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I.—The Site of Rome and the Walls of Rome.

One of the principal points in the early history of every nation is the effect of the natural configuration of the country in which their first settlements are formed upon the subsequent character of the people.

The site of Rome consists of several separate hills, upon which distinct groups of original settlers established themselves. These groups after a temporary rivalry seem to have agreed to form a confederation, in which the leading part was assigned to the Palatine settlement. Such was the origin of that special aptitude shown by the Romans for forming coalitions with rival states, and also of that most valuable trait in their political character, their reverence for law as laid down by a central authority, for each group was taught by their confederate union to regard itself as sharing that central authority. Hence, the historian Livy remarks that under the Roman Republic which built up the power of Rome, the command of law was superior to that of men. But besides this aptitude for confederate union and respect for central authority which the nature of the site seems to have instilled into them, the Romans were also taught by it a readiness to meet their enemies in the open field, and not to trust much to the protection of steep crags or fortified posts. None of the hills of Rome afforded a strong acropolis, such as most other ancient cities possessed. The Capitol of Rome was by no means impregnable. Its central depression rendered it always more or less accessible and liable to be seized by a powerful enemy. The Palatine, though partially fortified, was never considered a strong position. Hence we find that the Servian walls were the only fortifications erected to protect Rome for more than eight hundred years, from the time of Servius down to that of Aurelian. The statement of Strabo, that the absence of fortifications round Rome was to be accounted for by the native spirit of the Romans, which was “to defend their walls by their men, and not their men by their walls,” is evidently full of meaning.

II.—Monumental History.

Relics of the two great public works executed during the regal period of Roman history still remain in the venerable stone arches of the main drain which was constructed to make the Forum valley more habitable, and in the rough portions of the Servian walls which have been found on the Aventine and Quirinal Hills. It is probable that the ruined walls at the edge of the Palatine are anterior to the monuments of the time of Servius.

Of the earlier republican period of Roman history there are no monumental ruins now existing. The ruins which have been excavated on the Capitoline Hill and the basement of the Temple of Vesta in the Forum date from the regal epoch. And this is what might be naturally expected from the dislike of a republican government to require the forced labour anciently called for in the erection of large buildings.

But in the later period of the Roman republic some of the oligarchical leaders and successful generals constructed large buildings, of which traces can now be found. Thus the foundations of the temples and of the portico built in the Campus Martius by Metellus Macedonicus and by Cn. Octavius can be still recognised, and ruins of the immense stone theatre of Pompeius Magnus remain to the present day. But the greater portion of the ruins of Rome dates from the Augustan age and the subsequent imperial ages. First among them stands the Pantheon, which has kept its roof and its original structure uninjured through the storms and earthquakes and the wasting hand of time during more than nineteen centuries. It bears the date of B.C. 27 on the frieze of its portico. The Theatre of Marcellus must be next mentioned, and the Mausoleum of Augustus. To the Julian dynasty may be also ascribed the colossal columns of the Temple of Mars Ultor, with the huge wall adjoining them, and the Egyptian obelisks which still decorate some of the piazzas. To the same dynasty we owe the vast arches of the Claudian aqueduct, and the massive brick foundation of the Palatine palace.

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The Flavian dynasty, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian changed the characteristic features of the city of Rome. Where Caligula and Nero had covered the ground with costly palaces and pleasure-grounds, the Flavian emperors built the resorts of military and of national life. The Coliseum and the Arch of Titus were the fit accompaniments of their world-subduing, blood-thirsty legions, and the Baths of Titus, and the public reception rooms on the Palatine, encouraged the citizen life of Rome once more to develop itself.

The political aims and imperial ideas of Trajan, Hadrian and the Antonines are nobly illustrated by the modifications and enlargements they introduced in the structure and extent of the city of Rome. Trajan in his magnificent Forum and library sought to encourage the metropolitan life and literary tastes of the nation, while on his storied column he recorded their world-wide triumphs and reminded them of their enormous power.

The Mausoleum of Hadrian remains to commemorate the vast and ponderous strength of his rule, and the Aurelian Column stands to attest the lofty magnificence of the Antonine dynasty.

In the reign of Commodus, between the Antonine era and the time of Severus, a great fire devastated the central districts of Rome. The restorations effected by Severus and the popular policy of his successors are commemorated in the Arch of Severus, the Portico of the Pantheon, and the huge ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. The defensive power of the Roman nation then became gradually weaker and weaker, till in sixty years after the time of Caracalla, Aurelian commenced the sad task of home fortification. His walls, which were completed a hundred years later by Honorius, still surround the greater part of Rome. During these hundred years the power of the Constantinian rule, of which the great basilica and arch remain monuments, and the warlike courage of Diocletian revived for a time the imperial spirit at Rome.

The last and most familiar of the monuments which follow the transfer of power from Rome to Constantinople is the Column of Phocas in the Forum, erected when three centuries of desolation had followed the grandeur of Constantine and his dynasty.

The Vatican Hill and the northern end of the Transtiberine district were not enclosed within walls till the time of Pope Leo IV. He undertook in A.D. 848 the enclosure of St. Peter’s and the Vatican Hill, thus forming that district into a separate town, which was named after the Pope Civitas Leoniana. The western wall of this enclosure may still be traced by its ruins in the garden of the Vatican palace. After the successive destructions and minor repairs of the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, in 1527 the architect San Gallo was employed to erect huge bastions on the wall of Rome, which he placed chiefly between the Porta Ostiense and the Porta Appia. In 1628 Pope Urban VIII. restored the walls on the left bank, and subsequently in 1642 he proceeded to erect the walls which now stand between the Porta Portese and the Porta Cavallegieri, where the arms of that Pope are still affixed to the walls. This was the final important addition to the main walls of the city.

III.—Roman Building and Architecture.

The earliest form of Roman masonry, consisting of rectangular tufa blocks placed in layers alternately parallel to and across the line of the wall, so as to bind the mass together firmly, may be best seen in the ancient fragments of the Servian wall on the Aventine and the Quirinal Hills and in the ruins on the western slope of the Palatine. This kind of building is the natural product of the peculiar parallel cleavage in the tufaceous rocks of the Roman hills. In those parts of the Campagna where basalt rather than tufa becomes the usual material, as at Præneste, we find polygonal masonry. One specimen of a mode of construction anterior to the introduction of the arch into Roman masonry is left us at Rome. This is the vault of the old well-house near the Capitol called the Mamertine Prison, where we find overlapping horizontal blocks of stone which originally met in a conical roof, but are now truncated and capped by a mass of stones cramped together with iron. That the principle of the arch was known in the regal period of Rome is shown by the great arch of the Cloaca Maxima. But no arches remain of so early a date which are not subterranean, and it is not likely that the arch was used in the early temples at Rome. These were, as we learn from Vitruvius, constructed in the so-called Tuscan style, which was the Italian contemporary of the Greek Doric. It is possible that the columns in the walls of S. Maria in Cosmedin, which are placed at unusual distances from each other, may have been an imperial restoration of the Temple of Ceres, after the old Tuscan fashion (Fig. 1). The next modification of architectural style, which is usually called, from the general influence of the Greek colonists on Latin art, the Tusco-Doric order, may be seen in the lowest range of columns and bases in the Theatre of Marcellus. The shaft of these columns is much more slender than in the Grecian Doric, and only partially fluted, if at all; while a cima recta is substituted for the echinus of the capitals (Figs. 2 and 3). The position of the triglyphs and the proportions of the cornice were also much changed, and the whole effect became less massive and bold than that of the Tuscan temples.

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The ancient Tuscan arrangement of the interior of temples remained after this modification of their columns and capitals. The three ruins which now occupy the most prominent place at the northern end of the Forum, the Temples of Saturn, of Concord, and of Vespasian, all retain the plan called prostylos by Vitruvius. The Temple of Concord is especially remarkable for the union of a broad Tuscan cella with a narrow Greek portico. An alteration peculiarly Roman was made in the cella of the Greek temple. Instead of surrounding this part of a temple with rows of columns, the Romans clothed it with pilasters, thus introducing the mode of construction deservedly stigmatised by Vitruvius, under the name pseudoperipteral (Fig. 4). This may be seen in the ruin commonly called by the name of the Temple of Fortuna Virilis at Rome.

Fig. 1.

The Greek Ionic order became known and employed by the Romans early in the third century B.C. The Tomb of Scipio Barbatus shows the Ionic volute and dentil mixed with the Doric triglyph and gutta. The Roman alterations in the Ionic capital may be best seen in the pillars of the Temple of Saturn, and in the second range of columns surrounding the Theatre of Marcellus and the Coliseum. Specimens may also be seen in the basilica of S. Lorenzo fuori le Mura, and in the church of S. Maria in Trastevere, which have been transferred from the ancient temples. The distinctive Roman modification was the position of the volutes diagonally instead of laterally (Figs. 5 and 6).

Fig. 2.

It is supposed that the first introduction of the Greek Corinthian order into Rome was brought about by the barbarian act of Sulla, in transporting the columns of the Temple of Zeus from Athens to the Capitoline Temple of Jupiter. Of the remaining specimens of this order in Rome, the portico of the Pantheon is the oldest. In that building the capitals appear somewhat shorter and broader than in the later examples, at the ruins of the Temple of Castor in the Forum (Fig. 7), and in the peristyle of Nerva’s Forum called the Colonnacce.

Fig. 3.

The Composite capital, for it can hardly be called an order, as there is nothing in the entablature or the base to distinguish it from the Corinthian, was formed probably under the patronage of the early emperors. The earliest instance we have of it now extant in Rome, is in the Arch of Titus (Fig. 8) and there are only three other ruins where it is found. These are, the Arch of Septimius Severus, the Arch of the Goldsmiths, and the Baths of Diocletian, at Sta. Maria degli Angeli, where it is mixed up with Corinthian capitals. The peculiar combination of which it consists, the superposition of the Ionic volutes upon two rings of Corinthian acanthus leaves, is not generally considered a very happy artistic design. Hope says of it, that “instead of being a new creation of genius, it gave evidence of poverty to invent and ignorance to combine,” and Fergusson is hardly more complimentary to the Roman architects.

Fig. 4.

But though we must deny to this Roman adaptation of Greek forms the credit of originality, or even of symmetrical design, yet its rich appearance was peculiarly suited to the lavish ornamentation with which the Roman emperors delighted to trick out their palaces and halls, and it well represents to us the character of the Roman imperial architecture, with its indiscriminate combination of mouldings and profusion of gaudy detail.

The three great triumphal arches of Titus, Septimius Severus, and Constantine at Rome, and also the Arch of Drusus, are decorated with an unmeaning and foreign dress. In the Arch of Constantine alone, the columns which stand in front are in some measure justified by the statues they support.

Of the minor archways at Rome, that of Gallienus has Corinthian pilasters in the roughest style of art, the Janus Quadrifrons probably had rows of Corinthian columns between its niches, and the small gateway near it has decorative pilasters with Composite capitals. On the other hand, the Arch of Dolabella on the Cælian, which has a single line as cornice, and the Porta S. Lorenzo are examples of the striking effect of a simple arch without Greek ornament. The unmeaning pediments and tasteless columns with which most of these arches are adorned, remind us of Pope’s recipe for the front of a villa, “Clap four slices of pilaster on’t; that, laid with bits of rustic, makes a front.”

Fig. 5.

Colossal columns were as genuine a creation of Imperial Rome as triumphal arches. In both the sculpture had become subordinate to the pedestal. The idea of placing a statue upon the top of a column was probably unknown to the Greeks, or at least, never carried out on the immense scale of the two great Roman Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius. It must not, however, be forgotten, that the Column of Trajan, and probably also that of Marcus Aurelius, was enclosed within a narrow court, and that the bas-reliefs were intended to be seen from the roofs and windows of the surrounding buildings.

Fig. 6.

Some of the most characteristic remains of the Roman national taste in architecture are the Mausoleum of Hadrian, and the Tombs of Cæcilia Metella and of Plautius. The ponderous walls of these massive and indestructible marvels of masonry were essentially Roman, but in their external decorations we find a strange combination of foreign designs. The Mausoleum of Hadrian was dressed up with an array of pilasters, columns, and statues, and the Mausoleum of Augustus was covered with terraces and trees, in imitation of the Temple of Belus at Babylon.

The most conspicuous among the Roman appropriations of foreign monumental designs were the oriental obelisks which were brought from Egypt, and erected in the Circi at Rome and in front of some of the buildings, and some of which still stand in the piazzas of modern Rome. The remains of eleven of these have been found. The Romans often misused them by placing them alone, and not following the Egyptian method of always setting them in pairs.

Fig. 7.

The huge vaulted arches of brick-work and concrete which remain in the Baths of Caracalla, and the Basilica of Constantine, and the massive arches of the Claudian Aqueduct, are the glory of Roman architecture. For the Coliseum, astounding as are its durability and massive grandeur, is not so illustrative of the special Roman development of the use of the arch and of brick-work as are the other great ruins just mentioned. We see embodied in them the indomitable energy which bridged the valleys and tunnelled through the hills, but which possessed no eye for fine proportion of outline or symmetrical and harmonious combination of details. Brickwork was the material in which the characteristic Roman ruins were executed. The Coliseum and the Theatre of Marcellus are dressed in Greek robes, while the brick arches of the aqueducts, and the massive structure of the Baths of Caracalla reflect the peculiar genius and character of the Roman imperial power.

Fig. 8.