The Story of Assisi

by Lina Duff Gordon

THE TEMPLE OF MINERVA

And thus the monk dreams on about the Seraphic Province of Umbria; and we dream with him of the Umbrians who forsook the chase and their shepherd huts on the heights about Subasio, to gather round the marvellous temple built by the hero ere he went forth to found the city of Troy. People came from afar to look at the six-fluted columns, and while marvelling at a thing so fair, they resolved to build their homes within sight and under the shadow of the sacred walls. Here was the nucleus of a future town. The simple shelters of cane and brushwood were soon replaced by huts of a neater pattern made of wattle and clay, with earthen floors, rounded porches and pent roofs. The dwellers by the temple throve and prospered, and all was peace for a while, until the van-guard of that mysterious people, the Etruscans, appeared on the Umbrian horizon. We are told how Dardanus, while visiting the King of Lydia on his way to Troy, drew such a highly-coloured picture of the loveliness of Tuscany, the fruitful qualities of the soil, and the lightness of the air, that Tyrrhenus, the king's son, was immediately sent with a large army to take possession of so rich a province. Then came a struggle, and the Umbrian tribes were driven back south of the Tiber, which henceforth strictly defined the boundary between Umbria and Etruria.

Immediately to the west of Assisi, and on the longest spur of hills which juts out into the valley of the Tiber, stood the now Etruscan city of Perugia, to which a band of Etruscans had lately immigrated. The huge, grim walls which grew up round it after the advent of the new settlers, the narrow pointed gateways, some guarded by heads of stern and unknown deities, the general menacing and ferocious aspect of its buildings, soon warned the smaller Umbrian cities of what they might in coming ages expect from her inhabitants. It is probable that skirmishes were frequent between the neighbouring towns of Assisi and Perugia, and to judge from the subterranean passages which still exist beneath the streets of the former place, we may gather that she was open to constant attacks, and that her inhabitants found it more prudent to disappear underground at the approach of enemies than to meet them in open battle. These subterranean galleries, cut in the soft tufa, extend for miles under the present city: branching out in all directions they form a veritable labyrinth of secret passages. Here swiftly and silently as the foe advanced, men and women with their children would disappear into the bowels of the earth, some being occasionally buried beneath masses of soil shaken down by the tramp of many feet above them. Repeated dangers of this sort at last decided the Assisans to meet their enemies in more war-like fashion, and to surround themselves—as Perugia had done—with stones and mortar. Soon the town bristled with towers and turreted gateways, and the houses, no longer built of wattle and mud, began to foreshadow the strongly fortified palaces of a later date. None too soon did Assisi prepare for war. In the year 309 b.c. the shrill sound of the Roman clarion echoed through the Cimminian forest. It roused Etruria to arms, proclaiming the fact that the Romans had dared to penetrate beyond this dangerous barrier which hitherto had been deemed impassable. The Etruscans and Umbrians, forgetting all their former strifes, now joined against the new power which threatened to crush their liberties. The battles which followed beneath the walls of Perugia, and by Bevagna in the plain of the Clitumnus, brought all Umbria, in the space of a single year, under the yoke of Rome.

And now, although we leave the fields of legend and enter those of history, we find but little mention of Assisi: this is, however, easily accounted for. Built upon the unfrequented slopes of Mount Subasio, like a flower gradually opening to the sun's rays, she was far more secure than her neighbour Perugia who, commanding and commanded by the road from Rome to Ravenna, along which an army passed, stood in haughty and uncompromising pre-eminence. The comparatively obscure position of Assisi therefore gave her long periods of peace, and these she employed in building innumerable temples, a theatre, and a circus. It is impossible to excavate in any part of Assisi without coming upon relics of that time. Statues and busts of the Cæsars, of gods and of consuls, are lying in dark corners of the communal palace, and broken fragments of delicately-wrought friezes and heads of goddesses, half buried in bushes of oleander, adorn the Assisan gardens. Beneath the foundations of the more modern houses, mosaic floors and frescoed walls have been found, showing that Assisi had her years of early splendour. But full of life and action as this Roman period was, it is as completely hidden from us as are the temples now buried beneath the present town. It passed rapidly away, and yet is of some importance in the history of the world as having witnessed the birth of Sex. Aurelius Propertius, great among the poets even at a time when Virgil, Horace, and a host of others were filling Italy with their song.

Many an Umbrian town prides itself on being the birthplace of Propertius. The people of Spello have even placed a tablet in their walls to claim him as her son; but the Assisans, ignoring the rivalry of others, very quietly point to the many inscriptions of the Propertius' family collected beneath the portico of the Temple of Minerva. One may be noticed referring to C. Passennus Sergius Paullus Propertius Blaesus, said to be a lineal descendant of the poet, who is supposed to have married after the death of the fair Cynthia, and returned to his native valley to pass his last days in domestic tranquillity. Angelo Poliziano, on the margin of an early edition of the poet's works now in the Laurentian Library of Florence, has made a note to the effect that Propertius, as well as St. Francis, was born at Assisi; and certainly modern writers assign the honour to Assisi.

The somewhat vague utterances of Propertius as to his native town seem to show that the position of Assisi, with regard to Perugia and the plain, more nearly coincides with his description than that of any other city in the valley or on the hills. To one inquisitive friend he answers: "Tullus, thou art ever entreating me in the name of our friendship to tell thee my country and my descent. If thou knowest Perusia, which gave a field of death and a sepulchre to our father and in Italy's hour of affliction, when domestic discord drove Rome's own citizens one against the other—(Ah! hills of Etruria, to me beyond measure have ye given sorrow, for ye suffered the limbs of my kinsman to be cast aside unburied, and denied the handful of dust to cover his bones)—there it was that, close above the margin of her plain spread below, Umbria, rich in fertile domains, gave me birth."[2] The kinsman spoken of here is a certain Gallus, who lost his life in b.c. 41, when Lucius Antonius was besieged in Perugia by Augustus. The horrors of the general massacre which followed the fall of the city left sad memories in the mind of Propertius, then a mere child. In the general confiscation of property after the battle of Philippi his family lost their estates. But poor as they were, Propertius was sent to Rome to study, where, recognised as the leader of a new school of poetry, he remained until shortly before his death, at the age of thirty-five. His paternal estates having been restored to him, he forsook the splendour of the Augustan court, the patronage of Maecenas, the friendship of Virgil, and returned to the Umbrian country where his first inspirations had been awakened. The contrast between a house and garden on the Palatine hill, in the midst of the stir of Roman life, and a farm by the silent stream flowing through the stillest of valleys, must have been great. But, judging from his description of the country, he seems to have fallen readily into rural ways, and loved to watch the herds of white oxen, dedicated to the service of the goddesses, grazing close to the banks of the Clitumnus. We may infer that he hunted the "timorous hare and birds" in the thick oak forest of the Spoletan valley, but, as he playfully tells us, he left "the hazardous boar alone," for physical courage was not one of his characteristics.

From the plain his eyes were often raised in the direction of Assisi, and to his familiarity with her towers we owe this exquisite description of his birthplace, which, perhaps out of modesty, as he alludes to his own fame, he places in the mouth of a soothsayer: "Ancient Umbria gave thee birth from a noted household. Do I mistake, or do I touch rightly the region of your home, where misty Mevania stands among the dews of the hill-girt plain, and the waters of the Umbrian lake grow warm the summer through, and where on the summit of mounting Asis rise the walls to which your genius has added glory."[3]

Nothing happens, or at least nothing is mentioned in Assisan chronicles until Christianity stealthily worked its way up from Rome about the third century. Then bloodshed followed during a period of darkness when Christians and pagans divided the town into factions by their bitter fights for religion. At first the Christians suffered, and many were martyred in the Umbrian rivers, but only to triumph later when Roman Assisi soon vanished and Christian basilicas were built on the site of pagan temples. Although, after the Roman period, we find Assisi more nearly linked with the general history of Italy, she appears uninfluenced by outside events, and her atmosphere of remoteness remains unimpaired. Thus we may say that Huns, Franks, and Lombards merely passed by and left no lasting mark upon the city. For a moment she was suddenly aroused by the tempestuous arrival of one or other of their leaders, but once the danger was past she returned to her calm sleep upon the mountain side.