PROFESSOR LA_NCIANI ON ANCIENT ROME.* PROFESSOR LANCIANI is undoubtedly the
greatest living authority on Roman antiquities, and we may go even farther, and say that no writer on that ever-fascinating theme has done more than be to establish Roman arcbmology on a sound and scientific basis. We can never afford to ignore the great work done by J. H. Parker, and Dr. Dyer's work on the city of Rome is still of value and interest, though, as it was written in 1865, much of it is quite out of date at present, owing to the extensive researches which have almost recreated portions of Republican and Imperial Rome since that time. Nor can we forget the great value of Mr. Burn's treatises, both the larger and the smaller, the latter of which we have found most useful, especially amid the Palatine ruins. But undoubtedly for the intelligent visitor to Rome to-day this work by Professor Lanciani is the best that can be found. There is absolutely no detail connected with any Roman monument which has been brought to light concerning which the distinguished Roman Professor does not know everything that is to be known. He is not, however, a mere archaiological dryasdust, but a sympathetic and original investigator, whose wide historical spirit reinforces his immense mass of learning, and whose imagination helps him to reconstruct old Rome, its life, its institutions, its very aspect, with a fidelity to truth which is as wonderful as it is fascinating. Every English visitor to Rome should pack this invaluable work in his trunk before starting, and should recur to its pages while wandering amid the ruins. The chief result of the work that has been accomplished during the last fifteen or twenty years by the Italian school of archmology is the rehabilitation of no small part of the old traditional Roman history, and Professor Lanciani feels himself justified in telling us that we may now un- hesitatingly accept many of the traditions regarding the origin and early history of the Roman people which the German school set aside as pure myth. The destructive criticism began with Niebuhr, and for two generations the process continued of dissolving by elaborate criticism the old traditional account which had been generally accepte& For English people, the critical method culminated in Seeley's edition of the early books of Livy, in which a very severe attack was made on Dyer's work on the city of Rome. But just as researches in craniology and ethnology have modified much of the old dogma of the philologists respecting pre- historic man, so the actual excavations in Rome and Etruria which the Italian Government has encouraged since the Papal rule was brought to an end, have modified our views of early Roman history, and we should be inclined to say that few, if any, scholars would now be found who would take up the old ultra-sceptical attitude towards Roman tradition.
The artist is accustomed to lament the disappearance of the picturesque Rome which he knew in the time of Papal rule, and to attribute the unwelcome change in no small degree to the growth of research into ancient monuments as expressed by the excavations. To the artist the ruins in the Forum and on the Palatine looked better for his purponee as they were. It is part of the eternal war between the artistic and the scientific spirit. The former searches for beautiful impressions, the latter wishes to under- stand the development of human institutions, and we are not likely to see a truce proclaimed between them. For our own part, we must say that, in our judgment, speculative investments in real estate, and the quite natural, but rather inflated, pride of Italy in her recent achievements and her new national life, have had more to do with the spoiling of Rome than all the excavations put together. The unfinished Palace of Justice hard by the Castle of St. Angelo, the gigantic monument to Victor Emmanuel near the Piazza Venezia, and the new flats built by speculative Roman nobles, who have been nearly ruined by their foolish ventures, are the destroying agencies rather than the excavations. But even had the work of the arclueologista been of a more iconoclastie character than it has actually been, we should say that the insight it has given us into the history of Rome would have justified what has been done. The intelligent student who muses amid the cells of the Vestal Virgins or amid the imposing remains of the palace of Domitian will also, we think, be of this opinion, especially if he carries Professor • The Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome. By Rodolfo Landau', Fro- fessor of Ancient Topography in the University of Item& London: Mammal= and Co. Lanciani's book in his hand. For here is a complete and absolutely accurate record of what has been done up to date. The author remarks in his preface that we may treat Roman remains from three points of view—the chronological, the topographical, and the architectural—and that each system has its own advantages. Professor Lanciani has himself adopted the following method. He has first described in full detail the fundamental lines of Roman topography, the site, geology, climate, configuration of soil, rivers and springs, walls, .aqueducts, and roads. Next, he has minutely described the ,Palatine, centre and seat of Roman power and life. Then we are taken along the Sacra Via, no detail being suffered to escape us. The rest of the city is next described according ito the fourteen " regions " into which it was divided by Augustus, the regions being comprised in ten sections, each -of which has a character of its own. A short chapter follows on the "General Aspect of the City," and the work concludes with useful tables of dates, lists of Emperors and Popes, of architects and buildings, of sculptors and painters, of coins and measures. In short, we get here a complete vade
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Professor Lanciani discusses some of the vexed questions on which there has been such difference of opinion among historians, especially the question of the population of ancient Rome. The estimates have ranged from three- quarters of a million to fourteen millions, the latter extra- ordinary figure being given by Vossius! The author thinks that the real number was probably about one million. Gibbon estimated it at one million two hundred thousand at the time of Constantine, and Professor Lanciani thinks that "although his calculations rest on no scientific basis, yet his exquisite historical intuition made him strike almost the right figure." Bunsen's standard test is the right one—the slumber of those to whom grain was gratuitously distributed under Augustus—but he was mistaken as regards the numbers of the slave population. The habitable space also forms a. test, especially as we happen to know something about the building regulations under the Empire, and there are the walls of Aurelian to aid our estimate,—walls happily still standing, but which, we grieve to learn from Professor Lanciani, are doomed, since the money to repair and sustain them cannot be raised either by the Government or the Roman municipality. The sums wasted in one day in Africa might surely have prevented the ruin of a price- less relic of the past. Of this population of a million about one hundred and seventy-nine thousand lived in palaces, and eight hundred and twenty-one thousand in tenement-houses, which latter first came into existence in Rome as early as 455 B.C. There are houses in Traste- ,vere and the fast disappearing Ghetto that may be taken as good specimens of an old Roman tenement-house or insula. Rents in ancient Rome were very high, as much as 217 a year 'being paid for a miserable garret in the time of Julius Cwsar. A rent of 2266 was paid for a troisieme etage in the insula of Publius Clodins. The insuLz were excessively high as com- pared with the width of the streets, and there was fearful -over-crowding, lack of air, and not a little jerry-building. Nero comes out in Professor Lanciani's pages as a sanitary reformer, the fire he started having probably saved the city from a fax worse pestilence. On rebuilding, the Imperial architects greatly improved the city. Trajan also by an edict fixed the height of tenement-houses, but the people must still have found huge blocks of masonry in their way, as the palace of Caligula. towered 150 ft. over the street, and that of Septimius Severus 180 ft. It is singular to note how a certain character persistently clings to a district. The 'tourist in Rome notes to-day the large tenement-houses for the working classes near the Aventine ; it was precisely here that the Plebeians first established themselves in tenement- houses four and a half centuries before the Christian era. If the houses of the poor of old Rome were unhealthy, the water-supply, on the other hand, was magnificent. Even the splendid water-supply of the Rome of to-day is cast into the shade by that of ancient Rome, which was double per inhabitant that of the modern city. Every public and private garden, every warehouse, every private house, was well sup- plied, and there were also twelve hundred and twelve public fountains and two hundred and forty-seven reservoirs in the time of Constantine. What a comment on the London of to-day, with its East End deprived of water for weeks together ! There is one problem which the visitor to Rome is always putting to himself,—How came the ancient city to be buried under beds of earth of such varied thickness P Professor Lanciani answers this question from experience gained daring an excavation in 1883-81, in an ancient villa, which had not been destroyed by fire or violence, but which had been left to decay. He found that a noble Roman house of one story produces a stratum of loose material and rubbish 1 metre 85 centimetres high ; or, in other words, a building of 10 metres in height produces l'85 cubic metres for each square metre of surface; and he says, "If a building of very modest propor- tions has caused such a volume of ruins, it is easy to imagine what must have been the results of the destructionof the private and public monuments of ancient Rome." The successive fires and other agencies of destruction rendered rebuilding frequent, and thus huge masses of earth were from time to time removed and damped down in other spots. Thus Trajan removed nearly 800,000 cubic metres of earth to make room for his forum, and this mass was laid over a public cemetery. Diocletian demolished two temples to make way for his baths, and the products of destruction were heaped up 20 metres high near the present railway-station. Thus, in addition to the natural hills of Rome, artificial hills were formed, and, indeed, any rise after the fall of the Empire is declared by our author to be purely artificial, and so we begin to see how the singular phenomena we observe may be explained. The foundations of a house at the corner of the Via Cavour and the Piazza dell Esquilino were sunk 53 ft. before the stratum of debris was passed through. The soil which covered the Palace of the Cmsars has not been created entirely by the crumbling of the building, but also is soil removed by Cardinal Farnese from the Campus Martius to the top of the Palatine when building the Gesu Church. Thus we are enabled to see how crumbling, rebuilding, removals, have all contributed through the course of centuries of history to produce the surface and sub-surface results of the present day.
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