courage, which the Italians have never lacked,
though they have not always been fortunate in
the employment of it. Taste was never a char-
acteristic of Rome at any age, but in the great
days the Romans built well. This cannot be said
now, and all that is most modern is most exe-
crable; all that is oldest is most execrated and
profaned. The new barbarians who, in the present
dispensation, swoop down from cisalpine Gaul,
reared in the civic ideals of Genoa and Turin,
14 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
have no sympathy with the monumental records
of Rome, and no conception of anything to replace
them. The Rome of 1870 was dirty, but dignified ;
inconvenient for people with modern tastes, but
most comfortable for those who had adapted
themselves to its mediaeval ways. The Rome of
1897 is comfortable for nobody ; the miles of
new streets are filled mainly with huge, ugly
tenement houses, stuccoed flimsies, abhorrent
without and inhospitable within a tasteless
waste, where the highest virtue is fragility and
the noblest destiny demolition. Of the delightful
gardens which used to exist within the circuit of
the wall of Aurelianus, the only considerable frag-
ment remaining is that of the English Embassy;
and that, too, had been marked out in building lots,
and has been saved only by the protest of Her
Majesty's Government backed by the Times and
the Italian archaeological authorities. The famous
Ludovisi gardens, the pride of papal Rome, and
amongst the most beautiful in Europe, have been
built over, and the vengeful lover of Old Rome
sees with a malignant satisfaction the long rows
of untenanted windows of the huge apartment
houses of the quarter, over whose portals, newest
in stucco and whitewash, he reads the last remnant
of the language of the Romans, " Est locanda."
The Ludovisi gardens were offered to the muni-
cipality for 3,000,000 lire, and refused, while it
spent 3,700,000 lire in the purchase and demolition
of a single palace on the Corso, to make a vacant
space less than the hundredth part of the gardens.
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 15
The transformation of Rome during the past
twenty years is unique in the history of civilisa-
tion for barbarism, extravagance, and corruption;
never since the world began was so much money
spent to do so much evil.
But Rome survives it, as it has survived the
wrecking of the Goths, the Vandals, the Constable
de Bourbon ; survives even the Barbari and the
Barberini. The Campagna still undulates into
distance, if somewhat encroached on near the
walls, and the arches of the Claudian aqueduct
still measure off the space with their gigantic
stride; the Appian Way is not made a modern
cemetery, and there is left material for the artist
who has the courage to return; Aricia, Nemi,
Tivoli, and the far-off Olevano remain unchanged.
The papal city has been comparatively little altered
by the expropriations except along the Tiber, and
nobody need go to the new quarter who does not
choose so to do. Life is dear, too dear for the
cosmopolitan artist folk who used to make one of
the principal attractions of the city to westerners,
and with very few notable exceptions they are
succeeded by modern Italians, of whose art little
is to be said. There is old Giovanni Costa, like
Titian, outliving the school of poetic landscape,
and generously teaching its traditions to such as
will learn them and the Academy of France, until
lately presided over by the veteran Hubert, the
last of the school of healthy religious thought
in painting that to which surfaces were not
enough, and who were more troubled as to what
16 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
they should paint than how they should paint it:
but neither the one nor the other has had much
influence on the younger men. The Cafe Greco,
founded in the day of Salvator Rosa, has become a
German pastry-cookery, and the place where once
all the artists of Rome used to meet, along with
poets and the minor brood of the Muses, is no
longer to be recognised by the relic-hunter. De-
tails disappear, but the eternal city looms above
them like Mont Blanc over the little intervening
hills when seen from a distance, or like St. Peter's
from the Campagna, and will do so,.,>vb. en ^he
present system is in ruins and ivy grows over 'the
new quarter. All these crudities will disappear;
this pinchbeck Paris is only another illusion which
time will dissipate, and Rome will be again what
it has always been from its republican days, even
though the new republic comes and the papacy
.departs, a centre of attraction to a spiritual cos-
mopolitan population, never a centre of trade or
business; and the people who know it are not
those who are born in it, but those who are born
to it and its liberties of thought.
In the cosmopolitan sense, it was a great mis-
fortune that Rome became the capital of Italy,
but it was fated. The same attraction that drew
the Greek, the Sabine, the Gaul and the Carlov-
ingian, the Etruscan Pontifex Maximus and St.
Paul, has brought the Garibaldian and the house
of Savoy. But, after all, the interference with
the true enjoyment of Rome by its real citizen
is not great or material. It will be a place of
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 17
pilgrimage to the Catholic when the Pope has
gone, if he ever goes; the historian, the archae-
ologist, the poet, and the artist will always be its
citizens, though holding no allegiance to Pope or
King, subject neither to taxation nor conscription,
and though disinterested in its real estate. He
owns it who feels its spiritual (not ecclesiastical)
attraction. To him there is no city on the earth
which can content him after it. He may live
in New York or London, Venice or Naples, but
will always be more or less a stranger there,
and be ready to go back to Rome. The new
civilisation, while it has done much to disfigure
and degrade the city, has also done much to im-
prove it: made it cleaner and healthier, expelled
the highway robbers from the streets and the
brigands from the Campagna matters of less
importance to the true Roman than to the pros-
perous man of business, but to none indifferent.
Life is dearer than it used to be, but the rate
of insurance on it is lower and the ratio of the
doctor's bill less, and the cost is not prohibitory
to the man of small means. He who lives in
his own house in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue is
content in Rome with a small apartment in a
crooked street, and on the third or fourth storey,
and does not so stand on state but that he has
his dinner in from the nearest cook-shop and
his wine by the flask ; has one servant, instead of
three which he used to have when on his social
dignity; uses cabs, and thinks it no derogation
not to keep a carriage, and so lives on the rent
B
18 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
of his house in Mayfair. There are still quarters
to be found in the old palaces in the papal city,
but for people accustomed to fires there is some-
times a difficulty in keeping warm; for the
Italians have a superstition about fires, and so
it happens that instead of the cheerful grate
one has to be content with a stove, whose pipe
may go out at the window, in one or two of
the chambers, and be dependent on the rarely
absent sun for the rest. The fuel is dear, but
then little is wanted, and there are few days
when one cannot enjoy the outdoors and the
sunshine.
Society there is none. The Romans are not a
hospitable people, but one does not come to be
with them. They are much divided into cliques
and classes, and the great families content them-
selves in general with one great ball each year;
very exclusive, and, if I may judge by hearsay of
the foreigners who now and then attend, very
dull. With two or three exceptions, the high
nobility of Rome are as much of the Middle Ages
as the old churches, and to the spiritual Roman
they are mere shadows ; we walk through and
past them, and know not they are there. As a
general thing, foreign society is organised apart.
The old Roman aristocracy is divided into Blacks
and Whites, Pope or King, and the two sections
never mingle; the embassies from the same
government to the Vatican and the Quirinal have
no relations with each other, and the Blacks are
not in the books of the embassies to the King,
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 19
or the Whites invited to the receptions of those
to the Pope. If the new-comer will see the world
and can, he must choose under which colour he
will take it, but in any case he will not find what
in western lands is known as hospitality.
One of the most prominent English statesmen
said to me one day, in Rome, that the life of
public men was getting to be so laborious in the
new political conditions in England that it would
soon be a necessity to take refuge abroad from
the constant demands of one's constituents, and
that Italy, as the only available place of rest
and refuge, would be more and more resorted
to by them. Switzerland was useful only for a
portion of the year ; France was not far enough
or restful enough; and so it must happen that
Italy would become, to an increasing extent, the
refuge of overworked statesmen. And of Italian
cities, there is no question of the greater avail-
ability of Rome over all others. Florence is more
interesting in the art of the Middle Ages; Venice
holds the palm for its picturesqueness in the
spring and early summer, but its winters are
bleak and cheerless; Naples draws more from its
surroundings, Sorrento and Capri, than it offers
in itself; but Rome contains all that is most
interesting in Italy. The superstition as to its
sanitary condition is the bugbear which most
militates against it. This runs back into the
dark ages, but is unjustified by any statistics to
which I can get access. In a residence of nearly
a dozen years in the aggregate, and extending
20 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
over a period of nearly thirty, I have never had
in my family a single serious illness or a case
of typhoid or malaria, and in my personal
acquaintance I have never known half-a-dozen
cases of intermittent or malarial fever, and not
one of any gravity; while in a residence of five
years in Florence we had eight cases of typhoid
amongst seven persons. I have repeatedly stayed
in Rome through the entire summer without
any discomfort or inconvenience, and the late
English ambassador, Lord Saville, was accustomed
to spend his summers at the Embassy, saying
that he found no place so comfortable all the
year round as Rome. I have never met with
a case of the so-called "pernicious" fever, and
the physicians whom I know, and who attend
foreigners mostly, bear a like testimony. Dr
Drummond, who has practised here for years,
says that he never saw a case. The instances of
malarial fever I have known were similar to the
intermittents of our own country annoying, but
not dangerous. The statistics of the Italian
sanitary department are drawn up with the
greatest care and exactitude, and for the pur-
pose of improving the sanitary condition of the
country, therefore with no reference to publica-
tion or to foreign opinion; and I have before me
those of the deaths by malarial fevers for the
commune of Rome, including the Campagna and
the outlying towns and villages, Ostia and its
marshes, to the sea, with all the malarial districts
in the Ager Romanus; the division of the city
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 21
from these being impracticable, as the peasants
all come to the Roman hospitals for treatment.
In these returns, out of a population of over
500,000, the total of deaths by malarial fevers was,
in 1890, 308. The amelioration of the condition
of public health under the government of Crispi
can be judged from the diminution in the deaths,
which has been from 600 in 1887, gradually and
regularly, to 300 in the past year. With a system
of thermal establishments such as the ancient
Romans had, the deaths by malarial fevers would
be still less ; for there is no agency more effective
in extirpating malaria than the vapour bath, yet
there is not a tolerable Roman bath in Rome.
I am in continual receipt of letters asking if it
is safe to come to Rome as early as October, or
if it is safe to stay as late as May; and not un-
frequently I meet people who think that the visit
at any season is dangerous to life! Nothing is
so invincible as superstition. If we leave Rome
at all for the summer, it is only about the first of
August, and we return by the end of September;
not one-tenth of the population leaves, and the
death-rate is lower in summer than in winter.
From the first of November till the August rains
begin to fall, the worst parts of the Campagna
may safely be visited, if the sunset hours are
avoided, and even in the intervening months the
midday is free from danger ; but from the first
rains of August to the time of the setting in of
frost, it is not wise to be in most parts of the
Campagna towards sunset, though there are
22 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
sections in which it is not safe to go to sleep
at night in any season. The whole question of
malaria in Italy is one of exaggerated import-
ance. I have travelled in the worst parts of the
Maremme, which are regarded as the most deadly
and malarial of Italy, as late as the latter half
of June, and have found the harvesters at work
in gangs, and very few cases of fever anywhere;
while at Grosseto, the capital of the Maremme,
which the guide-books tell us is abandoned by
the inhabitants on the first of May, I found the
entire population on the ramparts listening to
the band till late into the evening, and none
had as yet gone to the hills, which they do only
to a limited extent the first of July. I had an
introduction to one family, the mother of which,
whose life had always been passed in Grosseto, had
never known, at the age of sixty, what inter-
mittent fever was. I know of no district of Italy
in which it is not practicable to travel ten
months out of the twelve, if one takes the pre-
cautions not to sleep in a malarial locality, or
drink water that is not known to be pure.
Typhoids are common in all great cities, but in
Rome less so than in most cities of its size; and
the returns to the sanitary authorities are a
proof that their frequency is diminishing in pro-
portion as the rigorous regulations are effective
and evasion is prevented. The water supply of
Rome is probably the best as to purity and the
most abundant in quantity of any furnished to
great cities. Typhoid very rarely occurs among
THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW 23
the inhabitants of the better class except from
drinking water at some wayside, or temporarily
infected, spring. The main supply, that by the
Acqua Marcia, is secure against pollution, and is
everywhere accessible, so that no house need be
without it. The sanitary laws are inflexible, and
the tenant of a neglected house has always the
remedy in his own hands. I have no hesitation
in saying that a person in moderate circumstances,
able to choose his quarters, can pass the months
between September and July in Rome under as
favourable conditions of health and comfort as
in any city in Europe ; and, with less precautions
against the heat than in New York one must take
against the cold, he may pass the entire year.
In summer, too, we have excellent seaside
resorts Anzio and Palo, and our hill country
at Albano, Aricia, Nemi, Frascati, and the other
castelli; and if there were a little enterprise in
Italy, we should have summer resorts in the
Abruzzi delightful in their sanitary and pictur-
esque features, but this remains for future
generations. Now a civilised man can hardly
pass a day in any of the mountain villages or
towns; filthy they are, beyond exaggeration. It
is enough to insist on the advantages of Rome
as a winter station, and as the fittest city of
winter refuge for the exhausted and disabled,
hors de combat in the battle of life, to whom
political affinities are immaterial ; for the refugees
from the nervous pressure of America, the social,
political, and business burdens of England; from
24 THE OLD ROME AND THE NEW
the immitigable boredom of German life, as well
as the glittering superficiality of Parisian: all
such may meet here on the neutral ground of
traditions, memories, and associations that ante-
date all our national divisions, and even all ex-
isting nationalities. Quod est in votis.
MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS
THE trip from Athens to Marathon is no joke,
especially in summer, and when brigands are
known to be sauntering unmolested along Mount
Parnes, a night's walk away. Yet, when Messrs
Goodenough and Cookson, American and English
consular officials, escaped from Constantinople for
a holiday, and stirred me out of my hot quarters
at Athens to show them the lions, etc., of course
it became necessary to put this excursion in the
programme. It was in August of 1869, and we
knew that there were brigands at Phylse, and did
not know that they were not nearer. In fact, the
people of Athens were so panic-stricken that
they would not go into the outskirts of the town
in the evening ; it was clear to the popular appre-
hension that we were besieged, and that the roi
des brigands, whoever he might be for the time,
was ruler of all the country round.
So, as our trip was to be in the nature of an
invasion of an enemy's country, I decided to make
it a surprise, and with strict injunctions of
secrecy on all around, went, at nightfall of the
day before we were to make the excursion, to
the Commandant de place and asked an escort
"not that there was any use in it, but the
25
26 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS
strangers were anxious," etc. The Commandant
stroked his moustache, expressed his sense of the
high honour of having been permitted to make
my acquaintance, offered me a cigarette, and we
talked European politics, the Cretan insurrection,
etc., and he assured me, as I rose to take my leave,
that an escort of cavalry should be waiting at
my door at 5 A.M. the next day. I went at 10
P.M. to the owner of horses and carriages and
ordered a carriage for the early hour, and a
relay of horses to be sent forward at once to the
half-way station. I knew that if, even then, one
of the friends of the brigands in town (by force
of circumstances I should have said the carriage-
owner, if I had been pressed to select one) should
send word to his colleagues that four distin-
guished foreigners, of whom two certainly were
ambassadors, were to start for Marathon on the
morrow, they would not get the news before
morning, and would not dare cross the plain by
day, so that we could reach Athens again before
they could get upon our road.
I awoke with the grey dawn and heard the
hoofs of the troopers' horses clattering on the
pavement in front of the house, and, running
over to the hotel, found my friends wasting the
precious coolness in deliberate breakfast. I in-
spected the horses, bullied the driver for having
brought us the shabbiest carriage in Athens (by
way of cutting down in advance his claim for
backsheesh, or extra pay on any score), inter-
jected a little Western celerity into the Eastern
MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 27
combination, and we started, picking up the
escort en route. The road (that which conducts
to Chalcis) is very good for a few miles, and
we rattled along until we had passed Hymettus
and emerged on the plains which slope towards
Euboea, when we turned sharp off by a bad
waggon-track, rather than carriage-road, through
the olive-orchards, and then through a pine-
forest as solitary as the backwoods of America.
No habitation, man, or grazing beast even, was
to be seen ; no tinkle of goat-bells to be heard.
In the midst of this forest, by the side of a
brook, seeming at first sight a succession of
stagnant pools, bordered by a luxuriant growth
of blackberries, oleanders, and rich grass, we
found our relay waiting. There was no delay in
changing, and about 10 A.M. we emerged from
the wood on the marsh - bordered plain of
Marathon.
The blue sea now breaks farther out than
when the Persian keels fretted it and marked
the sand that now lies hundreds of feet inland;
and many acres of the marsh, where, doubtless,
Persian bones and Persian trophies are bedded
to this day, are now solid earth. We drove up
to the mound through the maize-fields, and be-
tween the strips of vineyard, where the villagers
of New Marathon were watching the early
grapes; and having climbed the mound, made
its circuit, and hunted for fragments of flint
instruments, which form one of the items of
interest at Marathon, we bought of the patriarch
28 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS
of the adjoining fields who sat under a shelter
of reeds guarding his riches, lest they took to
themselves wings a supply of water-melons,
scarcely ripe grapes, and cantaloupes; each trooper
confiscating one of the former, and quenching
his thirst in the saddle. Then, having listened
to the guide's tale of the battle, oft told, and
ever growing in wondrous inequalities of heroism
and butchery: and looked where he told us (and
Murray, ever-to-be-consulted, confirmed,) that the
Greeks held their position and the Persians
landed: having, in short, "done" the place after
the manner of the guide-book-led tourist, we
drove back to the edge of the forest for shelter
from the intense sun while we lunched.
I think that timete Danaos must be one of
the things birched into us at school, for, with an
immense liking for the race, I have an instinctive
distrust of the preternatural shrewdness of the
true Achaian, and our driver was of the genuine
type, and had an uncanny way of looking across
the bridge of his nose towards the mountains,
which made me uneasy.
However, we lunched, drank copiously of good
wine of Phalerum, while the driver pottered
about his carriage and horses, to such good
purpose that, when finally we started on the
home road, we had not gone half-a-mile before
the carriage came to a standstill, out of order.
One of the wheels refused to revolve. Nothing
was broken, so far as could be seen; but no
efforts of all the persons concerned could make
MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS 29
the wheel turn, or get it off its axle. The ever-
to-be-suspected citizen of Athens begged us, with
much serenity, to compose and assure ourselves,
and be comfortable while he sent to Athens for
another carriage. My misgivings coming to a
head very rapidly, I asked him when the carriage
would arrive; and he replied, in the happiest and
most confident tone, that he hoped that it would
get there by nightfall. "Very well," said I, "we
will go and send it and you will stay and watch
this carriage." The look of blank amazement and
despair which came on his face as I pronounced
this decision, as unappealable as a sentence of
Minos, as he saw in my face and in the air of
the commander of my squad when I pronounced
it, was a revelation. Unhitching the horses, and
dismounting two of the troopers, we rode back to
the relay post at the little bridge, where the
party of Lord Muncaster was captured not many
months later, and there halted to wait for one of
the dismounted men, who had been charged with
a photographic camera, and had not kept up
with us. Meanwhile, one of the troopers rode on
to the next hamlet to see if some kind of trap
could not be obtained; for, between foot- weariness
and saddle - soreness, we were all desirous to
change our method of locomotion. Our escort
was thus diminished to two the corporal and
one private. The place was a capital one for an
ambush, as the capturers of Lord Muncaster's
party found it, and I looked into the thick trees
growing each side of the brook on the bank
30 MARATHON AND ITS BRIGANDS
overlooking it, and in the bed of it above us,
with a certain nervousness, which increased
when, after half-an-hour's waiting, the remaining
trooper was sent back to look for the missing
camera and its bearer.
There was nothing for it, however, but to wait
till the escort reassembled; and we lit our cigar-
ettes and lay down under the pine-trees. A cir-
cumstance that assured me somewhat was, that
I found the troopers' carbines all unloaded (they
were old-fashioned flint-lock smooth-bores) and
that there was not a single cartridge in the
company, from which I saw that they at least
anticipated no danger. The corporal was a jolly,
good-humoured veteran, whose air was that of
a man ready for any emergency or danger. I
asked him if he thought there was any ground
for fear that, if we were obliged to wait long
there, we might be carried off by some of the
country - people, brigands pro tempore? He re-