tral Golden Milestone at the
corner of the temple of Saturn--the god of remote ages, and of earth's
dim beginning; see, if you can, the splendid roads, where to right and
left the ashes of the great rested in tombs gorgeous with marble and
gold and bronze; see the endless villas and gardens and terraces lining
both banks of the Tiber, with trees and flowers and marble palaces, from
Rome to Ostia and the sea, and both banks of the Anio, from Rome to
Tivoli in the hills; conceive of the vast commerce, even of the mere
business of supply to feed two millions of mouths; picture the great
harbour with its thousand vessels--and some of those that brought grain
from Egypt were four hundred feet long; remember its vast granaries and
store-barns and offices; think of the desolate Isola Sacra as a lovely
garden, of the ruins of Laurentum as an imperial palace and park; reckon
up roughly what all that meant of life, of power, of incalculable
wealth. Mark Antony squandered, in his short lifetime, eight hundred
millions of pounds sterling, four thousand millions of dollars. Guess,
if possible, at the myriad million details of the vast city.

Then let twelve hundred years pass in a dream, and look at the Rome of
Rienzi. Some twenty thousand souls, the remnant and the one hundredth
part of the two millions, dwell pitifully in the ruins of which the
strongest men have fortified bits here and there. The walls of Aurelian,
broken and war-worn and full of half-repaired breaches, enclose a
desert, a world too wide for its inhabitants, a vast straggling
heterogeneous mass of buildings in every stage of preservation and
decay, splendid temples, mossy and ivy-grown, but scarcely injured by
time, then wastes of broken brick and mortar; stern dark towers of
Savelli, and Frangipani, and Orsini, and Colonna, dominating and
threatening whole quarters of ruins; strange small churches built of
odds and ends and remnants not too heavy for a few workmen to move;
broken-down aqueducts sticking up here and there in a city that had to
drink the muddy water of the Tiber because not a single channel remained
whole to feed a single fountain, from the distant springs that had once
filled baths for sixty thousand people every day. And round about all,
the waste Campagna, scratched here and there by fever-stricken peasants
to yield the little grain that so few men could need. The villas gone,
the trees burned or cut down, the terraces slipped away into the rive