Walks in Rome

by Augustus J. C. Hare

Beyond this a number of chambers have been discovered under the steep bank of the Palatine, and retain a quantity of graffiti scratched upon their walls. The most interesting of these, found in the fourth chamber, has been removed to the museum of the Collegio Romano. It is generally believed to have been executed during the reign of Septimius Severus, and to have been done in an idle moment by one of the soldiers occupying these rooms, supposed to have been used as guard-chambers under that emperor. If so, it is perhaps the earliest existing pictorial allusion to the manner of our Saviour's death. It is a caricature evidently executed in ridicule of a Christian fellow-soldier. The figure on the cross has an ass's head, and by the worshipping figure is inscribed in Greek characters, Alexamenos worships his God.

"The lowest orders of the populace were as intelligently hostile to it [the worship of the Crucified] as were the philosophers. Witness that remarkable caricature of the adoration of our crucified Lord, which was discovered some ten years ago beneath the ruins of the Palatine palace. It is a rough sketch, traced, in all probability, by the hand of some pagan slave in one of the earliest years of the third century of our era. A human figure with an ass's head is represented as fixed to a cross, while another figure in a tunic stands on one side. This figure is addressing himself to the crucified monster, and is making a gesture which was the customary pagan expression of adoration. Underneath there runs a rude inscription: Alexamenos adores his God. Here we are face to face with a touching episode of the life of the Roman Church in the days of Severus or of Caracalla. As under Nero, so, a century and a half later, there were worshippers of Christ in the household of Cæsar. But the paganism of the later date was more intelligently and bitterly hostile to the Church than the paganism which had shed the blood of the apostles. The Gnostic invective which attributed to the Jews the worship of an ass, was applied by pagans indiscriminately to Jews and Christians. Tacitus attributes the custom to a legend respecting services rendered by wild asses to the Israelites in the desert; 'and so, I suppose,' observes Tertullian, 'it was thence presumed that we, as bordering upon the Jewish religion, were taught to worship such a figure.' Such a story, once current, was easily adapted to the purposes of a pagan caricaturist. Whether from ignorance of the forms of Christian worship, or in order to make his parody of it more generally intelligible to its pagan admirers, the draughtsman has ascribed to Alexamenos the gestures of a heathen devotee. But the real object of his parody is too plain to be mistaken. Jesus Christ, we may be sure, had other confessors and worshippers in the Imperial palace as well as Alexamenos. The moral pressure of the advancing Church was felt throughout all ranks of pagan society; ridicule was invoked to do the work of argument; and the moral persecution which crowned all true Christian devotion was often only the prelude to a sterner test of that loyalty to a crucified Lord, which was as insensible to the misrepresentations, as Christian faith was superior to the logic, of heathendom."[148]—Liddon, Bampton Lectures of 1866, lect. vii. p. 593.

These chambers acquire a great additional interest from the belief which many entertain that they are those once occupied by the Prætorian Guard, in which St. Paul was confined.

"The close of the Epistle to the Ephesians contains a remarkable example of the forcible imagery of St. Paul. Considered simply in itself, the description of the Christian's armour is one of the most striking passages in the sacred volume. But if we view it in connection with the circumstances with which the Apostle was surrounded, we find a new and living emphasis in his enumeration of all the parts of the heavenly panoply,—the belt of sincerity and truth, with which the loins are girded for the spiritual war,—the breast-plate of that righteousness, the inseparable links whereof are faith and love,—the strong sandals, with which the feet of Christ's soldiers are made ready, not for such errands of death and despair as those on which the Prætorian soldiers were daily sent, but for the universal message of the gospel of peace,—the large shield of confident trust, wherewith the whole man is protected, and whereon the fiery arrows of the Wicked One fall harmless and dead,—the close-fitting helmet, with which the hope of salvation invests the head of the believer,—and finally the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, which, when wielded by the Great Captain of our Salvation, turned the tempter in the wilderness to flight, while in the hands of His chosen Apostle (with whose memory the sword seems inseparably associated), it became the means of establishing Christianity on the earth.

"All this imagery becomes doubly forcible if we remember that when St. Paul wrote the words he was chained to a soldier, and in the close neighbourhood of military sights and sounds. The appearance of the Prætorian Guards was daily familiar to him; as his 'chains,' on the other hand (so he tells us in the succeeding Epistle), became well known throughout the whole Prætorium! (Phil. i. 13). A difference of opinion has existed as to the precise meaning of the word in this passage. Some have identified it, as in the authorised version, with the house of Cæsar on the Palatine: more commonly it has been supposed to mean that permanent camp of the Prætorian Guards, which Tiberius established on the north of the city, outside the walls. As regards the former opinion, it is true that the word came to be used, almost as we use the word 'palace,' for royal residences generally or for any residences of princely splendour. Yet we never find the word employed for the imperial house at Rome: and we believe the truer view to be that which has been recently advocated, namely, that it denotes here, not the palace itself, but the quarters of that part of the imperial guards, which was in immediate attendance upon the emperor. The emperor was prætor or commander-in-chief of the troops, and it was natural that his immediate guard should be in prætorium near him. It might, indeed, be argued that this military establishment on the Palatine would cease to be necessary, when the Prætorian camp was established: but the purpose of that establishment was to concentrate near the city those cohorts, which had previously been dispersed in other parts of Italy: a local body-guard near the palace would not cease to be necessary: and Josephus, in his account of the imprisonment of Agrippa, speaks of a 'camp' in connection with the 'royal house.' Such we conceive to have been the barrack immediately alluded to by St. Paul: though the connection of these smaller quarters with the general camp was such that he would naturally become known to 'all the rest' of the guards, as well as those who might for the time be connected with the imperial household.

"St. Paul tells us (in the Epistle to the Philippians) that throughout the Prætorian quarter he was well known as a prisoner for the cause of Christ, and he sends special salutations to the Philippian Church from the Christians of the imperial household. These notices bring before us very vividly the moral contrasts by which the Apostle was surrounded. The soldier to whom he was chained to-day might have been in Nero's body-guard yesterday; his comrade who next relieved guard might have been one of the executioners of Octavia, and might have carried her head to Poppæa a few weeks before.

"History has few stronger contrasts than when it shows us Paul preaching Christ under the walls of Nero's palace. Thenceforward there were but two religions in the Roman world; the worship of the emperor, and the worship of the Saviour. The old superstitions had long been worn out; they had lost all hold on educated minds.... Over against the altars of Nero and Poppæa, the voice of a prisoner was daily heard, and daily woke in grovelling souls the consciousness of their divine destiny. Men listened, and knew that self-sacrifice was better than ease, humiliation more exalted than pride, to suffer nobler than to reign. They felt that the only religion which satisfied the needs of man was the religion of sorrow, the religion of self-devotion, the religion of the cross."—Conybeare and Howson.

Hence, we may ascend through some gardens beneath the Villa Mills, to the terrace which surmounts the grand ruins at the end of the Palace of the Cæsars, supposed to be remains of the Palace of Nero, but as no inscriptions have been discovered, no part of it can be identified.[149] These are by far the most picturesque portions of the ruins, and few compositions can be finer than those formed by the huge masses of stately brick arches, laden with a wealth of laurustinus, cytizus, and other flowering shrubs, standing out against the soft hues and delicate blue and pink shadows of the distant Campagna. Beneath the terrace is a fine range of lofty chambers, with a broken statue at the end, through which there is a striking view. One of these ruined halls has been converted into a kind of museum of architectural fragments found in this part of the palace, many of them of great beauty. This was the portion of the palace which longest remained entire, and which was inhabited by Heraclius in the seventh century. Some consider that these ruins were incorporated into the

Septizonium of Severus, so called from its seven stories of building, erected A.D. 198, and finally destroyed by Sixtus V., who carried off its materials for the building of St Peter's. It was erected by Severus at the southern corner of the palace, in order that it might at once strike the eyes of his African compatriots,[150] on their arrival in Rome. He built two other edifices which he called Septizonium, one on the Esquiline near the baths of Titus, and the other on the Via Appia, which he intended as the burial-place of his family, and where his son Geta was actually interred.

The remaining ruins on this division of the hill, supposed to be those of a theatre, a library, &c., have not yet been historically identified. They probably belong to the Palace of Domitian (Imp. A.D. 81—96), who added largely to the buildings on the Palatine. The magnificence of his palace is extolled in the inflated verses of Statius, who describes the imperial dwelling as exciting the jealousy of the abode of Jupiter—as losing itself amongst the stars by its height, and rising above the clouds into the full splendour of the sunshine! Such was the extravagance displayed by Domitian in these buildings, that Plutarch compares him to Midas, who wished everything to be made of gold. This was the scene of many of the tyrannical vagaries of Domitian.