Beyond this a number of chambers have been discovered under the steep bank of the Palatine, and retain a quantity of _graffiti_ scratched upon their walls. The most interesting of these, found in the fourth chamber, has been removed to the museum of the Collegio Romano. It is generally believed to have been executed during the reign of Septimius Severus, and to have been done in an idle moment by one of the soldiers occupying these rooms, supposed to have been used as guard-chambers under that emperor. If so, it is perhaps the earliest existing pictorial allusion to the manner of our Saviour's death. It is a caricature evidently executed in ridicule of a Christian fellow-soldier. The figure on the cross has an ass's head, and by the worshipping figure is inscribed in Greek characters, _Alexamenos worships his God_.

"The lowest orders of the populace were as intelligently hostile to it [the worship of the Crucified] as were the philosophers. Witness that remarkable caricature of the adoration of our crucified Lord, which was discovered some ten years ago beneath the ruins of the Palatine palace. It is a rough sketch, traced, in all probability, by the hand of some pagan slave in one of the earliest years of the third century of our era. A human figure with an ass's head is represented as fixed to a cross, while another figure in a tunic stands on one side. This figure is addressing himself to the crucified monster, and is making a gesture which was the customary pagan expression of adoration. Underneath there runs a rude inscription: _Alexamenos adores his God_. Here we are face to face with a touching episode of the life of the Roman Church in the days of Severus or of Caracalla. As under Nero, so, a century and a half later, there were worshippers of Christ in the household of Caesar.

But the paganism of the later date was more intelligently and bitterly hostile to the Church than the paganism which had shed the blood of the apostles. The Gnostic invective which attributed to the Jews the worship of an ass, was applied by pagans indiscriminately to Jews and Christians. Tacitus attributes the custom to a legend respecting services rendered by wild asses to the Israelites in the desert; 'and so, I suppose,' observes Tertullian, 'it was thence presumed that we, as bordering upon the Jewish religion, were taught to worship such a figure.' Such a story, once current, was easily adapted to the purposes of a pagan caricaturist. Whether from ignorance of the forms of Christian worship, or in order to make his parody of it more generally intelligible to its pagan admirers, the draughtsman has ascribed to Alexamenos the gestures of a heathen devotee. But the real object of his parody is too plain to be mistaken. Jesus Christ, we may be sure, had other confessors and worshippers in the Imperial palace as well as Alexamenos. The moral pressure of the advancing Church was felt throughout all ranks of pagan society; ridicule was invoked to do the work of argument; and the moral persecution which crowned all true Christian devotion was often only the prelude to a sterner test of that loyalty to a crucified Lord, which was as insensible to the misrepresentations, as Christian faith was superior to the logic, of heathendom."[148]--_Liddon, Bampton Lectures of 1866_, lect. vii. p. 593.

These chambers acquire a great additional interest from the belief which many entertain that they are those once occupied by the Praetorian Guard, in which St. Paul was confined.

"The close of the Epistle to the Ephesians contains a remarkable example of the forcible imagery of St. Paul. Considered simply in itself, the description of the Christian's armour is one of the most striking passages in the sacred volume. But if we view it in connection with the circumstances with which the Apostle was surrounded, we find a new and living emphasis in his enumeration of all the parts of the heavenly panoply,--the belt of sincerity and truth, with which the loins are girded for the spiritual war,--the breast-plate of that righteousness, the inseparable links whereof are faith and love,--the strong sandals, with which the feet of Christ's soldiers are made ready, not for such errands of death and despair as those on which the Praetorian soldiers were daily sent, but for the universal message of the gospel of peace,--the large shield of confident trust, wherewith the whole man is protected, and whereon the fiery arrows of the Wicked One fall harmless and dead,--the close-fitting helmet, with which the hope of salvation invests the head of the believer,--and finally the sword of the Spirit, the Word of God, which, when wielded by the Great Captain of our Salvation, turned the tempter in the wilderness to flight, while in the hands of His chosen Apostle (with whose memory the sword seems inseparably associated), it became the means of establishing Christianity on the earth.

"All this imagery becomes doubly forcible if we remember that when St. Paul wrote the words he was chained to a soldier, and in the close neighbourhood of military sights and sounds. The appearance of the Praetorian Guards was daily familiar to him; as his 'chains,'

on the other hand (so he tells us in the succeeding Epistle), became well known throughout the whole _Praetorium_! (Phil. i. 13).

A difference of opinion has existed as to the precise meaning of the word in this passage. Some have identified it, as in the authorised version, with the house of Caesar on the Palatine: more commonly it has been supposed to mean that permanent camp of the Praetorian Guards, which Tiberius established on the north of the city, outside the walls. As regards the former opinion, it is true that the word came to be used, almost as we use the word 'palace,'

for royal residences generally or for any residences of princely splendour. Yet we never find the word employed for the imperial house at Rome: and we believe the truer view to be that which has been recently advocated, namely, that it denotes here, not the palace itself, but the quarters of that part of the imperial guards, which was in immediate attendance upon the emperor. The emperor was _praetor_ or commander-in-chief of the troops, and it was natural that his immediate guard should be in _praetorium_ near him. It might, indeed, be argued that this military establishment on the Palatine would cease to be necessary, when the Praetorian camp was established: but the purpose of that establishment was to concentrate near the city those cohorts, which had previously been dispersed in other parts of Italy: a local body-guard near the palace would not cease to be necessary: and Josephus, in his account of the imprisonment of Agrippa, speaks of a 'camp' in connection with the 'royal house.' Such we conceive to have been the barrack immediately alluded to by St. Paul: though the connection of these smaller quarters with the general camp was such that he would naturally become known to '_all the rest_' of the guards, as well as those who might for the time be connected with the imperial household.

"St. Paul tells us (in the Epistle to the Philippians) that throughout the Praetorian quarter he was well known as a prisoner for the cause of Christ, and he sends special salutations to the Philippian Church from the Christians of the imperial household.

These notices bring before us very vividly the moral contrasts by which the Apostle was surrounded. The soldier to whom he was chained to-day might have been in Nero's body-guard yesterday; his comrade who next relieved guard might have been one of the executioners of Octavia, and might have carried her head to Poppaea a few weeks before.

"History has few stronger contrasts than when it shows us Paul preaching Christ under the walls of Nero's palace. Thenceforward there were but two religions in the Roman world; the worship of the emperor, and the worship of the Saviour. The old superstitions had long been worn out; they had lost all hold on educated minds....

Over against the altars of Nero and Poppaea, the voice of a prisoner was daily heard, and daily woke in grovelling souls the consciousness of their divine destiny. Men listened, and knew that self-sacrifice was better than ease, humiliation more exalted than pride, to suffer nobler than to reign. They felt that the only religion which satisfied the needs of man was the religion of sorrow, the religion of self-devotion, the religion of the cross."--_Conybeare and Howson._

Hence, we may ascend through some gardens beneath the Villa Mills, to the terrace which surmounts the grand ruins at the end of the Palace of the Caesars, supposed to be remains of the _Palace of Nero_, but as no inscriptions have been discovered, no part of it can be identified.[149]

These are by far the most picturesque portions of the ruins, and few compositions can be finer than those formed by the huge masses of stately brick arches, laden with a wealth of laurustinus, cytizus, and other flowering shrubs, standing out against the soft hues and delicate blue and pink shadows of the distant Campagna. Beneath the terrace is a fine range of lofty chambers, with a broken statue at the end, through which there is a striking view. One of these ruined halls has been converted into a kind of museum of architectural fragments found in this part of the palace, many of them of great beauty. This was the portion of the palace which longest remained entire, and which was inhabited by Heraclius in the seventh century. Some consider that these ruins were incorporated into the

_Septizonium of Severus_, so called from its seven stories of building, erected A.D. 198, and finally destroyed by Sixtus V., who carried off its materials for the building of St Peter's. It was erected by Severus at the southern corner of the palace, in order that it might at once strike the eyes of his African compatriots,[150] on their arrival in Rome. He built two other edifices which he called Septizonium, one on the Esquiline near the baths of Titus, and the other on the Via Appia, which he intended as the burial-place of his family, and where his son Geta was actually interred.

The remaining ruins on this division of the hill, supposed to be those of a theatre, a library, &c., have not yet been historically identified.

They probably belong to the _Palace of Domitian_ (Imp. A.D. 81--96), who added largely to the buildings on the Palatine. The magnificence of his palace is extolled in the inflated verses of Statius, who describes the imperial dwelling as exciting the jealousy of the abode of Jupiter--as losing itself amongst the stars by its height, and rising above the clouds into the full splendour of the sunshine! Such was the extravagance displayed by Domitian in these buildings, that Plutarch compares him to Midas, who wished everything to be made of gold. This was the scene of many of the tyrannical vagaries of Domitian.

"'Having once made a great feast for the citizens, he proposed,'

says Dion, 'to follow it up with an entertainment to a select number of the highest nobility. He fitted up an apartment all in black. The ceiling was black, the walls were black, the pavement was black, and upon it were ranged rows of bare stone seats, black also. The guests were introduced at night without their attendants, and each might see at the head of his couch a column placed, like a tomb-stone, on which his own name was graven, with the cresset lamp above it, such as is suspended in the tombs. Presently there entered a troop of naked boys, blackened, who danced around with horrid movements, and then stood still before them, offering them the fragments of food which are commonly presented to the dead. The guests were paralysed with terror, expecting at every moment to be put to death; and the more, as the others maintained a deep silence, as though they were dead themselves, and Domitian spake of things pertaining to the state of the departed only.' But this funeral feast was not destined to end tragically. Caesar happened to be in a sportive mood, and when he had sufficiently enjoyed his jest, and had sent his visitors home expecting worse to follow, he bade each to be presented with the silver cup and platter on which his dismal supper had been served, and with the slave, now neatly washed and apparelled, who had waited upon him. Such, said the populace, was the way in which it pleased the emperor to solemnise the funereal banquet of the victims of his defeats in Dacia, and of his persecutions in the city."--_Merivale_, ch. lxii.

It was in this palace that the murder of Domitian took place:

"Of the three great deities, the august assessors in the Capitol, Minerva was regarded by Domitian as his special patroness. Her image stood by his bedside: his customary oath was by her divinity.

But now a dream apprised him that the guardian of his person was disarmed by the guardian of the empire, and that Jupiter had forbidden his daughter to protect her favourite any longer. Scared by these horrors he lost all self-control, and petulantly cried, and the cry was itself a portent: 'Now strike Jove whom he will!'

From supernatural terrors he reverted again and again to earthly fears and suspicions. Henceforward the tyrant allowed none to be admitted to his presence without being previously searched; and he caused the ends of the corridor in which he took exercise to be lined with polished marble, to reflect the image of any one behind him; at the same time he inquired anxiously into the horoscope of every chief whom he might fear as a possible rival or successor.

"The victim of superstition had long since, it was said, ascertained too surely the year, the day, the hour which should prove fatal to him. He had learnt too that he was to die by the sword.... The omens were now closing about the victim, and his terrors became more importunate and overwhelming. 'Something,' he exclaimed, 'is about to happen, which men shall talk of all the world over.' Drawing a drop of blood from a pimple on his forehead, 'May this be all,' he added. His attendants, to reassure him, declared that the hour had passed. Embracing the flattering tale with alacrity, and rushing at once to the extreme of confidence, he announced that the danger was over, and that he would bathe and dress for the evening repast. But the danger was just then ripening within the walls of the palace. The mysteries there enacted few, indeed, could penetrate, and the account of Domitian's fall has been coloured by invention and fancy. The story that a child, whom he suffered to attend in his private chamber, found by chance the tablets which he had placed under his pillow, and that the empress, on inspecting them, and finding herself, with his most familiar servants, designated for execution, contrived a plot for his assassination, is one so often repeated as to cause great suspicion. But neither can we accept the version of Philostratus, who would have us believe that the murder of Domitian was the deed of a single traitor, a freedman of Clemens, named Stephanus, who, indignant at his patron's death, and urged to fury by the sentence on his patron's wife, Domitilla, rushed alone into the tyrant's chamber, diverted his attention with a frivolous pretext, and smote him with the sword he bore concealed in his sleeve. It is more likely that the design, however it originated, was common to several of the household, and that means were taken among them to disarm the victim, and baffle his cries for assistance. Stephanus, who is said to have excelled in personal strength, may have been employed to deal the blow; for not more, perhaps, than one attendant would be admitted at once into the presence. Struck in the groin, but not mortally, Domitian snatched at his own weapon, but found the sword removed from its scabbard. He then clutched the assassin's dagger, cutting his own fingers to the bone; then desperately thrust the bloody talons into the eyes of his assailant, and beat his head with a golden goblet, shrieking all the time for help. Thereupon in rushed Parthenius, Maximus, and others, and despatched him as he lay writhing on the pavement."--_Merivale_, ch. lxii.

Trajan stripped the palace of his predecessors of all its ornaments to adorn the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus,[151] but it was restored by Commodus, after a fire which occurred in his reign,[152] and enriched by Heliogabalus,[153] and almost every succeeding emperor, till the time of Theodoric.[154]

"'Brickwork I found thee, and marble I left thee!' their Emperor vaunted; 'Marble I thought thee, and brickwork I find thee!' the Tourist may answer."

_A. H. Clough._

CHAPTER VII.

THE CLIAN.

S. Gregorio--S. Giovanni e Paolo--Arch of Dolabella--S. Tommaso in Formis--Villa Mattei--Sta. Maria della Navicella--S. Stefano Rotondo--I Santi Quattro Incoronati--S. Clemente.

The Clian Hill extends from St. John Lateran to the Vigna of the Porta Capena, and from the Fountain of Egeria to the Convent of S.

Gregorio. It is now entirely uninhabited, except by monks of the Camaldolese, Passionist, and Redemptorist Orders, and by the Augustinian Nuns of the Incoronati.

In the earliest times the name of this hill was Mons Querquetulanus, "The Hill of Oaks," and it was clothed with forest, part of which long remained as the sacred wood of the Camenae. It first received its name of Clius from Clius Vibenna, an Etruscan Lucumo of Ardea, who is said to have come to the assistance of Romulus in his war against the Sabine king Tatius, and to have afterwards established himself here. In the reign of Tullus Hostilius the Clian assumed some importance, as that king fixed his residence here, and transported hither the Latin population of Alba.

As the Clian had a less prominent share in the history of Rome than any of the other hills, it preserves scarcely any historical monuments of pagan times. All those which existed under the republic were destroyed by a great fire which ravaged this hill in the reign of Tiberius,[155] except the Temple of the Nymphs, which once stood in the grove of the Camenae, and which had been already burnt by Clodius, in order to destroy the records of his falsehoods and debts which it contained.[156] Some small remains in the garden of the Passionist convent are attributed to the temple which Agrippina raised to her husband the Emperor Claudius, and in S. Stefano Rotondo some antiquaries recognize the Macellum of Nero. There are no remains of the palace of the Emperor Tetricus, who lived here, "between the two sacred groves,"[157] in a magnificent captivity under Aurelian, whom he received here at a banquet, at which he exhibited an allegorical picture representing his reception of the empire of Gaul, and his subsequent resignation of it for the simple insignia of a Roman senator.[158]

To the Christian visitor, however, the Clian will always prove of the deepest interest--and the slight thread of connection which runs between all its principal objects, as well as their nearness to one another, brings them pleasantly within the limits of a single day's excursion. Many of those who are not mere passing visitors at Rome, will probably find that their chief pleasure lies not amid the well-known sights of the great basilicas and palaces, but in quiet walks through the silent lanes and amid the decaying buildings of these more distant hills.

"The recollection of Rome will come back, after many years, in images of long delicious strolls, in musing loneliness, through the deserted ways of the ancient city; of climbing among its hills, over ruins, to reach some vantage-ground for mapping out the subjacent territory, and looking beyond on the glorious chains of greater and lesser mountains, clad in their imperial hues of gold and purple; and then, perhaps, of solemn entrance into the cool solitude of an open basilica, where your thought now rests, as your body then did, after the silent evening prayer, and brings forward from many well-remembered nooks, every local inscription, every lovely monument of art, the characteristic feature of each, or the great names with which it is associated. The Liberian speaks to you of Bethlehem and its treasured mysteries; the Sessorian of Calvary and its touching relics. Baronius gives you his injunctions on Christian architecture inscribed, as a legacy, in his title of Fasciola; St. Dominic lives in the fresh paintings of a faithful disciple, on the walls of the opposite church of St. Xystus; there stands the chair and there hangs the hat of St. Charles, as if he had just left his own church, from which he calls himself in his signature to letters 'the Cardinal of St. Praxedes;' near it, in a sister church, is fresh the memory of St. Justin Martyr, addressing his apologies for Christianity to heathen emperor and senate, and of Pudens and his British spouse; and, far beyond the city gates, the cheerful Philip[159] is seen kneeling at S. Sebastiano, waiting for the door to the Platonia to be opened for him, that he may watch the night through in the martyr's dormitory."--_Wiseman's Life of Leo XII._

"For myself, I must say that I know nothing to compare with a pilgrimage among the antique churches scattered over the Esquiline, the Clian, and the Aventine Hills. They stand apart, each in its solitude, amid gardens, and vineyards, and heaps of nameless ruins;--here a group of cypresses, there a lofty pine or solitary palm; the tutelary saint, perhaps some Sant' Achilleo, or Santa Bibiana, whom we never heard of before,--an altar rich in precious marbles,--columns of porphyry,--the old frescoes dropping from the walls,--the everlasting colossal mosaics looking down so solemn, so dim, so spectral;--these grow upon us, until at each succeeding visit they themselves, and the associations by which they are surrounded, become a part of our daily life, and may be said to hallow that daily life when considered in a right spirit. True, what is most sacred, what is most poetical, is often desecrated to the fancy by the intrusion of those prosaic realities which easily strike prosaic minds; by disgust at the foolish fabrications which those who recite them do not believe, by lying inscriptions, by tawdry pictures, by tasteless and even profane restorations;--by much that saddens, much that offends, much that disappoints;--but then so much remains! So much to awaken, to elevate, to touch the heart; so much that will not pass away from the memory, so much that makes a part of our after-life."--_Mrs. Jameson._

We may pass under the Arch of Constantine, or through the pleasant sunny walks known as the _Parco di San Gregorio_,--planted by the French during their first occupation of Rome, but which may almost be regarded as a remnant of the sacred grove of the Camenae which once occupied this site.

The further gate of the Parco opens on a small triangular piazza, whence a broad flight of steps lead up to the _Church of S. Gregorio_, to the English pilgrim one of the most interesting spots in Rome, for it was at the head of these steps that St. Augustine took his last farewell of Gregory the Great, and, kneeling on this green-sward below, the first missionaries of England received the parting blessing of the great pontiff, as he stood on the height in the gateway. As we enter the portico (built 1633, by Card. Scipio Borghese,) we see on either side two world-famous inscriptions.

On the right:

Adsta hospes et lege.

Hic olim fuit M. Gregori domus Ipse in monasterium convertit, Ubi monasticen professus est Et diu abbas praefuit.

Monachi primum Benedictini Mox Graeci tenuere Dein Benedictini iterum Post varios casos Quum jamdiu Esset commendatum Et poene desertum.

Anno MDLXXIII Camaldulenses inducti Qui et industria sua Et ope plurium R. E. Cardinalium Quorum hic monumenta exstant, Favente etiam Clemente XI. P. M.

Templum et adjacentes aedes In hanc quam cernis formam Restituerunt.

On the left:

Ex hoc monasterio Prodierunt.

S. Gregorius, M. Fundator et Parens S. Eleutherius, A.B. Hilarion, A.B.

S. Augustinus. Anglor. Apostol.

S. Laurentius. Cantuar. Archiep.

S. Mellitus. Londinen. Ep. mox.

Archiep. Cantuar.

S. Justus. Ep. Roffensis.

S. Paulinus. Ep. Eborac.

S. Maximianus. Syracusan. Ep.

SS. Antonius, Merulus, et Joannes, Monachi.

St. Petrus. A.B. Cantuar.

Marinianus. Archiep. Raven.

Probus. Xenodochi. Jerosolymit.

Curator. A. S. Gregori. Elect.

Sabinus Callipodit. Ep.