Part 8

In obedience to the Itinerary, it is from Anagni that we make our way to Ferentino. And as we go from Anagni to Ferentino, we better take in the special position of Anagni on the top of its isolated hill. Till we have gone some little distance, we are hardly conscious that Anagni is there at all; gradually the bell-tower rises into view, and the rest of the city follows. A few miles only lead us from the hill of Anagni to the hill of Ferentino. At the first glance it may be that the spot which we have reached does not specially strike as "Ferentinum of the rock." It does not seem to stand on such steep cliffs as many other hill-fortresses, Norba pre-eminently among them. But, when we begin to follow the line of the walls, we find out that, whether Lord Macaulay is right or wrong in speaking of Ferentinum at all, he has at least chosen his epithet wisely. Ferentinum is Ferentinum of the rock. Large parts of the wall stand directly on vast masses of rock, and sometimes rock and wall almost lose themselves in one another. And the walls of Ferentino certainly yield in interest to none of our series. They are still standing through the greater part of their ancient circuit, and for the most part they are of two manifest dates, differing in material and construction. There is an original lower part of the wall, built of huge blocks of lias which we may describe as rude, but less rude than the rudest work at Cori. The height to which this earliest construction of all reaches differs in different parts, but it has in most parts been patched and raised, not only by later repairs of all manner of dates, but long before then by a construction of very respectable antiquity, which would seem venerable if it were not for the elder and more massive stones beneath it. The later work has a general likeness to the walls of Anagnia both in construction and material, and it is distinguished from the more primitive work by the same mark. The pilers of the elder stones had no notion of the arch; the builders of the later wall were perfectly familiar with it. The only complete opening of the earlier work is a small postern with merely inclined sides; but in one of the ancient gates, not far from the modern gate by which the visitor is most likely to enter, stones of the earlier date support an arch of the second date. This ancient entrance is, as usual, warily placed; the giants, or whoever they were, from the days of Tiryns onwards, knew perfectly well how to take a military advantage of any enemy who might attack their strongholds. Another gate, now known as _Porta Maggiore_, is a much more elaborate work, with its inner and outer arch still remaining. Here the gate is placed with great skill, advanced in front at a point where the wall turns at an angle. The wall may be followed, and followed to great advantage, through the more part of its circuit. One hardly knows whether to count it gain or loss that the path becomes most difficult just at the point where, through large later repairs, the wall becomes least interesting. When we have to scramble--all at least save Alpine climbers--with constant thoughts for the safety of our legs and feet, we are less able to take in the differences in the various forms of construction, or to consider the dates to which we may be inclined to refer each. In the more instructive parts of the walls of Ferentino no such necessity is laid upon us; they may be studied with perfect ease, and the outlook from the various points of their circuit may be enjoyed at the same time. And at one point, not far from the _Porta Maggiore_, it will be well to go down the hill a little way to study the long inscription cut in the rock in honour of a local worthy and magistrate, Aulus Quinctilius by name, who seems to have played much the same part at Ferentinum in pagan days which Sir William Harpur played ages later at Bedford. He founded everything that, according to the notions of his day, could be founded. Among other things he ordained that thirty bushels of nuts should be yearly given to be scrambled for by the boys of Ferentinum, without distinction of bond or free. Now is the will of this pious founder carried out? Are there any Italian Charity Commissioners to look into these matters, and to see that the boys get their nuts? Or, if the scrambling for nuts be deemed a nuisance--yet many well-remembered scraps of Latin plead on its behalf--will they devise a scheme for the better employment of the funds? Or has the benefaction of the benevolent Quinctilius, like some benefactions nearer home, been lost altogether? Two or three years ago the _Times_ was filled with letters complaining how a charitable foundation in Somerset had vanished altogether, and how the founder's monument, once standing in the church, had been buried under a neighbouring barn. In one point at least the benevolent Aulus of Ferentinum has been more lucky. When Ferentinum had _quatuorviri_, they did not bury people in their temples, still less did they set up monuments in their temples to people who were not buried in them. So the monument which commemorates the bounty of Aulus Quinctilius stands in the open air clear enough to be seen, well fenced in withal, which the visitor may perhaps regret, as a little time may be wasted in searching for the key. But do his benefactions go on? We will not hint at their having been alienated by Goths or Vandals, by East-Roman exarchs or Lombard princes. Can we trust the really dangerous characters in these parts of the world, Popes, Popes' nephews, Roman princes, and Roman cardinals, who pull down buildings and steal their columns to make their own palaces and villas? Perhaps some of them may have swallowed up the funds which should go in nuts to the boys of Ferentinum.

We have been writing as we dreamed on the spot. As at Anagni, we wish--we must confess the weakness--to see independent Hernicans wherever we can. It gives us therefore a little shock when we come back and turn to our books, and find the walls of Hernican Ferentinum spoken of, without any special emotion, as "Roman." We look up again in a moment, and ask, What is Roman? At Ferentinum the word certainly means something quite different from what it commonly means in Britain and Northern Gaul. There we are happy if we light on anything earlier than the third century A.D. Here no one asks us to accept any date later than Sulla; some will allow us to go as far back as the middle of the second century B.C. We are allowed to think that the walls of Ferentinum were in being when old Carthage and old Corinth were still standing. But we have not yet got to our great piece of evidence. Ferentino contains inscriptions much older and more important--though about the comparative importance some might raise a doubt--than Aulus Quinctilius and his nuts. But we must get to them by the proper road; we must get into what once was the _arx_, what is now the ecclesiastical quarter. Now, at places like Ferentino, ecclesiastical and domestic buildings seem like something kindly thrown into the bargain. We go to look at walls, not at churches or houses; so we get something more than we asked for when we find that Ferentino contains many houses which are worth at least a glance, and several churches which are worth much more than a glance. Indeed at Ferentino the study of walls and that of churches cannot be kept asunder. That some of the great stones have been taken to build the small and now disused church of Saint Lawrence is a slight matter. The most striking feature of Ferentino in any distant view consists of the mass of buildings which is formed by piling the cathedral church, the bell-tower, and the Bishop's palace, on the walls of the _arx_, as a mighty sub-structure. The walls of the _arx_ show the same two dates as the walls of the tower. In one part we have only the vast rude stones of the first period; at another part they support the upper range of the second. The first no one will refuse to our Hernicans, to Hernicans older than Spurius Cassius; but how about the second, the "Roman" date? This is claimed in several inscriptions as the work of the censors Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius--censors, that is, not of Rome but of Ferentinum. The inscription may be seen in the first volume of the great _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, p. 238, and its closer likeness is given at fol. lxvii., lxviii. of the _Priscae Latinitatis Monumenta Epigraphica_. Now Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius are names of a frightfully modern sound, suggesting well-known persons of the days of Divus Julius and Divus Augustus. But no one asks us to think of them here, though we may likely enough have got hold of the Hernican forefathers of those better-known Romans. They had no such need to change their names and the alphabet in which they are written, as when the son of the Etruscan Avle Felimne became the Roman Publius Volumnius. Now our Hirtius and Lollius claim to have built what they built from the foundation; but they must at the outside only mean that they built the later work on the top of the primæval wall. And to a zealous eye even the work of Hirtius and Lollius has an archaic look about it. There are no columns against the wall, as in the _Tabularium_ of Catulus at Rome; the work is finished with a row of triglyphs, not unlike those on the tomb of "Cornelius Lucius Scipio Gnaivod patre prognatus." But we need not go back quite so far as his day. The further back we can go the better, but any time before Sulla will do. The history of Ferentinum allows us to carry our Hernicans of Ferentinum, like our Etruscans of Perusia, down to the Social War. Ferentinum, it must be remembered, was one of those Hernican towns which were true to Rome when Anagnia fought against her. What follows is most instructive. The men of Ferentinum, steady allies of Rome, refused the proffered reward of Roman citizenship, and chose rather to remain a distinct, even if a dependent, community. That is to say, the old Hernican city went on, as long doubtless as to the days of the Social War, a self-ordering commonwealth, with its own laws and magistrates--Aulus Hirtius and Marcus Lollius among them--subject only to the demands of military service which were needed in the wars of Rome, and sometimes perhaps to the unlawful excesses of powerful Romans.

This last fact comes out in a strange story told by Aulus Gellius (x. 3). It is an extract from a speech of Gaius Gracchus, setting forth the wrongs of the Italian allies. The wife of a Roman prætor suddenly wished the public baths of Ferentinum to be cleared and made ready for herself. The thing was not done so fast as the great lady wished; so her husband bade the two quæstors of the town to be seized; one was scourged, the other threw himself over the wall. This tale, told in the words of Gracchus, proves a good deal as to the arbitrary way in which Roman magistrates are not ashamed to deal with the dependent cities even of Italy, whatever might be their formal relation to Rome.

It is of less importance that Gellius casually speaks of the town as a _municipium_, while Livy also casually implies its possession of the Latin franchise. Such _obiter dicta_ do not go for very much. Scholars sometimes get astray in these times from forgetting that, not only casual sayings, but even formal documents, may sometimes err. Thus not long ago we saw a solemn paper in which a public officer, bound to accuracy, a clerk of the peace, had to describe several towns in the West of England. We here read of "the county of the city of Bristol," the "borough of Gloucester," the "borough of Bath," and the "borough of Taunton." An inquirer some ages hence might be misled into forgetting that Bath is a "city" and Gloucester even a "county of a city." May we not sometimes get wrong about _municipia_ and Latin colonies from the same kind of cause? Ferentinum was not, in the strict sense, a _municipium_, but an allied Hernican commonwealth. In the like sort, we once saw an official document from a high sheriff calling on the electors of a county to elect, not a "knight of the shire," as they had done for six hundred years, but a hitherto unheard-of being called a "member of Parliament." Is it not possible then that Livy, and even Cicero, may sometimes use a wrong phrase in talking of tribes, _curiae_, and centuries, in ages long before their own day?

The walls then, though called "Roman" in a vague sense--that is, it would seem, simply not primæval, like those of Cori and Segni--are doubtless Hernican in the sense of being built while Ferentinum was still a separate Hernican community. The walls that we see are most likely the walls over which the unlucky quæstor threw himself. The walls of the _arx_, where we read the legend of Hirtius and Lollius, connect the Hernican town with later times. Just at the point where the inscription is they are carried up to form the Bishop's palace, and from the middle of one side rises the bell-tower of the cathedral--a very good example of the usual Romanesque type of such buildings. The church of Ferentino is small and unpretending, and a good deal damaged within, but it still keeps its main features, not only its bell-tower, but its west front, its apses, its ranges of windows. A little restoration, in the true sense of the word, would soon make it into as good a specimen of its own class as could be needed. But, unless we altogether misunderstood the words of one of its own clergy, antiquity and simplicity are not esteemed at Ferentino. The little minster is convicted of the crime of being old, a charge which, except by comparison with the walls beneath it, cannot be denied. Only, if the church be an offender on this score, how fearful must be the crime of the walls? Unless we misunderstood in the most amazing way what we heard with our own ears, the church of Ferentino, convicted of the crime of old age, is sentenced to destruction. A new church is actually begun; when it is finished the old one is to go. Happily the new one as yet stands still for want of funds; let us hope that funds may refuse to drop in till a wiser Bishop and Chapter shall rule at Ferentino.

The church at Ferentino is dedicated to Saint Ambrose, who may be seen there in the worldly garb of the unbaptized prefect, before the infant voice greeted him as Bishop of Milan. And in the inner buildings of the _arx_--buildings most worthy of a visit on their own account--strange tales lurk of the sufferings of the saint, which seem to find no place either in history or in received legend. Among other things he was thrown into a boiling caldron. Down below is another church _Santa Maria Maggiore_, some centuries younger than the cathedral, and a very pretty example of its style; which, as far as we know, no one designs to destroy. Singularly graceful, but singularly un-Italian, it strikes by the power of contrast, as it rises above the walls, or as we go up to it from the gate which shares its surname. A few other ecclesiastical and domestic scraps may also be picked up in the city of the rock. The primitive remains are the great object in all these places; but it is always a gain when the walls shelter something which has an interest of another kind. The walls of the stout-hearted people who chose rather to be citizens of Ferentinum than citizens of Rome lose nothing by having been turned to an unlooked-for use as the holy places of their successors, perhaps descendants, of another age and another creed.

III. Alatri.

The tale of those Hernican cities, fenced in with primæval walls, among which we have been lately sojourning, is worthily brought to an end at Alatri. Among its immediate Hernican fellows that town must certainly claim the highest place; it might on some grounds claim the highest place, even if we throw in Old-Latin and Volscian rivals. Yet it is the one which has the least history. There is very little to say about it, except that Alatrium, like Ferentinum, was faithful to Rome, but preferred to keep its separate Hernican being rather than accept the proffered reward of Roman citizenship. It therefore doubtless remained a distinct commonwealth down to the Social War. And here at least there can be no question about dates. Alatri is not especially rich in mediæval antiquities; it has still less claim to be called rich in Roman antiquities. Nor does it supply us with the work of more or less Romanized Hernicans, like the censors of Ferentinum. At Alatri nearly everything that we care about is strictly primæval. We cannot reasonably doubt that both the circuits of wall at which we now look were there in the days of Spurius Cassius, and were by no means new then.

Alatri seems to have been somewhat of an out-of-the-way place in all ages. Not lying on any of the great roads of Italy, it has no place in the Itineraries, and now it lies much further than Anagni or Ferentino--nay, even than Cori and Norba, from common tracks of going and from the common haunts of men. Yet it cannot be looked on as seriously inaccessible; it may at least be reached without calling in the help of asses and mules. The party whose track we are now following--a party, be it noticed, numbering two ladies among them--reached Alatri in a carriage from Frosinone, having slept there after seeing Ferentino. The old Hernican town of Frusino had scant justice done to it by our wayfarers; as no man or book had pointed it out as a seat of primitive walls, it was treated merely as a resting-place between the wonders of Ferentino and the wonders of Alatri. Frosinone was slept in, but was not examined; yet a glance from its railway station, the point which connects Alatri with the modern world, shows that it at least possesses a by no means contemptible bell-tower. From Frosinone then our travellers made their way to Alatri, and, as Alatri gradually rose before them, they were for a while puzzled, perhaps for a while even disappointed, with what they saw. But it was not for lack of a striking object to crown the Alatrian hill-top. Of all the walls of our series, the inner range of the walls of Alatri, the walls which fence in the _arx_, are the most prominent in a distant view. Even the circuit of empty Norba, beyond our immediate range, hardly outdoes these defences of a still inhabited town. At Alatri indeed the primæval walls are so prominent that in the distant view no one would suspect them of being primæval walls at all. They are still so nearly perfect that they can and do discharge what may be looked on as a survival of their original function. They still fence in the innermost and loftiest quarter of the town, where, as in so many other cases, the ancient citadel has become the episcopal precinct. But at Alatri the episcopal precinct puts on a distinct and central character which is rarely found in Italian cities. The _arx_ is not in a corner, but in the middle; the lower town, fenced in by the wall of its own outer circuit, lies around it on every side. The _arx_ forms an open, lofty, and airy platform, looking forth from every point of the compass on the mountains which keep watch around--on the little towns, Veroli among them, perched here and there on their heights--on the houses and churches of Alatri, covering the slope of the hill which the _arx_ crowns. It is seldom that we find in an Italian town a church or any other building standing in this way free on a commanding site, not hemmed in on any side by parasitical buildings. These hill-towns are perhaps better off in this respect than most others; at Anagni, at Ferentino, the cathedral churches stand grandly on their heights, comparatively free from all buildings except their own proper companions. But there is not the wide, open space around them which surrounds the church of Alatri. One cannot help wishing that some more worthy building, either the primæval temple itself or some more fitting successor, occupied so noble a site, a site in truth which needs--let us say either the Parthenôn of Athens or the Parthenôn of Lincoln to do it justice. But the only thing that can be said for the cathedral church of Alatri is that the lower part of its wall is part of the _cella_ of the primæval temple. Here we have something even more than can be seen at Segni. We know not what may have been added in the way of a pillared front; but it is plain that, as far as the main walls are concerned, the building which was transformed into a Christian church was actually the house of pagan worship itself. And it was a house going back, not to dated Emperors or consuls, but to the unrecorded age which reared these cities great and fenced up to heaven. There is the terrace, there is the wall of the _cella_, wrought of the same wonderful masonry as the walls of the surrounding _arx_, as the walls of the yet again surrounding city. It is strange indeed to see the ordinary rites of Christian worship, the ordinary accompaniments of a Christian church, dwelling, as at Rome and Syracuse, within the temples of a creed, fallen indeed but perfectly familiar. But here we see them within walls reared in honour of we know not what--gods of unchronicled days, gods alongside of whom Jupiter of the Capitol may have seemed as strange and foreign as Mithras and Serapis now seem alongside of Jupiter of the Capitol.