This at once marks a wide difference between Rome and other cities of that time. Even the most famous of the early seats of maritime enterprise had the port separate from the city, later than the city. Corinth herself had her two havens, apart alike from her mountain citadel and from the venerable columns at its foot. When Corinth started in life men shrank from the close neighbourhood of the sea. It marks a later stage when Corinthian enterprise planted colonies absolutely in the sea—Syracuse on her island, the elder Korkyra on her peninsula. It was not till long after Ostia had arisen that inland Athens yoked herself to the sea. But, as the site of Rome itself on the broad Tiber showed that men had even then learned to understand the value of sites widely different from Tusculum on her height or Veii with her encircling brooks, so the creation of Ostia proves yet more. Rome, far more distant from the sea than Corinth, Megara, or even Athens, had already learned that a hold on the sea was needful for her power. There could have been nothing like it in Italy. There were inland cities and there were maritime cities; but there was no inland city which had put forth a maritime outpost at such a distance. Indeed, no other city had put forth such an outpost at all, maritime or otherwise. For Ostia was not a colony, not a dependency. It had no separate being of its own. It was a limb of Rome transplanted to a distance of fifteen Italian miles from the main body.
Ostia, then, called into being because Rome stood on the Tiber, is eminently a child of the Tiber. But Father Tiber is unluckily one of those fathers who do not scruple to swallow up their own children. He has changed his course, and he has changed it in a way which is not a little dangerous for what is still left of Ostia. The diggings which have been carried on by the Italian Government are most praiseworthy, and they have brought to light much that is most interesting and instructive. But streets, storehouses, temples, theatres, will in vain be dug out if the ravenous river god is to gulp them down as soon as they are well dug out. At the present moment one street, with its pavement laid bare, with its buildings still standing on each side, leads in a perilous manner into the stream. That is to say, one end is gone; the rest will soon follow; the pieces of wall nearest to the stream are crumbling to their fall. Surely it would be well to imitate in the haven of Ancus the work done for the mother-city by his successor. Fence in the flood, as the elder Tarquin fenced it in beside the mouth of the cloaca maxima; make a strong wall of defence against the waters, and the remains which are left of Ostia may abide as long as the cloaca maxima itself.
And what is left of Ostia is indeed worth preserving. Only a small part of the town has as yet been dug out; but, even as it is, Ostia is becoming a fair rival to Pompeii. The interest, indeed, is of a somewhat different kind in the two places. Pompeii will come first with the artist and Ostia with the historian. Nothing of any moment ever happened at Pompeii except the destruction and the discovery of Pompeii itself. But a great deal happened at Ostia, and that at widely distant dates. It is perhaps needless to mention that one thing which is said to have happened at Ostia never happened either there or anywhere else—namely, destruction by the Saracens in the fifth century, which is recorded indeed in Murray's "Handbook," but which was certainly unknown to Procopius. Ostia, destroyed by Marius, restored by Sulla, was failing in the days of Strabo to discharge its duty as the haven of Rome. It had yielded to the same enemy which afterwards overcame Ravenna and Pisa; the silt of Father Tiber was too much for it. Yet, notwithstanding this misfortune, notwithstanding the change which it led to, when Claudius found it needful to transfer the harbour of Rome to Portus on the other side of the river, Ostia contrived to live on through all disadvantages. For it has many and great buildings later than Strabo and Claudius, among them an Imperial house with graceful columns, which contains the famous shrine of Mithras. There is abundant evidence that all through the second century of our æra great architectural works were carried on at Ostia. Besides the palace, there is the great central temple, be it of Jupiter or of Vulcan, standing so proudly on its steps. There is a theatre whose columns and inscriptions supply no small materials for study, a theatre of which it might be too much to say that it suggests those of Orange or Taormina, but which certainly suggests that of Arles.
In the sixth century Procopius describes Ostia as lacking walls, and he complains that the road from Ostia to Rome did not follow the course of the river, and was therefore useless as a towing-path. This is eminently true still. The road goes through scenery of various kinds, some rather English-looking, though none very striking; the Tiber makes a far less important feature than we might have looked for. But, if Ostia had no walls in the days of Belisarius, it had no lack of walls in earlier days. The most interesting, from one point of view, among the ruins of Ostia are the remains, forming part of two sides of a square, of the primitive wall, a dry wall of massive stones, belonging no doubt to the period of the first foundation. These were clearly ruinous when the later brick buildings were reared; the wall was broken down, and men built against and upon it; they plastered it; they chamfered its stones for the convenience of plastering, as best suited their purpose. The flourishing town of the second century may well have been wall-less. Rome herself at that date had no defence. The wall of Servius had ceased to serve any military purpose, and the wall of Aurelian was not yet.
The history of Ostia from the ninth century onwards, from the vain attempt of Gregory the Fourth to turn Ostia into Gregoriopolis, belongs to another, though almost adjacent, site. New Ostia, with its castle, its cathedral, its gateway, its one or two narrow streets, but with seemingly hardly a dozen inhabitants, is a sadder sight than old Ostia, with no inhabitant except the stalwart custode, who defends himself against Ostian air by daily doses of quinine. Yet the castle of Cardinal Estouteville ranks high among picturesque fortresses; the cathedral shows a mixture of classical and Gothic detail for which nothing in Rome prepares us; fragments of ancient work lie around; the staircase of the bishop's palace, the palace of the first among cardinals, is rich in ancient inscriptions. But we hasten on to the older site. There is something specially striking in its half-excavated state. We tread the ancient pavement, between the ancient houses, of a street dug out of a cornfield on either side. The wall of Ancus loses itself in a bank of earth. Here a house, there a temple, is dug out, leaving just space enough to see it among surrounding blades of corn. At Pompeii, too, the diggings are not finished; but there one part is dug, another is not; here we thread our way along what is dug with the far greater mass of the undug to right and left of us. So far we are content; the undug may soon be promoted to the state of the dug, and Mother Earth is a safe keeper of antiquities. It is otherwise with Father Tiber. When he is close on one side of us, there is, as our guide truly tells us, no small danger. He once, as Horace witnesses, set forth to destroy the monuments of Numa at Rome; he is clearly minded to do the like by the monuments of Numa's grandson at Ostia.
The Alban Mount.
What is the common point of connexion between all the lands and places which bear the name of Alba, Albania, or something like it? They lie so far apart, they are inhabited by people of such utterly different nations and languages, that it is strange if there be any point of connexion among them, while it is at least as strange if the name has settled down on so many remote spots by sheer accident only. We must not forget that our own land has an interest in the question: we dwell in the Isle of Albion, and its northern part is specially Albanach or Albany. An English lady living on the eastern shore of the Hadriatic was lately complimented by a Scotch lady because, being an Albanian, she spoke such good English. It was afterwards suggested to her that she might have answered with a tu quoque or something more; the Englishwoman was no Albanian; the Scotchwoman in a certain sense was. But have Albanians of either of these kinds anything to do either with the Duke of Alva—for in his tongue "non aliud est vivere quam bibere"—or with the Albania beyond the Euxine? Then again it is singular to read, say in Dionysios of Halikarnassos, the local wars of Rome and Alba Longa described under exactly the same gentile names as those by which Imperial Anna describes strife between the New Rome and those Ghegs and Tosks who have again begun to make themselves famous. It is Ῥωμαῖοι and Ἀλβανοί in both cases, without the change of jot or tittle. In this case, at least, we believe that philologers would deny the slightest kindred between the names; but the casual identity is thereby only made the more startling. A malicious critic might say that Anna's Romans were as unlike old Romans as her Albanians could be unlike the men of Alba Longa. But her Romans did at least claim to be Romans, sharers in the inheritance of the wolf and the eagle; while her Albanians certainly laid no claims to any rights in the Alban sow and her thirty pigs.
Rome, undutiful daughter, swept away her mother city so thoroughly that its site has become a matter of dispute. But the name lived on in derivative forms. Alba perished, but the Alban lake and the Alban mount kept their places, to play no small part in the history of Rome. There is the lake, there is the great drain for its waters, so strangely interwoven with the tale of Veii. There is the mount, with the road by which the chariot of Marcellus went up in triumph; there are still the displaced stones of the temple which was the religious centre of the Latin name. But for the fanaticism of the last Stewart, the pillared front of the Latin Jupiter might still form the proudest of crowns for the height on which the gazer from the walls of Rome fixes his eye more commonly than on any other. And, if Alba perished, she did in a manner rise again. The neighbourhood of dead Alba became as favourite a quarter for the villas of Roman nobles as the neighbourhood of living Tusculum. There the great Pompeius had a dwelling; there, according to one version of his story, his body—or perhaps only his head—found a stately tomb, though Hadrian could make his verse by the Alexandrian Shore to say that no tomb had been found for him who had so many temples. But of all villas on Alban ground, of all Albana, the Albanum of the Emperors, with its spacious gardens, its long terraces still to be traced, of course came to be the greatest. The walled station of the Imperial guards, the fellow of the Prætorian camp at Rome, became the kernel of a new town, and Albano still exists, an episcopal city, seat of a cardinal-bishop, and it still keeps its character as a summer retreat for those who, now as of old, seek to escape the smoke and wealth and noise of lordly Rome. Albano and Alba stand in somewhat the same relation as Spalato and Salona. In both cases the new city grew out of an Imperial dwelling-place in the neighborhood of the old. But there is this wide difference between them, that Alba has utterly perished, while Salona survives in ample ruins. Alba had vanished ages and ages before Albano arose. Spalato stood ready to be a city of refuge for those who fled from Salona in her day of overthrow.
The town of Albano itself contains a good many antiquities, the most prominent among which, that which greets the eye on the entrance from Rome, is the huge tower-like pile, so cruelly stripped of its hewn stone, which, truly or falsely, passes for the tomb of Cnæus Pompeius Magnus. More striking on a close examination, though spoiled in its effect by a Papal freak of restoration, is the tomb which hovers between the names of Aruns son of Porsena and the Horatii and Curiatii. Which of the two would Sir George Lewis have looked on as the more impossible? This is the tomb which so singularly forestalled the outline of the Glastonbury kitchen—before its chimneys perished—and thereby of the Museum laboratory at Oxford. A good deal of the wall of the camp, a good deal of an amphitheatre on the hill-side, and several other fragments of the earlier Imperial time, are still to be seen. But after all Albano really exists, not for its own sake, but as a starting-point for the Alban lake and the Alban mount, and hardly less as a starting-point for