Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 / Studies from the Chronicles of Rome

by F. Marion Crawford

As for the youth, and the woman who had saved the State out of love for him, the Senate and the people made a noble and generous decree. For him, he received a sum of money from the public treasury in place of the fortune his mother had stolen from him, and he was exempted from military service, unless he chose to be a soldier, and from ever furnishing a horse to the State. But for the woman, whose life had been evil, it was publicly decreed that her sins should be blotted out, that she should have all rights of holding, transferring and selling property, of marrying into another gens and of choosing a guardian, as if she had received all from a husband by will; that she should be at liberty to marry a man of free descent, and that he who should marry her was to incur no degradation, and that all consuls and prætors in the future should watch over her and see that no harm came to her, as long as she lived. Her people made her an honourable Roman matron, and perhaps the stern old senators thus rewarded her in order that the man she had saved might marry her without shame. But whether he did or not, no one knows.

CHURCH OF SAINT NEREUS AND SAINT ACHILLÆUS
From a print of the last century

This is the first instance in which a religion, and the orgies were so called by the Romans, was practised upon the Aventine in opposition to that of the State. It was not the last. Under Domitian, Juvenal found a host of Jews established there, on the eastern slope and about the fountain of Egeria, and thirty years before him Saint Paul lived on the Aventine in the Jewish house of Aquila and Priscilla where Santa Prisca stands today. It is worth noting that Aquila, an eagle, the German Adler, was already then a Jewish name. Little by little, however, the Jews went back to the Tiber, and the Aventine became the stronghold of the Christians; there they built many of their oldest churches, and thence they carried out their dead to the near catacombs of Saint Petronilla, the church better known as that of Saint Nereus and Saint Achillæus. And there are many other ancient churches on the hill, and on the road that leads to Saint Sebastian's gate, and beyond the walls, on the Appian Way as far as Saint Callixtus; lonely, peaceful shrines, beautiful with the sculptures and pavements and mosaics of the Cosmas family who lived and worked between six and seven hundred years ago. On the other side of the hill, near the Circus, Saint Augustine taught rhetoric for a living, though he knew no Greek and was perhaps no great Latin scholar either—still an unbeliever then, an astrologer and a follower after strange doctrines, one whom no man could have taken for a future bishop and Father of the Church, who was to be author of two hundred and thirty-two theological treatises, as well as of an exposition of the Psalms and the Gospels. Here Saint Gregory the Great, once Prefect of Rome, preached and prayed, and here the fierce Hildebrand lived when he was young, and called himself Gregory when he was Pope, perhaps, because he had so often meditated here upon the life and acts of the wise Saint, in the places hallowed by his footsteps.

Later, the Aventine was held by the Savelli, who dwelt in castles long since destroyed, even to the foundations, by the fury of their enemies; and there the two Popes of the house, Honorius the Third—a famous chronicler in his day—and Honorius the Fourth, found refuge when the restless Romans 'annoyed them,' as Muratori mildly puts it. They were brave men in their day, mostly Guelphs, and faithful friends of the Colonna, and it is told how one of them died in a great fight between Colonna and Orsini.

It was in that same struggle which culminated in the execution of Lorenzo Colonna, the Protonotary, that Pope Sixtus the Fourth destroyed the last remains of the Sublician Bridge, at the foot of the Aventine. So, at least, tradition says. From that bridge the Roman pontiffs had taken their title, 'Pontifex,' a bridge-maker, because it was one of their chief duties to keep it in repair, when it was the only means of crossing the Tiber, and the safety of the city might depend upon it at any time; and for many centuries the bridge was built of oak, and without nails or bolts of iron, in memory of the first bridge which Horatius had kept. Now those who love to ponder on coincidences may see one in this, that the last remnant of the once oaken bridge, kept whole by the heathen Pontifex, was destroyed by the Christian Pontifex, whose name was 'of the oak'—for so 'della Rovere' may be translated if one please.

Years ago, one might still distinctly see in the Tiber the remains of piers, when the water was low, at the foot of the Aventine, a little above the Ripa Grande; and those who saw them looked on the very last vestige of the Sublician Bridge, that is to say, of the stone structure which in later times took the place of the wooden one; and that last trace has been destroyed to deepen the little harbour. In older days there were strange superstitions and ceremonies connected with the bridge that had meant so much to Rome. Strangest of all was the procession on the Ides of May,—the fifteenth of that month,—when the Pontiffs and the Vestals came to the bridge in solemn state, with men who bore thirty effigies made of bulrushes in likeness to men's bodies, and threw them into the river, one after the other, with prayers and hymns; but what the images meant no man knows. Most generally it was believed in Rome that they took the place of human beings, once sacrificed to the river in the spring. Ovid protests against the mere thought, but the industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to prove that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber for one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise sacrificed until the year of the city 657, when, Cnæus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a law that no man should be sacrificed thereafter. The question is one for scholars; but considering the savage temper of the Romans, their dark superstitions, the abundance of victims always at hand, and the frequency of human sacrifices among nations only one degree more barbarous, there is no reason for considering the story very improbable.

THE RIPA GRANDE AND SITE OF THE SUBLICIAN BRIDGE