We Have But To Use The
Little Common-Sense Which Heaven Has Vouchsafed Some Of Us In Order To
Realize
That Rome, either republican or imperial, was a state for which
we can have no genuine reverence, and that mostly
The ruins of her past
can stir in us no finer emotion than wonder. But necessarily, for the
sake of knowledge, and of ascertaining just what quantity and quality of
human interest the material records of Roman antiquity embody,
archaeology must devote itself with all possible piety to their
recovery. The removal, handful by handful, of the earth from the grave
of the past which the whole Forum is, tomb upon tomb, is as dramatic a
spectacle as anything one can well witness; for that soil is richer than
any gold-mine in its potentiality of treasure, and it must be strictly
scrutinized, almost by particles, lest some gem of art should be cast
aside with the accumulated rubbish of centuries. Yet this drama,
poignantly suggestive as it always must be, was the least incident of
that morning in the Forum which it was my fortune to pass there with
other better if not older tourists as guest of the Genius Loci. It was
not quite a public event, though the Commend atore Boni is so well known
to the higher journalism, and even to fiction (as the reader of Anatole
France's _La Pierre Blanche_ will not have forgotten), that nothing
which he archseolog-ically does is without public interest, and this
excursion in the domain of antiquity was expected to result in
identifying the site of the Temple of Jupiter Stator.
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