maggiore, some centuries younger than the cathedral, and a very pretty example of its style; which, as far as we know, no one designs to destroy. Singularly graceful, but singularly un-Italian, it strikes by the power of contrast, as it rises above the walls, or as we go up to it from the gate which shares its surname. A few other ecclesiastical and domestic scraps may also be picked up in the city of the rock. The primitive remains are the great object in all these places; but it is always a gain when the walls shelter something which has an interest of another kind. The walls of the stout-hearted people who chose rather to be citizens of Ferentinum than citizens of Rome lose nothing by having been turned to an unlooked-for use as the holy places of their successors, perhaps descendants, of another age and another creed.