Freeman Edward Augustus
Studies of Travel: Italy
Ostia
From the nearest neighbours and rivals of Rome, from the slight remains which mark the sites of Veii and Fidenæ, from the almost more instructive lack of remains which marks the site of Antemnæ, we may well pass to a spot which lies at a greater distance from Rome than any of them, but which never was Rome's rival or even neighbour, because it was from the beginning simply an outlying part of Rome itself. This is the forsaken haven of Rome at Ostia. The existence of Ostia at an early stage of the historic being of Rome is no small sign of what Rome already was, and it may well have had no small share in making Rome what she afterwards was to be. For an inland town like Rome to possess a haven of its own, existing solely as its haven, at once marked and strengthened the difference between Rome and other inland towns. For Ostia, it must be borne in mind, was the haven of Rome and nothing else. It was not a separate maritime city made into the haven of Rome by any process of conquest or confederation. Tradition makes Ostia spring into being because it was found that Rome needed a haven. And the tradition has nothing to contradict it and all likelihood to support it; the name of the place by itself might almost be accepted as proving its truth. The foundation of Ostia, too, is placed in a period which is eminently a traditional, as distinguished from a legendary, period. It is safer not to rule either that there was a personal Ancus Marcius or that there was not; but we may be pretty sure that the events assigned to his reign really happened, if we can only keep ourselves from attempting dates where there is no chronology. Tradition then calls Ancus the founder of Ostia. The really important point is that whoever founded Ostia founded it purely in the interest of Rome, and that in an age when Rome was still in the days of her early growth.
This at once marks a wide difference between Rome and other cities of that time. Even the most famous of the early seats of maritime enterprise had the port separate from the city, later than the city. Corinth herself had her two havens, apart alike from her mountain citadel and from the venerable columns at its foot. When Corinth started in life men shrank from the close neighbourhood of the sea. It marks a later stage when Corinthian enterprise planted colonies absolutely in the sea – Syracuse on her island, the elder Korkyra on her peninsula. It was not till long after Ostia had arisen that inland Athens yoked herself to the sea. But, as the site of Rome itself on the broad Tiber showed that men had even then learned to understand the value of sites widely different from Tusculum on her height or Veii with her encircling brooks, so the creation of Ostia proves yet more. Rome, far more distant from the sea than Corinth, Megara, or even Athens, had already learned that a hold on the sea was needful for her power. There could have been nothing like it in Italy. There were inland cities and there were maritime cities; but there was no inland city which had put forth a maritime outpost at such a distance. Indeed, no other city had put forth such an outpost at all, maritime or otherwise. For Ostia was not a colony, not a dependency. It had no separate being of its own. It was a limb of Rome transplanted to a distance of fifteen Italian miles from the main body.
Ostia, then, called into being because Rome stood on the Tiber, is eminently a child of the Tiber. But Father Tiber is unluckily one of those fathers who do not scruple to swallow up their own children. He has changed his course, and he has changed it in a way which is not a little dangerous for what is still left of Ostia. The diggings which have been carried on by the Italian Government are most praiseworthy, and they have brought to light much that is most interesting and instructive. But streets, storehouses, temples, theatres, will in vain be dug out if the ravenous river god is to gulp them down as soon as they are well dug out. At the present moment one street, with its pavement laid bare, with its buildings still standing on each side, leads in a perilous manner into the stream. That is to say, one end is gone; the rest will soon follow; the pieces of wall nearest to the stream are crumbling to their fall. Surely it would be well to imitate in the haven of Ancus the work done for the mother-city by his successor. Fence in the flood, as the elder Tarquin fenced it in beside the mouth of the cloaca maxima; make a strong wall of defence against the waters, and the remains which are left of Ostia may abide as long as the cloaca maxima itself.
And what is left of Ostia is indeed worth preserving. Only a small part of the town has as yet been dug out; but, even as it is, Ostia is becoming a fair rival to Pompeii. The interest, indeed, is of a somewhat different kind in the two places. Pompeii will come first with the artist and Ostia with the historian. Nothing of any moment ever happened at Pompeii except the destruction and the discovery of Pompeii itself. But a great deal happened at Ostia, and that at widely distant dates. It is perhaps needless to mention that one thing which is said to have happened at Ostia never happened either there or anywhere else – namely, destruction by the Saracens in the fifth century, which is recorded indeed in Murray's "Handbook," but which was certainly unknown to Procopius. Ostia, destroyed by Marius, restored by Sulla, was failing in the days of Strabo to discharge its duty as the haven of Rome. It had yielded to the same enemy which afterwards overcame Ravenna and Pisa; the silt of Father Tiber was too much for it. Yet, notwithstanding this misfortune, notwithstanding the change which it led to, when Claudius found it needful to transfer the harbour of Rome to Portus on the other side of the river, Ostia contrived to live on through all disadvantages. For it has many and great buildings later than Strabo and Claudius, among them an Imperial house with graceful columns, which contains the famous shrine of Mithras. There is abundant evidence that all through the second century of our æra great architectural works were carried on at Ostia. Besides the palace, there is the great central temple, be it of Jupiter or of Vulcan, standing so proudly on its steps. There is a theatre whose columns and inscriptions supply no small materials for study, a theatre of which it might be too much to say that it suggests those of Orange or Taormina, but which certainly suggests that of Arles.
In the sixth century Procopius describes Ostia as lacking walls, and he complains that the road from Ostia to Rome did not follow the course of the river, and was therefore useless as a towing-path. This is eminently true still. The road goes through scenery of various kinds, some rather English-looking, though none very striking; the Tiber makes a far less important feature than we might have looked for. But, if Ostia had no walls in the days of Belisarius, it had no lack of walls in earlier days. The most interesting, from one point of view, among the ruins of Ostia are the remains, forming part of two sides of a square, of the primitive wall, a dry wall of massive stones, belonging no doubt to the period of the first foundation. These were clearly ruinous when the later brick buildings were reared; the wall was broken down, and men built against and upon it; they plastered it; they chamfered its stones for the convenience of plastering, as best suited their purpose. The flourishing town of the second century may well have been wall-less. Rome herself at that date had no defence. The wall of Servius had ceased to serve any military purpose, and the wall of Aurelian was not yet.
The history of Ostia from the ninth century onwards, from the vain attempt of Gregory the Fourth to turn Ostia into Gregoriopolis, belongs to another, though almost adjacent, site. New Ostia, with its castle, its cathedral, its gateway, its one or two narrow streets, but with seemingly hardly a dozen inhabitants, is a sadder sight than old Ostia, with no inhabitant except the stalwart custode, who defends himself against Ostian air by daily doses of quinine. Yet the castle of Cardinal Estouteville ranks high among picturesque fortresses; the cathedral shows a mixture of classical and Gothic detail for which nothing in Rome prepares us; fragments of ancient work lie around; the staircase of the bishop's palace, the palace of the first among cardinals, is rich in ancient inscriptions. But we hasten on to the older site. There is something specially striking in its half-excavated state. We tread the ancient pavement, between the ancient houses, of a street dug out of a cornfield on either side. The wall of Ancus loses itself in a bank of earth. Here a house, there a temple, is dug out, leaving just space enough to see it among surrounding blades of corn. At Pompeii, too, the diggings are not finished; but there one part is dug, another is not; here we thread our way along what is dug with the far greater mass of the undug to right and left of us. So far we are content; the undug may soon be promoted to the state of the dug, and Mother Earth is a safe keeper of antiquities. It is otherwise with Father Tiber. When he is close on one side of us, there is, as our guide truly tells us, no small danger. He once, as Horace witnesses, set forth to destroy the monuments of Numa at Rome; he is clearly minded to do the like by the monuments of Numa's grandson at Ostia.
The Alban Mount
What is the common point of connexion between all the lands and places which bear the name of Alba, Albania, or something like it? They lie so far apart, they are inhabited by people of such utterly different nations and languages, that it is strange if there be any point of connexion among them, while it is at least as strange if the name has settled down on so many remote spots by sheer accident only. We must not forget that our own land has an interest in the question: we dwell in the Isle of Albion, and its northern part is specially Albanach or Albany. An English lady living on the eastern shore of the Hadriatic was lately complimented by a Scotch lady because, being an Albanian, she spoke such good English. It was afterwards suggested to her that she might have answered with a tu quoque or something more; the Englishwoman was no Albanian; the Scotchwoman in a certain sense was. But have Albanians of either of these kinds anything to do either with the Duke of Alva – for in his tongue "non aliud est vivere quam bibere" – or with the Albania beyond the Euxine? Then again it is singular to read, say in Dionysios of Halikarnassos, the local wars of Rome and Alba Longa described under exactly the same gentile names as those by which Imperial Anna describes strife between the New Rome and those Ghegs and Tosks who have again begun to make themselves famous. It is Ῥωμαῖοι and Ἀλβανοί in both cases, without the change of jot or tittle. In this case, at least, we believe that philologers would deny the slightest kindred between the names; but the casual identity is thereby only made the more startling. A malicious critic might say that Anna's Romans were as unlike old Romans as her Albanians could be unlike the men of Alba Longa. But her Romans did at least claim to be Romans, sharers in the inheritance of the wolf and the eagle; while her Albanians certainly laid no claims to any rights in the Alban sow and her thirty pigs.
Rome, undutiful daughter, swept away her mother city so thoroughly that its site has become a matter of dispute. But the name lived on in derivative forms. Alba perished, but the Alban lake and the Alban mount kept their places, to play no small part in the history of Rome. There is the lake, there is the great drain for its waters, so strangely interwoven with the tale of Veii. There is the mount, with the road by which the chariot of Marcellus went up in triumph; there are still the displaced stones of the temple which was the religious centre of the Latin name. But for the fanaticism of the last Stewart, the pillared front of the Latin Jupiter might still form the proudest of crowns for the height on which the gazer from the walls of Rome fixes his eye more commonly than on any other. And, if Alba perished, she did in a manner rise again. The neighbourhood of dead Alba became as favourite a quarter for the villas of Roman nobles as the neighbourhood of living Tusculum. There the great Pompeius had a dwelling; there, according to one version of his story, his body – or perhaps only his head – found a stately tomb, though Hadrian could make his verse by the Alexandrian Shore to say that no tomb had been found for him who had so many temples. But of all villas on Alban ground, of all Albana, the Albanum of the Emperors, with its spacious gardens, its long terraces still to be traced, of course came to be the greatest. The walled station of the Imperial guards, the fellow of the Prætorian camp at Rome, became the kernel of a new town, and Albano still exists, an episcopal city, seat of a cardinal-bishop, and it still keeps its character as a summer retreat for those who, now as of old, seek to escape the smoke and wealth and noise of lordly Rome. Albano and Alba stand in somewhat the same relation as Spalato and Salona. In both cases the new city grew out of an Imperial dwelling-place in the neighborhood of the old. But there is this wide difference between them, that Alba has utterly perished, while Salona survives in ample ruins. Alba had vanished ages and ages before Albano arose. Spalato stood ready to be a city of refuge for those who fled from Salona in her day of overthrow.
The town of Albano itself contains a good many antiquities, the most prominent among which, that which greets the eye on the entrance from Rome, is the huge tower-like pile, so cruelly stripped of its hewn stone, which, truly or falsely, passes for the tomb of Cnæus Pompeius Magnus. More striking on a close examination, though spoiled in its effect by a Papal freak of restoration, is the tomb which hovers between the names of Aruns son of Porsena and the Horatii and Curiatii. Which of the two would Sir George Lewis have looked on as the more impossible? This is the tomb which so singularly forestalled the outline of the Glastonbury kitchen – before its chimneys perished – and thereby of the Museum laboratory at Oxford. A good deal of the wall of the camp, a good deal of an amphitheatre on the hill-side, and several other fragments of the earlier Imperial time, are still to be seen. But after all Albano really exists, not for its own sake, but as a starting-point for the Alban lake and the Alban mount, and hardly less as a starting-point for
… the still glassy lake that sleeps
Beneath Aricia's trees.
Aricia has changed its site; the small modern town has flown up to the level of the arx, to be approached by Albano by almost the only work on which we do not grudge to see the name of Pius IX. The viaduct of that "Pontifex Optimus Maximus" – his votaries seem never quite to distinguish between him and Jupiter – is really a work worthy of Cæsars or consuls. Below it new Aricia has left the elder city, its fragments of walls and of the Appian Way, to be sought for in the valley below, the crater, so wise men tell us, of an extinct volcano, the biggest surely even in this region where craters meet us at every step. Scraps of primæval wall, hardly to be distinguished from the rocks, prepare us for what we are to see at places further out of the ordinary track; walls of the days of Sulla join on alike to what we have seen at Rome, and to what we are to see at Cori. But, after all, the "still glassy lake" to which the grove of the "rex nemorensis" has given the name of Nemi, is the true glory of Aricia. How well we remember being puzzled years and years ago with the thrilling run of the lines —
Those trees in whose dim shadow
The ghastly priest doth reign,
The priest who slew the slayer,
And shall himself be slain.
In these days the fault would be held to lie with the poet for venturing on an allusion which it might need a little research to take in. In those days we thought in such cases that the fault lay with ourselves; we admired without understanding till we lighted on the explanation which enabled us to understand as well. As such a process is a wholesome one, we will leave the lines without comment; not to speak of books of reference, the story will be found, in a somewhat grotesque form, in Dr. Merivale's chapter on the reign of Caius, better known as Caligula.
The ghastly priest has gone from Nemi; but the lake is there still, and the successors of the trees. Access is courteously granted by the present owner, who, we may believe, has never slain anybody, and who, we hope, may not be slain himself. But though we may admire Nemi from close by, we do not fully understand Nemi and its place among things, till we can look upon it in company with its greater fellow of Alba. That is, we must climb the Alban mount, or a good part of its height. But we go first to the Alban lake itself; and to do so we go along its rim and slide down the side of its crater. There we find the emissarius, so deftly cut in the rock, and which has done its work so well for so many ages. Who made it? Camillus, or some one long before Camillus? The men who built the great cloaca of Rome were quite capable of cutting the hole through the rock of Alba, without any message from Delphi or any design against the walls of Veii. Whoever the borer was, he did his work far more thoroughly than Claudius ages afterwards did his for the Fucine lake, which work it has been left for the Torlonia of our own day to finish. But no one, we may suppose, wished at any time to drain the Alban lake, but only to keep it in order. How needful such a work is we do not fully grasp till we can look down from above. Then we take in the strict accuracy of the name crater. We see the two lakes, greater and smaller, side by side, like two basins in the strictest sense, in which, at some time which geologists may fix, but which it is enough for history to say that it was long before the oldest primæval wall, the powers of water supplanted those of fire. We take in how the larger lake, with its narrow rim, in some parts of its circuit with its low rim, liable to be swollen, but with no natural outlet for its waters, might easily come to overflow, if artificial means had not been, in some early time, taken to check it.
But when we have wound our way by the rim of the lake, by the house which the so-called Prisoner of the Vatican never chooses to visit, by the rock which still bears his name, when we have crossed the so-called fields of Hannibal – yet another crater, science tells us – when we have climbed by the triumphal way to the height of Monte Cavo, we do indeed understand the geography and history of Rome and Latium better than we did before. The eye may range over the height of Tusculum and over the battle-ground of Regillus as far as the height of Præneste; it may range hither and thither over many points which have their charm both of history and of nature. But there are two sides to which the historical eye will be attracted before all others. Such a gazer will better take in the position of Rome, as he sees it, with its seven hills shrunk out of sight, a point – rather a line – in the Latin plain, with a wall of Etruscan hills beyond it. We see how utterly different was the position of Rome from the position of the elder cities; we see how she lies in the midst, at the very meeting-place of nations; we see how needful for her it was to make the barrier behind her her own; and we understand her wars with Veii better than before. But we look down too on the Latin plain itself: we look down, we believe, on the vanished site of Rome's mother at our feet; we look out on the great flat once fringed with cities, and on the great and wide sea beyond it. Here, standing forth as an advanced post of the land, we see where
… the Witch's Fortress
O'erhangs the dark-blue seas.
And beyond Circeii and its island satellites, we look on to the more distant height, in so many ages the boundary height, best known as a height by the name of Anxur, but known as a boundary by the name of Terracina. When we think how early Rome became the mistress, not only of the height on which we stand and of the kindred heights around it, but of that long coast-line and its protecting heights, we feel why Rome, so early in her history, had to enter on a career of wide-spreading policy, which could never have suggested itself to a power seated at Veii or at Præneste. Rome, on her great river, with her haven at its mouth, with her long line of sea-faring subjects or allies, felt from a very early time the friendship or enmity of the great powers of the sea to be an important matter. She had to dread Etruscan pirates and Phœnician traders; the Greek of Cumæ might perhaps do something more against her than merely shelter her tyrants. We may believe or not in the connexion between the Alban lake and the fall of Veii, but, as we look one way from beside the few stones that are left of Jove's loftiest temple, we understand how needful it was that Juno of Veii should move to Rome. We may or we may not have the camping-ground of Hannibal behind us; but as we look out seawards we believe in the first treaty with Carthage; we go on to wonder how things had turned about, when Duilius and Lutatius could break the Carthaginian power by sea, and when Hannibal could make his way into Italy by land.
