Prix de Rome

“ It was not until after the burning of the city by the Gauls that the city was laid out on a better plan; after the Punic wars wealth flowed in abundantly, and private persons began to erect magnificent mansions. From the period of the conquest of Asia until the reign of Augustus, the city daily augmented its splendour, but so much was added by that emperor, that he boasted that "he found Rome a city of brick, and left it a city of marble." ”

“ This is the veritable beating, pulsing heart of Rome, and Rome is the world. Here is reality. Here are solidity, strength, planning made real, dreams hewn in enduring stone. Here are wealth, accomplishment, power, might. Not twenty paces across there is the Millenarium Aureum, the resplendent bronze column set up to mark the center of the Roman world, the point from which miles are counted along the highways and their joining sea lanes stretching to the ends of the known earth to bind Rome into one colossal, unconquerable, enduring Empire!... ”

“ Rome owed its greatest monuments of art to the emperors. There was a cold and remorseless despotism; but the unnoticed millions toiled in peace. Literature did not thrive, since that can only live with freedom, but art received great encouragement, and genius, in the useful professions, did not go unrewarded. The empire did not fall till luxury and prosperity enervated the people and rendered them unable to cope with the barbarian hosts. Rome was never so rich as when she fell into the hands of Goths and Vandals. ”

“ V. ROME—THE THERMAE OF TITUS There were even birds, to fill the air with music. All the known world, and the far-away mysterious lands of which Alexander's followers had started legends multiplying centuries ago, had contributed to Rome's adornment; plunder and trade goods drifted through in spite of distances. The city had become the vortex of the energy, virility and vice of east and west—a glory of marble and gilded cornices, of domes and spires, of costumes, habits, faces, languages—of gorgeousness and squalor—license, privilege and rigid formalism—extravagance—and of innumerable gods. ”

“ Rome was strong and vigorous and happy while her people lived simply, and her noblest sons thought it no shame to share in humble manual labour. But when wealth and luxury entered in, when her populace, despising honest toil, lived on the doles of the Emperor, and her nobles wasted tens of thousands of pounds upon a single banquet, Rome became weak, rotten, wretched. ”

“ Besides the merchants and capitalists who were engaged in business on their own account in the provinces, there were thousands of agents for the great Roman corporations scattered through the Empire. Rome was the money centre of the world, and the great stock companies organized to lend money, construct public works, collect taxes, and engage in the shipping trade had their central offices in the capital whence they sent out their representatives to all parts of the world. ”

“ He who studies the ancient sources, however, with but a little of the critical spirit, is easily convinced that we have made for ourselves out of the much-famed corruption and Roman luxury a notion highly romantic and exaggerated. We need not delude ourselves: Rome, even in the times of its greatest splendour, was poor in comparison with the modern world; even in the second century after Christ, when it stood as metropolis at the head of an immense empire, Rome was smaller, less wealthy, less imposing, than a great metropolis of Europe or of America. ”

“ It is very hard for us to realise the events of the fourth century, and any picture of those times, and of the men and women who took part in the scenes then enacted, must, at the best, be shadowy. To the eye of the casual observer, Rome, seated on her seven hills, under the sway of the Emperor Diocletian, was at the zenith of fame and prosperity.
The throngs in the Forum—the gay crowds in the gardens of Circus Maximus, the race-course, the arena—all told of wealth and prosperity and pleasure. ”

“ Tiberius from his retreat in Rodi kept every one in Rome afraid, beginning with Augustus. Too rich, too eager now for pleasures and comforts, Rome was almost disgusted with the virtues and the defects that had in fact created it, and which survived in Tiberius—aristocratic pride, the spirit of rigour in authority, military valour, simplicity. Peace had come, extending everywhere, with wealth, the desire for enjoyment, happiness, pleasure, freedom, loosening everywhere the firmest bonds of social discipline, persuading Rome to lay down the heavy armour it had worn for so many centuries. ”

“ Political expenditures, in the latter days of the Roman republic, had become an even greater evil than is the case in the United States to-day. It is interesting, though alarming, to note that the greater political freedom became at Rome, the greater became the amount of political expenditures and the greater the power of money in elections. ”

“ It was, in the main, the fact that while Rome had grown, and grown into a new world, the old system of government remained, and did not fit this new world. Rome was beginning to be a great trading empire. Yet wealth and power was jealously held by a small class in Rome in their own hands. The men of this class grew rich. They went out to the provinces, to Sicily, Greece, and Spain, as governors and made great fortunes. They came home with their riches and bought up the land that had once belonged to peasants and 82 farmers, and worked this land with slaves. ”

“ In this manner the luxurious nobles and people of Rome passed their tranquil, inglorious lives.
The wealth of the capital was such as might well attract the barbarous invader. The palaces of the Senators were filled with gold and silver ornaments, and the churches had been enriched by the contributions of pious worshipers. Many of the nobles possessed estates which produced several hundred thousand dollars a year, and the wealth of the world was gathered within the walls of its capital. ”

“ That all Italy, on the morrow of the occupation of Rome, should have been delirious with enthusiasm at the thought of at last possessing the ancient and glorious city, the eternal capital to which the empire of the world had been promised, was but natural. It was, so to say, a legitimate explosion of the delight and the hopes of a young nation anxious to show its power. The question was to make Rome a modern capital worthy of a great kingdom, and before aught else there were sanitary requirements to be dealt with: the city needed to be cleansed of all the filth which disgraced it. ”

“ But today war prices have sent that precious pair home, and let us hope to honest work. It is a comfort to see Rome without their bloodless faces! That much the war has done for democracy at any rate!
And the passing of this "relic of old dacincy," the shabby genteel of the earth from Rome—even if the passing is a temporary social phenomenon, has a curious symbolic timeliness, coming when the working class is rising. It leaves Rome almost as middle class as Kansas City and Los Angeles! ”

“ Without this and a box of matches, you can never hope to be a good Roman. You must have seen that where the houses have any front-doors, three quarters of them are open all night long; for, as on every floor of a house, there live different families, they find it saves trouble—trouble is money in Rome—to leave the door unclosed. ”

“ It is not a thing of small moment [295] that all public utilities are conducted with an efficiency which I might call American, and that the Italian bureaucracy, proverbially slow, has become eager and agile.
I have given particular attention to the Capital. Rome is a universal city, dear to the heart of Italians and of the whole world. It was great in the time of the Roman Empire and has conserved a universal light. It was the historical seat and the centre of diffusion of Christianity. Rome is first of all a city with the aura of destiny and history. It is the Capital of the New Italy. ”

“ Le lieu est fait pour une aquarelle, et quand un beau soleil éclaire les débris antiques, les vieux murs sombres de la rue étroite où la poisson se vend sur des tables de marbre blanc, et à travers laquelle des nattes sont tendues, on a, à côté du monument romain, le spectacle d'un marché du moyen âge, et un peu le souvenir d'un bazar d'Orient."—Ampère, Emp. i. 179.
"Who that has ever been to Rome does not remember Roman streets of an evening, when the day's work is done? They are all alive in a serene and homelike fashion. ”

“ Rome, in fact, enveloped in the pleasures and gorged with the spoils of the universe, is kept alive by victory and government; her luxury and her pleasures are the price of her conquests: she can neither abdicate nor dispossess herself. ”

“ This idle and corrupt population seemed to have less than on other occasions to employ their hands, and so gave their time and their conversation to one another, laying no restraint upon the quantity of either. It is an indisputable fact that Rome exists to this day, for any one who will come into Italy may see it for himself, and he cannot reject the testimony of his eyes and ears. ”

“ A more beneficent employment of capital was illustrated by the profession of banking which, like most of the arts which exhibit the highest refinement of the practical intellect, had been given to the Romans by the Greeks. [154] It had penetrated from Magna Graecia to Latium and from Latium to Rome, and had been fully established in the city by the time of the Second Punic War. ”

“ It is the great merit of Augustus that he made Rome not only a city of marble, but one in which the person and property of all citizens were fairly secure. By a new and rational bankruptcy law, and by a well-organised system of police, he made life endurable even for the poorest. ”

“ The wealth of Rome could purchase, and her power could compel, the arts of conquered nations; and her political relations enabled her to accumulate in the metropolis those treasures which purer hands had created, and which her love of ostentation rendered it desirable she should possess. But we believe there is not extant one single passage of a Roman author, that shows a knowledge of what true art is, or what are its legitimate uses. ”

“ Ah! I loved Rome too well, and I still love it too well to regret being now within its walls. But, good heavens! what insanity its acquisition brought us, what piles of money it has cost us, and how heavily and triumphantly it weighs us down! Look! look!”
* 40,000,000 pounds.
He waved his hand as he spoke towards the livid roofs of the Palazzo delle Finanze, that vast and desolate steppe, as though he could see the harvest of glory all stripped off and bankruptcy appear with its fearful, threatening bareness. ”

“ So that, though with far less of real substantial riches than we have, their extravagance and luxury are equal, and their taste far before us. Then every thing wears a newer, fresher look than in Rome. The buildings of the republic, which many are so desirous to preserve, and whole streets even of ante-Augustan architecture, tend to spread around here and there in Rome a gloom--to me full of beauty and poetry--but still gloom. ”

“ The pursuit of money became a passion, and the rich assumed all the importance and consideration which had once been bestowed upon those who had rendered great public services.
As the wealth of the world flowed naturally to the capital, Rome became a city of princes, whose fortunes were almost incredible. It took eighty thousand dollars a year to support the ordinary senatorial dignity. Some senators owned whole provinces. Trimalchio, a rich freedman whom Petronius ridiculed, could afford to lose thirty millions of sesterces in a single voyage without sensibly diminishing his fortune. ”

“ His triumph celebrating his many victories far eclipsed in magnificence anything that Rome had before witnessed. In the procession were led captive princes from all parts of the world. Beneath his standards marched soldiers gathered out of almost every country beneath the heavens. Seventy-five million dollars of treasure were displayed. Splendid games and tables attested the liberality of the conqueror. Sixty thousand couches were set for the multitudes. The shows of the theatre and the combats of the arena followed one another in an endless round. ”

“ The germ of the old Roman race which civilized the world is still alive, and is quickly rising to a new life—lifting itself, after twenty centuries of burial, from the tomb of ignorance and oppression. Here is the centre of art and of the world's past recollections; here is spoken in its purity the most beautiful of languages; here are a fine climate and a fine country; and here are being strengthened the power and the splendour of united Italy.
THE WALLS OF ROME. FIRST WALL—ROMA QUADRATA.
The city of Romulus, upon the Palatine Hill, was called from its shape Roma Quadrata. ”

“ During the first and second century the population of Rome must have been in the neighborhood of one million, but in the third century it began to decline as a result of pestilence and the general bankruptcy of the empire. Inevitably in such a city there were the sharpest contrasts between riches and poverty, and the luxurious palaces of the wealthy were matched by the squalid tenements of the proletariat. In outward appearance Rome underwent a transformation which made her worthy to be capital of so vast an empire. ”

“ During those victorious years of social and war-like struggle, Rome grew and peopled the seven hills, and the Palatine became but a venerable cradle with legendary temples, and was even gradually invaded by private residences. But at last Caesar, the incarnation of the power of his race, after Gaul and after Pharsalia triumphed in the name of the whole Roman people, having completed the colossal task by which the five following centuries of imperialism were to profit, with a pompous splendour and a rush of every appetite. And then Augustus could ascend to power ”