Always those four gateways!
For a short after-breakfast ramble nothing is comparable to that green
space on the summit of the citadel. Hither I wend my way every morning,
to take my fill of the panorama and meditate upon the vanity of human
wishes. The less you have seen of localities like Tiryns the more you
will be amazed at this impressive and mysterious fastness. That portal,
those blocks - what Titans fitted them into their places? Well, we have
now learnt a little something about those Titans and their methods. From
this point you can see the old Roman road that led into Alatri; it
climbs up the hill in straightforward fashion, intersecting the broad
modern "Via Romana" - a goat-track, nowadays....
These Alatri remains are wonderful - more so than many of the sites which
old Ramage so diligently explored. Why did he fail to "satisfy his
curiosity" in regard to them? He utters not a word about Alatri. Yet he
stayed at the neighbouring Frosinone and makes some good observations
about the place; he stayed at the neighbouring Ferentino and does the
same. Was he more "pressed for time" than usual? We certainly find him
"hurrying down" past Anagni near-by, of whose imposing citadel he again
says nothing whatever....
I am now, at the end of several months, beginning to know Ramage fairly
well. I hope to know him still better ere we part company, if ever we
do. It takes time, this interpretation, this process of grafting one
mind upon another. For he does not supply mere information. A fig for
information. That would be easy to digest. He supplies character, which
is tougher fare. His book, unassuming as it is, comes up to my test of
what such literature should be. It reveals a personality. It contains a
philosophy of life.
And what is the dominating trait of this old Scotsman? The historical
sense. Ancient inscriptions interested him more than anything else. He
copied many of them during his trip; fifty, I should think; and it is no
small labour, as any one who has tried it can testify, to decipher these
half-obliterated records often placed in the most inconvenient
situations (he seems to have taken no squeezes). To have busied himself
thus was to his credit in an age whose chief concern, as regards
antiquity, consisted in plundering works of art for ornamental purposes.
Ramage did not collect bric-a-brac like other travellers; he collected
knowledge of humanity and its institutions, such knowledge as
inscriptions reveal. It is good to hear him discoursing upon these
documents in stone, these genealogies of the past, with a pleasingly
sentimental erudition. He likes them not in any dry-as-dust fashion, but
for the light they throw upon the living world of his day.
