It was the chant of the Resurrection!
“Alleluia, Alleluia!” came the sequel in one burst from that great multitude, as the angels’ voices grew fainter and were lost in the depths overhead. And then, on hearts bursting now with relief and joy there fell the awe that mortals feel in the presence of the Heavenly Ones, for there, on the summit of the towering fortress, stood the radiant archangel—and he was sheathing his flaming sword.
The pestilence was over. Once more God had had mercy on his people. And, since the angels’ song was addressed to the Queen of Heaven, we know that it was she whose prayers had stayed the arm that had clung round her neck in Bethlehem.
St. Gregory passed to his reward on March 12, 604, having reigned nearly fourteen years. The mourning city chose Sabinianus of Volterra to succeed him, but only three years had elapsed when Sabinianus in his turn made place for a Boniface (III) who lived but one year after his election, and then came another Boniface, a Saint, a strong man of the Abruzzi, and in his reign the world found out that though imperial Rome was indeed dead, the Rome that Gregory and Benedict and their fellow-workers had planted on her grave during that century of apparent eclipse had taken root below and shot out branches above, and had become as a mighty tree affording guidance, shelter, and sustenance to the whole Christian world.
Each of the great Popes seems to have had a special mission to fulfil, one that coloured all his acts and sheds its individual lustre on his memory. No doubt or hesitation seems to accompany the acceptance and fulfilment of it. Boniface’s mission bade him place the seal of visible Christianity on the city and consecrate it to the Faith for all time. To it was Boniface, the fourth of that name, who decreed and carried out the triumph of which I spoke in a preceding chapter. But it is a big subject and it must have a chapter to itself.
CHAPTER IV MEMORIES OF THE PANTHEON
If you stand before San Pietro in Montorio and look down from the spot where St. Peter was crucified, you will see, rounding up in the low-lying heart of the city, a dome, white, huge, uncrowned, standing out from the darker buildings round it like an enormous mother-of-pearl shell, softly iridescent, yet, when storm is in the air, taking on a grey and deathlike hue. That is the Pantheon, and thus it has stood, reflecting every mood of the Roman sky, since the days of Hadrian, who became Emperor in the year 117. Hadrian built the magic dome, but it is not his name that stands out in the gigantic lettering on the pediment over the portico. Ninety years before his time, Marcus Agrippa, the intimate friend and (for his sins!) the son-in-law of Augustus, erected a magnificent temple close to the Baths which still bear his name in the Campus Martius, the field of which my brother has told the touching story in “Ave Roma Immortalis.” Agrippa must have forgotten to properly propitiate the gods; we moderns should say that he “had no luck,” for his gorgeous temple was soon struck by lightning and presented a forlorn appearance when Hadrian, that enthusiastic builder, decided to restore it.
This he did on his usual princely scale; when he had done with it, the Pantheon (properly “Pantheum,” “all-holy”) must indeed have dazzled the eyes of the beholders, for the dome was entirely covered with tiles of gilt bronze that under the rays of the sun made it seem a second sun that had come to rest on earth. The gilt tiles were stripped off in 663 by a greedy little Emperor, Constans II, who took them away to Syracuse, whence the Saracens successfully looted them a few years afterwards. So the thing that looks like mother-of-pearl is really only covered with sheets of lead—but even lead, when the heavens have looked on it long enough, may become a thing of life and beauty. When Hadrian had finished his building there was nothing left of Agrippa’s original one except the portico; but Hadrian, with rare moderation, left the original founder’s name on that. The Pantheon, which is called by archæologists “the most perfect pagan monument in Rome,” seems to have been, in its beginnings, unfortunate, for only sixty-four years after Hadrian’s death it again stood sadly in need of repair, if we may believe the magniloquent inscription left on its front by Septimus Severus and his son, Caracalla, when they had carried out their pious designs of further restoration.
But it remains Hadrian’s best monument, substantially what he made it, a vast and perfect round under a vast and perfect dome, a place where the winds of heaven may sweep down from the central opening—thirty feet across—overhead, and circle round the wide well of the interior and rise to the sky again without having encountered the shock of a single angle on their way. And for more than seventeen hundred and fifty years the rain has fallen and the sun has shone, and the stars have looked down on Hadrian’s pavement through the great opening, whence worshippers now, like the worshippers in his time, could raise their eyes and thoughts to the vault of heaven above.
But for two hundred years—as if to partly balance the three centuries of persecution which had preceded them—the Pantheum was closed and none were permitted to pray there, two hundred years during which the silence was never broken, and stars and sun and winds had their way in the stupendous empty fane. It was the Emperor Honorius of inglorious memory who closed and sealed its bronze doors—the same that guard it now (and perhaps this and a few other such acts, which showed him at heart a sincere believer, should be remembered to his attenuated credit), preferring to have it abandoned altogether rather than used for the service of idols. And so it stood, a beautiful reproach, from 399 to 609, when our Pope Boniface told the Emperor Phocas that it was a burning shame not to wash it of pagan stains and consecrate it a church of the Lord.