houses which had once belonged to the Gens Cornelia, to the Anicii, to the Imperial and Consular families. And the feudal system aggravated divisions which ran through society from top to bottom; it brought in a semblance of caste and the reality of servitude. In these circumstances law struggled to overrule anarchy. But the law-giver was not an abiding power. He was elective and transitory, set up by force or chosen by intrigue; before he could tame the pride of these Conscript Fathers some one else had taken his place. Thus it came about that the Roman ideal hid in it seeds of undying discord. Let us speak philosophically and say that it was the meeting-place of elements which in this blind world,' as Dante pictures it, are hard to reconcile. We may term them the Imperial, the Popular, and the Sacerdotal. Each aims at the sovereignty of mankind by its own methods; each has a force as well as an inspiration proper to itself; each is impatient of a rival, and each has had its day of triumph, followed by disaster. He was Never should we forget that Rome is the keystone in the arch of history. Alexander left chaos behind him; Cæsar created Europe, observes Mr. Crawford. There is much to be said in favour of his contention. But assuredly the mightiest Julius'' the foremost man of all this world'-did not stand alone. In him all the lines of antiquity converged; he overcame by the strength of many social forces. Consul, Imperator, Pontifex Maximus-the head of religion, the captain of an ever-victorious army, the chief of the State. No designation was perhaps more ancient, none has survived with more fidelity to its historic duties, than that of Pontifex Maximus. If it was given, as learned men suppose, to the priest that offered sacrifice on the Sublician Bridge, we may, without stretching the allegory, perceive in his successor to-day at the Vatican, one who is the connecting link between Pagan and Christian Europe. But Cæsar embodied the whole Roman idea with a completeness and a world-wide significance unattainable to after ages. The unity which this sovereign city possessed in him and through him was transmitted, we may grant, along a line of Emperors; but one or other of its elements gradually lost its power. In the second century there was no strength left in the Populus Romanus, now an empty name. In the fourth, under Gratian or Theodosius, the priestly dignity had passed away to strangers and even to subjects. In the fifth an Emperor ceased to exist at Rome. The Decline * Gregorovius, vi, Part i, 263. and Fall,' which Gibbon has painted in funereal colours, meant no less than the breaking up of a complex and mighty system into its constituent parts, which have ever since been at war with one another, and are still in conflict. Now Rome, in the years of Trajan and his immediate successors, had drawn into herself the literatures, religions, arts, and peoples of antiquity, being original in nothing so much as in the secret of assimilation. Her narrow and prosaic spirit was incapable of bestowing on mankind a pure ideal; she protested even while she admitted to her citizenship the Greek poets, the Asiatic and Egyptian sacred rites, the foreigners who thronged inside her walls and who ascended to her seats of honour. She detested every society which had not asked her permission to exist. As she proscribed the worship of Bacchus, burnt the unauthorised Sibylline books, banished Isis from her temples, and yet, in the end, took up with these idolatries which she had cast out, so, when a sublimer faith began to make its presence known-in the Ghetto, as we may imagine, where the Jewish synagogue was erected, hard by the Porta Portese-her first word was 'Non licet esse vos.' But the deeper instinct of conquest by adaptation overcame her pride; and from Tacitus to Constantine a change was proceeding in religion, strictly analogous to that by which the Roman legions underwent a transformation into Barbarian armies. These were but two aspects of the same astonishing progress, although to Pagan or unbeliever each must have seemed decay. It had begun with Rome's first steps on the path of victory; it has ended by giving us Western civilisation. The panorama which we gaze upon from the Janiculum, or better still, from the tower of the Capitol, displays in high relief those contending powers, as each has built for itself on the volcanic soil. At one end is the Lateran, bestowed by Constantine on the new Pontifex Maximus, not yet so termed, who now sits in the Vatican over against it. The Palatine, a heap of ruins, tells us what befell the Emperor and his legions. At the Quirinal which lies between, with its look of a white-washed barracks, the King of Italy is lodged, by the grace of God and the will of the people.' Round about lies the ugly modern boulevard, in which that people dwells, crowded, vulgar, and uninteresting. The Empire has gone; the Papacy declares itself a captive; the popular idea has triumphed. Guelf and Ghibelline are dead names in history; the conscript families' sulk in their stately houses, or lose their rank amid a democratic throng on Monte Citorio and in the Royal Palace. Under a crowned Republic, the dream of Rienzi and Arnold of Brescia seems at length to have been realised. The taking of Rome in 1870 was, from an historical point of view, the most picturesque event in the nineteenth century. How many stages led up to it Gregorovius has made manifest, with all a German's adamantine industry, but in a vivid and sometimes brilliant style, dignified, copious, and firm. He is a Ghibelline who has developed into an Italian patriot, while pleading for the Teutons and Lombards as something better than Barbarians, and entitled to their share in the mediæval glories of the Peninsula. Nor is he insensible to the merits of the greater Popes. He can perceive the worth of Saint Leo and Saint Gregory. He abounds in eloquent description of the deeds by which Roman Bishops in the eighth century preluded the setting up of the Holy Roman Empire. Leo IX he recognises a noble champion of Christendom against the Saracens. If he is severe on Hildebrand, whom he charges with tyranny and ambition, yet in him too he perceives a splendour of achievement which stamps him as the Julius Cæsar of the Papacy. Had no Pontifex Maximus survived when the Empire fell, it is impossible in his judgment that a second Rome should have risen from the ashes of the first, or that mediæval Christendom should have been established. In But the ancient unity was lost. Henceforth the struggle between Pope and Emperor was, if not absolutely unbroken, yet so nearly continuous as to spread a gloom over several centuries. And the Populus Romanus had its pretensions too; it was a shadow which rose up, darkening the light of coronations in St. Peter's, driving the Popes out of the Lateran, strangling them in Sant' Angelo, never to be appeased by bribes, but only to be kept down by the strong hand. Not one of these powers would abdicate; none would acquiesce in the division of rights and duties familiar to modern minds. Gregorovius undertakes repeatedly the task of distinguishing between what were the Emperor's privileges and what were those of the Pope or the People. To say that he has succeeded, when controversy rages still around these questions, would be very bold. The saying ran from early days: Ubi Imperator ibi Roma'; yet the Emperor was now always absent from the city; and, until the flight of Eugenius III. in 1147, the Pope was commonly present. As for the People, they appeared to elect the Emperor by their acclamations; they appointed him their Patrician or Chief Magistrate, and received the law at his hands. Nevertheless, they fell upon his Frankish or Suabian soldiery a hundred times; as many times were they themselves cut down, dispersed, and flung behind the walls of their city. Where, then, in all this confusion was the Law? It is, perhaps, safest to answer that there were many laws. To grasp the history of Rome during its Middle Age, we must dismiss from our minds every conception, whether of law or liberty, which belongs to our own day. From the reign of Theodoric down to Pius VII-for nearly thirteen hundred years-Rome and the adjacent territories enjoyed their special immunities, or behaved as self-governing towns, which, when they had paid their dues, and received a legation from the Pope, were independent. Once we let slip this clue we shall not find our way, either in Gibbon or Gregorovius. The Holy Roman Empire was a name, an incident, or an ideal. The municipalities were real, nor would they allow Pope or Kaiser to lessen their privileges. Rome has always boasted herself a free city, and in this self-government did her freedom consist. From this point of view it signifies little whether we quote diplomas such as that of Lothaire in 824, to which Pope Eugenius II swore allegiance, or collect Papal coins which are stamped with the Imperial effigy, or recite the humble protestations of the Pontiffs who exalt in the Emperor a dignity they never claimed for themselves except in the ambiguous language of Gregory IX or Boniface VIII. Mere legal phrases will not define the nature or extent of the Temporal Power, which, as Gibbon truly remarks, was more of an influence than of a power as we now understand the term. And, adds Signor Villari, absolute government was unknown during the Middle Ages. We must come down to Martin V, perhaps to Julius II -in other words, to the eve of the Reformation-if we would see the Popes exercising an unlimited sway over their States; and even then local privileges were not abolished. The last popular uprising took place under Eugenius IV in 1434; fifty years later, the Orsini beat down the Colonna in a final struggle in the streets of Rome. But the nobles had lost their sovereign power in the days of Rienzi. It is significant, also, that Frederick III, the last German Emperor who was crowned in St. Peter's, belongs to this period. Since that day, the Holy Roman Empire disappears from the Eternal City. Its task was accomplished. Yet the Emperor, provided he could march across the Alps and make his way into St. Peter's with an army, did represent the supreme dominion of law. He wielded the sword of Charlemagne, wore the golden crown, administered justice, and ratified with his consent the Papal election. He was Cæsar, as the other was Pontifex Maximus. Together they fulfilled that one idea with which Dante has made his people's heart throb, not only in the prose of the 'De Monarchia,' but in the gloom and glory of his sublime pilgrimage. It was a two-headed eagle, spirit and flesh-the Roman Church and the Roman Empire forming one perfect Christendom. On the whole, much cannot be added, in spite of recent and minute investigations, to what Gibbon has told us concerning the Temporal Power. If, as he declares, the Emperor had precariously reigned by right of conquest,' it must be allowed that the authority of the Pope was founded on the soft though more solid basis of opinion and habit.' The fabulous Donation of Constantine, believed, resisted, and finally exploded by the advance of criticism-which has shown it to be a forgery invented somewhere between the years 752 and 777-did but materialise an event of world-wide significance, the rise of Christian Rome upon the ruins of Pagan or Imperial greatness." The name of Dominus, or Lord, was inscribed on the coin of the Bishops: their title was acknowledged by acclamations and oaths of allegiance,' continues the historian, and, with the free or reluctant consent of the German Cæsars, they had long exercised a supreme or subordinate jurisdiction over the city and patrimony of St. Peter. The reign of the Popes, which gratified the prejudices, was not incompatible with the liberties, of Rome; and a more critical inquiry would have revealed a still nobler source of their power-the gratitude of a nation whom they had rescued from the heresy and oppression of the Greek tyrant.' † Thus the free city had two suzerains, one absentee, the other a defenceless ecclesiastic. The Pope had a perpetual neither an army nor a dynasty to uphold him; he must lean upon his allies among the conscript families, or endeavour, by the unedifying ways of nepotism, to raise up ministers in whom he could put his trust. Thereby he drove to sedition the Ghibelline or the Republican, enemies either to some noble house, or to the Barons and their whole system. As the Popes, from Gregory VII onwards, exercised more and more the high feudal sovereignty which was conceded to them by most or by all of the European kingdoms, their position at home offered a melancholy contrast to the reverence of these distant subjects. It is remarkable how seldom, if indeed ever, the Roman people have cared to demean themselves as the first citizens in the * See Döllinger's 'Papst-Fabeln,' sub voce. |