Ravenna, a Study. Edward Hutton
writes
"I'd rather at Ravenna have a cistern than a vine
Since I could sell my water there much better than my wine,"
and again:
"That landlord at Ravenna is plainly but a cheat
I paid for wine and water, but he served wine to me neat"[1]
[Footnote 1: Martial, Fp iii. 56, 57. Trs Hodgkin]
This weakness would seem, however, to have been overcome by Trajan, who built an aqueduct nearly twenty miles long, which Theodoric restored, after the fall of the empire, in 524. This aqueduct, of which some arches remain in the bed of the Bedesis (Ronco), seems to have run, following the course of the river, from near Forli, where there still remains a village called S. Maria in Acquedotto, to Ravenna.
[Illustration: GREEK RELIEF FROM A TEMPLE OF NEPTUNE]
The great city-port thus became one of the most important and considerable of the cities of Italy, at a time when the whole of the West was rapidly increasing in wealth and population, and especially the old province of Cisapline Gaul, which had indeed become, during the pax romana, the richest part of the new Italy. Always an important military port it was often occupied by the emperors as their headquarters from which to watch and to oppose the advance of their enemies into Italy, and the possessor of it, for the reasons I have set forth, was always in a commanding position. Thus in A.D. 193 it was the surrender of Ravenna without resistance that gave the empire to Septimius Severus, when, scarcely allowing himself time for sleep or food, marching on foot and in complete armour, he crossed the Alps at the head of his columns to punish the wretched Didius Julianus and to avenge Pertinax. It was there in 238 that Pupienus was busy assembling his army to oppose Maximin when he received the news of the death of his enemy before Aquileia.
And because it was impregnable and secluded it was often chosen too as a place of imprisonment for important prisoners.
It is true that we know very little, in detail, of the life of any city other than Rome during those years of the great Peace in which we see the empire change from a Pagan to a Christian state. Those centuries which saw Christendom slowly emerge, in which Europe was founded, still lack a modern historian, and the magnitude and splendour of their achievement are too generally misconceived or ignored. We are largely unaware still of what they were in themselves and of what we owe to them. By reason of the miserable collapse of Europe, of Christendom, in the sixteenth century and its appalling results both in thought and in politics, we are led, too often by prejudices, to regard those mighty years rather as the prelude to the decline and fall of the empire than as the great and indestructible foundations of all that is still worth having in the world.
For rightly understood those centuries gave us not only our culture, our civilisation, and our Faith, but ensured them to us that they should always endure. They established for ever the great lines upon which our art was to develop, to change, and yet not to suffer annihilation or barrenness. They established the supremacy of the idea, so that it might always renew our lives, our culture, and our polity, and that we might judge everything by it and fear neither revolution, defeat, nor decay. They, and they alone, established us in the secure possession of our own souls so that we alone in the world might develop from within, to change but never to die, and to be—yes, alone in the world—Christians.
The almost incredible strength and well being of those years must be seized also. There was not a town in Italy and the West that did not expand and increase in a fashion almost miraculous during that period. It was then the rivers were embanked, the canals made, the great roads planned and constructed, and our communications established for ever. There was no industry that did not grow marvellously in strength, there is not a class that did not increase in wealth and well-being beyond our dreams of progress. There is scarcely anything that is really fundamental in our lives that was not then created that it might endure. It was then our religion, the soul of Europe, was born.
Christianity, the Faith, which, little by little, absorbed the empire, till it became the energy and the cause of all that undying but changeful principle of life and freedom which rightly understood is Europe, is thought to have been brought first to Ravenna by S. Apollinaris, a disciple as we are told of S. Peter, who made him her first bishop. So at least his acts assert; and though little credence may, I fear, be placed in them, that he was the first bishop of Ravenna, and in the time of S. Peter, is not at variance with what we know of that age, is attested by the traditions of the city, and is supported by later authorities. S. Peter Chrysologus (c. 440), the most famous of his successors, for instance, assures us of it. This great churchman calls S. Apollinaris martyr, and in that there is nothing strange, but he asserts that though he often spilt his blood for the Faith, yet God preserved him a long time, not less than twenty years, to his church, and that his persecution did not take away his life.[1]
[Footnote 1: His relics lay for many years in the church dedicated in his honour at Classis; but in 549 they were removed from their great tomb and placed in a more secret spot in the same church. Cf. Agnellus. Liber Pontificalis Ecclesiae Ravennatis (Ed. Holder—Egger in Monumenta Germanicae Historica) and S. Peter Chrysologus, Sermon 128 in Migne.]
The empire which it had taken more than a millenium to build, which was the most noble and perhaps the most beneficient experiment in government that has ever been made, was in obvious economic and administrative decay by the middle of the fourth century. Christianity perhaps was already undermining the servile state, which in its effort of self-preservation adopted an economic system hopelessly at variance with the facts of the situation; while the weakness of its frontiers offered a military problem which the empire was unable to face. Diocletian had attempted to solve it by dividing the empire, but the division he made was rather racial that strategic, for under it the two parts of the empire, East and West, met on the Danube. The eastern part, by force of geography, was inclined to an Asiatic point of view and to the neglect of the Danube; the western was by no means strong enough either financially or militarily to hold that tremendous line.
We read, in the letters of S. Ambrose among others, of the decay of the great cities of Cisalpine Gaul,[1] of the failure of agriculture in that rich countryside, of the poverty and misery that were everywhere falling upon that great state. It is possible that in the general weakening of administrative power even the roads, the canals, the whole system of communications were allowed to become less perfect than they had been; everywhere there was a retreat. The frontiers were no longer inviolate, and it is probable that in the general decay the port of Classis, the city of Ravenna, suffered not less than their neighbours.
[Footnote 1: See S. Ambrose, Ep. 39, written in 388, quoted by Muratori, Dissertazioni, vol. i. 21. "De Bonomensi veniens Urbe, a tergo Claternam, ipsam Bononiam, Mutinam, Regium derelinquebas; in dextera erat Brixillum; a fronte occurrebat Placentia. … Te igitur semirutarum Urbium cadavera, terrarumque sub eodem conspectu exposita funera non te admonent. … "]
Indeed already in 306 it is rather as a refuge than as a great and active naval base that Ravenna appears to us, when Severus, destitute of force, "retired or rather fled" thither from the pursuit of Maximian. He flung himself into Ravenna because it was impregnable and because he expected reinforcements from Illyricum and the East, but though he held the sea with a powerful fleet he made no use of it, and the emissaries of Maximian easily persuaded him to surrender. Already perhaps, a century later, when Honorius retired from Milan on the approach of Alaric and the first of those barbarian invasions which broke up the decaying western empire had penetrated into Cisalpine Gaul, the great works of Augustus and Trajan at Ravenna, the canals, the mighty Fossa, and the port itself had fallen into a sort of decay which the fifth century was to complete, till that marvellous city, once the base of the eastern fleet and one of the great naval ports of the world, became just a decaying citadel engulfed in the marshes, impregnable it is true, but for barbarian reasons, lost in the fogs and the miasma of her shallow and undredged lagoons.
IV
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