the yellow sand-stone of the Janiculum; dusty tufa from the hills; travertine, which is limestone under the action of water; and, above all, into that Roman cement, which outwears time and defies fire. Without this hydraulic' mixture, no buildings could have been projected with the incredibly great span of dome which we perceive, for instance, in the Baths of Caracalla, and which is imitated on so magnificent a scale in St. Peter's. Rome is built, one may say, of pozzolana, rather than of the granites, porphyries, and Eastern or African marbles which were brought from afar to adorn its constructions.* Every architect, Etruscan, Greek, Græco-Roman, Byzantine, Mediæval, Renaissance, has built of materials found on the spot, and the later do but make a noble or a base employment of what the earlier has furnished to them; so that Rome may be read in its architecture, as a classic composition beneath the monkish Latin of a palimpsest.

From the age of the Seven Kings comparatively little remains. The scarped cliff and wall of Romulus, the Tullianum, since baptised under the style of the Mamertine Prison, the Cloaca Maxima, and the Agger, begun by Tarquin the Old, finished by Servius-we are still amazed at the strength and solidity of these. For nine hundred years the city needed no defence except that which the Etruscan dynasty set up. Then came Aurelian, whose fortified ramparts survived to no small extent, until the cannon of the Italian army and the pick of the commercial architect laid parts of them low. The old town, built of crude brick and friable tufa, did not last beyond the early days of the Empire. Augustus, according to the wellknown saying, made of Rome a marble city. Yet repeated fires raged in its narrow streets, where the houses overhung the causeway and almost touched, as in a mediæval borough, with their projecting fronts. But the greatest clearance was executed, if we may believe Tacitus, by Nero, when he burnt deliberately some three out of the fourteen regions, to make room for his Golden House, and probably also to fulfil the scheme of rebuilding on which he had set his heart. From this period Regal Rome was a mere memory, some few vestiges of which were preserved as relics of an uncivilised but heroic past.†

The Ancyrean inscription, reproduced by Professor Middleton, shows on what a splendid scale of harmony, no less than of magnitude, Augustus carried out his design of beautifying the Forum, Capitol, and Palatine, while extending his great ancestor's work, the Basilica Julia, and adding thereto the

* Middleton, i, 9-77. Vol. 191.-No. 381.

D

↑ Ibid., 89.

Heroon, or temple of Cæsar. It was the best period in Roman art, refined or elevated under Hellenic guidance, its execution largely entrusted to Greeks. The city grew into a museum, rich with spoils beyond reckoning. Not even yet are they exhausted, whether above ground or in the subterranean drift and débris which have yielded up so many treasures of marble, bronze, gold, incised gems, and mural paintings-the latter doomed almost inevitably to perish on contact with the open air. Long after Augustus, when the capital had been plundered again and again, a thousand marble statues, we are told, were burnt into lime by the degenerate Romans. The Vandals who followed Genseric in 455, and the Jews of Trastevere, says Mr. Crawford, melted down all they could lay hands upon of the four thousand bronze statues left from Imperial times.† Constans II carried off in 663 a world of antiquities which never arrived at Byzantium. He was less fortunate than the first Christian Emperor, who had adorned his New Rome with the trophies of the Old. Yet the Vatican galleries have still a collection of statuary which is the largest in Europe, and most of it is classic. The Capitol boasts a second museum: a third is lodged in the Baths of Diocletian: a fourth in the Lateran. When Virgil wrote 'rerum facta est pulcherrima Roma,' the great city deserved his admiration; but so universal a presence of beautiful things within it must not lead us to imagine that they were products of the native genius.

Rome conquered art as she overthrew the nations and took their gods captive. She had no skill of her own in these finer effects; but she could set up a Pantheon which symbolised her all-devouring unity. The Augustan Age did not last beyond Nero. His Golden House brought within its enormous dimensions a new collection of paintings, sculptures, and curios; it became the prison of art,' for many besides the works of that Fabullus whom Pliny touches in his epigram. But a baser period was setting in. The Flavian Emperors built, as we may say, on Cyclopean standards. Their Colosseum was immense rather than beautiful: so too were the Palace which Domitian erected, the Capitoline Jupiter restored by him, and the Temple to his father Vespasian. Even Hadrian, that most interesting modern,' as Mr. Dennie calls him, was a lover of huge and Egyptian-like buildings. His mighty Mausoleum reigns in the sky of Rome; during nine hundred or a thousand years it has served as a barracks and a fortress. The rotunda of the Pantheon declares, by its brick-stamps, his authorship,

* Middleton, i, 384–387.

+ Crawford, i, 96.

and was perhaps the crowning work of Apollodorus, the architect of that Forum which Trajan began and which Hadrian completed; therein was to be found the most splendid group of buildings in the Imperial city. But the Temple of Venus and Rome, due likewise to this art-loving Emperor, has all but disappeared, leaving where it stood an empty platform. The temple of Faustina recalls Antoninus Pius: the Emperor Marcus survives in his equestrian statue, and his column rises above the Piazza Colonna. Severus, it is thought, raised the Septizonium, or 'Seven Stories,' to dazzle the Numidian pilgrims, his fellow-countrymen, as they first caught sight of the city. But all, from this time forward, becomes mere weight and rudeness of impression. To decorate his triumphal arch, Constantine annexed the bas-reliefs from Trajan's Forum. Henceforth, Rome was to be laid waste by its rulers or its people. The Barbarians have left a name in history which they did not deserve; and to this day we talk of Goths and Vandals, where we should see the Romans pulling down what their ancestors had built up.

On this head Gregorovius is indignant and persuasive; but we need not quote him, for Lanciani has made ample admission to the same effect. There is no longer any doubt,' says the latter, that the Romans have done more harm to their own city than all the invading hosts put together. The action of centuries. and of natural phenomena, such as hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and inundations, could not have done what men have accomplished knowingly and deliberately.'t. The Barbarians had no instruments with which to achieve this enormous destruction. Alaric, indeed, laid waste the gardens and the house of Sallust. Genseric stripped its bronze roof from the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus. Vitiges tore down the aqueducts. But it was the defenders of Sant' Angelo that hurled upon the army led by Vitiges the marble statues which decorated Hadrian's gigantic sepulchre. Romans quarried the Circus Maximuswhich under Trajan was perhaps the most conspicuous of the city monuments, ' covered inside and out,' says Middleton,' with white marble, relieved with gold and painting, brilliant mosaics, columns of coloured Oriental marbles, and statues of white marble and gilt bronze-quarried it until it was destroyed even to the foundations and not a vestige of it left. Romans bought or sold the right of pulling down the Colosseum; and in 1452 the contractor, Giovanni Foglia, took away thence two thousand five hundred and twenty-two cartloads of travertine ‡

* Dennie, 279.

† Dennie, 275.

Ibid., 226-276.

In the seventeenth century Urban VIII, following the example of Urban V, made it into the picturesque ruin which we all know. The Septizonium, or at least its three lower stories, existed down to the reign of Sixtus V, who destroyed it in order to use its columns and marble entablatures in the Basilica of St. Peter's. Had not Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon to Christian worship, beyond a doubt it would have shared in the destruction which overtook so many other temples. But the gold-plated tiles of its dome were carried off by Constans II; and Urban VIII moulded its bronze girders into a hundred and ten cannon for Sant' Angelo, or gave them to Bernini, who twisted them into the huge spiral columns that support the baldacchino above St. Peter's shrine.* It is a story without an end, since to-day the authorities, while busy in putting a modern ring about the Seven Hills, have continued the demolitions of their predecessors, and are intent on disfiguring the Capitol with a statue of Victor Emmanuel that shall vie with the largest ever set up there. Restoration has nearly always spelt ruin for ancient buildings; but in Rome it has been accompanied with a wanton disregard of history, astonishing enough in a people whose very greatness consists in this, that they are made and moulded of things past,' though now fallen out with fortune.'

A curious enquiry opens upon us, whether changes deep enough to merit the title of revolutions can be wrought without demolishing the outward symbols as well as the spiritual reality of that which they sweep away. The fall of Paganism robbed temples, theatres, circuses, and even baths, of the function which they had fulfilled hitherto. In what way could they be adapted to Christian uses? It was their fate to be left desolate, then ruined or made into quarries by a new race. Thus Hadrian's Tomb became the rallying-point or the refuge of Popes, Senators, and Emperors. In the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus a fierce brigand family, the Frangipani, and after them the Annibaldi, held their court. Those triumphant Jews, the Pierleoni, took possession of the Theatre of Marcellus, the graceful outline of which, yet standing in part, emerges on the tourist from the Palazzo Savelli. The Orsini stronghold was in Pompey's Theatre. Within the tomb of Cecilia Metella the Gaetani made their den. All this must have seemed natural enough when, as in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a forest of towers met the eye in Rome, while the crooked streets were full of perilous ambushes, and every day was a day of battle. Under stress of an

* Dennie, 263.

existence so begirt with combat, the Baths or the Mausoleums might well appear to be covering positions, and the noble who seized on them would reck little of their former purposes, which legend was overclouding in the strangest fashion.*

Here it is that Mr. Crawford throws out an interesting suggestion, due on the one hand to his intimate knowledge of Rome, where he spent his childhood in the Villa Montalto, and on the other to subsequent travels and studies among the byways of the old Italian life. The key to Roman history, he maintains, is the patria potestas. Under the Republic, the Empire, the Papacy, what we are always reading is the contest of certain great families for power; and power, though it passes into Cæsar's hands or is wielded by the Gregorys and the Innocents, has a hard struggle to keep itself intact against the Patricians. In Italy the power of the gens has prevailed from earliest ages, and, though beaten upon by modern law and custom, still it endures. There are sixty 'conscript families,' which own princely rank, in the Rome of to-day.† But the 'Patres Conscripti' go back much further than we can trace them; and the Laws of the Twelve Tables, in recognising the power of life and death over his offspring which every paterfamilias might exercise, were but setting their seal on institutions long established among the mixed people to whom the Capitol was a shrine and the Forum a centre of unity, though seldom of peace.

From the existence, side by side, of great ambitious houses, faction has always sprung. The chronicles of Rome abound in violence; and law, though Rome's highest achievement, was never able to win the respect or curb the fury of the Romans. As a people they have died and risen again more than once. The two millions (among whom were perhaps five slaves to every free citizen), who dwelt within its borders so late as the Antonines, had dwindled, and at last disappeared, when Totila captured the city. In Rienzi's days, if we reckon the whole population at twenty thousand, we shall not fall below probable conjecture. An immense variety of race and custom must have been flowing into the capital of the world, not only during its meridian period, but for centuries afterwards, and as long as the new Italian nation was being formed. Down even to Norman times-to the year 1085 and later-the surges of war and emigration beat round about it on every side and confused or multiplied its genealogies. But still the genius loci prevailed. Gothic or Lombard stems-Gregorovius recites a formidable list-flourished in the domains, or took to themselves the

* Gregorovius, IV, Part ii, 463.

t Crawford, i, 78.