Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2: Studies from the Chronicles of RomeCrawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion)
History
Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2: Studies from the Chronicles of Rome
Crawford, F. Marion (Francis Marion)
Rome (Italy) -- Description and travel
This is the first instance in which a religion, and the orgies were so
called by the Romans, was practised upon the Aventine in opposition to
that of the State. It was not the last. Under Domitian, Juvenal found a
host of Jews established there, on the eastern slope and about the
fountain of Egeria, and thirty years before him Saint Paul lived on the
Aventine in the Jewish house of Aquila and Priscilla where Santa Prisca
stands today. It is worth noting that Aquila, an eagle, the German
Adler, was already then a Jewish name. Little by little, however, the
Jews went back to the Tiber, and the Aventine became the stronghold of
the Christians; there they built many of their oldest churches, and
thence they carried out their dead to the near catacombs of Saint
Petronilla, the church better known as that of Saint Nereus and Saint
Achillaeus. And there are many other ancient churches on the hill, and on
the road that leads to Saint Sebastian's gate, and beyond the walls, on
the Appian Way as far as Saint Callixtus; lonely, peaceful shrines,
beautiful with the sculptures and pavements and mosaics of the Cosmas
family who lived and worked between six and seven hundred years ago. On
the other side of the hill, near the Circus, Saint Augustine taught
rhetoric for a living, though he knew no Greek and was perhaps no great
Latin scholar either--still an unbeliever then, an astrologer and a
follower after strange doctrines, one whom no man could have taken for a
future bishop and Father of the Church, who was to be author of two
hundred and thirty-two theological treatises, as well as of an
exposition of the Psalms and the Gospels. Here Saint Gregory the Great,
once Prefect of Rome, preached and prayed, and here the fierce
Hildebrand lived when he was young, and called himself Gregory when he
was Pope, perhaps, because he had so often meditated here upon the life
and acts of the wise Saint, in the places hallowed by his footsteps.
Later, the Aventine was held by the Savelli, who dwelt in castles long
since destroyed, even to the foundations, by the fury of their enemies;
and there the two Popes of the house, Honorius the Third--a famous
chronicler in his day--and Honorius the Fourth, found refuge when the
restless Romans 'annoyed them,' as Muratori mildly puts it. They were
brave men in their day, mostly Guelphs, and faithful friends of the
Colonna, and it is told how one of them died in a great fight between
Colonna and Orsini.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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