Italian Yesterdays, vol. 1

by Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Then it was dashed from him and emptied at a blow. Annia Regilla died very suddenly when the birth of her fifth child was hourly expected, and for a time her broken-hearted husband seemed likely to succumb to despair; but the very magnitude of his grief saved him—in more ways than one. The Greek desire for concrete expression, the impulse to embody in visible form the worshipped ideals of the mind, drove him at first to violent manifestations of mourning which appeared extravagant and unreal to the easy-going superficial Romans of his day. They took life pretty much as it came, even as the Romans do now, and the sight of Herodes Atticus in his black robes, in his house hung completely with black—where he even removed the flowery-tinted marbles of walls and pavements to replace them with sombre grey—all this afforded intense amusement to his fashionable friends.

But he had one enemy. His wife’s brother had deeply resented the marriage of Annia Regilla to a man whom he considered a low-born outsider, quite unfit to mate with a maid of his own patrician house; and, she being dead, the haughty aristocrat gave free rein to his animosity and accused Herodes of having poisoned his spouse. The absurdity of the indictment was potent to all, but the outraged widower insisted upon being publicly tried for the crime. The outcome, as he intended it should, crushed the calumny forever, the Judges declaring that his devotion to his wife during her lifetime and the unmistakable sincerity of his grief at her death were all-sufficient proofs of his innocence.

The fury of anger roused in him by the attack seems to have recalled his energies and restored his balance of mind. He quit mere repining, and swore to erect to his dead such a monument as woman never had before. The beautiful villa where their happy years had been passed stood in a shallow valley of the Campagna, some little distance to the right of the Appian Way, not far from the already ancient tomb of Cecilia Metella. At that time the land along the Appian Way, nearly as far as the Alban Hills, was covered with palaces and villas, costly monuments and beautiful gardens. The home of the wealthy Greek was remarkable enough to be famous even among these, although he had chosen for its site a piece of land belonging to his wife, indeed, but held till then in rather scornful repute. In spite of the fact that a small temple of Jupiter had stood there from very early times, this charming valley had been used as a spot to which the “Jews,” otherwise the Christians, had more than once been banished under very hard conditions, to punish their contumacy in refusing to sacrifice to the statues of the gods. Here, says a learned Catholic historian, St. Peter himself came with many of his flock, during his first visit to Rome, to take refuge in the subterranean crypts which, hastily dug in those early years, were afterwards enlarged and extended till they formed an underground city for the living and a safe resting-place for the dead.

Of Christianity, whether above or below ground, Herodes Atticus knew little and doubtless cared less. The despised sect aroused but faint interest in the upper classes, and the most scathing reproaches on their voluntary degradation were addressed to any of the latter who joined it or manifested pity for its sufferers. But Atticus had a warm and generous heart in his bereavement; it is said that he gave away great sums in charity, and one can scarcely doubt that some of these gifts relieved the wants of the poor Christians who begged for alms along the Appian Way, and, as we shall presently see, served the Church so notably in times of persecution, both before and after the days of Herodes Atticus. The estate of the latter covered all the ground on the right from the third to the fourth milestone of the famous road, and he had vowed during Annia Regilla’s lifetime that he would make it the most beautiful as well as hospitable of all the suburban villages. Now, he laid out what was afterwards known as the “Pagus Triopius” in lovely gardens, baths, and temples, where all his friends, rich and poor, were invited to enjoy their share of his wealth by an inscription over one of the gates, which ran, “This is the abode of hospitality.”

After his acquittal from the abominable accusation brought against him by his brother-in-law, he offered all his wife’s jewels to the Temple of Ceres and Proserpine, asking Heaven to smite him if he had been guilty of the imagined crime; then he built her a magnificent tomb in a garden laid out for that purpose—a garden which he called “The Field of Sepulchre” and in which only her direct descendants were to be laid forever.

In reading all the story of this true lover (translated—for Greek is still Greek to me—from the very full inscriptions found at the Pagus, and from the writings of Philostrates and Pausanias) I could not help reflecting how few direct ways true love has of manifesting itself—for one and the same was the thought of Abraham, insisting on buying and holding for his very own the field of Mamre, to bury Sara in—and the preoccupation of the highly cultured Greek to enshrine the remains of his beloved Annia, where, by all human prevision, they could never be disturbed. Also, the beloved Annia’s tomb has crumbled into dust. All that is left of Herodes Atticus’ garden is the ilex grove and the ruined nymphæum with the broken statue and the clear fountain, which, as a little girl, I knew as the grotto of Egeria.

But that which, all unknown to Atticus, was even then burrowing and spreading beneath his beautiful gardens and palaces, the underground city of Christianity, where the faith lay like rich seed in the dark, warm earth, that survives, and its ways have been worn smooth by the feet of thousands of pilgrims for nearly twenty centuries. The rent bodies and few poor ashes of the “Christian Beggars” of the Appian Way were never approached save with love and veneration, and, whereas the slab of exquisite Pentelic marble on which Annia’s epitaph—in thirty-nine Greek verses—was inscribed, has become part of a public collection, the name and date, and the rude attempt at a palm branch to indicate the martyr’s death, stand out as clear to-day on the walls of the Catacombs as they did when they were hastily scratched in the soft clay, at some midnight burial under Nero or Diocletian, the envious though mourning brethren praying “that the Church might have peace,” but, yet more fervently, that they also might be found worthy if their own hour must come first.

CHAPTER II REMINISCENCES OF MODERN ROME

Rome’s Seasons—Childhood Memories of a Roman Spring—My Birthday Festival—A Day in the Country—The Appian Way—Rome’s Great Wall—An Adventure with the Campagna Steers—Campagna Sheep-Dogs—Early Morning Street Scenes—The Giardino Colonna—Secluded Italian Gardens—Inroads of Commercialism—Discovery of a Dream-Garden of the Renaissance—Song of the Nightingale in the Lost Italian Garden.

It is time to take breath. So far, we have been living over in mind the joys and sorrows of certain dwellers near the Appian Way, but every true story, however fair and fine, seems to run like crystal beads strung on a dark thread. The shadow of possible tragedy is behind all things human, and even the happiest tales of old leave one with a little pang at heart for the black hour of death which came to all the actors in them sooner or later. One turns with relief to the things that people wrongly call inanimate—the things of Nature, whose life is so comfortingly different from our own, so rich in vitality that each declining season is lifted up and carried on in the arms of the next, as it were, to return in all its vigour and beauty when the moment arrives.