There were not many days in the course of that idyllic winter that did not see some of us in the Forum. We haunted it early and late; alighting for a few minutes, en route for other places, to run down the slight wooden stair leading from the street-level, to verify to our complete satisfaction some locality about which we had read or heard, or studied since yesterday’s visit. Or coming, with books and children, when the Tramontana was blowing up and down every street in the city, and we could find no other nook so sheltered and warm as the lee of the wall where once ran the row of butchers’ stalls, from one of which Virginius snatched the knife to slay his daughter. My favorite seat was upon the site of the diminutive Temple of Julius Cæsar (Divus Julius) the first reared in Rome in honor of a mortal. The remnants of the green-and-white pavement show where lay the body of great Cæsar when Mark Antony delivered his funeral oration, and where Tiberius performed the like pious office over the bier of Augustus.
The Via Sacra turns at this point, losing itself in one direction in the bank, which is the limit of the excavation, winding in the other through the centre of the exposed Forum, up to the Capitol foundations. Horace was here persecuted by the bore whose portrait is as true to life now as it was then. Dux read the complaint aloud to us once, with telling effect, substituting “Broadway” for the ancient name. Cicero sauntered along this fashionable promenade as a young man waiting for clients; trod these very stones with the assured step of the successful advocate and famous orator, and upon them dripped the blood from his severed hand and head, and the tongue pierced by Fulvia’s bodkin. Beyond the transversing modern street is a mound, once a judgment-seat. There Brutus sat, his face an iron mask, while his sons were scourged and beheaded before his eyes. In the Comitium was the renowned statue of the she-wolf, now in the Capitoline Museum, which was struck by lightning at the moment of Cæsar’s murder in Pompey’s Theatre. Cæsar passed by this way on the Ides of March from his house over there—the Regia—where were enacted the mysteries of the Bona Dea when Pompeia, Calphurnia’s predecessor, admitted Clodius to the forbidden rites. The soothsayer who cried out to him may have loitered in waiting by the hillock, which is all that is left of Vesta’s Fane, where were kept the sacred geese.
Boy knew each site and meant no disrespect to the “potent, grave, and reverend” heroes who used to pace the ancient street, while entertaining himself by skipping back and forth its entire length so far as it is uncovered, “telling himself a story.” He was always happy when thus allowed to run and murmur, a trick begun by the time he could walk. Content in this knowledge, the Invaluable sat upon the steps of the Basilica Julia, knitting in hand, guarding a square aperture near the Temple of Castor and Pollux, the one danger (to Boy) in the Forum. For, looking into it, one saw the rush of foul waters below hurrying to discharge themselves through the Cloaca Maxima—built by Numa Pompilius—into the Tiber. Here, it is said, yawned the gulf into which Curtius leaped, armed and mounted.
“A quagmire, drained and filled up by an enterprising street contractor of that name,” says Caput, to whom this and a score of other treasured tales of those nebulously olden times are myths with a meaning.
While I rested apart in my sunny corner, and watched the august wraiths trooping past, or pretended to read with eyes that did not see the book on my knees, Boy’s “story-telling” drifted over to me in rhymical ripples:
“On rode they to the Forum,
While laurel-wreaths and flowers
From house-tops and from windows
Fell on their crests in showers.
When they drew nigh to Vesta,