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quoting a few lines-would we had space for more—especially the first stanza, which so well displays the present aspect of the monument:

But who was she, the Lady of the dead
Tomb'd in a palace? Was she chaste and fair?
Worthy a king's, or more, a Roman's bed?
What race of chiefs and heroes did she bear?
What daughter of her beauties was the heir?
How lived-how loved-how died she?
So honour'd-and conspicuously there,
Where meaner relics must not dare to rot,
Placed to commemorate a more than mortal lot?

Thus much alone we know-Metella died,

Was she not

The wealthiest Roman's wife: Behold his love or pride.

For

Within the last three miles from Rome the approach to the great city was marked by the larger intermingling of other stately and sacred edifices with the monuments of the dead. There was the temple of the Deus Rediculus, indicating the height from which Hannibal is said to have surveyed and then turned his back on unassailable Rome. No wonder! Hannibal, ever conqueror in the field-at Trebia, at Thrasymene, at Cannæ,-was baffled by almost every town which he attempted to besiege; for his army was utterly unfit for such operations, unprovided with the materials for a siege,—the mining tools, the hands accustomed to use them, the engines, and all the apparatus necessary for such work. Terror or treachery opened the gates of fatal Capua.

After this appear, on one side of the road, the valley and fountain of Egeria, of which the holy romance, the venerable reminiscences of Numa, were, to the indignation of Juvenal, profaned in his day with its occupation by the miserable Jews. These were no longer flourishing merchants-it may have been already money-lenders, for such, as we know from Cicero, they were in Asia Minor-but crushed down, by the hatred excited by the obstinate war, and by the influx of slaves (now scattered by millions throughout the Roman Empire), into mean pedlars,

and defiling the soil and the waters of this sacred spot with their provision-baskets and pallets of straw.

The noble arch of Drusus perhaps bestrode the way; and other temples crowded the road up to the Capenian Gate. But there were monuments too, and those singularly illustrative of almost every period in the annals of Rome. There was the tomb of Romolus, the son of the last Pagan Emperor of Rome. Maxentius, perhaps in honour of that son, had laid out a vast circus, as though the votive offering of expiring Paganism. There was the tomb of Geta, who fell by the fratricidal hand of Caracalla, a fearful memorial of the crimes of what we call the second period of the empire. There were the sepulchres of the freedmen of Augustus, and of the freedmen of Livia, both, as might be expected, very capacious. The ashes of Augustus himself, as is well known, reposed in the Campus Martius. There was a tomb, which, though raised by a private man, must have been of unexampled splendour, that of Priscilla, the wife of Abascantius, a favourite of Domitian. It is well, among all the monuments of pride and crime, to dwell on this one prodigal memorial of true domestic affection; and this tomb, and the inmate of the tomb, are described in a work of one of the later Roman poets, worthy to live. Like all the verse of Statius, the consolation, as we may call it, inscribed to Abascantius, is in many parts strained, forced, exaggerated; but there are lines with a depth of tenderness unsurpassed-difficult to equal, in Latin verse. He describes the dying moments of Priscilla :

Jamque cadunt vultus, oculisque novissimus error,
Obtusæque aures, nisi cum vox sola mariti
Noscitur. Illum unum media de morte reversa

Mens videt: illum ægris circumdat fortiter ulnis
Immotas obversa genas, nec sole supremo

Lumina, sed dulci mavult satiare marito.

All Rome poured forth to see the costly funeral procession of Priscilla, to the Appian Way, on the banks of the Almo, near the temple of Cybelé :

Est locus ante urbem, qua primum surgitur ingens
Appia, quaque Italo gemitus Almone Cybele
Ponit.

She was interred (it should seem an unusual course), not burned; her husband could not have endured the sight and the tumult of a cremation:

Nec enim fumantia busta,

Clamoremque rogi potuit perferre.

The tomb must have been most sumptuous. All around stood, in niches, marble statues of Priscilla, in the garb and attributes of various goddesses :

Mox in varias mutata novaris

Effigies: hoc ære Ceres, hoc lucida Gnossis,
Illo Maia tholo, Venus hoc non improba saxo.
Accipiunt vultus, haud indignata, decoros
Numina.-STATII Silva, v. 1.

Nearest to the walls of Rome, as though holding the guardians of her impregnable gates, was the well-known tomb of the Scipios. The greatest of the race, Africanus, reposed not in this sepulchre; he died, and his ashes remained, at Liternum. But there is no reason to doubt that his place was filled by the great father of Roman poetry, the conservator of her legendary annals, Ennius. And surely we may refer to the whole race the splendid lines of Lucretius. Scipio, the thunderbolt of war, the terror of Carthage, bequeathed his bones to the earth, even as if he had been the vilest of slaves; and wilt thou whose life, even while thou art living and in the light of day, is little more than death, wilt thou struggle, and be indignant that thou must die?'

Scipiades fulmen belli, Carthaginis horror
Ossa dedit terræ, proinde ac famul infimus esset.

Tu vero dubitabis et indignabere obire,
Mortua quoi vita est prope jam vivo atque videnti ?

LUCRET. iii. 1047-48, 1058-59.

Thus, along each of the great roads which led to Rome, was, as it were, a great necropolis, a line of stately sepulchres, in which lay the remains of her illustrious dead, and of those who might aspire to the rank of the illustrious. We may conjecture indeed from Cicero that, even in his day, the most famous, and hallowed by the most famous men, was the Appian necropolis. In the well-known passage, where Tully would infer the immortality of the soul from the greatness of the older Romans, he says: "When you go out of the Capenian Gate, where you behold the tombs of Calatinus, of the Scipios, of the Servilii, of the Metelli, can you suppose that they are miserable?' (An tu egressus porta Capena, cum Calatini, Scipionum, Serviliorum, Metellorum sepulchra vides, miseros putas illos?')

But during the early Empire appeared in Rome a religious community, among whom reverence for the dead, a profound feeling for the preservation of the buried body in its integrity, was not only a solemn duty, but a deep-rooted passion. The Christians not only inherited from their religious ancestors the Jews the ancient and immemorial usage of interment, but this respect for the dead was clasped and riveted, as it were, round their hearts by the great crowning event of their faith. Christ, in their belief, had risen bodily from the grave; a bodily resurrection was to be their glorious privilege. Some, many indeed, no doubt in the first ages of Christianity, looked for this resuscitation as speedy, imminent, almost immediate. Their great Apostle indeed had taught a more sublime, less material tenet; he had spoken of glorified bodies, not natural bodies: Flesh and blood cannot enter into the kingdom of God, neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. But the sanctity of the body committed to the earth was still rooted in the very depths of their souls; the burning of the dead was to them a profanation. Long before relics came to be worshipped, the mangled and scattered limbs, it might be, of the confessor or martyr, were a pious trust, to be watched over with reverential care, to

be preserved with tender affection. This feeling is well described by Prudentius:

Hinc maxima cura sepulcris
Impenditur, hinc resolutos
Honor ultimus accipit artus,
Et funeris ambitus ornat.
Quidnam tibi saxa cavata,
Quid pulcra volunt monumenta,"
Nisi quod res creditur illis

Non mortua sed data somno ?-Cathem. x.

This community had grown with wonderful rapidity, so as, even in the reign of Nero, to be exposed to a cruel-it might have been supposed an exterminating- persecution. They were of sufficient importance to be cast forth, as it were a scapegoat, to the populace, who were maddened, after the fire of Rome, by the most blind and furious passions of our nature, panic, revenge, superstition; and perhaps to divert the thoughts of the multitude from the Government, against whom some suspicious murmurs had begun to spread.

But the religion had a life which defied, which gained strength from persecution. During the reign of Domitian, in Rome, certain members of the imperial family were accused of belonging to this, for a time, proscribed race. What truth there may be in the accusation, we do not distinctly know (the whole transaction is very obscure); yet we would fain indulge the hope that, in their death, these victims had the consolations of Christianity.

And still the Christians grew and multiplied throughout the Roman world-in Rome especially, the centre of that world. There can be little doubt that, during what has been called the golden age in the Roman history, the reigns of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and that of Marcus Aurelius down to the great Eastern plague, they were in constant unchecked accretion; they were in still advancing proportion to the pagan population. Of this wonderful revolution during those times history is silent; for the best of reasons, because there is no history.

H H

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