Roman city

“ Rome created the word that denotes this marvellous and monstrous phenomenon, of history, the enormous city, the deceitful source of life and death--urbs--the city. Whence it is not strange that the countless urbes which the grand economic progress of the nineteenth century has caused to rise in every part of Europe and America look to Rome as their eldest sister and their dean. ”

“ THE remains of the lofty arcades upon which the aqueducts of ancient Rome were carried to the city have been justly classed among the finest and most picturesque ruins of the Roman Empire. Stretching across the plain eastward of the city, and towering high above the landscape, they are the first objects to fix the gaze and command the admiration of the stranger approaching the home of the Cæsars, and to fill his mind with visions of the strength and grandeur of the nation which mastered the world two thousand years ago. ”

“ Establishing the city of Rome as a stable, defensible center of merchandising and commerce, transport, finance, population, wealth and power with a hinterland of associates and dependencies. As it turns out, the city of Rome has outlived both the Roman Empire and Roman Civilization. ”

“ But Rome cannot be taken as a criterion of the Roman States. It is a cosmopolite city, resorted to by strangers from all parts of the world, animated and enriched by their presence. Take away the artists' studios, the shops of the dealers in mosaic and cameos, statuettes and sarcophagi,—and those who purchase them,—and grass would be growing in the streets of Rome, as it did six months ago in the half-depopulated cities of the Legations. ”

“ In an architectural point of view no modern city approaches Rome. It contained more statues than all the Museums of Europe. It had every thing which we have except machinery. It surpassed every modern capitol in population. It was richer than any modern city, since the people were not obliged to toil for their daily bread. ”

“ With the progress of Roman greatness, the city and its inhabitants gradually increased, filled up the vacant space, pierced through the useless walls, covered the field of Mars, and, on every side, followed the public highways in long and beautiful suburbs. ”

“ All these gifts were for the city of Rome, and for the people of the city, not for the Empire, nor for Italy. This is characteristic of ancient generosity or philanthropy, that its recipients are commonly the people of a single town, usually the donor's native town. It is one of many indications of the fact that the Roman thought of his city as the state, and even under the Empire he rarely extended the scope of his benefactions beyond the walls of a particular town. The small cities and villages throughout the West reproduced the capital in miniature. Each was a little world in itself. ”

“ Others attributed to them magic virtues; some have given themselves up to the admiration they [204] felt in looking at the immensity of Roman ruins, the richness of early materials, the perfection of the handiwork. These latter, it might be affirmed, are the most numerous. Even during the most sombre period of the Middle Ages, all Europe felt the fascination that Rome, the oldest city par excellence, exercised for twenty centuries. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Worthy of saving from the wreck of life—
I chop this weed. And for the soul of Rome,
The lazar soul, the slave, the fuller, cobbler,
The fool, the God-forsaken and the child ...
What if Rome fall? The City of God remains
Eternal in the Heavens. Yes, but Earth,
Where is thy city, if it be not Rome?
Destroy your Romans, Hadrians, what is left?—
Itinerant exorcists and prophets, idlers,
And sacred beggars, leper lips that curse{240}
Rome and her beauty? These the citizens
Of the City of God! What will that city be?
Themselves externalized, as Rome has flowered
From Roman minds ”

“ Their city was not so secured by nature or art as to make their dispositions so fierce, but the natural disposition of the inhabitants, which took delight in plunder, had induced them to make excursions into the neighbouring lands belonging to the allies of the Romans, and to intercept such Roman soldiers, suttlers, and merchants as they found ranging about. ”

“ All the Hellenistic states had thus been completely subjected to the protectorate of Rome, and the whole empire of Alexander the Great had fallen to the Roman commonwealth just as if the city had inherited it from his heirs. From all sides kings and ambassadors flocked to Rome to congratulate her; and they showed that fawning is never more abject than when kings are in the antechamber. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Modern Rome stands thirty feet above the level of Ancient Rome, and is a strange mixture of narrow streets, open squares, churches, fountains, ruins, new palaces, and dirt. Built during the seventeenth century, the city is situated in a valley which formed part of the ancient city, and lies to the north of it, being divided from it by the Capitoline Hill, and offering to the visitor attractions which no other city can boast. ”

“ Not till then did Rome become, for the number and size of her temples, the magnificence of her baths, her basilicas, and her private palaces, for the beauty of her public gardens, for her size and population, the first and most marvellous city of the Empire: the portent which evokes the admiration of the whole world. ”

“ 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!... ”

“ So silent, so lonely, so fair is this waving expanse with its guardian mountains, it might be some wild solitude, an American prairie or Asiatic steppe, but that in the midst thereof, on some billows of rolling land, we discern a city, sombre, quaint, and old,—a city of dreams and mysteries,—a city of the living and the dead. And this is Rome,—weird, wonderful, ancient, mighty Rome,—mighty once by physical force and grandeur, mightier now in physical decadence and weakness by the spell of a potent moral enchantment. ”

“ One loses sight of all dabbling and pretension when seated at the feet of dead Rome,—Rome so grand and beautiful upon her bier. Art is dead here; the few sparkles that sometimes break through the embers cannot make a flame; but the relics of the past are great enough, over-great; we should do nothing but sit, and weep, and worship.
In Rome, one has all the free feeling of the country; the city is so interwoven with vineyards and gardens, such delightful walks in the villas, such ceaseless music of the fountains, and from every high point the Campagna and Tiber seem so near. ”

“ But perhaps the most poetical thing Pompeii has yielded to modern research, was that grand figure of a Roman soldier, clad in complete armor; who, true to his duty, true to his proud name of a soldier of Rome, and full of the stern courage which had given to that name its glory, stood to his post by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till the hell that raged around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could not conquer.
We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so well deserves. ”

“ In painted Rome, in the Rome of poetry, there laziness may luxuriate; but in the real Rome, where obelisks, Colosseum, Capitol, triumphal arches, incessantly behold and reproach thee,—where the history of ancient deeds, all day long, like an invisible storm-wind, sweeps and sounds through the city, and impels and lifts thee,—O, who can stretch himself out in inglorious ease and contemplation before the magnificent stirring of the world? ”

“ Rome, too, shakes off the yoke of Goth and Vandal, and resumes her proud title of ‘mistress of the world.’ Again the lofty Capitol is reared on the Tarpeian rock, the long and splendid triumphal procession enters the gates of the temple of Jupiter, and Rome is once more the ‘eternal city.’ Then we turn toward the classic shores of Greece, and Athens, the ‘mother of the arts,’ opens her splendors before us. ”

“ Rome is yet the capital of the world. It is a city of palaces and temples, more glorious than those which any other city contains, and of ruins more glorious than they. Seen from any of the eminences that surround it, it exhibits domes beyond domes, and palaces, and colonnades interminably, even to the horizon; interspersed with patches of desert, and mighty ruins which stand girt by their own desolation, in the midst of the fanes of living religions and the habitations of living men, in sublime loneliness. ”

“ In the morning world below lay far and wide the great, still Rome,—no living city, a solitary, enormous, enchanted garden of the old, hidden, heroic spirits, laid out on twelve hills. The unpeopled pleasure-garden of spirits announced itself by its green meadows and cypresses between palaces, and by its broad, open stairways and columns and bridges, by its ruins and high fountains and garden of Adonis, and its green mountains and temples of the gods ”

“ A day's journey by railway takes us to Rome, the "Eternal City," which is built on both sides of the Tiber, three or four leagues from its influx to the Mediterranean. We know that this city must at one time have been nearly as populous as London is to-day, but the present number cannot much exceed four hundred thousand. The ruins of Rome—for it is a city of ruins, notwithstanding its many fine modern structures—can give but a faint idea of what the great capital was in the days of its glory. ”

“ You found there a blossoming of that ancient sap, peculiar to the soil of Rome, which in all ages has thrown up preposterous edifices, of exaggerated hugeness and dazzling and ruinous luxury. It would seem as if the absolute masters successively ruling the city brought that passion for cyclopean building with them, derived it from the soil in which they grew, for they transmitted it one to the other, without a pause, from civilisation to civilisation, however diverse and contrary their minds. ”

“ Amid the solemn mournfulness that reigns over declining Rome, this delightful elevation rises light, airy, and inviting, at once a refreshment to the body and a solace to the spirit. From its smooth summit the city is seen in its utmost majesty, and the surrounding country in its brightest aspect. The crimes and miseries of Rome seem deterred from approaching its favoured soil; it impresses the mind as a place set apart by common consent for the presence of the innocent and the joyful—as a scene that rest and recreation keep sacred from the intrusion of tumult and toil. ”

“ I had no choice; so, depositing my trunk in this same den of the bears till better quarters could be found, I set off for a ramble through the city.
To a traveller who enters Rome as I did, at the waste end of the city, where he sees nothing but mouldering walls and heaps of grass-grown ruins, it is quite a matter of wonder to find, at the other extremity, such a collection of populous streets and splendid structures. My first steps were directed to St. Peter’s church, that ornament and wonder of modern Rome, the most magnificent edifice that the world ever saw. ”

“ More than two thousand years ago, at a time when the people in the British Isles and in most parts of Western Europe were living the lives of savages, occupied in fighting, hunting, and fishing, dwelling in rude huts, clad in skins, ignorant of everything that we call civilization, Rome was the centre of a world in many ways as civilized as ours is now, over which the Roman people ruled. ”

“ Every square, every column, every obelisk, every fountain, has its little colony of beggars, who have a prescriptive right to levy alms of all who come to see these objects. We shall afterwards advert to the proof thence arising as to the influence of the system of which this city is the seat.
Rome, though it surpasses all the cities of the earth in the number, beauty, and splendour of its public monuments, is imposing only in parts. It presents no effective tout ensemble. ”