A poor monk, Fray José Moscoso, built a wall round it, hoping to preserve the precious thing, but Soult’s French soldiers destroyed it by turning the enclosure into a goat pen. There is an engraving of this mosaic in the Biblioteca Columbina at Seville. When the archæologists come to Spain,—or rather when the Spanish archæologists carry their work farther,—there will be a rich treasure trove. Very little scientific excavation has been undertaken yet. The soil, so rich in archæological as well as in mineral and agricultural wealth, has hardly been scratched. That is one of the interesting things about Spain,—it has still so much to do. With all its wonderful, romantic past, it is still a young country, with a great future before it. The Spaniards have been so busy keeping the East out of the West, fighting the battles of other nations, keeping those wretched Bourbons on the thrones of Italy where they were not wanted, opening up the New World and making Spanish America, that they have neglected Spain. That was yesterday. To-day all is changed. Spain has pulled on the seven-league boots of the giant Progress, and is striding manfully ahead, making up for lost time.
It is easy enough to turn one’s back upon the great army of ghosts at Seville in Fair time, when life is at the flood and the pulses leap with the thrill of it; in Sevilla Vieja, the old Roman city of Italica, it can’t be done. Here are none but ghosts, and one old gabaloonzy man who acts, in the absence of the true guardian, as our guide; he is a shepherd and his sheep crop the grass that grows over Italica. He stopped his knitting to pick a wild orchid rooted into the crumbling arch of the old Roman amphitheatre.
“Miré,” he said; “this is the bee flower. Can you see the bee?”
His needles clicked again, the only sound in the great circus save the noise of the sheep cropping the grass of the arena. In and out of the crimson alfalfa and the wild thyme, buzzed the wild bees gathering honey. They made a soft humming, at first confused, then growing clearer and clearer, till the faint hints of meaning in their song seemed to grow into words:
“Scipio Africanus founded me,” sang the bees, speaking for Italica, “as a refuge for his veterans after the great war with Carthage.”
Out of the shadowy archway leading to the wild beast dens, a stronger shadow fell on the grass. Here, in the city his love and care established for the old soldiers who followed him to victory and immortal glory, I saw magnanimous Scipio, and at his side, a fainter pair, Allutius the Celtiberian prince, with the fair woman both men loved, and whom the Roman, when he learned that she was affianced to Allutius, renounced, refusing all ransom, and asking as his only recompense the friendship of Allutius for the Republic. It was not stranger than all the rest that the shade of the bride looked like Trinidad.
“Three Emperors I gave to Rome,—Trajan, Hadrian, Theodosius!” ran the song of the bees, speaking for Italica forsaken.
Trajan—the good emperor of whom Rome still gossips and has so little harm to say? Why, it was only the other day that standing by your tomb in the Eternal City, in your forum, in the shadow of the great column that bears the record of your triumphs, I heard the old story, told and retold by poet, painter and sculptor; how clear it echoes through the ages! As you rode forth to battle, a poor widow stood at your bridle and would not let you pass, crying out for justice for her son, whom your soldiers had ridden down and killed, innocent of ill. You stopped on your triumphant way and gave that justice the poor woman cried out for, then rode on to victory. Five centuries after your death, in the time of Pope Gregory the Great, your skull was found, with the tongue still alive, so the great Gregory was able to hold parley with you.
“Trajan! Trajan! Where art thou?” cried Gregory.