Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) (7 page)

Now, from the slopes beyond Aricia, we can see our journey's end. Beneath our feet stretches for mile after mile a broad plain, the Roman Campagna. Away to the north and east it is bounded by the long blue line of the Sabine Hills, with Mount Soracte standing out conspicuous beyond the city. Rome itself lies in the centre, its seven hills crowned with gilded temple roofs and shining marble walls and columns, its winding river flashing back the sunlight. But the ancient walls of the city are almost lost in the huge suburbs. The whole plain, almost to your feet, is dotted over with villas and gardens, which stretch away on all sides of the city as far as the eye can reach. Straight lines are drawn across the great expanse of building and greenery, converging upon the heart of the city as the spokes of a wheel converge upon its hub. These are the great roads, and, more wonderful still, the great aqueducts, which bring the waters of the neighbouring hills to supply the countless fountains and public baths.

Descending to the plain, our road runs straight as an arrow for ten miles to the city. On either side of the way are the tombs of the noble families whose names are almost an index to the history of Rome. The villas begin to crowd closer together, and the gardens grow smaller. Now come streets, though we are still beyond the walls, and the roadway bears an endless stream of chariots, litters, waggons, horsemen, and foot-passengers. Now the blare of a trumpet is heard, and a cohort, marching south, clanks past through the dust, everything else promptly clearing the way for the iron files. They are men worth seeing, bronzed and lean from hard campaigning; for they are not long home from Palestine and the siege of Jerusalem.

Here is the dark Porta Capena towering in front of us. We pass under the gloomy archway, perpetually weeping from the leakage of the Marcian aqueduct that passes overhead, and we are in Rome at last. In a kind of romantic dream we drive past the ancient wall of Servius Tullius, turn to the right between the Cælian and Palatine hills, and along the Velia to the slope of the Esquiline hill, where our friend's town house is situated.

T
HE
town house of our friend Publius Synistor is a much more elaborate affair than the little country villa at Pompeii. Of course it is by no means a great mansion, like some of the houses in the neighbourhood. Cicero's house on the Palatine cost him £30,000, and Cicero was not a grandee, but only a successful advocate. There are some houses not far away which have cost sums from £100,000 up to half a million. All the same, though Publius is a prudent man who makes no pretence of splendour, he has a good average specimen of a comfortable gentleman's house, and we shall get quite a fair idea of the Roman home when he shows us through it.
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The building covers a whole street-block, or "island," as the Romans call it; but that does not mean that Publius himself occupies the whole. The average Roman does not mind so much about the outside of his house, so long as the inside pleases him, and Publius has planned his house so that the frontage and the two sides are divided into little shops, which are let to various tenants, and bring him in a good round sum every year. We knock at a door between two of these shops, and after we have waited a moment in the narrow vestibule till the porter has taken a glance at us through his spy-hole in one of the door-posts, the leaves of the door slide back in their groove and we enter the inner hall, stepping across a threshold inscribed with the word "Salve!" (Welcome) in mosaic.

This inner hall leads us to what in old Republican days was the chief room of every Roman house. We have a greater variety of rooms now, but the "atrium," as it is called, still keeps a kind of official position in the house. It is a large oblong room, lit only from the centre of the roof, where there is a square opening, which admits light, fresh air, and all the rain that is going. Beneath this roof-window lies an open tank bordered with coloured marbles, into which the rain from the house roof pours through terra-cotta spouts—a picturesque and cool arrangement, but decidedly damp and unwholesome, especially in rainy weather. The floor is laid with mosaic pavement, and the walls are painted with a crimson dado, and with frescoes of landscape and legend. Near the tank stand the images of the household gods, and a little altar, consecrated to them, which is supposed to typify the hospitable hearth of the house. Round the atrium are grouped six bedrooms, small and stuffy, like most Roman sleeping-rooms.

At the far end of the atrium heavy curtains are hung from a row of four pillars. Drawing the central curtain aside, we enter a small room, gorgeously decorated with paintings and floored with beautiful mosaic. It is the room where all the family records are kept, and its sumptuousness shows the importance which a Roman household attached to its history. On the left side of this sacred chamber is the little library of the master of the house, with a cabinet of antique gems and coins in which he takes great pride; on the right, beyond a lobby, lies a small breakfast-room.

The lobby leads us out into a beautiful open court. Round the four sides of it runs a broad shady veranda, up whose pillars climbing plants twine their tendrils; and several other bedrooms open on this gallery. In the centre of the court, and embowered in flowering shrubs, lies the basin of a fountain which sends its jet of clear water from the Sabine hills high into the sunlight. One or two graceful statues rise among the greenery around the fountain, and altogether, the shade, the coolness, and the pleasant tinkling of the falling waters make this one of the most attractive parts of the house, especially on a day of blazing sunshine.

The large dining-room, with its horseshoe table, opens off this court to the right; while on the other side of the court, behind the bedrooms, lie the kitchen and the other workrooms of the house. Last of all, we pass between the pillars at the back of the court into the garden, which is laid out in formal beds, gay with colour, and backed by a handsome colonnade, in the centre of which stands a kind of summer lounge, where meals are often brought when the fine weather tempts one to live out of doors.

Such is the house where we shall live for a while in Rome, and you may take it as a fair specimen of the home of a good, well-to-do Roman citizen of the upper middle-class. On the whole, while it has a good deal of dignity, the luxurious folks of later ages might object that it inclined to be chilly and draughty, and altogether lacking in the cosiness that really makes a house home; but the Roman citizen has never been accustomed to anything else, and finds no fault with arrangements that would make moderns shudder. What would a lady think to be told that, in the midst of all her splendid frescoes and mosaics, poor Maxima has not even a scrap of looking-glass to dress her back hair by! The polished silver thing that she calls a mirror is exquisitely embossed and chased, it is true, but for any toilet purpose it is a mere scorn and derision.

You must not think, however, that all these lords of the earth, the free Roman citizens, are housed as well as the good Publius. There are something like 45,000 tenement blocks in Rome—huge four and five storey abominations, the upper storeys often built of wood, and therefore continually in danger of catching fire. Away down on the low flats by the Tiber, damp and fever-haunted, or in the Suburra just below our feet, street after street, narrow, winding, filthy, consists of nothing but these hateful warrens, in which thousands of human beings are crowded together under conditions that make health impossible and cleanliness and decency mere fantastic dreams. There is a very seamy side to the grandeur of Imperial Rome, as a five minutes' stroll through the Suburra will quickly show you. Perhaps in that respect Rome is no worse than other great cities. Thebes and Babylon no doubt could match her; and if ever, in far-off misty Britain, there should rise (impossible fancy as it seems) a city as great as Rome, there will be the same mixture there of splendour and squalor, velvet and rags, marble and mud.

Anyhow, there is no question of Rome's splendour wherever she makes up her mind to be splendid. You will get an instance of that as we take a morning stroll through the city. We saunter down from the Esquiline towards the outer wall by the Via Labicana, and here, almost at the very start of our walk, is a building that strikes one with admiration. A noble front, encrusted with costly marbles, spacious halls and waiting-rooms, floored with mosaic, surrounded with statues of emperors and heroes, walls covered with brilliant frescoes, and at the side a small but gorgeous temple of Jupiter—what can it be? It is the headquarters of Battalion No. II. of the City Police and Fire Brigade! Rome has seven battalions of these magnificently lodged gentry, each with its own fine establishment; and if you think this fine, you should see Main Headquarters, where the 1st Battalion and the Central Administration are housed!

Talking of the police and fire brigade reminds one of the work they have to do. They may be handsomely lodged, but in Rome, as elsewhere, and perhaps even more in Rome than elsewhere, "a policeman's lot is not a happy one." To tell you the truth, the force is not popular in the Eternal City. The Prefect of Police may be a very mighty man, and, indeed, he usually advances from his post to be Governor of Egypt, and then Prefect of the Prætorium, which is the highest honour open to a Roman knight; but that does not hinder the unwashed multitude from jeering at him and his watchmen, and calling "Tar-bucket!" after them as they go down the street. The reason for this vulgar nickname is that each fireman, when called out on duty, carries, along with his pick and axe, a water-bucket woven of wicker-work, and made water-tight by being smeared with tar.

As firemen, the "tar-buckets" have never any lack of work. Rome is continually burning, in some quarter or another. It is only a matter of six years since the great fire of Nero's day swept away two-thirds of the whole city, and there are huge blackened spaces still to show where the fire was worst. But every now and then there is a big blaze somewhere in the town, and smaller fires occur almost every day. Sometimes they occur so conveniently for their owners that unkind neighbours smile behind their hands when the burnt-out householder talks about his losses. There are no insurance companies, but if you go about the thing neatly, and have made yourself useful in your neighbourhood, your friends will subscribe enough to give you a better house than the one you have lost. Look at this smart new house, for instance. It belongs to a rather shady gentleman named Tongilianus, and it cost him, or rather the friends out of whom he squeezed the money, 10,000 sesterces. The house that he used to live in, before the ever-to-be-lamented fire which obliged him to build this new one, cost 200! Misfortune, you see, is sometimes a blessing in disguise.

But besides their duties as firemen, the police have a big, and indeed an almost hopeless task, as guardians of the public safety. Rome is a huge city; it has the usual proportion of rascals in its vast population; perhaps it has even more than the usual proportion, being, as it is, the centre of the whole world. And there is one circumstance that makes it very difficult to preserve order, and to keep the streets safe. Perhaps some day in the far-off future a great genius will arise who will invent some method of lighting the streets at night, but at present there is no sign of him. Rome has not so much as one solitary public lamp in all her miles of crowded streets. Imagine a city of, shall we say, a million and a half of people, ranging from the greatest wealth to the most desperate poverty, without one spark of light to guide the wayfarer! He may carry his own light, of course—a smoking, dripping torch, or a miserable apology for a lantern, with a bronze frame and horn sides, but such makeshifts only make darkness visible.

The result is that, whenever the evening shadows begin to fall, all shops are shut and bolted, and the dark and gloomy streets present a very suspicious and sinister appearance. If you go abroad much after sunset, you go at your own risk, and you had better go well armed and with a guard of your own slaves; for cut-throats and pickpockets abound. Many a man who set out in the dark, merely to go from one street to another, has made a much longer journey than that, and has been fished out of the Tiber half-way to Ostia next morning. Nor is this the only danger. A couple of slaves and a torch may protect you against the thieves, but if you happen to meet a gang of young bloods of the upper class coming home from a supper-party where the wine has got above the wit, you had better take to your heels, for it is not a couple of slaves who will protect you! Only the other night one of Publius's neighbours, a most respectable man, was set upon by a party of these drunken rowdies, youths of consular and knightly families, and was insulted, beaten, stripped, and left lying senseless on the ground, so that he was nearly frozen to death when the police found him in the morning. Of course the "vigiles" do their, best, but the task is quite beyond them, and nothing but light, and plenty of it, will ever make the streets of Rome safe.

But we have spent enough time over the police and the rascals of Rome, and we turn city-wards again. We pass along the road between the Esquiline and Cælian hills, to where the builders are working on the site of the Flavian Amphitheatre, and then turn southwards between the Cælian and the Palatine and pass the Circus Maximus, the huge enclosure where the chariot-races take place. That house just overlooking the Circus was made part of the Imperial Palace by the Emperor Caligula, who was so fond of chariot-racing and jockeys that he wanted to live as near the race-course as possible. Now it has been turned into a school for the pages of the Court, and you can see some of the young aristocrats at their games. They seem very much like other schoolboys, after all. See, some of them have been scribbling on the walls: "Corinthus is leaving school!" "Marianus Afer is leaving school!" What became of Corinthus and Marianus Afer in the big world, I wonder? One young rascal has a taste for art, it seems. Here is his drawing—a donkey turning a mill; and what is this he has written underneath? "Work, little ass, as I have worked myself, and you shall have your reward." Boys will be boys, even though their school stands where a Roman Emperor dwelt, and bears the awe-inspiring name of the Pædagogium.