I will bet one thing,
though - nobody else tried to cut that mule out of her harness.
In the chill late afternoon of a Roman day the guides brought us
back to the city and took us down into the Roman Forum, which is
in a hollow instead of being up on a hill as most folks imagine
it to be until they go to Rome and see it; and we finished up the
day at the Golden House of Nero, hard by the vast ruins of the
Coliseum. We had already visited the Forum once; so this time we
did not stay long; just long enough for some ambitious pickpocket
to get a wallet out of my hip pocket while I was pushing forward
with a flock of other human sheep for a better look at the ruined
portico wherein Mark Antony stood when he delivered his justly
popular funeral oration over the body of the murdered Caesar. I
never did admire the character of Mark Antony with any degree of
extravagance, and since this experience I have felt actually
bitter toward him.
The guidebooks say that no visitor to Rome should miss seeing the
Golden House of Nero. When a guidebook tries to be humorous it
only succeeds in being foolish. Practical jokes are out of place
in a guidebook anyway. Imagine a large, old-fashioned brick
smokehouse, which has been struck by lightning, burned to the roots
and buried in the wreckage, and the site used as a pasture land
for goats for a great many years; imagine the debris as having
been dug out subsequently until a few of the foundation lines are
visible; surround the whole with distressingly homely buildings
of a modern aspect, and stir in a miscellaneous seasoning of beggars
and loafers and souvenir venders - and you have the Golden House
where Nero meant to round out a life already replete with incident
and abounding in romance, but was deterred from so doing by reason
of being cut down in the midst of his activities at a comparatively
early age.
In the presence of the Golden House of Nero I did my level best
to recreate before my mind's eye the scenes that had been enacted
here once on a time. I tried to picture this moldy, knee-high wall,
as a great glittering palace; and yonder broken roadbed as a
splendid Roman highway; and these American-looking tenements on
the surrounding hills as the marble dwellings of the emperors; and
all the broken pillars and shattered porticoes in the distance as
arches of triumph and temples of the gods. I tried to convert the
clustering mendicants into barbarian prisoners clanking by, chained
at wrist and neck and ankle; I sought to imagine the pestersome
flower venders as being vestal virgins; the two unkempt policemen
who loafed nearby, as centurions of the guard; the passing populace
as grave senators in snowy togas; the flaunting underwear on the
many clotheslines as silken banners and gilded trappings.
