A Tour Through Old ProvenceForrest, A. S. (Archibald Stevenson)
History
A Tour Through Old Provence
Forrest, A. S. (Archibald Stevenson)
Provence (France) -- Description and travel
The Pagan and Christian tombs found in the Alyscamps (Elysian Fields)
have been an inexhaustible mine of wealth, not only to collectors and
museums, but to the inhabitants of the town and surrounding country. The
massive monolithic stone coffins have been turned to use, and in the
district one finds them converted into water-troughs, benches, washtubs,
and even pig-troughs. The dust of the dead of twenty centuries amounts
to very little, and the natives evidently thought it a work of
supererogation to carve, with much labour, the limestone rocks into
articles of daily use when they had such quantities lying ready to their
hands.
The Church of St. Anne forms a very fitting museum for many of the
interesting tombs that have been rescued from the hands of ruthless
utilitarians, and there they can be studied in peaceful and solemn
surroundings. Many of the more imposing of these ancient funeral
monuments are now used as altars in the churches of Provence, as in the
Church of St. Trophimus, immediately opposite the Museum.
The inscriptions on these tombs form an abbreviated biography of the
former occupants of the town. They tell of “Nautæ Arlatenses,” or
boatmen, who plied the craft that carried the merchandise up and down
the Rhone; the “Fabrii navales,” or naval builders, a body that were
held in high esteem by the most exalted in the city; and the naval
architects, a grade higher still, professional gentlemen who mixed with
intimacy with the “Upper Ten”; the “Utriculare,” a separate body of
watermen who plied large rafts, supported by air bladders made of
sheep-and-goat skins, over the shallow lagoons to outlying islands and
to the port of Fos. From this source we learn of the oil merchants and
sail or tarpaulin manufacturers, as well as of the students and scholars
who flourished in the Gallic-Greco-Roman city.
One of the most interesting biographical tombs removed from the
Alyscamps is that of Julia Tyrannia. It records not only the highly
appreciated virtues and accomplishments of this young lady, whose life
was cut short at the
[Illustration: IN A CAFE ARLES.]
age of twenty, but on two panels on one side the musical instruments on
which she performed are cut in deep relief: a lyre, a guitar, very much
like a modern mandoline, a water-organ with nine pipes, one of the
earliest representations of this instrument (there is a similar one
carved in the fourth century on the tomb of Theodosius at
Constantinople), and a syrinx, or panpipes, in a box. Underneath this
latter there is a lamb, which might either typify the gentle
disposition of the occupant or that she was of the Christian faith.
There is often great difficulty in distinguishing between the Pagan and
Christian tombs, owing to the similarity of the symbols used; but in
some cases the newer faith expresses hopes that are lacking in the Pagan
inscriptions, as a comparison of these two free translations clearly
shows:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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