TARPEIAN ROCK. 131 in his own house, and make him his slave! That the floors of the Mamertine dungeons were often trodden by villains, there can be no doubt. What foot of ground on the soil of Italy could plead exemption from such pollution? If they excluded from light and air the conspirators of Cataline, and the treacherous Jugurtha, so did they also the Apostles of our Saviour! In short, the only merit of the Mamertine Prisons was their diminutive size, which prevented the immolation of human victims on a scale proportioned to the tyranny of the princes, and the cruelty of the people of Rome.* TARPEIAN ROCK. Carrying the eye a little to the right, we behold the involuntary associate (in crime) of the Mamertine prisons-the farfamed TARPEIAN ROCK, down which the first MANLIUS, who saved the capitol, with ten thousand other victims of popular fury, patrician pride, or imperial cruelty, have been hurled! Of all that tremendous precipice, painted in such terrific colours by Seneca, "immensæ altitudinis aspectus," only thirty feet of its summit now overlook the consolidated dust of ancient temples, and the accumulating filth of modern hovels! The senses are offended by the effluvium which rises from the base of this marble-hearted executioner; and were we not conscious that the rapid Tiber washed away the thousands of human beings that were dashed to pieces whilst precipitating from crag to crag along its horrid surface, we might fancy that the putrid corses were still polluting the air of Heaven with their tainted * The picture which Ammianus Marcellinus draws of the cruelty and effeminacy of the Roman citizens, is truly disgusting. "When they have called for warm water (says he) if a slave has been tardy in his obedience, he is instantly chastised with three hundred lashes :-but should the same slave commit a wilful murder, the master will mildly observe that he is a worthless fellow; and if he repeats the offence, he shall not escape punishment.” Such were the noble Romans, the lords of the world, the demi-gods of antiquity!! exhalations! From such a scene, presenting nothing that can relieve either memory or imagination from a sense of horror and humiliation, we turn in haste not unmingled with disgust ! JUPITER TONANS. Returning from this digression, we see springing up beneath us, at the very base of the capitol, or rather on its southern declivity, three beautiful fluted Corinthian columns of Grecian marble, once forming part of a magnificent temple, erected by VANITY and dedicated to HYPOCRISY! In every age and every religion, modern as well as ancient, man has taken the liberty to endow his Creator with all, even the very worst of his own passions and propensities! These impieties were invented by the priests, credited by the populace, laughed at by philosophers -but rigidly enjoined by princes, as powerful engines for wielding the mighty mass of the people. An imperial manslaughterer, who shed the innocent blood of three hundred senators, and proscribed his friend Cicero, is travelling in his litter among the defiles of the Pyrennees. A current of electric fluid, in its way from a cloud to the earth, encountered one of Augustus' bearers, and sent him to the shades. To look upon this event as a lucky escape, would have been a natural, though an ignoble thought. No! JUPITER, in pure wantonness, sacrificed the slave, just to shew Augustus a mark of his celestial respect and esteem! As the father of the gods threw down his thunderbolt in honor of a Cæsar, the latter erected a magnificent temple to Jupiter Tonans at the head of the Forum, to remind the people that the king of Heaven and the imperator of Rome were on terms of the most friendly intimacy! This impious assumption of divine interference in the common concerns of human life, is nearly as rife at the present moment as in the days of Romulus or Cæsar. It may be more general, but it is certainly less reprehensible in Catholic than in Protestant countries. Catholic superstition employs the humbler machinery of saints and angels in worldly matters, and rarely TEMPLE OF CONCORD. 133 troubles the ALMIGHTY with applications or even thanks for faProtestant fanaticism, on the contrary, considers the Creator of the Universe as a complete drudge in the affairs of the godly. A celebrated evangelical divine declared, ex cathedra, in modern Babylon, to a wondering congregation, that he had just received a pair of excellent small-clothes from the Redeemer of mankind! TEMPLE OF CONCORD. Close to the right of JUPITER TONANS stands the Ionic portico of the TEMPLE of CONCORD-or rather of DISCORD. It may have been the Temple of Fortune-but that is of little consequence. It is evident that the vow of Camillus was not put in execution till two or three centuries after his death, when Opimius, "by massacres and executions, cut off the most active of his popular opponents," and then, in piety, and in imitation of Camillus, built a Temple to Concord! Under the inscription on the frontispiece of the Temple was, one night, written,"Vecordiæ. opus. ædem. facit. Concordiæ." Senseless Fury builds a temple to Concord! Yet Cicero laments this same murderer, applying to him the epithet PRESTANTISSIMUS !* * Though not inclined to question the right of Cicero to the title of Pater Patriæ, for detecting the conspiracy of Cataline, and saving the City of Rome from fire and sword; yet there are many parts of the orator's and the patriot's conduct, which are not very worthy of imitation or admiration. I may only allude to the contemptible artifices which he used to work on the superstition of the Romans. He declaimed on the "mighty streams of light from the western sky-the blazing of the Heavens, &c."-but that was all fair. When, however, he gravely tells the Roman people, that when the new and enlarged statue of Jupiter was placed with its face looking towards the forum and senate house, the gratified God instantly detected the Cataline conspiracy, and developed the conspirators to the senators, we cannot help blushing for Cicero-and for humanity! ARCH OF SEPTIMIUS SEVERUS. To the left of the three beautiful columns of Jupiter Tonans, and at the foot of the STEPS OF GROANS, stands, partly excavated from the earth, the arch of SEVERUS. Triumphal arches ought to inspire horror wherever they lift their proud heads :— first, on account of the wars and concomitant miseries which they are intended to commemorate-secondly, on account of the base motives or abject adulation which generally gave them origin-thirdly, on account of the detestable and cruel pride by which triumphs were always marked. Behold that marble monument to the arms or to the memory of SEPTIMIUS SEVERUSa man who bought the sceptre of the world by a bribe of 400 pounds sterling to each common soldier of his Pannonian army, (double the sum by which his ignoble predecessor had purchased the same throne, when put up to public auction by the Prætorian bands)—that Septimius, who "promised only to betray, who flattered only to ruin"-who sent an affectionate epistle to Albinus in Britain, with orders that the bearers of it should assassinate him in the delivery-who murdered the sons of Niger, massacred the inhabitants of Byzantium, condemned to death, without even the semblance of trial, FORTY-ONE ROMAN SENATORS, with their WIVES, CHILDREN, ADHERENTS, and thousands of innocent persons-who permitted his infamous minister to forcibly emasculate an hundred Roman citizens, (many of them fathers of families,) as eunuchs for his daughter's cortège -who caused to be preached in the senate the doctrine of PASSIVE OBEDIENCE AND NON-RESISTANCE; the doctrine that the Emperor was above the law, and "could command by his arbitrary will the lives and fortunes of his subjects”*—who ordered his army not to subdue, but to extirpate the natives of Caledonia-and who, finally, without the virtues of Aurelian, * Gibbon. These retrospective glances at history cannot but be useful as well as interesting in the present times! cursed the world with a son (Caracalla) more diabolical than Commodus-a son who attempted and embittered his father's life, murdered his brother (Geta) in the arms of their common mother, and put millions of innocent men to death! For such a scourge of the human race, and disgrace to human nature, the marble arch arose, and stands to this day, the wonder, if not the admiration of unreflecting travellers. Perish such memorials of the pride of cruel tyrants and the adulation of crouching subjects! The convulsions of Nature, and the operations of Time had buried one-third of this monument in the grave. Curiosity, and veneration for antiquity have cleared away the accumulating earth that was slowly immuring the memorials of a murderous father and a fratricide son! FORUM ROMANUM. Behold the ROMAN FORUM, around whose grass-grown grave still linger the few surviving associates of its former grandeur ! Melancholy band of mourners, they are bowed down beneath the weight of years and the vicissitudes of fortune! Scarred with wounds from foreign and domestic foes-they appear in the act of performing the last obsequies to their fallen parent, and calmly awaiting the hour that may seal the fiat of their own extinction! And what was this FORUM, whose monumental remains so often call forth the sigh of regret from the bosom of the stranger who surveys them from the Tower of the Capitol? It was an infernal cauldron from which boiled out, for a thousand years, every turbulent and hell-born passion of the human mind—a moral volcano which daily vomited forth, on an afflicted world, "plague, pestilence, and famine". Where Murder bared her arm, and rampant War Yoked the red dragons of his iron car.* The nursery of tyrants, and the hot-bed of sedition-where villains preached up virtue; where traitors declaimed on patri * Where the whole of the conscript fathers publicly murdered Tiberius Gracchus, (an incorruptible tribune,) together with all his adherents!! |