rs,
the tombs of the Appian Way broken and falling to pieces, or transformed
into rude fortresses held by wild-looking men in rusty armour, who
sallied out to fight each other or, at rare intervals, to rob some train
of wretched merchants, riding horses as rough and wild as themselves.
Law gone, and order gone with it; wealth departed, and self-respect
forgotten in abject poverty; each man defending his little with his own
hand against the many who coveted it; Rome a den of robbers and thieves;
the Pope, when there was one,--there was none in the year of Rienzi's
birth,--either defended by one baron against another, or forced to fly
for his life. Men brawling in the streets, ill clad, savage, ready with
sword and knife and club for any imaginable violence. Women safe from
none but their own husbands and sons, and not always from them. Children
wild and untaught, growing up to be fierce and unlettered like their
fathers. And in the midst of such a city, Cola di Rienzi, with great
heart and scanty learning, labouring to decipher the inscriptions that
told of dead and ruined greatness, dreaming of a republic, of a
tribune's power, of the humiliation of the Barons, of a resurrection for
Italy and of her sudden return to the dominion of the world.

Rome, then, was like a field long fallow, of rich soil, but long
unploughed. Scarcely below the surface lay the treasures of ages,
undreamt of by the few descendants of those who had brought them
thither. Above ground, overgrown with wild creepers and flowers, there
still stood some such monuments of magnificence as we find it hard to
recall by mere words, not yet voluntarily destroyed, but already falling
to pieces under the slow destruction of grinding time, when violence had
spared them. Robert Guiscard had burned the city in 1084, but he had not
destroyed everything. The Emperors of the East had plundered Rome long
before that, carrying off works of art without end to adorn their city
of Constantinople. Builders had burned a thousand marble statues to lime
for their cement, for the statues were ready to hand and easily broken
up to be thrown into the kiln, so that it seemed a waste of time and
tools to quarry out the blocks from the temples. The Barbarians of
Genseric and the Jews of Trastevere had seized upon such of the four
thousand bronze statues as the Emperors had left, and had melted many of
them down for metal, often hiding them in strange places while waiting
for an o