The Historians' History of the World 05

A form of architecture called the Tuscan was mostly used, which bore an imperfect resemblance to that early Greek style usually called the Doric. But the existing remains of the republican period are too scanty to allow of any precise statements. The true arts of Rome were, then and always, the arts of the builder and engineer. It would not be wrong to call the Romans the greatest builders in the world. Some of their mighty works, works combining solidity of structure with beauty of form and utility of purpose, still remain for our admiration, having survived the decay of ages and the more destructive hands of barbarian conquerors. In every country subject to their sway, roads and bridges and aqueducts remain in sufficient number and perfection to justify all praise. We class the roads among the buildings, according to their own phraseology,[73] and their construction deserves the name as justly as the works upon our own railways. The first great military road and the first aqueduct are due to the old censor Appius Cæcus, and they both remain to preserve the memory of the man, often self-willed and presumptuous, but resolute, firm of purpose, noble in conception, and audacious in execution. Other aqueducts and other roads rapidly followed; the spade and trowel were as much the instruments of Roman dominion as the sword and spear. By the close of the Punic Wars solid roads, carried by the engineer’s art over broad and rapid streams, through difficult mountain passes, across quaking morasses, had already linked Rome with Capua in the south, with Placentia and Cremona in the north. Such were the proud monuments of the Appii, the Æmilii, the Flaminii.

It may be said that these magnificent works, as well as the vast amphitheatres and baths which afterwards decorated Rome and every petty city in her provinces, were due to the invention of the arch. This simple piece of mechanism, so wonderful in its results, first appears in the Great Cloaca. It was unknown to the Greeks, or at least not used by them. It may be that the Romans borrowed it from the Etruscans; the Cloaca is attributed to an Etruscan king, and similar works are discovered in ruined cities of Etruria. But if they borrowed the principle they used it nobly, as witness the noble bridges still remaining, the copious streams carried over the plain for miles at the height of sixty or seventy feet from the level of the soil. If they had little feeling for beauty and delicacy in the use of the pencil or the chisel, their buildings are stamped with a greatness which exalted the power of the state while it disregarded the pleasure of the individual.

Their attention to practical utility in draining and watering their city is especially noted by Strabo in contrast with the indifference shown by the Greeks to these matters. To the facts already stated may be added their rule, established so early as the year 260 B.C., that no one should be buried within the city—a rule scarcely yet adopted in London. From this time dates the beginning of those rows of sepulchral monuments which the traveller beheld on either side of the road as he entered the Eternal City. It was a gloomy custom, but better at least than leaving graveyards in the heart of crowded cities.

A striking proof of engineering skill is shown in the tunnels cut through solid rock for the purpose of draining off volcanic lakes; this art we may also believe to have been originally borrowed from the Etruscans. The first tunnel of which we hear was that by which the Alban Lake was partially let off during the siege of Veii, a work which was suggested by an Etruscan soothsayer. Other works of like kind still remain, though the time of their execution is not always known. Here shall be added the notice of one work of kindred sort, which happens by a rare coincidence to combine great utility with rarest beauty. The famous M. Curius Dentatus, when censor in 272, cut a passage through the rock, by which the waters of Lake Velinus were precipitated into the Nar. By this means he recovered for his newly conquered Sabine clients a large portion of fertile land, and left behind the most lovely, if not the most sublime, of all waterfalls. The Falls of Terni, such is the famous name they now bear, were wrought by the hand of man. “Thousands of travellers visit them,” says Niebuhr; “how few know that they are not the work of Nature!”b

LITERATURE