Studies of Travel: ItalyFreeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
Studies of Travel: Italy
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Italy -- Description and travel
says the line which comes as such a relief after the involved
constructions of later Latin writers, a line which records a fact as
simply worded as it could be in a mediæval chronicle, which gives us
a true leonine rime, and which makes its way through six feet without
a single dactyl. To the Campanian knights their Roman citizenship was
doubtless pleasant enough; it may have been less so to the commons,
who had the private rights only, and who were burthened with a payment
to the knights. Yet we find that the revolt of Capua to Hannibal was
largely the work of noble leaders. The truth doubtless is that the
large amount of independence which Capua still kept only made any
measure of dependence more galling. Then came the blow which made Capua
for a while cease to be a city. Its lands became the property of the
Roman people; its walls were left simply as a shelter for those who
filled them. Yet the great city of Campania arose again, to be once
more a great city till the second blow, when men of Semitic speech came
not as deliverers but as destroyers, when Capua moved to Casilinum,
and when all that was left of the elder city put itself under the
keeping of a heavenly protectress as Santa Maria di Capua. Among those
remnants of what was, the walls of Capua, the _arx_ of Capua, are not
to be found; at all events they do not strike the traveller on his
first or his second visit. For something faintly answering to a Capuan
_arx_, he takes himself to the neighbouring mountains. There, on their
lowest slopes, looking out on Vesuvius and Ischia, looking down on the
Campanian plain, with its river, with its older and its newer Capua, we
come to a spot where a famous temple of the older faith has given way
to a less famous one of the new. A journey from Caserta to the Capuan
amphitheatre in the plain may well take in a journey to the slope of
Tifata, the slope of the hill on which Hannibal so often pitched his
camp, and where the church of Sant' Angelo in Formis has supplanted the
holy place of Diana and Jupiter, which took its name from the mountain
which rises above its massy tower.
V. A Church by the Camp of Hannibal.
We reach Tifata, the very centre of the marching and counter-marching
of Hannibal, the spot from which we may best call up a picture of
beleaguered Capua, of Fulvius waiting for his prey, of the stout
fighting on either side of the enclosing lines, of Hannibal, as his
last hope, turning aside to threaten Rome, in the chance that the
danger of Rome might lead to the relief of Capua. The name Tifata, in
some tongue, most likely in the old Oscan, describes the evergreen oaks
which doubtless formed the sacred grove of Diana. The goddess had no
lake here, as she had at Aricia, nor do we hear of any such grim legend
on Tifata as grew round--
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account