"Almighty and merciful God, who didst adorn the blessed Galla with the virtue of a wonderful love towards thy poor; grant us, through her merits and prayers, to practise works of love, and to obtain Thy mercy, through the Lord, &c. Amen."
On, or very near this site, stood the Porta Carmentalis, which, with the temple beside it, commemorated Carmenta, the supposed mother of Evander, a Sabine prophetess, who is made by Ovid to predict the future grandeur of Rome.[88] Carmenta was especially invoked by women in childbirth. The Porta Carmentalis was reached from the Forum by the Vicus Jugarius. It was by this route that the Fabii went forth to meet their doom in the valley of the Crimera. The Porta had two gates—one for those who entered, the other for those who left it, so that in each case the passenger passed through the "Janus," as it was called, upon his right. After the massacre of the Fabii, the road by which they left the city was avoided, and the Janus Carmentalis on the right was closed, and called the Porta Scelerata.
"Carmentis portæ dextro via proxima Jano est
Ire per hanc noli, quisquis es; omen habet."
Ovid, Fast. ii. 201.
Just beyond the Porta Carmentalis was the district called Tarentum, where there was a subterranean "Ara Ditis Patris et Proserpinæ."
We now reach (left) the Church of S. Nicolo in Carcere. It has a mean front, with an inscription in honour of one of the Aldobrandini family, and is only interesting as occupying the site of the three Temples of Juno Matuta, Piety(?), and Hope, which are believed to mark the site of the Forum Olitorium. The vaults beneath the church contain the massive substructions of these temples, and fragments of their columns.
The central temple is believed to be that of Piety, built by M. Acilius Glabrio, the duumvir, in B.C. 165 (though Pliny says that this temple was on the site afterwards occupied by the theatre of Marcellus), in fulfilment of a vow made by his father, a consul of the same name, on the day of his defeating the forces of Antiochus the Great, king of Syria, at Thermopylæ. Others endeavour to identify it with the temple built on the site of the Decemviral prisons, to keep up the recollection of the famous story, called the "Caritas Romana,"—of a woman condemned to die of hunger in prison being nourished by the milk of her own daughter. Pliny and Valerius Maximus tell the story as of a mother; Festus only speaks of a father;[89]—yet art and poetry have always followed the latter legend. A cell is shown, by torchlight, as the scene of this touching incident.
"There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light
What do I gaze on? Nothing. Look again!
Two forms are slowly shadowed on my sight—
Two insulated phantoms of the brain:
It is not so; I see them full and plain—
An old man, and a female young and fair,
Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose vein
The blood is nectar:—but what doth she there,
With her unmantled neck, and bosom white and bare?
"But here youth offers to old age the food,
The milk of his own gift:—it is her sire,
To whom she renders back the debt of blood
Born with her birth. No, he shall not expire
While in those warm and lovely veins the fire
Of health and holy feeling can provide
Great Nature's Nile, whose deep stream rises higher
Than Egypt's river;—from that gentle side
Drink, drink, and live, old man! Heaven's realm holds no such tide.
"The starry fable of the milky-way
Has not thy story's purity; it is
A constellation of a sweeter ray,
And sacred Nature triumphs more in this
Reverse of her decree, than in the abyss
Where sparkle distant worlds:—Oh, holiest nurse!
No drop of that clear stream its way shall miss
To thy sire's heart, replenishing its source
With life, as our freed souls rejoin the universe."
Childe Harold.
A memorial of this story of a prison is preserved in the name of the church—S. Nicolo in Carcere. It was probably owing to this legend that, in front of the Temple of Piety, was placed the Columna Lactaria, where infants were exposed, in the hope that some one would take pity upon and nurse them out of charity.