Studies of Travel: ItalyFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Italy
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Italy -- Description and travel
Now was it only a dream when we tracked out these walls, and took a
certain pleasure in speaking of them as Hernican walls? We come back
to our library; we take down the _Dictionary of Geography_; we turn to
the article "Anagnia," and we find that by far the best contributor to
the series, Mr. E. H. Bunbury, has another tale to tell. Our feelings
are damped when he says, "The only remains extant there are of Roman
date and of little interest." As to the "little interest," we venture
to have our own opinion in any case; we should hold that so great
an extent of ancient wall still bounding an inhabited town was an
object of high interest, even if it could be shown to belong to the
latest days which could come under the definition of "Roman date."
But what is Roman date? Mr. Bunbury sends us to the correspondence of
the Emperor Marcus with Cornelius Fronto. We hope he does not ask us
to believe that the walls are later than the days of the philosophic
Emperor. For, if he will allow them to be as old as that, we can call
the Emperor himself to witness that they must be a good deal older. For
Marcus himself read an inscription over one of the gates, "_Flamen sume
samentum_." He did not know what "_samentum_" meant, and we cannot find
the word in our Latin dictionary. But a native explained to him its
meaning in the Hernican language; it meant the skin of the victim which
the _flamen_ put on his head when he entered the town. We do not want
to be unreasonable in our dates, if only we can let in our Hernicans
at some corner. When we looked at the walls, we saw at once that they
had no fellowship with the primæval works at Cori and at Segni; they
did seem to us to have fellowship with the works of the Tarquins at
Rome. We shall be quite happy if Mr. Bunbury will allow us to put the
walls as early as the year B.C. 307. The next year Anagnia sank from
a Hernican city, a free ally of Rome, into a town whose people were
burthened with Roman citizenship without the Roman franchise. If we may
carry back walls over whose gates Hernican inscriptions could be read
between four and five hundred years later, to a date as nearly as that,
we shall have done all that we could wish. They will be walls of the
days of Hernican independence, walls on which Hannibal and Pyrrhos have
looked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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