Roman Mosaics; Or, Studies in Rome and Its NeighbourhoodMacmillan, Hugh
Philosophy
Roman Mosaics; Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood
Macmillan, Hugh
Rome (Italy) -- Description and travel
is filled with the calcined bones of the court buffoon, a poor deaf
and dumb slave who had wonderful powers of mimicry, and used to amuse
his morose master by imitating the gesticulations of the advocates
pleading in the Forum. Another pigeon-hole contains the remains of the
keeper of the library of Apollo in the imperial palace on the
Palatine. A most pathetic lamentation in verse is made by one Julia
Prima over the ashes of her husband; and an inscription, along with a
portrait of the animal, records that beneath are the remains of a
favourite dog that was the pet of the whole household--a little touch
of nature that links the ages and the zones, and makes the whole world
kin. The whole of this region, called Monte d'Oro, for what reason I
know not, seems to have been a vast necropolis, in which not only
Columbaria for their slaves and freedmen were built by the great
patrician families, but also family vaults for the wealthier middle
classes were constructed and sold by speculators, just as in our
modern town cemeteries.
Very near the modern gate of the city the road passes under the
so-called Arch of Drusus. It consists of a single arch, whose keystone
projects on each side about two feet and a half beyond the plane of
the frontage; and is built of huge solid blocks of travertine, with
cornices of white marble, and two composite columns of African marble
on each side, much soiled and defaced, which are so inferior in style
to the rest of the architecture that they are manifestly later
additions. The whole monument is much worn and injured; but it is made
exceedingly picturesque by a crown of verdure upon the thick mass of
soil accumulated there by small increments blown up from the highway
in the course of so many centuries. It was long supposed that
Caracalla had barbarously taken advantage of the arch to carry across
the highway at this point the aqueduct which supplied his baths with
water. But the more recent authorities maintain that the arch itself,
so far from being the monument of Drusus, was only one of the arches
built by Caracalla in a more ornamental way than the rest, as was
commonly done when an aqueduct crossed a public road. This theory does
away at one fell stroke with the idea so long fondly cherished that
St. Paul must have passed under this very arch on his way to Rome, and
that his eye must have rested on these very stones upon which we gaze
now. It is hard to give up the belief that the stern old arch, severe
in its sturdiness and simplicity as the character of the apostle
himself, did actually cast its haunted shadow over him on the
memorable day when, a prisoner in chains in charge of a Roman soldier,
he passed over this part of the Appian Way, and it signalised a far
grander triumph than that for which it was originally erected. We
should greatly prefer to retain the old idea that under that arch
Christianity, as represented by St. Paul, passed to its conquest of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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