FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150  
151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   >>  
ngs. And doubtless this explanation was correct. Yet the pleasure of these little pedantic and artistic mummeries, which took place in suburban gardens, while the townsfolk streamed in the hot June nights, decked with bunches of cloves and of lavender, to make bonfires in the empty places near the Lateran, little guessing that their ancestors had once done the same in honour of the neighbouring Venus--the innocent childishness of these learned men was perhaps spiced, for some individuals at least, by a momentary belief in the gods of the old poets, by a sudden forbidden fervour for the exiled divinities of Virgil and Ovid, under whose reign the world had been young, men had been free to love and think, and Rome, now the object of the world's horror and contempt, had been the world's triumphant mistress. But these had been mere mummeries, mere child's play, and the soul of Filarete had thirsted for a reality. He could not have answered had you asked whether he believed in the absolute existence and power of the old gods, any more than whether he disbelieved in the power of Christ and His avenging angels; his cultivated and sceptical mind was, after all, in a state of disorder similar to that of Domenico's ignorance. All that he knew with certainty was that Christ and His worship represented to him all that was unnatural, cruel, foolish, and hypocritical; while the gods were associated with every thought of liberty, of beauty, and of glory. And so, one evening, after working up still further the enthusiasm, the passionate desire of his friend, he told Domenico that, if he chose, he too perhaps might see a god. In his antiquarian rambles Filarete had discovered, a mile or two outside the southern gates of Rome, a subterranean chamber, richly adorned with stuccoes--known nowadays as the tomb of certain members of the Flavian family, but which, thanks to the defective knowledge of his day and the habit of seeing people buried in churches, the humanist had mistaken for a temple--intact, and scarcely desecrated, of the Eleusinian Bacchus. Above its vaults, barely indicated by a higher mound in the waving ground of the pasture land, had once stood a Christian church, as ancient almost as the supposed temple below, whose Byzantine columns lay half hidden by the high grass, and the walls of whose apse had become overgrown by ivy and weeds, the nest of lazy snakes. The Gothic soldiers, Arians or heathens, who had burned down, in
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   126   127   128   129   130   131   132   133   134   135   136   137   138   139   140   141   142   143   144   145   146   147   148   149   150  
151   152   153   154   155   156   157   158   159   >>  



Top keywords:
Filarete
 

Christ

 

temple

 

Domenico

 

mummeries

 
southern
 
family
 

members

 
Flavian
 

chamber


richly

 

stuccoes

 
nowadays
 

adorned

 
subterranean
 

working

 
evening
 
enthusiasm
 

thought

 

liberty


beauty

 

passionate

 

desire

 

antiquarian

 

rambles

 

discovered

 

friend

 

mistaken

 

hidden

 

columns


ancient

 
supposed
 

Byzantine

 

overgrown

 

Arians

 
soldiers
 

heathens

 
burned
 

Gothic

 
snakes

church
 

Christian

 
churches
 
buried
 

humanist

 

scarcely

 
intact
 

people

 
defective
 

knowledge