lican soil, and now all you see is a long, clean, livid
trench, cleared of ivy and bramble, where the fragments of paving, the
bases of columns, and the piles of foundations appear like bits of bone.
Level with the ground the Basilica Julia, entirely mapped out, looks like
an architect's ground plan. On that side the arch of Septimius Severus
alone rears itself aloft, virtually intact, whilst of the temple of
Vespasian only a few isolated columns remain still standing, as if by
miracle, amidst the general downfall, soaring with a proud elegance, with
sovereign audacity of equilibrium, so slender and so gilded, into the
blue heavens. The column of Phocas is also erect; and you see some
portions of the Rostra fitted together out of fragments discovered near
by. But if the eye seeks a sensation of extraordinary vastness, it must
travel beyond the three columns of the temple of Castor and Pollux,
beyond the vestiges of the house of the Vestals, beyond the temple of
Faustina, in which the Christian Church of San Lorenzo has so composedly
installed itself, and even beyond the round temple of Romulus, to light
upon the Basilica of Constantine with its three colossal, gaping
archways. From the Palatine they look like porches built for a nation of
giants, so massive that a fallen fragment resembles some huge rock hurled
by a whirlwind from a mountain summit. And there, in that illustrious,
narrow, overflowing Forum the history of the greatest of nations held for
centuries, from the legendary time of the Sabine women, reconciling their
relatives and their ravishers, to that of the proclamation of public
liberty, so slowly wrung from the patricians by the plebeians. Was not
the Forum at once the market, the exchange, the tribunal, the open-air
hall of public meeting? The Gracchi there defended the cause of the
humble; Sylla there set up the lists of those whom he proscribed; Cicero
there spoke, and there, against the rostra, his bleeding head was hung.
Then, under the emperors, the old renown was dimmed, the centuries buried
the monuments and temples with such piles of dust that all that the
middle ages could do was to turn the spot into a cattle market! Respect
has come back once more, a respect which violates tombs, which is full of
feverish curiosity and science, which is dissatisfied with mere
hypotheses, which loses itself amidst this historical soil where
generations rise one above the other, and hesitates between the fifteen