"La guerre aux habitants de Privernum (Piperno) rattache à une localité du Palatin.... Les habitants de Fondi avaient fait cause commune avec les habitants de Privernum. Leur chef, Vitruvius Vacca, possedait une maison sur le Palatin; c'était un homme considérable dans son pays et même à Rome. Ils demandèrent et obtinrent grâce. Privernum fut pris, et Vitruvius Vacca, qui s'y était réfugié, conduit à Rome, enfermé dans le prison Mamertine pour y être gardé jusqu'au retour du consul, et alors battu de verges et mis à mort; sa maison du Palatin fut rasée, et le lieu où elle avait été garda le nom de Prés de Vacca."—Ampère, Histoire Romaine, iii. 17.
But the name will seem singularly appropriate to those who are familiar with the groups of meek-faced oxen of the Campagna, which are always to be seen lying in the shade under the trees of the Forum, or drinking at its water-troughs.
"'Romanoque Foro et lautis mugire Carinis.'
"Ce vers m'a toujours profondément frappé, lorsque je traversais le Forum, aujourd'hui Campo-Vaccino (le champ du bétail); je voyais en effet presque toujours à son extrémité des bœufs couchés au pied du Palatin. Virgile, se reportant de la Rome de son temps à la Rome ancienne d'Evandre, ne trouvait pas d'image plus frappante du changement produit par les siècles, que la présence d'un troupeau de bœufs dans le lieu destiné à être le Forum. Eh bien, le jour devait venir où ce qui était pour Virgile un passé lointain et presque incroyable se reproduirait dans la suite des âges; le Forum devait être de nouveau un lieu agreste, ses magnificences s'en aller et les bœufs y revenir.
"J'aimais à les contempler à travers quelques colonnes moins vieilles que les souvenirs qu'ils me retracaient, reprenant possession de ce sol d'où les avait chassés la liberté, la gloire, Cicéron, César, et où devait les ramener la plus grande vicissitude de l'historie, la destruction de l'empire romain per les barbares. Ce que Virgile trouvait si étrange dans le passé n'étonne plus dans le présent; les bœufs mugissent au Forum; ils s'y couchent et y ruminent aujourd'hui, de même qu'au temps d'Evandre et comme s'il n'était rien arrivé."—Ampère, Hist. Rom. 1. 211.
"In many a heap the ground
Heaves, is if Ruin in a frantic mood
Had done his utmost. Here and there appears,
As left to show his handy-work not ours,
An idle column, a half-buried arch,
A wall of some great temple. It was once,
And long, the centre of their Universe,
The Forum—whence a mandate, eagle-winged,
Went to the ends of the earth. Let us descend
Slowly. At every step much may be lost,
The very dust we tread stirs as with life,
And not a breath but from the ground sends up
Something of human grandeur.
. . . . .
Now all is changed; and here, as in the wild,
The day is silent, dreary as the night;
None stirring, save the herdsman and his herd,
Savage alike; or they that would explore,
Discuss, and learnedly; or they that come,
(And there are many who have crossed the earth,)
That they may give the hours to meditation,
And wander, often saving to themselves,
'This was the Roman Forum!'"
Rogers' Italy.
"We descended into the Forum, the light fast fading away and throwing a kindred soberness over the scene of ruin. The soil has risen from rubbish at least fifteen feet, so that no wonder that the hills look lower than they used to do, having been never very considerable at the first. There it was one scene of desolation, from the massy foundation-stones of the Capitoline Temple, which were laid by Tarquinius the Proud, to a single pillar erected in honour of Phocas, the eastern emperor, in the fifth century. What the fragments of pillars belonged to, perhaps we can never know; but that I think matters little. I care not whether it was a temple of Jupiter Stator or the Basilica Julia, but one knows that one is on the ground of the Forum, under the Capitol, the place where the tribes assembled, and the orators spoke; the scene, in short, of all the internal struggles of the Roman people."—Arnold's Journal.
"They passed the solitary column of Phocas, and looked down into the excavated space, where a confusion of pillars, arches, pavements, and shattered blocks and shafts—the crumbs of various ruins dropt from the devouring maw of Time—stand, or lie, at the base of the Capitoline Hill. That renowned hillock (for it is little more) now rose abruptly above them. The ponderous masonry, with which the hillside is built up, is as old as Rome itself, and looks likely to endure while the world retains any substance or permanence. It once sustained the Capitol, and now bears up the great pile which the mediæval builders raised on the antique foundation, and that still loftier tower, which looks abroad upon a larger page of deeper historic interest than any other scene can show. On the same pedestal of Roman masonry, other structures will doubtless arise, and vanish like ephemeral things.
"To a spectator on the spot, it is remarkable that the events of Roman history, and of Roman life itself, appear not so distant as the Gothic ages which succeeded them. We stand in the Forum, or on the height of the Capitol, and seem to see the Roman epoch close at hand. We forget that a chasm extends between it and ourselves, in which lie all those dark, rude, unlettered centuries, around the birthtime of Christianity, as well as the age of chivalry and romance, the feudal system, and the infancy of a better civilization than that of Rome. Or, if we remember these mediæval times, they look further off than the Augustan age. The reason may be, that the old Roman literature survives, and creates for us an intimacy with the classic ages, which we have no means of forming with the subsequent ones.