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.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 72 of 186
Words from 37140 to 37641
of 97259
