Anon, as the fancy writers say, we skirted one of the many wrecked
aqueducts that go looping across country to the distant hills,
like great stone straddlebugs.
In the vicinity of Rome you are
rarely out of sight of one of these aqueducts. The ancient Roman
rulers, you know, curried the favor of the populace by opening
baths. A modern ruler could win undying popularity by closing up
a few.
We slowed up at the Circus of Romulus and found it a very sad
circus, as such things go - no elevated stage, no hippodrome track,
no centerpole, no trapeze, and only one ring. P. T. Barnum would
have been ashamed to own it. A broken wall, following the lines
of an irregular oval; a cabbage patch where the arena had been;
and various tumble-down farmsheds built into the shattered masonry
- this was the Circus of Romulus. However, it was not the circus
of the original Romulus, but of a degenerate successor of the same
name who rose suddenly and fell abruptly after the Christian era
was well begun. Old John J. Romulus would not have stood for that
circus a minute.
No ride on the Appian Way is regarded as complete without half an
hour's stop at the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus; so we stopped.
Guided by a brown Trappist, and all of us bearing twisted tapers
in our hands, we descended by stone steps deep under the skin of
the earth and wandered through dim, dank underground passages,
where thousands of early Christians had lived and hid, and held
clandestine worship before rude stone altars, and had died and
been buried - died in a highly unpleasant fashion, some of them.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 288 of 341
Words from 78136 to 78428
of 93169
