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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). The Modern Romans. David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882). The Modern Romans. David J. Brewer, et al., eds. 1900. The World's Best Essays Dictionary Biographies Literary Criticism Welcome Terms of Service ⧏ Previous Next ⧐ Contents Bibliographic Record David J. Brewer, et al., eds.  The World’s Best Essays.  1900. The Modern Romans
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) From “Outre-Mer.”

THE MODERN Romans are a very devout people. The Princess Doria washes the pilgrims’ feet in Holy Week; every evening, foul or fair, the whole year round, there is a rosary sung before an image of the Virgin, within a stone’s throw of my window; and the young ladies write letters to St. Louis Gonzaga, who in all paintings and sculpture is represented as young and angelically beautiful. I saw a large pile of these letters a few weeks ago in Gonzaga’s chapel, at the church of St. Ignatius. They were lying at the foot of the altar, prettily written on smooth paper, and tied with silken ribbons of various colors. Leaning over the marble balustrade, I read the following superscription upon one of them: “All’ Angelico Giovane S. Luigi Gonzaga, Paradiso” (To the angelic youth St. Louis Gonzaga, Paradise). A soldier with a musket kept guard over this treasure, and I had the audacity to ask him at what hour the mail went out; for which heretical impertinence he cocked his mustache at me with the most savage look imaginable, as much as to say,—“Get thee gone”:—  “Andate, Niente pigliate, E mai ritornate.”

1   The modern Romans are likewise strongly given to amusements of every description. Panem et circenses, says the Latin satirist, when chiding the degraded propensities of his countrymen; Panem et circenses,—they are content with bread and the sports of the circus. The same may be said at the present day. Even in this hot weather, when the shops are shut at noon, and the fat priests waddle about the streets with fans in their hands, the people crowd to the Mausoleum of Augustus, to be choked with the smoke of fireworks and see deformed and hump-backed dwarfs tumbled into the dirt by the masked horns of young bullocks. What a refined amusement for the inhabitants of “pompous and holy Rome!”…

2   Yonder across the square goes a Minente of Trastevere, a fellow who boasts the blood of the old Romans in his veins. He is a plebeian exquisite of the western bank of the Tiber, with a swarthy face and the step of an emperor. He wears a slouched hat and blue velvet jacket and breeches, and has enormous silver buckles in his shoes. As he marches along he sing a ditty in his own vulgar dialect:—  “Uno, due, e tre, E lo Papa non è Re.” Now he stops to talk with a woman with a pan of coals in her hand. What violent gestures! what expressive attitudes! Head, hands, and feet are all in motion,—not a muscle is still. It must be some interesting subject that excites him so much and gives such energy to his gestures and his language. No; he only wants to light his pipe!

3   It is now past midnight. The moon is full and bright, and the shadows lie so dark and massive in the street that they seem a part of the walls that cast them. I have just returned from the Coliseum, whose ruins are so marvelously beautiful by moonlight. No stranger at Rome omits this midnight visit; for though there is something unpleasant in having one’s admiration forestalled, and being, as it were, romantic aforethought, yet the charm is so powerful, the scene so surpassingly beautiful and sublime,—the hour, the silence, and the colossal ruin have such a mastery over the soul,—that you are disarmed when most upon your guard, and betrayed into an enthusiasm which perhaps you had silently resolved you would not feel.

4   On my way to the Coliseum I crossed the Capitoline Hill, and descended into the Roman Forum by the broad staircase that leads to the triumphal arch of Septimius Severus. Close upon my right hand stood the three remaining columns of the temple of the Thunderer and the beautiful Ionic portico of the temple of Concord, their base in shadow, and the bright moonbeam striking aslant upon the broken entablature above. Before me rose the Phocian column—an isolated shaft, like a thin vapor hanging in the air scarce visible—and far to the left the ruins of the temple of Antonio and Faustina and the three colossal arches of the temple of Peace, dim, shadowy, indistinct, seemed to melt away and mingle with the sky. I crossed the Forum to the foot of the Palatine, and, ascending the Via Sacra, passed beneath the Arch of Titus. From this point I saw below me the gigantic outline of the Coliseum, like a cloud resting upon the earth. As I descended the hillside, it grew more broad and high, more definite in its form, and yet more grand in its dimensions, till, from the vale in which it stands encompassed by three of the seven hills of Rome,—the Palatine, the Cœlian, and the Esquiline,—the majestic ruin in all its solitary grandeur “swelled vast to heaven.”

5   A single sentinel was pacing to and fro beneath the arched gateway which leads to the interior, and his measured footsteps were the only sound that broke the breathless silence of the night. What a contrast with the scene which that same midnight hour presented, when, in Domitian’s time, the eager populace began to gather at the gates, impatient for the morning sports! Nor was the contrast within less striking. Silence, and the quiet moonbeams, and the broad, deep shadows of the ruined wall! Where were the senators of Rome, her matrons, and her virgins? Where the ferocious populace that rent the air with shouts when in the hundred holidays that marked the dedication of this imperial slaughterhouse, five thousand wild beasts from the Libyan deserts and the forests of Anatolia made the arena sick with blood? Where were the Christian martyrs, that died with prayers upon their lips amid the jeers and imprecations of their fellowmen? Where the barbarian gladiators, brought forth to the festival of blood, and “butchered to make a Roman holiday?” The awful silence answered, “They are mine!” The dust beneath me answered, “They are mine!”

6   I crossed to the opposite extremity of the amphitheatre. A lamp was burning in the little chapel which has been formed from what was once a den for the wild beasts of the Roman festivals. Upon the steps sat the old beadsman, the only tenant of the Coliseum, who guides the stranger by night through the long galleries of this vast pile of ruins. I followed him up a narrow wooden staircase, and entered one of the long and majestic corridors which in ancient times ran entirely round the amphitheatre. Huge columns of solid mason work, that seem the labor of Titans, support the flattened arches above; and, though the iron clamps are gone which once fastened the hewn stones together, yet the columns stand majestic and unbroken amid the ruin around them, and seem to defy “the iron tooth of time.” Through the arches at the right I could faintly discern the ruins of the Baths of Titus on the Esquiline; and from the left, through every chink and cranny of the wall, poured in the brilliant light of the full moon, casting gigantic shadows around me, and diffusing a soft, silvery twilight through the long arcades. At length I came to an open space where the arches above had crumbled away, leaving the pavement an unroofed terrace high in air. From this point I could see the whole interior of the amphitheatre spread out beneath me, half in shadow, half in light, with such a soft and indefinite outline that it seemed less an earthly reality than a reflection in the bosom of a lake. The figures of several persons below were just perceptible, mingling grotesquely with their foreshortened shadows. The sound of their voices reached me in a whisper; and the cross that stands in the centre of the arena looked like a dagger thrust into the sand. I did not conjure up the past, for the past had already become identified with the present. It was before me in one of its visible and most majestic forms. The arbitrary distinctions of time, years, ages, centuries were annihilated. I was a citizen of Rome! This was the amphitheatre of Flavius Vespasian!

7   Mighty is the spirit of the past amid the ruins of the Eternal City!

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