THE FORUM ROMANUM, VIA. SACRA.* Roam and its antiquities find
admirable illustration in this costly and elaborate volume. The photograph-plates bring the old historic scenes vividly before us. Mr. Parker, as is well known, is an enthusiast on the subject, and he has fortunately had time and money at his command, and has made an intelligent use of them. "Few," he says of himself, with a pardonable egotism, "have had more opportunities of arriving at the truth." He has been working at archatology under the most favourable oh, cumstances for upwards of forty years. Till within a compara- tively recent period, the history of the city of Rome, as we were taught it in our youth, seems to have been as much a matter of pure conjecture as the history of its people. Consequently the
• The Forum Romanum, Via &ay. By 1. H. Parker, O.B. Oxford; Parker and Co. London: Murray.
truth has to contend with a number of prejudices, for which the old race of scholars were largely responsible. They were "clever ,men," Mr. Parker says, and did their best with insufficient data ; but they had little to guide them, except topographical passages and allusions in the classical authors, it seems that some scholars even now are perverse enough to cling to what are 'called "the Roman traditions," and to refuse to avail themselves of the new lights. Mr. Parker is inclined to be rather hard on scholars, and we dare say they are now and then stupidly conser- vative. But on the whole, we believe they are quite willing to hear reason, and to accept proofs, when he is really able to give them. Many of the ruins, as he says, have for centuries been sub- jects of controversy, but with the excavations which are now being made with method and judgment, there is every prospect of the topography of the city being much better understood. It is pretty well ascertained that the famous three columns were a part of a portion of ten columns belonging to the great Temple of Castor and Pollux, much of the basement of which is still to be traced. Enough remains of the palace and bridge of the fourth Cmsar, Caligula, as we generally call him, who delighted in gigantic feats of architecture, to show what they must have originally been. The plates in Mr. Parker's book exhibit probable restorations. Of course, when the site of one building has been determined, it is often possible by means of passages in Roman writers to deter- mine those of others. Much of the city was buried from fifteen to twenty feet deep, and it was then quite hopeless to attempt to fix the dimensions of the Forum Romanum. This can now be done, and it turns out that its extent was much smaller than was supposed. Its greatest length seems to have been 671 feet, and its greatest width 202 feet. Within these limits was crowded what must strike us as a surprising multitude of structures. Besides the Senators' assembly-house, there were at least half-a. dozen temples and thirty-four little chapels, and a hundred and twenty lams, which, however, we must not suppose were "lakes," but merely fountain-basins. There was also the celebrated Basilica Julia of Augustus, a vast building, which has not yet been ex- cavated; and so immense was the number of statues which Julius Coarser contrived to crowd into this same space, that we are told by the historian, Ainmianus Marcellinus, that the Emperor Con- stantine, on his famous visit to Rome, was amazed and stupefied. Here, too, stood the "golden milestone" set up by Augustus to mark the centre of the city, and hence called umbilicus urbis. As might have been expected, some of the Roman nobles had their town houses in and around the Forum, and of these, it appears from the Regionary Catalogue, there were no less than one hundred and thirty. One can but infer that they must have been on a moderate scale. Of the temples, many were repeatedly rebuilt. Of the Temple of Concord, for instance, at the north- east corner of the Forum, the remains of three distinct periods are to be traced in the basement, which is still to be seen to the height of about fifteen feet. In close proximity to this temple were the public treasury (mrarium), the record-office (tabu- larium), and the Senate-house ; in fact, the buildings were connected together, and thus the Senate had the public money quite under its control. As the Roman army was paid in copper, spacious cellars were required, and these seem to have been provided. In plate 3 we see the remains of the basement of the Temple of Concord, with the foundations of the public treasury ; and in front is a piece of pavement, which Mr. Parker thinks is of the time of Salle. It is just on the beginning of the slope of the Capitoline, and it is to be noted that the buildings of which we have been speaking were, in fact, part of the great structure known as the Capitolium, being situ- ated, as we have explained, at the north-east extremity of the Forum. The Temple of Concord is often spoken of by Cicero and other authors as the Senate-house, but this was a loose way of speaking, as the actual place of assembly was a building near or behind the temple. It was, according to Mr. Parker (he might as well have given us his authority or reason for this state- . ment), sixty feet long, by thirty feet wide,—a space, we should think, rather inconveniently small for the Senators, who certainly numbered more than four hundred, as Cicero in one of his letters to Atticus speaks of a division in which four hundred and fifteen voted. On this occasion, if Mr. Parker is right, each senator would have had less space for himself than is allotted to a child in our national schools. But this, we may presume, was a very exceptionally large assembly. On the opposite side of the way to the buildings just mentioned stand the remains of a temple with eight columns, which used to be called the Temple of Saturn. But that temple was, we know, connected with the public treasury ; as in the case of the Temple of Concord; there was a door-way in
the wall of the treasury, under the basement of the temple. Hence the temple itself was sometimes spoken of as the treasury, just as we have seen that the Temple of Concord was called the Senate-house. Part of this door-way still exists, and the head is visible. Mr. Parker infers that the eight-columned temple must be that of Vespasian, its basement having been thoroughly exca- vated, and no traces of any vaults for treasure having been found. His inference, however, is somewhat doubtful. All we know is- that Domitian built a temple to Vespasian, and that in the cata- logue known as the Notitia de Regionibus the Temples of Vespa- sian and of Saturn are mentioned together. -Plate 10 shows us this temple, which, it appears, was rebuilt by the Emperor Septimius Seven's, out of the old materials.
Next in archmological interest to the Forum is the Via Sacra, one of Rome's oldest and most important streets. It was here, it will be remembered, that Horace encountered his famous bore, who was almost his death. It was usual to consider it part of the Forum, but this is not strictly correct; and it appears to have been proved, by excavations made in 1875, that the Forum really ended with a line which would just exclude the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina. Excavations of the present year have brought to light the pavement of the Via at the foot of the steps of this temple, and the foundations of the seven lower steps still remain. The street in question was commonly called the Sacred Slope (Clivus Sacer), as it led from the Forum to the foot of the slope where now stands the Church of St. Cosmas and St. Damian, and then ascended the slope, its extremity in this direc- tion being known as the Summa Sacra Via, on which stood the portico or colonnade of the Empress Livia. This was on a grand scale, and is particularly mentioned by Strabo, who says—in a passage quoted by Mr. Parker—that "if any one should visit the old Forum and see the temples, basilicas, porticoes, and the Capitol, with the great works on it, and those on the Palatine, and the porticoes of Livia, each successive place would cause you speedily to forget what you had seen before. Such is Rome." The Via Sacra was a comparatively short street, but it was crowded with temples and other buildings. Of these the beat known, perhaps, is Con- stantine's great basilica, which, though often regarded as an authority for ecclesiastical architecture, and actually copied by the Renaissance school of architects, was never, Mr. Parker says, a church at all, but was built simply as a law-court and a market- hall. Next in fame comes the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, already referred to, the most perfect of the Roman remains, with its familiar monolithic columns and sculptured marble frieze. It was built about A.D. 165, and it is represented on a coin of Antoninus, which is shown us in plate 26. So, too, is another temple, which has always been considered one of the most splendid specimens of Roman art, and called by the various titles of "Temple of the City," "Temple of Venus," and "Temple of Rome and Venus." This, too, belongs to the second century A.D., and was the work of the Emperor Hadrian, on whose coins it is to be seen. Affixed to its walls, in the time of Septimius Severus, was the celebrated marble plan of Rome, the slabs of which were probably shattered by an earthquake. It was not meant as a stranger's guide to the city, but rather to exhibit its general magnificence. From the exist- ing remains, it is quite impossible to reconstruct anything like a plan of what Rome then was. It was attached to the walls of the temple with metal hooks, the relics of which are still visible, and some portions of it were excavated in 1867, under the direc- tions of a Roman archmologist, 'rocco. The monks of the Church of St. Cosmus and St. Damian would not allow Mr. Parker to make some further excavations in their garden, by which he hoped to recover additional fragments of this plan ; but it seems that the Italian Government have now got possession of their monastery, and there is a chance of the work being continued. Titus's Arch, too, one of Rome's very well-known antiquities, comes within the limits of the Via Sacra, standing, as it did, on the Summa Via. The inscription on its south front records that it was erected by the Senate and people of Rome, in the reign of Domitian, to the late Emperor Titus (Divo Tito), the son of Vespasian. In plate 42 we see the sculptures representing the spoils which the con- queror brought dway with him from Jerusalem, among them the seven-branched candlestick and the Ark of the Covenant.
Of inscriptions Mr. Parker gives us many specimens. They often help us to determine questions of topography which to the old scholars were really insoluble. One there is of great value, known as the Monumentum Ancyranum, and exhibited, as itnow is, in plates 28-29. Augustus wrote out a detailed account of the state of the empire and of its resources, and of this a copy, incised on bronze tablets, was by his command attached to his mausoleum. Another copy (and this has been preserved in a
somewhat mutilated condition) was inscribed on the walls of a temple in honour of the Emperor at Ancyra, in Asia Minor. This document contains a good deal of information about the great buildings and temples of Rome, and throws much light, according to Mr. Parker, on the true history of the city, especially of the Foram. He has given it us at length, with Professor Mommsen's explanations and conjectural completions of missing words and sentences. There is a long enumeration of the various public works of Augustus. The Emperor, no doubt, did very much towards the restoration of the city, which had sustained consider- able injury in the civil wars, though his famous boast that he had made it city of marble was something of an exaggeration. The truth seems to be that marble was scarce in Rome during the first century. By the third century, however, it had become very plentiful, and several large blocks of a valuable kind long lay buried in the mud of the Tiber, and were discovered in the years 1867 and 1868. Sites for building at Rome seem to have been expensive in the age of the first Cresars, and the land which Julius Caesar purchased for his Forum is said to have cost him 1800,000. It was in the heart of Rome, and closely adjoined the Forum Romanum, but even thus this appears an almost incredible amount for a space by no means excessive. The city must have deserved to be called magnificent at the end of Augustus's reign, and yet much of it still remained in a very unsatisfactory state, with the narrow, winding, and irregular streets which, as Tacitas says in his Annals (xv., 38), characterised old Rome, as it was rebuilt after its capture by the Gauls. The tremendous fire in A.D. 64, which Nero had the credit of contriving, remedied the evil to a great extent, and Rome must subsequently have almost become a new city. It was still further improved and embellished by the succeeding Emperors, and even Vespasian, stingy as he has been sometimes represented, did something towards the re- storation of the Capitol, built four temples, and at least began the great Flavian amphitheatre (the Colosseum), a work which Augustus was said to have meditated. It was the Imperial age which witnessed the creation of Rome's outward and visible splendour, and to that age the more particularly stilling remains for the most part belong.
Mr. Parker's book is oddly arranged, and for purposes of re- ference is not always convenient. We do not see why the title- page should be at the end, though that is a small matter. Mr. Parker's great object, he says, is to explain antiquities by the eye, and in this he has certainly succeeded. We believe him to be, on most points, a master of his subject, but now and then his explanations are not as clear as we could wish. We must add, too, that many of the passages quoted in his notes are so badly and inaccurately printed that one has to resort not nnfrequently to conjectural emendation. Often, too, he entirely misunder- stands and actually misconstrues these passages in a way for which we cannot at all account. In page 32, he makes Festns say that a four-horse chariot of terra-cotta on the summit of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus was placed there by the Romans of Veii, after the inhabitants of that city were transferred to Rome. What Festus really says (in the passage quoted) is this, —that the Romans contracted with a certain Teientine potter of great skill for the manufacture of the chariot in question ! It seems that Mr. Parker has forgotten a not uncommon use of the word locare. Horace, again, does not mean (as is implied in page 30) that the bank where he kept his own account had broken. The words are put into the mouth of the Stoic philoso- pher Damasippus, whom he represents as saying that he had taken to philosophy after he had lost his money on the exchange (ad medium Janum). On the same page we are told that Cicero speaks of the medius Janus as a place where "some of the best of men were seen sitting, as if they had been philosophers disputing in a school." This struck us as very funny, and on referring to the passage in the De Officiis (II, 25), we found that Cicero says that there are certain questions with respect to the investment and use of money which the excellent men (optimi yin) who sit at the medius Janus are more competent to deal with than philosophers. Of course, his "excellent men" is said ironically, and how Mr. Parker can have so ludi- crously misconceived his meaning we cannot imagine. If he had much sense of humour, he would not (page 51) have made Aulus Gains speak of Vestal virgins "having been caught," just because " capta " is the word used. The first Vestal was, it seems, " caught " by Numa Pompilius, but it is hardly to be sup- posed that that august and religious monarch ran after her through the streets of Rome. Capior was the technical word for the law- ful choice and appointment of a Vestal, and pointed to the fact that she was taken from her father's house, emancipated, in Roman legal phraseology, from the patria potestas, and claimed for the service of the State. Thus the operation might be described as a sort of seizure, but the young lady can hardly be said to have been "caught." Mr. Parker, we are sure, must be too sensible a man to despise accuracy in such matters, but it really is a pity that he has not taken more pains with his notes, and that here and there he has stumbled into such strange errors. For the antiquities of Rome, which, even yet, we understand, are very imperfectly explored, he has, indeed, done good service, and will, we hope, do more. His book will be of the utmost value to students of one of the most interesting of all subjects.
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