Roman Forum

 In his book on Rome Edward Hutton devoted a whole chapter to a tour of the remains in the Roman Forum. Despite his love of ancient Rome, its philosophy, laws, and poetry, he saw in the art of these monuments the cruelty at the core of pagan Rome.

Arch of Titus

How different is this hard and realistic Roman art from the work of the Greeks in the frieze of the Parthenon! There, with a perfect feeling for animals, Pheidias has carved the bull led to sacrifice, the victim of the Gods, amid the chanting of the priests, the songs of the people; but the Roman artist seems to have understood nothing and to have seen after all only with his bodily eyes. It is before such work as this that we seem to realize almost for the first time the limitations of Rome, the immense gulf that—yes, we must admit it at last—separates us from her. Her artists lacked a certain delicacy and clairvoyance and were without spirituality or finesse. They seem, here at least, to have been mere copycats of Nature without insight or sensibility. We seem to understand at last, before such work as this, how even Aurelius* could sit through all the brutality of the amphitheatre, and drag, even he in his Triumph, along the Sacred Way that little German family, the father and mother in chains, their child crying in her arms, on the threshold of a home brought bodily over the mountains ‘to make a Roman holiday,’ for the enjoyment of the Roman people.Yes, that explains too, the failure of Rome, not in art only, but in life, in government. To the heart which would refuse to look on just that with indifference—that and the rest—the future belonged. Yet we may well ask ourselves, if only to avoid a kind of vulgar self-complacency, what latent cruelty we still entertain…which in certain circumstances might induce us to do the like… (41-2)

There is one splendor in the forum which might seem to sum up, as it were, the whole significance of the place. I mean the Triumphal Arches…. Of the two which are left to us the Arch of Titus is the earlier. Set up in his honour by the Senate, to commemorate the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70…Consisting of a single arch supported by composite pillars, it is decorated with fine reliefs. In the tympana are set winged Victories bearing palms and crowns, while beneath the inscription is carved a sacrificial procession as a frieze. Within, under the arch, are two marble reliefs in which we see Titus crowned by Victory proceeding along the Sacred Way to the Capitol in a chariot driven by Roma. Opposite is another relief of a Triumphal procession with the captives and the spoils; the table with the showbread, and the seven-branched candlestick from the temple at Jerusalem; while in the vault the divine Emperor is borne to heaven by the bird of Jove. Carved some twenty years before the balustrades of the Rostra, these reliefs have much of their character and as little feeling or sense of beauty as they. The work of those who were always the victors, they celebrate a strength and persistence which have suffered neither a love of beauty nor a love of truth to cheat them of reality. It is as though we saw an indomitable tyranny, already a little weary of itself marching once more, how uselessly, over the humble and meek. Rome was already incapable of any sort of expression save that of government. For her, life no longer had illusions or promises; one not only died at the word of command, one lived by it also. (44-45)

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Edward Hutton: Rome. 1922, fourth edition. First edition, 1907.

* Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher Emperor.