Italian Prisons. Griffiths Arthur

like spectres through the silent and nearly deserted streets of the desolate city. Rome recovered slowly, but the Western Empire was surely dying; feeble emperors reigned like shadows, and at length the throne fell to an adventurous barbarian soldier, Odoacer, a king of mercenaries, who ruled wisely and gave Rome thirteen years of tranquillity and peaceful progress. He was nevertheless a usurper, a foreign soldier hated and feared by the people, to be set aside as soon as a stronger man appeared. This was Theodoric, leader of the war-like Austro-Goths, a heroic people who had assimilated the civilising processes of East and West.

      Theodoric invaded Italy and made himself king; but he did not interfere with existing institutions and ere long won the respect, if not the affection, of the Roman people. He was not a Christian but he esteemed the Catholic faith; he knelt at the great basilica of St. Peter, approaching it in a triumphal procession across Hadrian’s bridge. He fed the populace with free food, amused them with games and spectacles in the Amphitheatre and Circus Maximus, and was deeply anxious to restore and care for the ancient monuments and buildings of the city. He was the noblest barbarian that ever ruled Italy, and his memory still lingers in the great cities he founded or restored. He endowed the capital with many great works, such as the restoration of the Appian Way and the drainage of the Pontine marshes. It is sufficient for my purpose to record that he made the mausoleum of Hadrian the model for his own tomb, which he erected at Ravenna and was at great pains to strengthen. The Roman castle was known for centuries as the house or prison of Theodoric, owing the second title no doubt to the security its walls afforded. Rome was undoubtedly a strong place of arms when the Goths under Vitiges, after the death of Theodoric, again attacked it. They were met and repelled by Belisarius, the great general appointed by the emperor Justinian, who had already won fame in Persian wars and who made very strenuous preparations to meet the attack, repairing the walls of Rome, which in spite of Theodoric’s restorations were still damaged and in parts ruinous. He added trenches and provided flank defence by a projecting guard house; above all, he filled the public granaries and fully victualled the place.

      Vitiges when he arrived saw that he could not take the city by a coup de main and must make a regular siege. The skill of the Goths, accustomed to fight in the open field, was of little avail in laying siege to a city, and Vitiges, overlooking this fact, staked his entire kingdom against the walls of Rome, with the result that his heroic people here found their overthrow. The Goths formed six entrenched camps before these defences, all on the left side of the river; a seventh they erected on the right bank of the Tiber on the Neronian Field, or the plain which stretches under Monte Mario from the Vatican Hill as far as the Milvian bridge. They thus not only protected the bridge itself but at the same time threatened the bridge of Hadrian and the entrance to the city through the inner gate of Aurelian. This gate, already named St. Peter’s, stood outside the bridge of Hadrian and beyond the wall which, from the Porta Flaminia on the inner side of the river, surrounded the field of Mars. Vitiges at length was ready to deliver a decisive assault. Wooden towers sufficiently high to overlook the defences, were set on strong wheels; projecting battering rams of iron were hung by chains to be thrust against the walls, each manned by fifty men, and long scaling ladders were constructed to be attached to the battlements. To these preparations (at the rude simplicity of which modern military science may smile) Belisarius opposed measures all his own. He set upon the walls skilfully contrived catapults or balistae, and great stone slings (onagri) called “wild asses” were constructed to throw a bolt with such force as to pin a mail-clad man fast to a tree. The gates were themselves defended with so-called “wolves” or drawbridges fashioned out of heavy beams and furnished with iron pins which were to be released at a given moment to fall on the assailants with overwhelming force.

      Belisarius had entrusted the guard of the mausoleum to his most valued lieutenant, Constantinus, ordering him also to cover the neighbouring walls of the city, which (perhaps on the left of the Aurelian Gate) remained undefended save by small outposts, the river in itself affording some protection. Meanwhile the Goths attempted to cross the Tiber in boats and Constantinus, leaving the more numerous forces in the Aurelian Gate and at the mausoleum as garrison, was forced to appear in person on the menaced spot. The Goths next advanced against the mausoleum. Should they be able to take this main work, they might hope to make themselves masters of the bridge and gate. They brought no machines, nothing but scaling ladders which they covered with their broad shields. A portico or covered colonnade led to the Vatican basilica from the neighbourhood of the tomb, and in this colonnade the approaching party sheltered themselves from the missiles rained down by the men stationed in the mausoleum. They crept along the narrow streets which surrounded the ruined circus of Hadrian so cautiously that the besieged in the fortress were unable to use the catapults against them. Then dashing forward, they shot a cloud of arrows on the battlements of the tomb and leaned their scaling ladders against it. Pressing forward on all sides they had nearly surrounded and scaled the mausoleum when despair suggested to the defenders to make use, as projectiles, of the many statues with which it was decorated, and forthwith they hurled these statues down upon the Goths. The broken masterpieces, statues of emperors, gods and heroes, dropped in heavy fragments upon the devoted heads of the assailants who were routed utterly. This wild scene around the grave of an emperor—a conflict which recalls the mythic battles of the giants—ended the struggle by the Aurelian Gate. His unsuccessful attack cost Vitiges the flower of his army.

      The cost to Rome was terrible. The mausoleum was robbed for ever of her rich and incomparable artistic treasures. Priceless statues chiselled by the hands of Praxiteles and Polycletus, things of great beauty, divine creations of gods and heroes, had been used as mere projectiles with which to crush barbarian soldiers, and lay broken and blood-bespattered beneath the rescued walls. They remained for long years where they fell, untouched, unearthed even, until in the seventeenth century Pope Urban VII, a Barberini, designing to improve the fortifications, deepened the ditch of the castle of St. Angelo, and the workmen discovered the famous statue of the Barberini Faun, now in the Glyptothek of Munich, where it still remains to prove how richly Hadrian had originally endowed and adorned his tomb.

      History repeats itself, and ten years later Belisarius again defended Rome, now against the Goths under Totila, a masterful soldier who ascended the throne of Theodoric in 541 and renewed the war against the Byzantine Empire. He in turn besieged Rome and took it before it could be relieved. The great monuments were spared, although he had threatened to “turn the whole city into pasture for cattle,” and he presently withdrew to return and reoccupy it a second and a third time. A brave soldier, Paulus, trained by Belisarius, had retired into the mausoleum, which he held obstinately till reduced by famine, when he and his followers resolved to cut their way out, preferring death to surrender. Totila, however, offered them liberal terms if they would lay down their arms, and took them into his service. Then, having suffered severely himself in the fight, he entered the mausoleum, renewed its defences, stored his valuables within and sallied forth to face a new attack from the side of Ravenna. He was killed there and the tomb reverted to the Byzantine emperor.

CHAPTER II

       THE LEONINE CITY

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