Into Imperial Rome

At every turn we come on some new crime against humanity done by fanaticism or greed. Into Imperial Rome there was swept, as into the museum of the world, the marbles, the statues, the bronzes, the ivories, the paintings and carvings, the precious works of human genius for some six or seven centuries — everything of rarity and loveliness that could be found between Cadiz and the Black Sea.

There were tens of thousands of statues in Greek marble, and as many in bronze; there were marble columns, monoliths, friezes, reliefs, obelisks, colossi, fountains. Halls, porticos, temples, theatres, baths, were crowded with the spoils of the world, rich enough to furnish forth ten such cities as London, Paris, or New York. It is all gone. There are but a few fragments now that chance has spared. Twenty sieges, stormings, pillages, a hundred conflagrations, the barbarous greed of the invading hordes, the barbarous fanaticism of the first Christians, the incessant wars, revolutions, riots, and faction fights of the Middle Ages, the brutal greediness of popes, cardinals, their nephews and their favourites — worst of all, perhaps, modem industrial iconoclasm — have swept away all but a few chance fragments.

Greek art of the great age

In the time of Pliny there must have been still extant thousands of works of the purest Greek art of the great age. There is now not one surviving intact in the whole world; and there are but two — the Hermes of Olympia and the Aphrodite of Melos — of which even fragments remain in sufficient preservation to enable us to judge them. Every other work of the greatest age is either, like the Parthenon relics, a mere ruin, or is known to us only by a later imitation. Of the bronzes not a single complete specimen of the great age survives. And this loss is irreparable. Even if such genius of art were ever to return to this earth again, it is certain that the same passion for physical beauty, the same habit of displaying the form, can never again be universal with any civilised people. And thus by the wanton destructiveness of successive ages, one of the most original types of human genius has become extinct on this earth, even as the mastodon or the dodo are extinct mystical bulgaria tours.

But masterpieces of marble and bronze were dross in comparison with the masterpieces of the human soul, of intellect, purity, and love, that have been mangled on this same spot and in sight of these supreme works of genius. The Christian pilgrim from some Irish or American monastery, from Santiago in Chile, from Armenia or Warsaw — the Catholic missionary on his way to die in China, or Polynesia, or Uganda — prostrates himself in the dust where Paul was beheaded and Peter crucified, where Gregory and Augustine prayed, and in the Colosseum he sees nothing but a monstrous black ruin; but he kneels in the arena where the blood of martyrs was poured forth like water, which has witnessed such heroic deaths, such revolting crimes. Each zealot —Catholic, Protestant, or sceptic — remembers only his own martyrs. Romans massacred Gaul and Goth; Polytheists martyred Christians; Papal creatures tortured Republicans, Protestants, and Reformers; emperors’ men slew popes’ men, and popes’ men slew the emperors’ men; Colonnas and Orsinis, Borgias and Cencis, Borgheses and Barberinis have poured out blood upon blood, and piled up crime on crime, till every stone records some inhuman act, and witnesses also to courage and faith as memorable and quite as human.