Roman Holidays and Others

Temple of Jupiter Stator was not the first nor yet the second visit I had paid the place. There had been intermediate mornings when I met two fri

he moment I was aware that this spot or that, though it looked so improbable, was the scene of deeds which will reverberate forever; they taught me to be tolerant of what I had too lightly supposed fables as serious traditions closely verging on facts. I learned to believe again that the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, because she had her den no great way off on the Palatine, and that Romulus himself had really lived, since he had died and was buried in the Forum, where they showed me his tomb, or as much of it as I could imagine in the sullen little cellar so called. They also showed me the rostrum where the Roman orators addressed the mass-meetings of the republican times, and they showed me the lake, or the puddle left of it, into which Curtius (or

already. In fact, until his work in the Roman Forum is finished, the Forum of Trajan must remain his greatest achievement, and the sculptured column of the great emperor must serve equally as the archaeologist's monument. I do not remember why in the old time I should have kept coming to look at that column and study the sculptured history of Trajan's campaigns, toiling around it to its top. I think one could then get close to its base, as now one cannot, what with the deepening of the Forum to its antique level and the enclosure of the whole space with an iron rail. The area below is free only to a large company of those cats which seem to have their dwelling among all the ruins and restorations of ancient Rome. People come to feed the Trajan cats with the fish sold near by for the

ir of the statuary's boy. It performed this office with a very motherly anxiety, seated on the top of a high rotary table where ordinarily the statuary worked at his carving, and pausing from time to time, as it licked the boy's

relic of ancient Rome and so much more impressive, in its all but unbroken peristyle, than the later but recumbent claimant to its identity that I am sure the owners of the little bronze or alabaster copies of it scattered over the world must share my pious reluctance. The custodian is still very proud of it, and would have lectured me upon it much longer than I let him; as it was, he kept me while he could cast a blazing copy of the Popolo Romano into the cavernous crypt under

f the steps to the Campidoglio, with Castor and Pollux beside their horses at top, may be a fortunate accident of his course. If this happens it will help to rehabilitate for him the Rome of the paganism to which these divinities remained true through all temptations to Judaize during the unnumbered centuries of their sojourn

so affected me, for I do not know that my veneration was due it more than many other fragments of the past; but no arch or pillar of them all seems so impressive, so pathetic. To make the reader the greatest possible confidence, I will own that I passed five times through the Piazza Colonna to my tailor's in the next piazza (at Rome your tailor wishes you to try on till you have almost worn your new clothes out in the ordeal) before I realized that the Column of Marcus Aurelius was not the more famous Column of Trajan. There is, in fact, a strong family likeness between these columns, both being bandaged round from bottom to top with the tale of the imperial achievements and having a general effect in

ality 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,

m 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 yo

faces from age to age; and it will be well for the very wealthy members of our smart

d 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 sh

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

Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously built upon by the multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to house themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other, would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have been like in its glory. But the ruined Mount Morris, even allowing for the natural growth of the landscape in two thousand years, could show no such prospect twenty centuries hence as we got that morning from a bit of wilding garden near the Convent of San Bonaventura, on the brow of the Palatine. Some snowy tops pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon, and across the Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell down and stumbled to their legs again. The Baths of Caracalla bulked up in rugged, monstrous fragments, and then in the foreground, filling the whole eye, the Colosseum rose and stood, and all Rome sank round it. The Forum lay deep under us, vainly struggling with the broken syllab