Leaving the cathedral, we drive up a pleasant, winding road, past terraces of century plants and curious cacti, to S. Pietro, in Montorio, where from the piazza we obtain such an outlook as would be hard to surpass, embracing the tremendous sweep from St. Peter’s dome to the flats of the Campagna. All Rome is at our feet. The Apennines from Soracte to the Alban Mount are bathed in sunlight, shadow and shower. Historic villages lie along the slopes, nestling in the valleys, and crowning the hill-tops. The giants of the past move through the spiritual sky and hover over this ancient city where they lived, and suffered, and died. The view from the terrace of the Pincian is justly celebrated, but it does not equal the outlook from this height.
If one desires to use his time in Rome to the best advantage let him have nothing to do with half-educated guides, whose information is often untrustworthy. There are promenade lectures given by well-informed English archæologists, who have spent years in Rome, making a special study of the ruins and modern excavations. The Chautauqua quartette were fortunate in securing the services of Mr. S. Russell Forbes, whose recent book, entitled “Rambles in Rome,” gains for him the gratitude of all those who have felt the need of just such a printed guide. Our first morning was spent at the Roman Forum and Colosseum, under Mr. Forbes’s delightful leadership. Starting from the temple of Castor and Pollux we went over the whole ground of the Forum, pausing before the mound which covers the ashes of the great Cæsar, seeing the rostrum from which Mark Antony made his funeral oration, and also the rostrum where Cicero delivered his famous speeches, and on which, after his assassination, his head and hands were nailed, “that everybody might see them in the very place where he had formerly harangued with so much vehemence.” We walked over the identical pavement used in the days when Rome was mistress of the world, and saw ruts in the stone made by chariot wheels, when England was but a barbarous isle. The Flavian Amphitheater, known to us as the Colosseum, received this name from the colossal statue of Nero, that stood near, and it was first spoken of in this way by Venerable Bede, of England. Byron is responsible for the mis-spelling of the word, which he writes Coliseum. Mr. Forbes thinks there is no evidence that Christians suffered in this arena, with the exception of St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch. The cross which formerly stood in the center is now removed, and the excavations have revealed three parallel curving walls, which were put up by the Emperor Commodus, who boasted that he could kill an hundred lions with as many javelins. Standing in safety on one of these high walls the beasts were led out to meet the cruel, murderous spears cast at them with unerring aim by this brutal emperor. From the upper gallery one can look down on what Richter calls “the crater of this burnt out volcano” and imagine the vast Amphitheater in the year of its dedication, A. D. 80, when the games continued for one hundred days, and 5,000 beasts were slain, while from 80,000 to 100,000 spectators crowded these now deserted spaces. Visiting the Colosseum by moonlight a solemn hush broods over the place where was once such abounding, riotous life, the roar of wounded and infuriated wild beasts, mingling with the death-groans of gladiators and martyrs. The silence is broken by the musical monotone of a tolling church bell, suggesting the new light which had just risen on the world when this amphitheater was in process of construction, and which has been the chief force in extinguishing the desire for such brutal and bestial exhibitions.
It is a brilliantly blue morning and the Chautauquans are in high spirits, for at 10 o’clock they are to start in open carriages, with Mr. Forbes as guide, for the Appian Way and the Catacombs. They first visit the baths of Caracalla, which even in ruins give one some conception of the magnificence of Rome under the Empire. These sunken mosaic pavements are still beautiful, the vacant niches suggest the fine works of art that once adorned them, and the grass-grown arches and walls, over which rooks and jackdaws now fly, speak of the gay life that once assembled here. It was a vast structure covering a mile square, and accommodating 1,600 bathers at once. Here were not only every conceivable kind of bath known to us moderns, but rooms for games, reading and conversation, each of these most elegantly fitted up, and on top of all were the gardens. It was a place of fashionable resort, where the pleasure-loving Romans could spend their days. Built by the emperor, it was then thrown open free to all, in order to curry favor with the people.
The Appian Way is lined with temples, villas and tombs. As it was against the law to bury inside the walls, the ancient Romans were accustomed to place their dead on either side of the principal roads leading from the city. At the despoiled tomb of the Scipios we each of us took a lighted candle and went down into gloomy, subterranean passages, to see the niches which once held the sarcophagi of Scipio Barbatus, Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, and other distinguished members of the Scipio family.—
“The Scipios’ tomb contains no ashes now;
The very sepulchers lie tenantless
Of their heroic dwellers.”
The treasures of this tomb have been carried to the Vatican Museum.
At the Columbaria we walked through blossoming hedges of pink roses to the great sepulchers for those whose bodies were burned as was customary during the first centuries of the Christian era, although even then the distinguished Patrician families followed the ancient mode of interment. This early cremation did not consume the body to powder as in our days, but the bones were left and gathered into an urn. These funeral vases were placed in little niches, resembling the nests in a modern pigeon-house, and therefore called Columbaria. Here were placed the remains of the officers of Cæsar’s household—we read one inscription to the barber of the mighty Julius, and other names are familiar from St. Paul’s letters. Tryphena, Tryphosa, Onesimus—are these the funeral urns of the persons mentioned by the apostle? So our learned guide was inclined to think, and we were well pleased to believe it possible.
The Catacombs of St. Callixtus was our next stopping place, and here again we each received a lighted taper, and forming a procession descended out of the gladsome light of day into the gloomy bowels of the earth—the burial place, and, as many think, the hiding place of the first converts to Christianity. We wind in and out a mazy labyrinth, excavations on either side of us in the soft greenish brown tufa for graves, one above another, and of irregular size. Many of these graves were rifled by barbarians for the treasure supposed to be contained therein. The sarcophagi and slabs have been carried to museums, especially to the Lateran, where, on another occasion, we studied the touching inscriptions, some of which were evidently wrought by affection and not by skilled workmen. Some frescoes remain in the Catacombs which are interesting from their very rudeness, showing that the Christians would not employ pagan art for their sacred places. Coming to the Chapel of the Bishops, we see engraved in beautiful characters this inscription, put up by Pope Damasus: “Here, if you would know, lie heaped together a number of the holy. These honored sepulchers enclose the bodies of the saints, their lofty souls the palace of heaven has received. . . . Here lie youths and boys, old men and their chaste descendants, who kept their virginity undefiled. Here I, Damasus, wished to have laid my limbs, but feared to disturb the holy ashes of the saints.” From the chapel a gallery leads to the Crypt of St. Cecilia. When Paschal I. had the body of this martyred virgin removed in 820, it was found “fresh and perfect as when it was first laid in the tomb, and clad in rich garments mixed with gold, with linen cloths, stained with blood, rolled up at her feet.” Although there are shafts for ventilation and light, how good it seemed to reach once more the upper air and the flood of sunlight, and to see the blue sky and green earth!