In Spite Of Them, The Sight Of The Temple Does Mightily Lift
The Heart; And Though You May Have Had, As I Had, Forty-Odd Years To
Believe In It, You Must Waver In Doubt Of Its Reality Whenever You See
It.
It seems too great to be true, standing there in its immortal
sublimity, the temple of all the gods by pagan creation, and all the
saints by Christian consecration, and challenging your veneration
equally as classic or catholic.
It is worthy the honor ascribed to it in
the very latest edition of Murray's _Handbook_ as "the best-preserved
monument of ancient Rome"; worthy the praise of the fastidious and
difficult Hare as "the most perfect pagan building in the city"; worthy
whatever higher laud my unconsulted Baedeker bestows upon it. But I
speak of the outside; and let not the traveller grieve if he comes upon
it at the noon hour, as I did last, and finds its vast bronze doors
closing against him until three o'clock; there are many sadder things in
life than not seeing the interior of the Pantheon. The gods are all
gone, and the saints are gone or going, for the State has taken the
Pantheon from the Church and is making it a national mausoleum. Victor
Emmanuel the Great and Umberto the Kind already lie there; but otherwise
the wide Cyclopean eye of the opening in the roof of the rotunda looks
down upon a vacancy which even your own name, as written in the
visitors' book, in the keeping of a solemn beadle, does not suffice to
fill, and which the lingering side altars scarcely relieve.
I proved the fact by successive visits; but, after all my content with
the outside of the Pantheon, I came to think that what you want in Rome
is not the best-preserved monument, not the most perfect pagan building,
but the most ruinous ruin you can get. I am not sure that you get this
in the mouldering memorials of the past on the Palatine Hill, but you
get something more nearly like it than anything I can think of at the
moment. In that imperial and patrician and plutocratic residential
quarter you see, if you are of the moderately moneyed middle class, what
the pride of life must always come to when it has its way; and your
consolation is full if you pause to reflect how some day Fifth Avenue
and the two millionaire blocks eastward will be as the Palatine now is.
Riches and power are of the same make in every time, though they may
wear different faces from age to age; and it will be well for the very
wealthy members of our smart set to keep this fact in mind when they
visit that huge sepulchre of human vainglory.
But I will not pretend that I did so myself that matchless April morning
when I climbed over the ruins of the Palatine and found the sun rather
sick-eningly hot there. That is to say, it was so in the open spaces
which were respectively called the house of this emperor and that, the
temple of this deity or that, whose divine honors half the Caesars
shared; in the Stadium, beside the Lupercal, and the like. The Lupercal
was really imaginable as the home of the patroness wolf of Rome, being a
wild knot of hill fitly overgrown with brambles and bushes, and looking
very probably the spot where Caesar would thrice have refused the crown
that Antony offered him. But for the rest, one ruin might very well pass
for another; a temple with a broken statue and the stumps of a few
columns could very easily deceive any one but an archaeologist.
Fortunately we had the charming companionship of one of the most amiable
of archaeologists, who was none the less learned for being a woman; and
she made even me dimly aware of identities which would else have been
lost upon me. To be sure, I think that without help I should have known
the Stadium when I came to it, because it seemed studied from that in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, though it was indefinitely more
dilapidated, was so obviously meant for the same sorts of games and
races. I do not know but it was larger than the Cambridge Stadium,
though I will not speak so confidently of its size as of that deathly
cold in the vaults and subterranean passages by which we found our way
to the burning upper air out of the foundations and basements of palaces
and temples and libraries and theatres that had ceased to be.
One of the most comfortable of these galleries was that in which
Caligula was justly done to death, or, if not Caligula, it was some
other tyrant who deserved as little to live. But for our guide I should
not have remembered his slaughter there, and how much satisfaction it
had given me when I first read of it in Goldsmith's _History of Rome;_
and really you must not acquaint yourself too early with such facts, for
you forget them just when you could turn them to account. History is apt
to forsake you in the scene of it and come lagging hack afterward; and
you cannot hope always to have an archaeologist at your elbow to remind
you of things you have forgotten or possibly have not known. Suetonius,
Plutarch, De Quincey, Gibbon, these are no bad preparations for a visit
to the Palatine, but it is better to have read them yesterday than the
day before if you wish to draw suddenly upon them for associations with
any specific spot. If I were to go again to the Palatine, I would take
care to fortify myself with such structural facts from Hare's _Walks in
Rome,_ or from Murray, or even from Baedeker, as that it was the home of
Augustus and Tiberius, Domitian and Nero and Caligula and Septimius
Severus and Germanicus, and a very few of their next friends, and that
it radically differed from the Forum in being exclusively private and
personal to the residents, while that was inclusively public and common
to the whole world.
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