taken from his letter to the Roman people asking them to CHAP. XV. receive back Rienzo :-'When was there ever such peace, such tranquillity, such justice, such honour paid to virtue, such rewards distributed to the good and punishments to the bad, when was ever the state so wisely guided, as in the time when the world had obtained one head, and that head Rome; the very time wherein God deigned to be born of a virgin and dwell upon earth. To every single body there has been given a head; the whole world therefore also, which is called by the poet a great body, ought to be content with one temporal head. For every twoheaded animal is monstrous; how much more horrible and hideous a portent must be a creature with a thousand different heads, biting and fighting against one another! If, however, it is necessary that there be more heads than one, it is nevertheless evident that there ought to be one to restrain all and preside over all, that so the peace of the whole body may abide unshaken. Assuredly both in heaven and in earth the sovereignty of one has always been best.' His passion for the heroism of Roman conquest and the Dante. ordered peace to which it brought the world, is the centre of Dante's political hopes: he is no more a Ghibeline embittered by exile, but a patriot whose fervid imagination sees a nation arise regenerate at the touch of its rightful lord. Italy, the spoil of so many Teutonic conquerors, is the garden of the Empire which Henry is to redeem: Rome the mourning widow, whom Albert is denounced for neglecting. Passing through Purgatory, the poet sees Rudolf of Hapsburg seated gloomily apart, mourn 'Vieni a veder la tua Roma, che piagne "Cesare mio, perchè non m' accompagne?"' Purgatorio, canto vi. 112. CHAP. XV. Attitude of ing his sin in that he left unhealed the wounds of Italy." In the deepest pit of Hell's ninth circle lies Lucifer, huge, three-headed; in each mouth a sinner whom he crunches between his teeth, in one mouth Iscariot the traitor to Christ, in the others the two traitors to the first Emperor of Rome, Brutus and Cassius. To multiply illustrations from other parts of the poem would be an endless task; for the idea is ever present in Dante's mind, and displays itself in a hundred unexpected forms. Virgil himself is selected to be the guide of the pilgrim through hell and Purgatory, not so much as being the great poet of antiquity, as because he was born under Julius and lived beneath the good Augustus,' because he was divinely charged to sing of the Empire's earliest and brightest glories. Strange, that the shame of one age should be the glory of another. For Virgil's melancholy panegyrics upon the destroyer of the republic are no more like Dante's appeals to the coming saviour of Italy than is Caesar Octavianus to Henry count of Luxemburg. The visionary zeal of the man of letters was seconded the Jurists. by the more sober devotion of the lawyer. Conqueror, theologian, and jurist, Justinian is a hero greater than either Julius or Constantine, for his enduring work bears him witness. Absolutism was the civilian's creed: the phrases 'legibus solutus,' 'lex regia,' whatever else tended in the same direction, were taken to express the prerogative of him whose official style of Augustus, as well as the vernacular name of 'Kaiser,' designated the legitimate Inferno, canto xxxiv. 52. Purgatorio, canto vii. 94. b See especially the long passage on the Roman Eagle in Parad, xviii, xix, and xx. Not that the doctors of the civil law were necessarily political partisans of the Emperors. Savigny says that there were on the contrary more Guelfs than Ghibelines among the jurists of Bologna.— Geschichte des röm. Rechts im Mittelalter, vol. iii. p. 80. successor of the compiler of the Corpus Iuris. Since it CHAP. XV. was upon this legitimacy that his claim to be the fountain of law rested, no pains were spared to seek out and observe every custom and precedent by which Old Rome seemed to be connected with her representative. The offices Old Rome. Of the many instances that might be collected, it would Imitations of be tedious to enumerate more than a few. of the imperial household, instituted by Constantine the Great, were attached to the noblest families of Germany. The Emperor and Empress, before their coronation at Rome, were lodged in the chambers called those of Augustus and Livia; a bare sword was borne before them by the praetorian prefect; their processions were adorned by the standards-eagles, wolves, and dragons, which had figured in the train of Hadrian or Theodosius. The constant title of the Emperor himself, according to the style introduced by Probus, was 'semper Augustus,' or 'perpetuus Augustus,' which erring etymology translated ' at all times increaser of the Empire.'' Edicts issued by a Franconian or Swabian sovereign were inserted as Novels in the Corpus Iuris, in the latest editions of which custom still allows them a place. The pontificatus maximus of his pagan predecessors was supposed to be preserved by the admission of each Emperor as a canon of St. Peter's at Rome and St. Mary's at Aachen.1 Some d Cf. Palgrave, Normandy and England, vol. ii (of Otto and Adelheid). The Ordo Romanus talks of a ‘Camera Iuliae' in the Lateran palace, reserved for the Empress. e See notes to Chron. Casin. in Muratori, S. R. I. iv. 515. 'Zu aller Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs.' & Novellae Constitutiones. h Marquard Freher, Scr. Rer. Germ. iii. The question whether the seven electors vote as singuli or as a collegium, is solved by shewing that they have stepped into the place of the senate and people of Rome, whose duty it was to choose the Emperor, though (it is naïvely added) the soldiers sometimes usurped it. - Peter de Andlau, De Imperio Romano. T CHAP. XV. Reverence for times we even find him talking of his consulship.1 Annalists usually number the place of each sovereign from Augustus downwards. The notion of an uninterrupted succession, which moves the stranger's wondering smile as he sees ranged round the magnificent Golden Hall of Augsburg the portraits of the Caesars, laurelled, helmeted, and periwigged, from Julius the conqueror of Gaul to Joseph the partitioner of Poland, was to those generations not an article of faith only because its denial was inconceivable. And all this historical antiquarianism, as one might call ancient forms it, which gathers round the Empire, is but one instance, and phrases in the Middle though the most striking, of that eager wish to cling to Ages. the old forms, use the old phrases, and preserve the old institutions to which the annals of mediaeval Europe bear witness. It appears even in trivial expressions, as when a monkish chronicler says of evil bishops deposed, Tribu moti sunt, or talks of the 'senate and people of the Franks,' when he means a council of chiefs surrounded by a crowd of half-naked warriors. A certain continuity of institutions there had really been. One may say, for instance, that the mediaeval trade-guilds, though often traceable to a different source, represented the old collegia, and that villenage was not unconnected with the system of coloni under the later Empire. But the men of the Middle Ages were not thinking of such cases when they reproduced the old phrases in drawing up edicts and charters on Roman precedents. They imitated for i Thus Charles, in a capitulary added to a revised edition of the Lombard law issued in A.D. 801, says, 'Anno consulatus nostri primo.'-M. G. H., Legg. i. p. 83. So Otto III calls himself 'Consul Senatus populique Romani.' J Francis II, the last Emperor, was one hundred and twentieth (or one hundred and twenty-second) from Augustus. Some chroniclers call Otto the Great Otto II, counting in Salvius Otho, the successor of Galba. On the love of imitating, and liked to fancy themselves to be CHAP. XV the heirs of an old order which had never quite vanished. Even in remote Britain, the Teutonic invaders used after a time Roman ensigns, and stamped their coins with Roman devices; called themselves 'Basileis' and 'Augusti.' Especially did the cities perpetuate Rome through her most lasting boon to the conquered, municipal self-government; those of later origin emulating in their adherence to antique style others which, like Nismes and Cologne, Zürich and Augsburg, could trace back their institutions to the coloniae and municipia of the first centuries. the walls and gates of hoary Nürnberg the traveller still sees emblazoned the imperial eagle, with the words 'Senatus populusque Norimbergensis,' and is borne in thought from the quiet provincial town of to-day to the stirring republic of the fourteenth century: thence to the Forum and the Capitol of her greater prototype.* For, in truth, through all that period which we call the Dark and Middle Ages, men's minds were possessed by the belief that all things continued as they were from the beginning, that no chasm never to be recrossed lay between them and that ancient world to which they had not ceased to look back. We who are centuries removed can see that there had passed a great and wonderful change upon thought, and art, and literature, and politics, and society itself a change whose best illustration is to be found in the process whereby there arose out of the primitive basilica the Romanesque cathedral, and from it in turn the endless varieties of Gothic. But so gradual was the * Nürnberg herself was not of Roman foundation. But this makes the imitation all the more curious. [She is no longer (1904) a quiet town as when the lines in the text were written forty years ago.] The fashion even passed from the cities to rural communities like some of the Swiss cantons, eg. 'Senatus populusque Uronensis.' |