The British Quarterly Review

Or all periods of the world's history there is none which so imperatively calls on him who would master it to unite the characters of student and traveller as the great transitional time of European history. The days when the Roman and the Teutonic elements of modern society stood as yet side by side are days which cannot be studied in books only. A large proportion of the greatest existing Roman monuments. belong to those days of Rome's physical decline which were in truth the days of the new birth of her moral power. Some of them are strictly works of defence, such as were needed only in days when the frontiers of the Empire had to be defended, and no longer to be pushed forward. Others are works of another kind, but which teach the same lesson in another shape. Those were days when new capitals, new seats of empire, cities adorned with the highest skill of

the time-cities whose greatness the old Rome could be supposed to grudge-arose on distant and barbarous frontiers. But the growth of these cities was not a sign of the strength of the Empire, but of its weakness. It was a sign that the presence of her armies and of her sovereigns was constantly needed on frontiers which dangerous enemies always threatened and often overpassed. But it was a sign too that the true life of Rome had flowed away from the centre to the extremities. It was held of old that the pomarium of the Roman city might be enlarged only by a conqueror who had enlarged the borders of the Roman Empire. But when the whole Empire had become Roman, it might be said that the pomarium of the city was advanced to the frontier of the Empire. Within that border, at least in the western half of the Empire, all was Rome. Wherever the Roman went, he carried Rome with him. The cities which he reared on his frontier might pass for her suburbs. The fortresses which he raised beyond the Rhine and the Danube might pass for the outlying posts of the defences of his old home by the Tiber. But the Old Rome for awhile sank from her old place in the world which she had herself created. It was but for awhile. She has outlived Nikomêdeia and Antioch, Trier and York, Milan and Ravenna. And, as an European and Christian city, she has outlived the New Rome herself. But there was a time when these outlying colonies outstripped their metropolis as the living centres of Roman life and Roman power. There were days when the pulse of Rome beat more quickly in her Gaulish suburb than it beat within the inner circle of Romulus and Tatius. We are wont to connect the name of the great Constantine mainly with his Eastern foundation, with that New Rome which seems fated to bear his name for ever. But before he reigned on the Bosporos, before he reigned on the Tiber, he had reigned with a sway no less Roman on the banks of the Mosel. In the border-land of Gaul and Germany, in a city which boasted of having been founded ages before Rome herself, he had built and conquered and listened to the voice of pagan panegyrists, before he found panegyrists of another faith in the far Megarian colony which at his word grew into the younger Rome. The first city of Constantine, the scene of his most

Comparison of Trier and Ravenna.

truly Roman reign, of his most truly Roman triumphs, is to be looked for, not at Rome, not at Byzantium, but at Augusta Treverorum.

A picture of the great days of Trier will follow as no unfitting companion piece to the picture which we gave some time back of the great days of Ravenna. In strictness, the picture of Trier should have come the earlier of the two, for the greatness of Trier came before the greatness of Ravenna. The highest boast of Ravenna is to have held the throne of the Goth reigning in Italy. The highest boast of Trier is to have held the throne of Roman Cæsars, reigning in Gaul and bridling Germany. The proudest trophies that were ever raised in Trier, the proudest days of triumph that were ever kept there, were trophies and triumphs for Roman victories over Teutonic enemies. The proudest days of Ravenna were days when no trophy, no triumph, was needed to remind men of Teutonic victories over Roman enemies. The Goth dwelling in the Roman city was himself his own trophy. The monuments of Trier are badges of Roman victory; the monuments of Ravenna are badges of Roman overthrow. And yet both are but parts of the same story. The Roman at Trier was the harbinger of the Goth at Ravenna. When the Cæsars fixed their home by the Mosel instead of by the Tiber, when they kept their days of victory, no longer on Latin, but on Gaulish or German soil, it was a sign that the days were coming when Teutonic kings should reign in Italy, and should visit Rome herself as plunderers and as restorers. When Trier became an imperial city, it was a sign that things had changed since Drusus and Germanicus had marched forth from Rome for warfare in the same lands. It was a sign that Rome had now no new worlds to conquer, that all that she could now do was to defend what she still kept, or at most to win back what she had lost. From Constantine and Valentinian holding the Frank in check at Trier, there is but one step to Honorius hiding himself from the Goth at Ravenna. Rome, as the seat of empire, marks the stage when the Roman could still conquer in aggressive warfare. Trier marks the stage when he could still conquer, but only in warfare waged for the defence of his own borders. Ravenna See British Quarterly Review, October, 1872.

marks the stage when his days of conquest were over, when the strife was no longer for victory but for life, when the only choice for Italy lay between a conqueror from beyond the Alps and a so-called deliverer from beyond the Hadriatic.

In the eyes of the Romans of those days Augusta Treverorum was a second Rome, a colony, a daughter whose honours might sometimes awaken the envy of her parent. But Treveran patriotism told another tale. The city beyond. the Alps was by far the older of the two. Twelve hundred and fifty years before Romulus watched the vultures on the Palatine, in the seventh year of the life of the patriarch Abraham, Trebetas, the son of Ninus, driven forth from the land of Assyria, wandered through the desolate continent of Europe, where as yet there were no cities nor dwellings of man any kind. At last he came to a river beside which was a fair valley, a valley rich in streams, shaded by woods, and girt in by mountains. . The goodly spot pleased him: here he would at last fix his dwelling; here then he began to build a city, the first city built on European soil, and the name of it he called after his own name, Treveris.* It was to the native princes of his dynasty, not to the alien lords of the younger city far to the south, that Treveris, not yet Augusta, owed those great works, whose fame was in after days transferred to the southern conqueror. It was the princes of the house of Trebetas who raised the walls, the palaces, built of brick after the fashion of Babylon, † the mighty pile of the Black Gate, with its huge stones, joined not by the help of mortar, but bound together with fetters of iron. And not only were gates and walls and palaces the work of the chiefs of those early times, but Trier, the elder city, seems to have forestalled the younger Rome in some of those buildings and institutions which we are apt to look on as distinctively Roman. The forum might be so called by a mere application of a Latin word; the temple, full of a hundred idols, where demons gave oracles to their worshippers, might have been dedicated to the deities of a native

* The legend will be found in full in the 'Gesta Treverorum,' printed in the eighth volume of Pertz, p. 140. It is told also by Otto of Freising, in his first book of Annals.

+ Ott. Fris. i. 8. 'Instar Babylonici muri ex cocto latere factum.'

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The British Quarterly Review, 第 62 卷