One Of The Most Comfortable Of These Galleries Was That In Which
Caligula Was Justly Done To Death, Or, If Not Caligula, It Was Some
Other Tyrant Who Deserved As Little To Live.
But for our guide I should
not have remembered his slaughter there, and how much satisfaction it
had given
Me when I first read of it in Goldsmith's _History of Rome;_
and really you must not acquaint yourself too early with such facts, for
you forget them just when you could turn them to account. History is apt
to forsake you in the scene of it and come lagging hack afterward; and
you cannot hope always to have an archaeologist at your elbow to remind
you of things you have forgotten or possibly have not known. Suetonius,
Plutarch, De Quincey, Gibbon, these are no bad preparations for a visit
to the Palatine, but it is better to have read them yesterday than the
day before if you wish to draw suddenly upon them for associations with
any specific spot. If I were to go again to the Palatine, I would take
care to fortify myself with such structural facts from Hare's _Walks in
Rome,_ or from Murray, or even from Baedeker, as that it was the home of
Augustus and Tiberius, Domitian and Nero and Caligula and Septimius
Severus and Germanicus, and a very few of their next friends, and that
it radically differed from the Forum in being exclusively private and
personal to the residents, while that was inclusively public and common
to the whole world. I strongly urge the reader to fortify himself on
this point, for otherwise he will miss such significance as the place
may possibly have for him. Let him not trust to his impressions from
his general reading; there is nothing so treacherous; he may have
general reading enough to sink a ship, but unless he has a cargo taken
newly on board he will find himself tossing without ballast on those
billowy slopes of the Palatine, where he will vainly try for definite
anchorage.
The billowy effect of the Palatine, inconvenient to the explorer, is its
greatest charm from afar, in whatever morning or evening light, or sun
or rain, you get its soft, brownish, greenish, velvety masses. Distance
on it is best, and distance in time as well as space. If you can believe
the stucco reconstruction opposite the Forum gate, ruin has been even
kinder to the Palatine than to the Forum, with which it was equally ugly
when in repair, if taken in the altogether, however beautiful in detail.
As you see it in that reproduction, it is a horror, and a very vulgar
horror, such a horror as only unlimited wealth and uncontrolled power
can produce. If you will think of individualism gone mad, and each
successive personality crushing out and oversloughing some other,
without that regard for proportion and propriety which only the sense of
a superior collective right can inspire, you will imagine the Palatine.
Mount Morris, at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously
built upon by the multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to
house themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other,
would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have
been like in its glory.
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