Never had that proud city suffered from her barbarian conquerors, in the decline of the Roman empire,—from Alaric, from Genseric, or from Odoacer,—the same merciless treatment as she underwent from the rage of the imperial troops;—the subjects, or the soldiers of a Catholic king! Rapacity, lust, and impiety, were exhausted by these men. Roman ladies of the noblest extraction were submitted to the basest and vilest prostitution. The sacred ornaments of the sacerdotal, and even of the pontifical dignity, were converted to purposes of ridicule and buffoonery. Priests, nay even bishops and cardinals, were degraded to the brutal passions of the soldiery; and after having suffered every ignominy of blows, mutilation, and personal contumely, were massacred in pastime. Exorbitant ransoms were exacted repeatedly from the same persons; and when they had no longer wherewithal to purchase life, they were butchered without mercy. Nuns, virgins, matrons, were publicly devoted to the infamous appetites of the soldiers; who first violated, and then stabbed, the victims of their pleasures. The streets were strewed with the dead; and it is said that eight thousand young women, of all ranks and conditions, were found to be pregnant within five months from the sack of the unfortunate city.

Three years after the sack by Bourbon, that is in 1530, an inundation of the Tiber ruined a multitude of edifices both public and private, and was almost equally calamitous with the sack of Rome. Simond, writing from Rome in January 1818, says: “The Tiber has been very high, and the lower parts of the town under water; yet this is nothing compared with the inundations recorded on two pillars at the port of Ripetta, a sort of landing-place. The mark on one of them is full eighteen feet above the level of the adjoining streets; and, considering the rapidity of the stream, a great part of the city must then have been in imminent danger of being swept away.” In 1819 the Pantheon was flooded; but this is not an uncommon event, as it stands near the river, and the drain, which should carry off the rain-water that falls through the aperture in the top, communicates with the stream. The inundations of the Tiber, indeed, are one of the causes, which combined to destroy so many of the monuments of Rome during the middle ages. There is one recorded in 1345, among the afflictions of the times, when only the summits of the hills were above the water, and the lower grounds were converted into a lake for the space of eight days. Several floods are mentioned by the ancient writers; and Tacitus speaks of a project which was debated in the senate, A. D. 15, for diverting some of the streams running into the Tiber, but which was not carried into execution in consequence of the petitions of various towns, who sent deputies to oppose it; partly on the ground of their local interests being affected, and partly from a feeling of superstition, which emboldened them to urge that “Nature had assigned to rivers their proper courses,” and other reasons of a similar nature.

Aurelian endeavoured to put an effectual stop to the calamities which sprang from the lawless river, by raising its banks and clearing its channel. However, the deposits resulting from these frequent inundations have contributed greatly to that vast accumulation of soil, which has raised the surface of modern Rome so many feet above the ancient level; and thus the evil itself has occasioned a remedy to a partial extent.

We must now close this portion of our imperfect account, and proceed to give our readers some idea in respect to the present condition of Rome’s ancient remains; gleaned, for the most part, from the pages of writers who have recently been sojourners in “the Eternal City:” but in doing this we by no means wish our readers to expect the full and minute particulars, which they may find in works entirely dedicated to the subject; for Rome, even in its antiquities, would require a volume for itself.

When Poggio Bracciolini visited Rome in the fifteenth century, he complained that nothing of old Rome subsisted entire, and that few monuments of the free city remained; and many writers of more recent times have made the same complaint. “The artist,” says Sir John Hobhouse, “may be comparatively indifferent to the date and history, and regard chiefly the architectural merit of a structure; but the Rome which the Florentine republican regretted, and which an Englishman would wish to find, is not that of Augustus and his successors, but of those greater and better men, of whose heroic actions his earliest impressions are composed.” To which, however, may be added what Dr. Burton questions, viz., Whether, in his expectations, the traveller may not betray his ignorance of real history. “The works of the Romans, in the early ages of their nation, were remarkable for their solidity and strength; but there seems no reason to suppose that much taste or elegance was displayed in them. But then, again, if we wish to confine ourselves to the republic, there is surely no need of monuments of brick and stone to awaken our recollections of such a period. If we must have visible objects on which to fix our attention, we have the ground itself on which the Romans trod; we have the Seven Hills; we have the Campus Martius, the Forum,—all places familiar to us from history, and in which we can assign the precise spot where some memorable action was performed. Those who feel a gratification, by placing their footsteps where Cicero or Cæsar did before them, in the consciousness of standing upon the same hill which Manlius defended, and in all those associations which bring the actors themselves upon the scene, may have all their enthusiasm satisfied, and need not complain that there are no monuments of the time of the republic.”

The remains of ancient Rome may be classed in three different periods. Of the first, the works of the kings, embracing a period of two hundred and forty-four years, from the foundation of the city by Romulus to the expulsion of Tarquin, very little have escaped the ravages of time; the Tullian walls and prison, with the Cloaca Maxima, being the only identified remains. Of the works of the republic, which lasted four hundred and sixty-one years, although the city, during that period, was more than once besieged, burned, and sacked, many works are yet extant:—the military ways and aqueducts, and some small temples and tombs. But it was during the third period, that of the emperors, that Rome attained the meridian of her glory. For three centuries all the known world was either subject to her, or bound by commercial treaties; and the taste and magnificence of the Romans were displayed in the erection of temples to the gods, triumphal arches and pillars to conquerors, amphitheatres, palaces, and other works of ostentation and luxury, for which architecture was made to exhaust her treasures, and no expense was spared to decorate.

Architecture was unknown to the Romans until Tarquin came down from Etruria. Hence the few works of the kings, which still remain, were built in the Etruscan style, with large uncemented, but regular blocks. In the gardens of the convent Giovanni a S. Paolo is a ruin of the Curia Hostilia, called the Rostrum of Cicero; and some few fragments, also, remain of a bridge, erected by Ancus Martius. On this bridge (Pons Sublicius) Horatius Cocles opposed singly the army of Porsenna; and from it, in subsequent times, the bodies of Commodus and Heliogabalus were thrown into the Tiber. In the pontificate of Nicholas V. it was destroyed by an inundation. There are also the remains of a large brick edifice, supposed to have been the Curia, erected by Tullus Hostilius, which was destroyed by fire when the populace burned in it the corpse of Clodius. Julius Cæsar commenced its restoration; and Augustus finished it, and gave it the name of Curia Julia, in honour of his father by adoption.

In regard to the form and size of the city, we must follow the direction of the seven hills upon which it was built. 1. Of these Mons Palatinus has always had the preference. It was in this place that Romulus laid the foundation of the city, in a quadrangular form; and here the same king and Tullus Hostilius kept their courts, as did Augustus afterwards, and all the succeeding emperors. This hill was in compass 1200 paces. 2. Mons Tarpeius, took its name from Tarpeia, a Roman virgin, who in this place betrayed the city to the Sabines. It had afterwards the denomination of Capitolinus, from the head of a man, casually found here in digging for the foundation of the temple of Jupiter. This hill was added to the city by Titus Tatius, king of the Sabines; when, having been first overcome in the field by Romulus, he and his subjects were permitted to incorporate with the Romans. 3. Mons Esquilinus was taken in by Servius Tullius, who had here his royal seat. 4. Mons Viminalis derived its name from the osiers that grew very plentifully upon it. This hill was taken in by Servius Tullus. 5. Mons Cœlius owes its name to Cœlius, or Cœles, a Tuscan general greatly celebrated in his time, who pitched his tents here when he came to the assistance of Romulus against the Sabines. Its having been taken into the city is attributed to Tullus Hostilius, by Livy and Dionysius; but by Strabo, to Ancus Martius. 6. Collis Quirinalis was so called from the temple of Quirinus, another name of Romulus; or from the Curetes, a people that removed hither from a Sabine city, called Cures. It afterwards changed its name to Caballus, Mons Caballi, and Caballinus, from the two marble horses, with each a man holding him, which are set up here. They are still standing, and, if the inscription on the pilasters be true, were the work of Phidias and Praxiteles; made by those masters to represent Alexander and his horse Bucephalus, and sent to Nero as a present by Tiridates king of Armenia. 7. Mons Aventinus derived its name from Aventinus, an Alban king, from the river Avens, or from (ab Avibus) the birds, that used to flock there from the Tiber. Gellius affirms, that this hill was not enclosed within the bounds of the city, till the time of Claudius; but Eutropius expressly states that it was taken into it even so early as that of Ancus Martius.

As to the extent of the whole city, the greatest, recorded in history, was in the reign of Valerian, who enlarged the walls to such a degree, as to surround a space of fifty miles. The number of inhabitants, in its flourishing state, is computed by Lipsius at four millions. The present extent of the walls is about thirteen miles. Sir John Hobhouse walked round them in three hours, thirty-three minutes and three quarters; and Dr. Burton did the same in three hours and ten minutes.

This circuit will bring into view specimens of every construction, from the days of Servius Tullius down to the present. Aurelian took into his walls whatever he found standing in their line, and they now include some remains of the Tullian walls, the walls of the Prætorian barracks, the facing of a tank, aqueducts, sepulchral monuments, a menagerie, an amphitheatre, a pyramid, &c. Thus do they exhibit the uncemented blocks of the Etruscan style, the reticular work of the republic, the travertine preferred by the first emperors, the alternate tufa and bricks employed by their successors, and that poverty of materials which marks the declining empire. Since the first breach, made by Totila, the walls have been often and variously repaired; sometimes by a case of brick-work, filled up with shattered marbles, rubble, shard, and mortar. In some parts, the cementitious work is unfaced; here you find stones and tufa mixed; there tufa alone, laid in the Saracenic manner: the latter repairs have the brick revêtement of modern fortification.