says the line which comes as such a relief after the involved constructions of later Latin writers, a line which records a fact as simply worded as it could be in a mediæval chronicle, which gives us a true leonine rime, and which makes its way through six feet without a single dactyl. To the Campanian knights their Roman citizenship was doubtless pleasant enough; it may have been less so to the commons, who had the private rights only, and who were burthened with a payment to the knights. Yet we find that the revolt of Capua to Hannibal was largely the work of noble leaders. The truth doubtless is that the large amount of independence which Capua still kept only made any measure of dependence more galling. Then came the blow which made Capua for a while cease to be a city. Its lands became the property of the Roman people; its walls were left simply as a shelter for those who filled them. Yet the great city of Campania arose again, to be once more a great city till the second blow, when men of Semitic speech came not as deliverers but as destroyers, when Capua moved to Casilinum, and when all that was left of the elder city put itself under the keeping of a heavenly protectress as Santa Maria di Capua. Among those remnants of what was, the walls of Capua, the arx of Capua, are not to be found; at all events they do not strike the traveller on his first or his second visit. For something faintly answering to a Capuan arx, he takes himself to the neighbouring mountains. There, on their lowest slopes, looking out on Vesuvius and Ischia, looking down on the Campanian plain, with its river, with its older and its newer Capua, we come to a spot where a famous temple of the older faith has given way to a less famous one of the new. A journey from Caserta to the Capuan amphitheatre in the plain may well take in a journey to the slope of Tifata, the slope of the hill on which Hannibal so often pitched his camp, and where the church of Sant' Angelo in Formis has supplanted the holy place of Diana and Jupiter, which took its name from the mountain which rises above its massy tower.
V. A Church by the Camp of Hannibal.
We reach Tifata, the very centre of the marching and counter-marching of Hannibal, the spot from which we may best call up a picture of beleaguered Capua, of Fulvius waiting for his prey, of the stout fighting on either side of the enclosing lines, of Hannibal, as his last hope, turning aside to threaten Rome, in the chance that the danger of Rome might lead to the relief of Capua. The name Tifata, in some tongue, most likely in the old Oscan, describes the evergreen oaks which doubtless formed the sacred grove of Diana. The goddess had no lake here, as she had at Aricia, nor do we hear of any such grim legend on Tifata as grew round—
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
Yet beside the rites of Canaan, the rites of the gods who had sent forth him whose name proclaimed him as the Grace of Baal, the darkest forms into which any kind of Italian or Hellenic worship strayed might well seem mild. In tracking the career of Hannibal, we are ever disappointed at the utter lack of means to call up a picture of the man himself apart from his public acts. He had human weaknesses, for he found a mistress at Salapia. He had his sallies of merriment, for he could raise a laugh at the grave Gisgo. But the course of his inner life is hidden from us. Still we can at least see that he was, in his own belief, charged with a mission from the gods of his own city. And it needs an effort to bear in mind that the gods of Hannibal were Baal and Moloch. The goddess to whom he would have reared a temple would have been, not a Diana, but an Ashtoreth. Yet, among the many, and mostly false, charges of cruelty brought against the great Phœnician by Roman writers, we do not hear, as we do in the case of some other Carthaginian commanders, of captives being made to pass through the fire to the gods of Carthage. Hannibal, the friend of Capua, would at Capua honour Diana of Tifata; but it was not Diana that had sent him. With what thanks did he honour his own gods, when Capua, second city of all Italy, welcomed the victor of Trebia, Trasimenus, and Cannæ? Is it too bold a flight to fancy the mount of Tifata the scene of the same form of Baal-worship as the mount of Carmel?
But the gods of Italy lived on, undisturbed by the momentary presence of Semitic rivals. Diana was not the only power worshipped on Tifata; Jupiter also had his holy place. And it may be that the venerable church which now forms the chief attraction of the hill-side represents the holy place of Jupiter rather than the holy place of Diana. It is curious to see how a kind of appropriateness was often sought after in the nomenclature of Pagan temples when turned into Christian churches. Thus, at Athens, the Parthenôn remained the Parthenôn, while the temple of the warrior Thêseus or Hêraklês became the church of the warrior George. We should look for a Santa Maria or a Santa Lucia at the least, on the site of the sanctuary of Diana. Had we here a San Pietro, we should have very little doubt in setting down the prince of the Apostles as having supplanted the father of gods and men. But at Sant' Angelo in Formis we feel somewhat less certain; St. Michael suggests the Norman, and the Norman has been there. It may well be that the name is no older than his day.