IV. From Alatri to Capua.
We have done for a while with the hill-cities, though it would not be hard to find several other spots of the same kind, rivalling in historical interest, and, by all accounts, rivalling also as to existing remains, any of those which we have gone through. But the special necessities of an iter ad Brundisium carry us to quite other parts of the Italian peninsula, to parts where the sources of interest are fully equal to those of Etruscan or Latin cities, but where they are wholly different in kind. We leave the hills, or touch only their lowest slopes. For a while the mountains still soar above us, while our work is in the plains. Presently we lose the mountains even as distant companions; but before long we have the blue waves of Hadria as their substitute. At last we reach our goal; we go for a season even beyond it. And when we have gone as far as the devices of modern science can carry us, when we have reached the very end of the general railway system of Central Europe, our landscape again takes in both the sea and the mountains. But the eye now ranges beyond the bounds of Italy, beyond the bounds of Western Europe. We see across the narrowed waters to the heights of another peninsula. Without seeking for more than a chance likeness between the names—a name that ranges from the Euxine to the Hudson—without seeking in any sort to identify the Ἀλβανοί of Dionysios and the Ἀλβανοί of imperial Anna, it is still with a curious feeling of coincidence that the eyes which not many days before were looking up to the mount of Alba, now look across the sea to the wilder mountains of Albania.
Some of those who now looked across had already learned something of those heights from earlier and nearer experiences. Still it is a new feeling to look out on them from Italian ground, above all to look out on them from the spot where the Turk made his entrance into the western world, and where the signs of his short presence have stamped themselves deep on local memory. Standing at Otranto, looking on the Albanian heights, the foremost thought is how near Otranto came to being to the West of Europe all that the Thracian Kallipolis was to the East. But we are as yet far from Otranto, far from the heel of the boot, far even from any point of the Hadriatic coast. We are still on the western side of the great backbone of Italy; we have still to catch glimpses of the Tyrrhenian waters, to look, as at distant objects, on the bold outline of Ischia and on Vesuvius crowned with his pillar of cloud. But this time we do not obey the seemingly inflexible law which decrees that he who goes to Rome and does not turn back from Rome must go and see Naples, whether he dies after the sight or not. This time we have no call either to Naples itself or to the far more attractive range of objects of which Naples is the centre. Our errand is to pass from the primæval cities of the Latin and the Volscian to the cities of south-eastern Italy. Their chief present attraction lies in the series of churches raised in the days of the Norman and Angevin kings; but their memories carry us back through a long series of stirring ages, not indeed to the hoary antiquity of Cori and Alatri, but to the days when Southern Italy, the earliest Italy, was counted for a part of Hellas. It is not for nothing that we look out from thence on those eastern lands which then perhaps were the less Hellenic of the two.
Greek influence indeed begins—some say that it historically began—on the western, not the eastern, shore of Italy, in lands which, in the present journey, we leave to the west of us and see only in glimpses. We hurry on, passing by much that we might well stop and study, from Frosinone to Caserta. And we are luxurious enough to rejoice at finding ourselves there. We have proved that a few days and nights may be passed among Volscians and Hernicans without damage or even serious discomfort; but we trust that it is not an avowal to be ashamed of that it is a pleasing exchange to find ourselves in thoroughly civilized quarters in the plains of Campania. We have found our Capua; not, however, at Capua itself, but under the shadow of the royal palace a few miles off. But we desert Capua only because Capuan comforts—we will not talk of luxuries—have fled from Capua and have found their new home at Caserta. Those who have tried a night at Capua itself, Santa Maria di vetere Capua, not the newer Capua on the site of Casilinum, report that, if Hannibal's army could be quartered there again, they would certainly not be corrupted by anything excessive in the way of creature comforts. Anagni and Frosinone are said to be far in advance of the city which long was to Rome what Paris long was to London. The excuse doubtless would be that Capua is Capua no longer. The name of Capua, and with it the stirring history of early mediæval Capua, has wandered from the true Capua to Casilinum. It is not at the town now called Capua, but at the village—it is hardly more—of Santa Maria, that we must look for what is left of Etruscan Vulturnum, of Samnite, Campanian, and Roman Capua, the special city of pleasure, the city where, before all others, pleasure was sought for in scenes of blood.
On our present course we have no special call to either Capua, old or new. We have in times past seen both the amphitheatre of the elder Capua and the cathedral portico of the newer. But, when Caserta has been chosen as a convenient halting-place, it would be a shame for the historic traveller to pass by two such famous spots without a glance at either, while in their neighbourhood lies a third object, of no small value in its own line, which will have the further charm of novelty. It is well, while still fresh from the Flavian amphitheatre at Rome, to look again on the amphitheatre of Capua—Capua, the mistress of Rome in the sports of slaughter. There is a certain special lore of amphitheatres, the mastery of which does not fall to the lot of all, even of those who look on the monuments either of Rome or Capua with a general historical eye. But it is easy to see that in the Capuan amphitheatre the underground arrangements can be studied as they hardly can be studied anywhere else. The walls, the seats, are far less perfect than at Rome; much more then are they less perfect than at Verona. But the substructure seems wholly untouched. In the Roman Coliseum the underground work is only partially brought to light, while of what has been brought to light it is not always clear how much is the work of the Flavian Emperors, and how much of the mediæval barons who turned the amphitheatre into a fortress. Here, better than at Rome, we may study what really happened when the lions came up from underground to be slaughtered by the imperial hands of Commodus. If any question is raised as to the date of the building, one who is not a special Capuan topographer may be satisfied with the fact, that the inscription of Hadrian claims for that prince only a renovation and enrichment of the building with columns and statues. This seems to imply that the shell is older; it may be far older. In idea at least, the amphitheatre of Capua is far older than that of Rome. It illustrates a strange but well-known law of human nature, that the taste for luxury and the taste for blood should find a common home.
Besides the modernized basilica, besides the tombs of various sizes and designs which line the road—one of which is indeed singularly like a model of an amphitheatre—the true Capua has little to show besides the amphitheatre itself. It is strange to see so great a city, one which for some ages must have been far greater, far more splendid than Rome, so utterly gone—or rather to see the little that is left of it translated to another site. But great as Capua undoubtedly was, we begin to doubt its extreme antiquity. Capua, once Etruscan Vulturnum, remained Etruscan Vulturnum till the fourth century of Rome. It was the last remnant of the great Etruscan dominion in that region of Italy. As such, it represents a state of things far older than Rome. But the city itself may well be of later date than Rome. At all events, we may be sure that it is of far later date than Cori and Alatri. The city by the Vulturnus, down in the plain, taking its name from its guardian river, marks an advance not only on the mountain strongholds of Segni and Norba, but on Veii, on Rome itself. It must be far older than Florence; but it is the fellow of Florence; it marks an equal forsaking of the oldest type of a city. It is hard to see where the arx of Capua could have stood, if we are to understand by an arx something set upon a hill. But what a position that of Capua was, according to later ideas, is shown by its revival after the Hannibalian war. The Samnite settlement, parted away from their kinsfolk of the mountains, had become Campanians, and, to seek shelter against their kinsfolk of the mountains, they had been fain in some sort to become Romans.
"Cives Romani tunc facti sunt Campani,"
says the line which comes as such a relief after the involved constructions of later Latin writers, a line which records a fact as simply worded as it could be in a mediæval chronicle, which gives us a true leonine rime, and which makes its way through six feet without a single dactyl. To the Campanian knights their Roman citizenship was doubtless pleasant enough; it may have been less so to the commons, who had the private rights only, and who were burthened with a payment to the knights. Yet we find that the revolt of Capua to Hannibal was largely the work of noble leaders. The truth doubtless is that the large amount of independence which Capua still kept only made any measure of dependence more galling. Then came the blow which made Capua for a while cease to be a city. Its lands became the property of the Roman people; its walls were left simply as a shelter for those who filled them. Yet the great city of Campania arose again, to be once more a great city till the second blow, when men of Semitic speech came not as deliverers but as destroyers, when Capua moved to Casilinum, and when all that was left of the elder city put itself under the keeping of a heavenly protectress as Santa Maria di Capua. Among those remnants of what was, the walls of Capua, the arx of Capua, are not to be found; at all events they do not strike the traveller on his first or his second visit. For something faintly answering to a Capuan arx, he takes himself to the neighbouring mountains. There, on their lowest slopes, looking out on Vesuvius and Ischia, looking down on the Campanian plain, with its river, with its older and its newer Capua, we come to a spot where a famous temple of the older faith has given way to a less famous one of the new. A journey from Caserta to the Capuan amphitheatre in the plain may well take in a journey to the slope of Tifata, the slope of the hill on which Hannibal so often pitched his camp, and where the church of Sant' Angelo in Formis has supplanted the holy place of Diana and Jupiter, which took its name from the mountain which rises above its massy tower.