The antiquaries have chosen to point out the scene of this adventure at the church of "St. Nicholas in carcere," which should, therefore, stand on the site of the Decemviral prisons and the Temple of Piety. But here a great difficulty presents itself. For if the Theatre of Marcellus had displaced both the prisons and the temple, which the words of Pliny would lead us to suppose, it seems useless to look for either one or the other at this day. But at this church there are evident remains, not of one only, but of two, and perhaps three temples, whose columns are incrusted in the lateral walls on each side. The antiquaries have assigned these triple vestiges to the Temple of Piety, built by Glabrio, to the Temple of Piety raised to the Roman matron, and to a Temple of Juno Matuta. This is sufficiently bold, when, if we follow Pliny, the first did not exist in his time, when, according to Festus, there were not two but only one temple, and when Juno Matuta is only known to have stood somewhere in the Forum Olitorium.* The name of the church is S. Nicholas, "in carcere Tulliano." But the Tullian prisons could never have been here nor anywhere, except on the Clivus Capitolinus hanging over the Forum, and it has been proved that the last epithet which deceived the Cardinal Baro * "Forum Olitorium, Columna Lactaria, Ædes Pietatis. Ædes Matuta." Sext. Rufi. de regionib. Urb. "Regio circus Maximus. Ap. Græv., tom. iii. p. 98. nius,* and occasioned one of the famous Roman controversies, is a fanciful addition of latter times. Notwithstanding the assertion of Pliny, a prison that went by the name of the Decemviral existed near the Theatre of Marcellus in the days of the regionaries, and a Temple of Piety is recorded by Rufus, in the Forum Olitorium; but as the temple is not mentioned by Victor,† and as the other writer puts it even in a different region from the prison, it seems stretching their authority to conclude S. Nicholas in carcere to be the site both of the one and the other, as well as of a second Temple of Piety, which never appears to have had any distinet existence. The name of the church is a very admissible evidence for the contiguity, at least, of the prison; and as the columns cannot have belonged to that structure, they may be assigned to any of the temples or basilicas noted as being in that quarter. Lucius Faunus says there were in his time some vestiges of the prison; but the hole to which strangers are conducted by torchlight at the base of the columns can hardly have any reference to the ancient dungeon.§ * In notis ad Martyrol. a. d. xiv. Martii. Apolog. contra Hugonium, de stationibus urbis Romæ. Nardini, lib. v. cap. xii. gives a long account of the controversy. † Victor, "Carcer. C. or CL.X. Flaminius, ib. p. 106. Rufus says, Circus Flaminius, ibid. p. 97. The C should be CL.X. Virorum." Regio IX. Circus "Carcer. C. Virorum." Regio ‡ De Antiq. Urb. Rom. lib. iii. cap. v. ap. Sallengre, tom. i. p. 217. § Nardini, lib. vi. cap. ii. takes no notice of the columns, but believes in the site of the prison and the story of Festus. * Aringhi has given the most striking example of the perversion of antiquaries, when he supposes that some lines of Juvenal's third satire were intended to extol the size and magnificence of the single prison which could contain all the criminals of early Rome: as if the satirist had meant to praise the architectural grandeur, not the virtue, of the primitive ages.† Our own times have furnished us with a new piety, which the French audience of Mr. Bruce thought to be a phrase happily invented by our gallant countryman. The courageous attachment of wives to their husbands under calamity, superior to what is found in any other relation of life, has been acknowledged in all periods, from the Augustan proscription ‡ to the plague at Florence; § and the conjugal piety of Madame Lavalette is distinguished from many similar exploits, merely because it was seconded so nobly, and occurred in an age capable of appreciating such heroic devotion. "felicia dicas Sæcula, quæ quondam sub regibus atque tribunis + Roma subterranea, lib. ii. cap. i. tom. i. p. 200. Id tamen notandum est, fuisse in proscriptos uxorum fidem summam, libertorum mediam, servorum aliquam, filiorum nullam. --C. Vell. Paterc. Hist. lib. ii. cap. lxvii. § Boccacio, in the introduction to the Decameron, puts the abandonment of husbands by their wives as the last horror of the plague. VOL. II. H THE SPADA POMPEY. The projected division of the Spada Pompey has already been recorded by the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.' Gibbon found it in the memorials of Flaminius Vacca,* and it may be added to his mention of it that Pope Julius III. gave the contending owners five hundred crowns for the statue, and presented it to Cardinal Capo di Ferro, who had prevented the judgment of Solomon from being executed upon the image. In a more civilised age this statue was exposed to an actual operation; for the French, who acted the Brutus of Voltaire in the Coliseum, resolved that their Cæsar should fall at the base of that Pompey, which was supposed to have been sprinkled with the blood of the original dictator. The nine-foot hero was therefore removed to the arena of the amphitheatre, and to facilitate its transport suffered the temporary amputation of its right arm. The republican tragedians had to plead that the arm was a restoration but their accusers do not believe that the integrity of the statue would have protected it. The love of finding every coincidence has discovered the true Cæsarean ichor in a stain near the right knee; * Memorie, no. lvii. p. 9, ap. Montfaucon, Diar. Ital. About this time Prince Borghese and some other Roman nobles publicly burnt their title-deeds, but they were accused of destroying only copies of them and keeping the originals. * but colder criticism has rejected not only the blood but the portrait, and assigned the globe of power rather to the first of the emperors than to the last of the republican masters of Rome. Winkelmann is loth to allow an heroic statue of a Roman citizen, but the Grimani Agrippa, a contemporary almost, is heroic; and naked Roman figures were only very rare, not absolutely forbidden. The face accords much better with the "hominem integrum et castum et gravem," than with any of the busts of Augustus, and is too stern for him who was beautiful, says Suetonius, at all periods of his life. The pretended likeness to Alexander the Great cannot be discerned, but the traits resemble the medal of Pompey. The objectionable globe may not have been an ill-applied flattery to him who found Asia Minor the boundary and left it the centre of the Roman empire. It seems that Winkelmann has made a mistake in thinking that no proof of the identity of this statue with that which received the bloody sacrifice can be derived from the spot where it was discovered.§ Flaminius Vacca says sotto una cantina, and this cantina is known to have been in the Vicolo de' Leutari, near the Cancellaria, a position corresponding exactly to that of the Janus before the basilica of Pompey's theatre, to Storia delle arti, &c. lib. ix. cap. i. pag. 321, 322, tom. ii. + Cicer. epist. ad Atticum, xi. 6. Published by Causeus in his Museum Romanum. § Storia delle arti, &c. ibid. |