Mrs. Hugh Fraser

Romance and Companionship of the Past—Rome the Supremely Beloved—Pictures and Legends of Her Origin—Migration of the Alban Shepherds—Romulus and Remus—Etruria’s Civilisation—Whole World Contributes to Rome’s Growth—Brilliant Scenes in the Roman World—Rome’s High Destiny—Numa Pompilius, the Law-giver—Egeria’s Grotto—Love Story of Herodes Atticus and Annia Regilla—Early Christianity.

It has always seemed to me that one of the most perfect experiences within the grasp of mortals would be that of a child brought up in seclusion by an adored parent, only known to its heart and mind as such—and to find, on reaching maturity and coming out into the world, that the beloved one was the ruler of a mighty empire, venerated and feared by millions of men. How that knowledge would transfigure and ennoble the memories of childhood, of the protecting companionship bestowed, the being rocked to sleep in those strong arms, of the sunny play-hours of childhood’s day watched by those wise and loving eyes!

All this was Rome to me, through many a long year before the doors were opened and the glory of her was made known to my mind. Then the old indulgent comradeship, accessible to every mood of youthful joy and sorrow, became tinged with awe and yet was doubly cherished; it grew a thousand times more precious, yet, like some holy relic that one wraps in silk and gold, had to be enshrined with other sacrednesses in the sanctuaries of memory. One was no longer Rome’s careless child, to whom all her yesterdays were playthings of equal value with her wild flowers of to-day. She called—and there was no disobeying the new command. The nursery door was closed forever, and one took one’s place silently and gladly in the last, lowest rank of her subjects and soldiers.

From that moment one began to learn, weakly and imperfectly, it is true. At first the greatness of the new knowledge overwhelmed one. I remember writing to the great French Prelate who received me into the Church, that I felt like a beggar suddenly admitted into the palace of his King, dazzled with the warmth and splendour, yet utterly ignorant of which way to turn or how to comport himself in those august surroundings. I fancy others have experienced the like bewilderment, and happy they, if they fell into such wise and loving hands as those which were held out to me and finally helped me to fix on a study which, far from making the most serious of all subjects dry and unattractive, enriched it with the warmest touches of human feeling—the holy glory of the true romance.

Such study, such reading, is really within reach of all in these days of almost universal translation and simplification; but so many know nothing of how to obtain the right books—so many, indeed, are utterly unconscious that there is anything to know beyond the few distorted facts doled out in non-Catholic schools, that even the most unassuming effort to share these riches with them may be useful and welcome. Modern life is apt to be a dry, unflowery affair, but that is because our own laziness of mind permits it to become so. If we choose to take the past, it is ours; and I defy any one to claim his inheritance therein and not find a heart-warming thought, a refreshment and a fragrance for every moment of solitude, a chapter of high romance for every day of the long, working year!

A romance must be a love story, and of all the love stories of time, that of Rome is the most marvellous. Certain girl children, we are told, were born so beautiful that, like Helen of Troy, Lucrezia Borgia—and she whose soul was of equal loveliness with what the chronicler calls “the supreme and royal beauty” of her body, Saint Radegonde, Queen of France, they were passionately loved, passionately defended, passionately sung, from the hour of their birth. And Rome, from the hour when the first hut was built on the right bank of the yet nameless river, when the stones of her first low wall wrote her name on that predestined soil, has been loved with a personal passion that has not its like in the world’s history. So, we know, she will be loved to the end. The very hatreds that have attacked her, the cataclysms that have exhausted themselves in attempts to annihilate her, the cupidity and treachery that have bargained for her whom no price can buy, no hand of man can hold, all testify to the desire of the nations to call her theirs. Above and beyond the clamours of earth, she pursues her immortal destiny, “mother of all earth’s orphans” as Byron called her, the nurse of every noble and humble soul, the home and property of the poorest, most ignorant Catholic—but no man’s henchwoman, no King’s chattel; now as in the past, and till earth’s last sunrise, the true mistress of the world.

Could she be less, marked at her birth for empire, first of nations and then of souls? What has not been brought to her by tribute humanity since nature bore her in flame and upheaval, cradled her in sunshine and nurtured her with balm? Looking at her to-day and remembering her past, what wonderful pictures are unrolled before our eyes! Let us go back to the first of which history speaks, and call up the time when the nameless river flowed past the yet nameless hills that were to become the judgment seats of the world.

Standing on the outer rim of the Pincian terrace, watching the primrose die to grey after a sunset in spring, I have gazed over towards St. Peter’s and tried to see the land as it looked to Rome’s builders, the shepherds who fled hither from their ruined homes in the Alban Hills and halted on the southern side of the yellow river, unbridged and unnamed as yet. For it was surely the river that stayed their panic flight only eighteen miles from where the twin volcanoes had vomited fire from the craters that are now the limpid lakes of Nemi and Albano. Though near, the spot seemed safe for the first night. Doubtless they told each other that the next day they would find a ford and travel twice as far again to the low, dark line of the Cimmerian Hills to the northward. But here, at any rate, was herbage and water for the sheep and kine they had saved, and unbroken solitude, where, under the rough skin canopy spread from bough to bough, the women—the few who had found strength to travel—could nurse their babies and sleep for one night unmolested by hostile tribes.

So they rested, the younger men keeping watch by the two or three campfires built to scare away the wolves and foxes. And the morning came, a morning of March, with a leap of the sun from behind the Sabine ramparts, and the dew pearled on oak and wild olive branch overhead, on moss and fern beneath, with the little wild almond trees on the slopes across the river snowy with newly burst blossoms, while the first lark soared up towards the sun-shot blue in an ecstasy of song, and the swallows, just back from the shores of Africa, wheeled lower and lower and darted upward again, with angry cries, when they found their last year’s home invaded by men and beasts. They made friends with men’s dwellings later, and, forgetting the crannies of the woodlands, have built in the eaves of palaces for many a century now, but I take it that in swallow sagas those first traditions have been winged down and are still twittered about, with due respect, when the patriarchs hold their sky conclaves in the autumn and the spring, and drill the fledglings for three weeks before the great semestral migration.

From where the tired shepherds had halted on the high land to the southeast of the river, the empty cradle of unborn Rome would look very fair in the clear spring morning, and but short debate must have decided, for those men of few words, that here the gods meant them to stay. So here, as we can still trace, Romulus, the wolf’s nursling, marked (after enquiring of the wise men of Etruria as to the commands of the gods concerning the foundation of a city) the lines for his wall, ploughing, as the legend says, with white Campagna steers, on his chosen hill the Palatine, where the new altar, raised over a pit in which the first-fruits of the year and a handful of soil from each man’s former home had been buried, already sent up clouds of incense into the sweet spring air on that memorable 21st of April, 754 B.C. And Remus, his twin, wolf-nursed like him, was angry that his own hill, the Aventine, had not been awarded the honours, mocked at his brother’s commands, and sprang across the mystic furrow, to be instantly slain by Celer, Romulus’ faithful henchman, thus conferring the baptism of human blood which almost till our own times was prescribed by necromancers as the only means of rendering great strongholds stable and impregnable.

It is strange to find that from the very birthday of Rome she knew how to levy tribute of the higher kind from other nations. When the frightened Alban shepherds, mostly men little regarded heretofore in the rich city of Alba Longa, spread their skin tents and then threw up their windowless cane huts on the banks of the Tiber, Etruria, a few score of miles to the north, possessed a written language, learned hierophants, bold and scientific architects, full-grown arts of surpassing beauty, marble amphitheatres, great cities supplied with indefectible streams of pure water, and a costly and complicated system of drainage. Rome sends humble enquiries to Etruria, beseeching to be taught how to address and propitiate the great gods. Etruria gladly condescends to reply, and in a given time, though not without much strife and bloodshed, Etruria becomes first a tributary and then a vassal of the adolescent Empress of the world, who, through all the centuries of her after history, repeats that requisition. Rough, practical, hard-handed, and strong, yet avid of beauty, she will have all that is fairest and most precious. Her Art consisted in appreciation; she resolved to possess; the world had to be conquered to give her what she desired, but the world gave—Greece her sculpture and painting and poetry, the Orient its silks and jewels and spices, the South its gold and grain, its wild beasts and hordes of slaves, the North its furs and warriors, the West its granite and lead; the seas swarmed with her laden fleets, and the whole known world became a vast diagram of white converging roads choked with spoils for Rome.

What strange sights those roads must have seen when the long camel trains came plodding through from Persia with their escort of black-bearded, ringletted merchants, raising whirlwinds of dust and eliciting strings of curses from the fair-haired drivers of ox-teams from Gaul, drawing huge loads of fruit and wine to Roman markets! There the vendors of jewels, keen-eyed Jews and Syrians, armed to the teeth, had to draw aside angrily for the passage of bulky wares which one gem from the tiny silk-wrapped packet in their bosoms would have paid for ten times over; here comes a richly draped litter with armed horsemen in attendance—a great noble’s wife? No, only a beautiful woman being carried to the slave market where she will fetch the highest price. Suddenly a solitary horseman dashes through the throng at break-neck pace, heedless of the death his steed’s hoofs may deal. Shall the CÆsar’s despatches wait for the safety of the common herd? With perhaps eight or nine hundred miles of road to cover in a given time, the Imperial messenger sees nothing, knows nothing, but his goal and the shortest way to it. How they rode—those express messengers! There are many wild rides on record, but for swiftness and perseverance I think that of the benevolent Roman official CÆsarius, hastening from Antioch to Constantinople to intercede for the guilty Antiocheans, is the most wonderful. I believe it is Theodoret who attests to the fact that he covered the distance of nearly eight hundred miles through two ranges of mountains and over much broken country, in six days!

Many a century had to pass before all roads could lead to Rome, but, while the city was still a mere fortified hamlet, one spot took on the character which it has kept through the ages and will keep till the last day. Looking over to the further bank of the river, the builders on the Palatine could see, as we see to-day, when the sun has sunk in the west, a long dark ridge rising like a wall to shut out the lower crimson of the sky. It was wooded then, with oak and pine, though now there is but one tree left, the “Doria pine,” to mark where the forest grew. The ridge sunk at its northern extremity, in irregular undulations, heavily wooded and mysteriously dark, and these connected it with a chain of low hills which stretched away along the river’s bank till they were lost in the mist of the Campagna.

The higher ridge very early took on the name of Mons Janiculum; the further hills were more or less nameless till the Renaissance: but the bosky stretch between the two was regarded from the first as sacred ground. Why, one can scarcely say, except for its solitude and its cloistered verdure. Looking towards it now, one asks oneself if there was indeed a time when those who gazed westward from the city’s ramparts at evening, did not behold, across the sea of mist that lays twilight on the streets while the heights are still bathed in gold, that immortal outline of a dome, dark, delicate, and definite, between them and the setting sun? A time when the soil that bears it held only the oaks and ilexes of the grove where the “Vates,” the unapproachable hierophants of high, half-known gods, prayed and prophesied according to their lights? Where the common people came, not too close, and paused, hushed and trembling, under the great trees, to learn the wills and ways of the gods? How gladly they must have sped back, ere night fell, across the one bridge, to their safe, crowded homes within the walls, to lean together across the olive-wood fire and speak in whispers of the oracles they had heard, while the baby rolled naked on the soft goatskin, and the brown-legged youngsters sat on their haunches, sniffing at the goat’s meat bubbling in the caldron on the hook, and the good wife brought out the fern basket of snowy cheese and washed the crisp fennel roots on the doorstep! Were they merely men of their hands, those first Romans, thinking more of comfort and safety than of anything else? A writer who could surely speak with authority tells us that from the first the people of Rome itself have been innately religious, always conscious or subconscious of their city’s destiny. Surely to one, here and there, in some portentous dawn or brooding twilight, the figure of things to be was cast up against the sky! Did not the slowly-moving clouds sometimes pause over that low ridge in the west, to mass themselves in the likeness of a dome, the stars sink down from their courses to foreshadow the gold of a cross?

The Mons Vaticanus, low, and excluded from the city limits, was never reckoned one of the seven hills; of all the Roman district it was considered the least healthy part, the land being swampy and subject, on its lowest levels, to the periodical incursions of the river. The “Vates,” versed as they were in all wisdoms, doubtless discovered means by which to preserve themselves from malaria, for this continued to be their sanctuary, if not their home, for many generations. After the Romans had, at the prayer of their stolen Sabine wives, become reconciled with the men of Sabina—and, in true Roman fashion, first given them part in the land and invited them to assist in government, and then taken them on as masters—the great Sabine Judge-King, Numa Pompilius, established himself among the Vatican groves to compile his books of laws. There he wrote, there he died, and there was buried, commanding that his precious volumes should have a separate tomb near his own. “A man’s works live after him;” the site of Numa’s tomb was mere guess-work, his very existence was scoffed at as a myth, by progressive historians, till accident revealed the still intact sepulchre of his cherished writings, precisely on the spot marked by tradition for some twenty-five centuries. The good law-giver was one of the revered realities of my childhood; with sorrow I saw his memory cast away, when I grew up, on the ever-growing scrap-heap of condemned myths, where the iconoclasts of history throw everything that does not fit in to their small neat conceptions; he has come back to me in these later years, and how welcome the towering luminous figure that hovered so protectingly over my early mind pictures of infant Rome!

One point in his history always puzzled me, the great distance between his home across the Tiber and the grotto where Egeria, the heavenly nymph, instructed him in wisdom. That lay in a fold of the CÆlian Hill, and the entire length of the city has to be traversed to reach it from the Vatican. I used to weave many fairy tales for myself about Egeria when, as children, we were taken to spend the day in the lovely spot then known as her “Grotto,” and so exquisitely described by Byron in “Childe Harold” that there seems nothing left for ordinary mortals to tell about it. But—I will take the risk of appearing presumptuous and say that one factor was wanting to Byron for the task—he was not born a Roman, and his sad childhood, unlike my own, held no memories of paradisial hours of play and dreaming round the hallowed fountain, and in the sacred grove.

For sacred the spot remains, although we know now that it was not, as men thought for many centuries, Egeria’s grotto and Egeria’s grove, but the shrine and monument of a merely human love, very strong and pure, the love of a husband mourning a good wife and vowing to perpetuate her memory in beauty and charity. Since this book is not for the learned, but for those who, treading the busy walks of modern life, have no time to pore over history and its romances, I will venture to tell again the story of this true lover.

During the short reign of Nerva (96-98 A.D.), an Athenian gentleman, named Hipparchus, fell into disgrace with the still very Greek government of his native city. I do not know the origin of the trouble, but Athens always dealt rather capriciously with her great ones, and we may infer that the great wealth of Hipparchus had aroused envy in his less fortunate fellow-citizens. His entire fortune was confiscated, nothing being left to him but an apparently worthless plot of ground near the Acropolis. This ground his son, Atticus, undertook with philosophical patience to cultivate, so as to provide some food for the impoverished family. To his amazement the furrow intended to produce leeks and cabbages revealed a hidden treasure of gold, buried there in some forgotten stress of past ages, and so abundant that the young man, after his first joy of surprise, was filled with terror.

The discovery was portentous and the revulsion of feeling almost too much for a mortal to bear. However, he had presence of mind enough to keep the thing secret from all but his own family. One can fancy how, in the blue Athenian morning, he hastily threw the earth and stones back over the precious find, and, abandoning spade and ploughshare, went home to take counsel as to his conduct in regard to it. Did the old man, Hipparchus, die of joy on hearing of his good fortune? It may have been so, for at this point he disappears from the story and returns no more. Atticus remains in possession, but such hazardous possession! If his fellow-citizens heard of the treasure, they would wrest it from him; if the Emperor learnt of it, he, as lord of all soil of the Empire, had the right to claim it for himself. To enjoy it on the spot or to remove it in secret was equally impossible, and Atticus wisely decided to throw himself on the well-known generosity of the Emperor. So he sent him word that he had discovered a fortune on his land, and humbly asked to be directed as to the disposal of it. The Emperor, too busy to give the subject much thought, or else pleased with the man’s honesty, replied that he could use it as he liked. But this casual authorisation was not enough to calm the fears of Atticus. Once more he wrote to Nerva, saying that the treasure was too great for the use of a private person and that he entreated the Emperor to make known his will in regard to it. This time he received a most explicit answer, to the effect that his own good fortune had bestowed the gift upon him and that he was to “use what he could, and abuse the rest.”

Thus fortified in his rights, Atticus did use his wealth royally, and bequeathed it to his own son, Herodes Atticus, who, forgetting past injuries, lavished it in ornamenting with splendid buildings the city of his birth, in all-embracing charities, in providing public games of the greatest splendour, and in the encouragement of art and literature. Then, desiring to see the seat of Empire and enjoy the intellectual atmosphere of the Augustan age, he removed to Rome, and on account of his great learning and attainments, was appointed tutor to Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, the adopted sons of the then reigning Emperor, Antoninus Pius. He left no literary monument of his own for us to admire, but the clear beauty of the style of Marcus Aurelius is doubtless due in great part to the early training received from his Greek tutor.

Standing thus high in imperial favour, Herodes Atticus was enabled to make a splendid alliance. He obtained the hand of Annia Regilla, a daughter of the great Julian House, and thus crowned the long romance of his life by a real love marriage. Annia Regilla was marvellously beautiful, as good as she was fair, and returned her husband’s affection by a love as whole-hearted as his own. In an age when universal selfishness and luxury made it necessary to legislate against race suicide, she bore Herodes child after child, each more welcome to its parents than the last. Was ever a man’s cup of earthly happiness so royally full?

Then it was dashed from him and emptied at a blow. Annia Regilla died very suddenly when the birth of her fifth child was hourly expected, and for a time her broken-hearted husband seemed likely to succumb to despair; but the very magnitude of his grief saved him—in more ways than one. The Greek desire for concrete expression, the impulse to embody in visible form the worshipped ideals of the mind, drove him at first to violent manifestations of mourning which appeared extravagant and unreal to the easy-going superficial Romans of his day. They took life pretty much as it came, even as the Romans do now, and the sight of Herodes Atticus in his black robes, in his house hung completely with black—where he even removed the flowery-tinted marbles of walls and pavements to replace them with sombre grey—all this afforded intense amusement to his fashionable friends.

But he had one enemy. His wife’s brother had deeply resented the marriage of Annia Regilla to a man whom he considered a low-born outsider, quite unfit to mate with a maid of his own patrician house; and, she being dead, the haughty aristocrat gave free rein to his animosity and accused Herodes of having poisoned his spouse. The absurdity of the indictment was potent to all, but the outraged widower insisted upon being publicly tried for the crime. The outcome, as he intended it should, crushed the calumny forever, the Judges declaring that his devotion to his wife during her lifetime and the unmistakable sincerity of his grief at her death were all-sufficient proofs of his innocence.

The fury of anger roused in him by the attack seems to have recalled his energies and restored his balance of mind. He quit mere repining, and swore to erect to his dead such a monument as woman never had before. The beautiful villa where their happy years had been passed stood in a shallow valley of the Campagna, some little distance to the right of the Appian Way, not far from the already ancient tomb of Cecilia Metella. At that time the land along the Appian Way, nearly as far as the Alban Hills, was covered with palaces and villas, costly monuments and beautiful gardens. The home of the wealthy Greek was remarkable enough to be famous even among these, although he had chosen for its site a piece of land belonging to his wife, indeed, but held till then in rather scornful repute. In spite of the fact that a small temple of Jupiter had stood there from very early times, this charming valley had been used as a spot to which the “Jews,” otherwise the Christians, had more than once been banished under very hard conditions, to punish their contumacy in refusing to sacrifice to the statues of the gods. Here, says a learned Catholic historian, St. Peter himself came with many of his flock, during his first visit to Rome, to take refuge in the subterranean crypts which, hastily dug in those early years, were afterwards enlarged and extended till they formed an underground city for the living and a safe resting-place for the dead.

Of Christianity, whether above or below ground, Herodes Atticus knew little and doubtless cared less. The despised sect aroused but faint interest in the upper classes, and the most scathing reproaches on their voluntary degradation were addressed to any of the latter who joined it or manifested pity for its sufferers. But Atticus had a warm and generous heart in his bereavement; it is said that he gave away great sums in charity, and one can scarcely doubt that some of these gifts relieved the wants of the poor Christians who begged for alms along the Appian Way, and, as we shall presently see, served the Church so notably in times of persecution, both before and after the days of Herodes Atticus. The estate of the latter covered all the ground on the right from the third to the fourth milestone of the famous road, and he had vowed during Annia Regilla’s lifetime that he would make it the most beautiful as well as hospitable of all the suburban villages. Now, he laid out what was afterwards known as the “Pagus Triopius” in lovely gardens, baths, and temples, where all his friends, rich and poor, were invited to enjoy their share of his wealth by an inscription over one of the gates, which ran, “This is the abode of hospitality.”

After his acquittal from the abominable accusation brought against him by his brother-in-law, he offered all his wife’s jewels to the Temple of Ceres and Proserpine, asking Heaven to smite him if he had been guilty of the imagined crime; then he built her a magnificent tomb in a garden laid out for that purpose—a garden which he called “The Field of Sepulchre” and in which only her direct descendants were to be laid forever.

In reading all the story of this true lover (translated—for Greek is still Greek to me—from the very full inscriptions found at the Pagus, and from the writings of Philostrates and Pausanias) I could not help reflecting how few direct ways true love has of manifesting itself—for one and the same was the thought of Abraham, insisting on buying and holding for his very own the field of Mamre, to bury Sara in—and the preoccupation of the highly cultured Greek to enshrine the remains of his beloved Annia, where, by all human prevision, they could never be disturbed. Also, the beloved Annia’s tomb has crumbled into dust. All that is left of Herodes Atticus’ garden is the ilex grove and the ruined nymphÆum with the broken statue and the clear fountain, which, as a little girl, I knew as the grotto of Egeria.

But that which, all unknown to Atticus, was even then burrowing and spreading beneath his beautiful gardens and palaces, the underground city of Christianity, where the faith lay like rich seed in the dark, warm earth, that survives, and its ways have been worn smooth by the feet of thousands of pilgrims for nearly twenty centuries. The rent bodies and few poor ashes of the “Christian Beggars” of the Appian Way were never approached save with love and veneration, and, whereas the slab of exquisite Pentelic marble on which Annia’s epitaph—in thirty-nine Greek verses—was inscribed, has become part of a public collection, the name and date, and the rude attempt at a palm branch to indicate the martyr’s death, stand out as clear to-day on the walls of the Catacombs as they did when they were hastily scratched in the soft clay, at some midnight burial under Nero or Diocletian, the envious though mourning brethren praying “that the Church might have peace,” but, yet more fervently, that they also might be found worthy if their own hour must come first.