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Ravenna, A Study by Edward Hutton

E >> Edward Hutton >> Ravenna, A Study




Now Caesar was not ignorant of the real state of affairs, but he was
perhaps not yet ready to act, or he hoped in fact to save the ancient
state; at any rate, he gave it as his opinion that particular regard
should be had to the tranquillity of the republic, lest any one should
assert that he was the originator of civil war. Therefore he sent
again to his friends, making through them this very moderate request,
that two legions and the provinces of Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum
should be left him. No one could openly quarrel with such a reasonable
demand and the patience with which it was more than once put forward;
for when Caesar could not obtain a favourable answer from the consuls,
he wrote a letter to the senate in which he briefly recounted his
exploits and public services, and entreated that he should not be
deprived of the favour of the people who had ordered that he, although
absent, should be considered a candidate for the consulship at the
next election. He stated also that he would disband his army if the
senate and the Roman people desired it, provided that Pompey would do
the same. But he stated also that, as long as Pompey retained the
command of his army, there could be no just reason why Caesar should
disband his troops and expose himself to the power of his enemies.

This was Caesar's third offer to his opponents. He entrusted the
letter to Curio, who travelled one hundred and sixty miles in three
days and reached the City early in January. He did not, however,
deliver the letter until there was a crowded meeting of the senate and
the tribunes of the people were present; for he was afraid lest, if he
gave it up without the utmost publicity, the consuls would suppress
it. A sort of debate followed the reading of the letter, but when
Scipio, Pompey's mouthpiece, spoke and declared, among other things,
that Pompey was resolved to take up the cause of the senate now or
never, and that he would drop it if a decision were delayed, the
majority, overawed, decreed that Caesar should "at a definite and not
distant day give up Transalpine Gaul to Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus,
and Cisalpine Gaul to Marcus Servilius Nonianus and should dismiss his
army, failing which he should be esteemed a traitor. When the
tribunes, of Caesar's party, made use of their right of veto against
this resolution not only were they, as they at least asserted,
threatened in the senate house itself by the swords of Pompeian
soldiers and forced, in order to save their lives, to flee in slaves'
clothing from the capital, but the senate, now sufficiently overawed,
treated their interference as an attempt at revolution, declared the
country in danger, and in the usual form called the burgesses to take
up arms, and all the magistrates faithful to the constitution to place
themselves at the head of the armed."

That was on January 7th. Five days later Caesar was on his way at the
head of his troops to invade Italy and, without knowing it, to found
the empire, that universal government out of which we are come.

It was with one legion[1] that Caesar undertook his great adventure.
That legion, the Thirteenth, had been stationed near Tergeste
(Trieste), but at Caesar's orders it had marched into Ravenna in the
first days of January. Upon the fateful twelfth, with some secrecy,
while Caesar himself attended a public spectacle, examined the model
of a fencing school, which he proposed to build, and, as usual, sat
down to table with a numerous party of friends,[2] the first companies
of this legion left Ravenna by the Rimini gate, to be followed after
sunset by its great commander; still with all possible secrecy it
seems, for mules were put to his carriage, a hired one, at a mill
outside Ravenna and he went almost alone.

[Footnote 1: Plutarch says "Caesar had not then with him more than 300
horse and 5000 foot. The rest of his forces were left on the other
side of the Alps."]

[Footnote 2: So Suetonius; but Plutarch says "As for himself, he spent
the day at a public show of gladiators, and a little before evening
bathed, and then went into the apartment, where he entertained
company. When it was growing dark, he left the company, having desired
them to make merry till his return, which they would not have long to
wait for."]

The road he travelled was not the great way to Rimini, but a by-way
across the marshes, and it would seem to have been in a wretched
state. At any rate Caesar lost his way, the lights of his little
company were extinguished, his carriage had to be abandoned, and it
was only after wandering about for a long time that, with the help of
a peasant whom he found towards daybreak, he was able to get on, afoot
now, and at last to reach the great highway. That night must have
tried even the iron nerves and dauntless courage of the greatest
soldier of all time.

Caesar came up with his troops on the banks of the Rubicon, the sacred
boundary of Italy and Cisalpine Gaul in the narrow pass between the
mountains and the sea. "There," says Suetonius, whose account I have
followed, "he halted for a while revolving in his mind the importance
of the step he was about to take. At last turning to those about him,
he said: 'We may still retreat; but if we pass this little bridge
nothing is left us but to fight it out in arms.'"

Now while he was thus hesitating, staggered, even he, by the greatness
of what he would attempt, doubtless resolving in silence arguments for
and against it, and, if we may believe Plutarch, "many times changing
his opinion," the following strange incident is said to have happened.

A person, remarkable, says Suetonius, for his noble aspect and
graceful mien, appeared close at hand sitting by the wayside playing
upon a pipe. When not only the shepherds herding their flocks
thereabout, but a number of the legionaries also gathered round to
hear this fellow play, and there happened to be among them some
trumpeters, the piper suddenly snatched a trumpet from one of these,
ran to the river, and, sounding the advance with a piercing blast,
crossed to the other side. Upon which Caesar on a sudden impulse
exclaimed: "Let us go whither the omens of the gods and the iniquity
of our enemies call us. The die is cast." And immediately at the head
of his troops he crossed the river and found awaiting him the tribunes
of the people who, having fled from Rome, had come to meet him. There
in their presence he called upon the troops to pledge him their
fidelity, with tears in his eyes, Suetonius assures us, and his
garments rent from his bosom. And when he had received their oath he
set out, and with his legion marched so fast the rest of the way that
he reached Ariminum before morning and took it.

The fall of Ariminum was but a presage, as we know, of Caesar's
triumph. In three months he was master of all Italy. From Ravenna he
had emerged to seize the lordship of the world, and out of a misery of
chaos to create Europe.




III

RAVENNA IN THE TIME OF THE EMPIRE


That great revolutionary act of Julius Caesar's may be said to have
made manifest, and for the first time, the unique position of Ravenna
in relation to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. In the years which followed,
that position remained always unchanged, and is, indeed, more
prominent than ever in the civil wars between Antony and Octavianus
which followed Caesar's murder; but with the establishment of the
empire by Octavianus and the universal peace, the _pax romana_, which
it ensured, this position of Ravenna in relation to Italy and to
Cisalpine Gaul sank into insignificance in comparison with her other
unique advantage, her position upon the sea. For Octavianus, as we
shall see, established her as the great naval port of Italy upon the
east, and as such she chiefly appears to us during all the years of
the unhampered government of the empire.

In the civil wars between Antony and Octavianus, however, she appears
still as the key to the narrow pass between Italy and Cisalpine Gaul.
Let us consider this for a moment.

Antony, as we know, after that great scene in the senate house when
the supporters of Pompey and the aristocrats had succeeded in denying
Caesar everything, had fled to Caesar at Ravenna. In the war which
followed he had been Caesar's chief lieutenant and friend. At the
crucial battle of Pharsalus in 48 B.C. he had commanded, and with
great success, the left wing. In 44 B.C. he had been consul with
Caesar and had then offered him the crown at the festival of the
_Lupercalia_. After Caesar's murder he had attempted, and not without
a sort of right, to succeed to his power. It was he who pronounced the
speech over Caesar's body and read his will to the people. It was he
who obtained Caesar's papers and his private property. It cannot then
have been without resentment and surprise that he found presently a
rival in the young Octavianus, the great-nephew and adopted son of the
dictator, who joined the senate with the express purpose of crushing
him.

Now Antony, perhaps remembering his master, had obtained from the
senate the promise of Cisalpine Gaul, then in the hands of Decimus
Brutus, who, encouraged by Octavianus, refused to surrender it to him.
Antony proceeded to Ariminum (Rimini), but Octavianus seized Ravenna
and supplied it both with stores and money.[1] Antony was beaten and
compelled to retreat across the Alps. In these acts we may see which
of the two rivals understood the reality of things, and from this
alone we might perhaps foresee the victor.

[Footnote 1: Appian, III. 42.]

That was in 44 B.C. A reconciliation between the rivals followed and
the government was vested in them and in Lepidus under the title of
_Triumviri Reipublicae Constituendae_ for five years. In 42 B.C.
Brutus and Cassius and the aristocratic party were crushed by Antony
and Octavianus at Philippi; and Antony received Asia as his share of
the Roman world. Proceeding to his government in Cilicia, Antony met
Cleopatra and followed her to Egypt. Meanwhile Fulvia, his wife, and
L. Antonius, his brother, made war upon Octavianus in Italy, for they
like Antony hoped for the lordship of the world. In the war which
followed, Ravenna played a considerable part. In 41 B.C., for
instance, the year in which the war opened, the Antonine party secured
themselves in Ravenna, not only because of its strategical importance
in regard to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, but also because as a seaport
it allowed of their communication with Antony in Egypt from whom they
expected support. All this exposed and demonstrated more and more the
importance of Ravenna, and we may be sure that the wise and astute
Octavianus marked it.

But it was the war with Sextus Pompeius which clearly showed what the
future of Ravenna was to be. In that affair we find Ravenna already
established as a naval port apparently subsidiary, on that coast, to
Brundusium, as Misenum was upon the Tyrrhene sea to Puteoli; and there
Octavianus built ships.

It was not, however, till Octavianus, his enemies one and all disposed
of, had made himself emperor at last, that, on the establishment and
general regulation of his great government, he chose Ravenna as the
major naval port of Italy upon the east, even as he chose Misenum upon
the west.

Octavianus had learned two things, certainly, in the wars he had
fought to establish himself in the monarchy his great-uncle had
founded. He had learned the necessity and the value of sea power, and
he had understood the unique position of Ravenna in relation to the
East and the West. That he had been able to appreciate both these
facts is enough to mark him as the great man he was.

Julius Caesar, for all his mighty grasp of reality, had not perceived
the enormous value, nay the necessity, of sea power, and because of
this failure his career had been twice nearly cut short; at Ilerda,
where the naval victory of Decimus Brutus over the Massiliots alone
saved him; and at Alexandria. Both the liberators and Antony had
possessed ships; but both had failed to use them with any real effect.
It was Sextus Pompeius who forced Octavianus to turn to the sea, and
when Octavianus became Augustus he did not forget the lesson. Sole
master of the Mediterranean and of all its ships of war, he understood
at once how great a support sea power offered him and his principate.
Nor was the empire, while it was vigorous, though always fearful of
and averse from the sea, ever to forget the power that lay in that
command.

Thus it was that among the first acts of Augustus was the
establishment of two fleets, as we might say, "in being" in the
Mediterranean; the fleet of Misenum and the fleet of Ravenna; the
latter with stations probably at Aquileia, Brundusium, the Piraeus,
and probably elsewhere.

The fleet of Ravenna was, certainly after A.D. 70, probably about A.D.
127, entitled _Praetoria_. The origin of this title is unknown, but it
was also borne by the fleet of Misenum and it distinguishes the
Italian from the later Provincial fleets, the former being in closer
relation to the emperor, just as the Praetorian cohorts were
distinguished from the legions.

The emperor was, of course, head of all the fleets, which were, each
of them, commanded by a prefect and sub-prefect appointed by him; and
if we may judge from the recorded promotions we have, it would seem
that the Misenate prefect ranked before the Ravennate and both before
the Provincial. But in the general military system the navy stood
lowest in respect of pay and position. The fleets were manned by freed
men and foreigners who could not obtain citizenship until after
twenty-six years' service. We find Claudius employing the marines of
the _Classis Ravennas_ to drain lake Fucinus, and it was probably
Vespasian who formed the Legion II. _Adjutrix_ from the Ravennate,
even as Nero had formed Legion I. _Adjutrix_ from the Misenate
marines.

The Ravenna that Augustus thus chose to be the great base and port of
his fleet in the eastern sea was, as we have seen, a place built upon
piles in the midst of the marshes, impregnable from the land, and,
because impregnable, able, whenever it was in dispute, to command the
narrow pass between the mountains and the sea that was the gate of
Italy and Cisalpine Gaul. Such a place, situated as it was upon the
western shore of that sea which was the fault between East and West,
was eminently suitable for the great purpose of the emperor. Pliny[1]
indeed would seem to tell us that from time immemorial Ravenna had
possessed a small port; but such a place, well enough for the small
traders of those days, could not serve usefully the requirements of a
great fleet. Therefore the first act of Augustus, when he had chosen
Ravenna as his naval base, was the construction of a proper port and
harbour, and these came to be named, after the fleet they served and
accommodated, Classis. Classis was situated some two and a half miles
from the town of Ravenna to the east-south-east. We may perhaps have
some idea both of its situation and of its relation to Ravenna if we
say that it was to that city what the Porto di Lido is to Venice.

[Footnote 1: Pliny, iii. 20; cf. also Strabo, v. 7.]

It is very difficult, in looking upon Ravenna as we see it to-day, to
reconstruct it, even in the imagination, as it was when Augustus had
done with it. To begin with, the sea has retreated several miles from
the city, which is no longer within sight of it, while all that is
left of Classis, which is also now out of sight of the sea, is a
single decayed and deserted church, S. Apollinare in Classe. Strabo,
however, who wrote his _Geography_ a few years after Augustus had
chosen Ravenna for his port upon the Adriatic, has left us a
description both of it and the country in which it stood, from which
must be drawn any picture we would possess of so changed a place. He
speaks of it, as we have seen, as "a great city" situated in the
marshes, built entirely upon piles, and traversed by canals which were
everywhere crossed by bridges or ferry-boats. While at the full tide
he tells us it was swept by the sea and always by the river, and thus
the sewage was carried off and the air purified, and this so
thoroughly, that even before its establishment by Augustus the
district was considered so healthy that the Roman governors had chosen
it as a spot in which to train gladiators.[1] That river we know from
Pliny[2] was called the Bedesis; and the same writer tells us that
Augustus built a canal which brought the water of the Po to Ravenna.

[Footnote 1: Strabo, v. 7.]

[Footnote 2: Pliny, iii. 20.]

Tacitus in his _Annals_[1] merely tells us that Italy was guarded on
both sides by fleets at Misenum and Ravenna, and in his _Histories_[2]
speaks of these places as the well known naval stations without
stopping to describe them. While Suetonius,[3] though he mentions the
great achievement of Augustus, does not emphasise it and does not
attempt to tell us what these ports were like.

[Footnote 1: Tacitus, Ann. iv. 5.]

[Footnote 2: Tacitus, Hist. ii. 100; iii. 6, 40.]

[Footnote 3: Suetonius, _Augustus_.]

Perhaps the best description we have of Augustan Ravenna comes to us
from a writer who certainly never saw the port in its great Roman
days, but who probably followed a well established tradition in his
description of it. This is Jornandes, who was born about A.D. 500 and
was first a notary at the Ostrogothic court and later became a monk
and finally bishop of Crotona. In his _De Getarum Origins et Rebus
Gestis_ he thus describes Ravenna:

"This city (says he) between the marshes, the sea, and the Po is only
accessible on one side. Situated beside the Ionian Sea it is
surrounded and almost submerged by lagoons. On the east is the sea, on
the west it is defended by marshes across which there remains a narrow
passage, a kind of gate. The city is encircled on the north by a
branch of the Po, called the Fossa Asconis, and on the south by the Po
itself, which is called the Eridanus, and which is there known as the
King of Rivers. Augustus deepened its bed and made it larger; it
flowed quite through the city, and its mouth formed an excellent port
where once, as Dion reports [this passage of Dion Cassius is lost], a
fleet of 250 ships could be stationed in all security.... The city has
three names with which she glorifies herself and she is divided into
three parts to which they correspond; the first is Ravenna, the last
Classis, that in the midst is Caesarea between Ravenna and the sea.
Built on a sandy soil this quarter is easily approached and is
commodiously situated for trade and transport."

We thus have a picture of Ravenna as a triune city, consisting of
Ravenna proper, the port Classis, and the long suburb between them,
Caesarea, connected by a great causeway and everywhere watered by
canals, the greatest of which was the Fossa Augusta by which a part of
the waters of the Po were carried to Ravenna and thence to Classis and
the sea; a city very much, we may suppose, what we know Venice to be,
if we think of her in connection with the Riva, the great suburb of
the Marina, and the Porto di Lido. At Classis we must understand there
was room for a fleet of two hundred and fifty ships and accommodation
for arsenals, magazines, barracks, and so forth, while there is one
other thing we know of this port, and that from Pliny,[1] who tells us
that it had a Pharos like the famous one of Alexandria. "There is
another building (says he) that is highly celebrated, the tower that
was built by a king of Egypt on the island of Pharos at the entrance
to the harbour of Alexandria.... At present there are similar fires
lighted up in numerous places, Ostia and Ravenna for example. The only
danger is that when these fires are thus kept burning without
intermission they may be mistaken for stars."

[Footnote 1: Pliny xxx. vi. 18]

Such was the splendour of Ravenna in the time of Augustus. His
achievement so far as Ravenna was concerned was to understand her
importance not only in regard to Italy and Cisalpine Gaul, an
importance already discounted by the universal peace he had
established, but in regard to the sea. He turned Ravenna into a
first-class naval port and based his eastern fleet upon her; and this
was so wise an act that, so long as the empire remained strong and
unhampered, Ravenna appears as the great base of its sea power in the
East.

In that long peace which Italy enjoyed under the empire we hear little
of Ravenna. We know Claudius built a great gate called Porta Aurea,
which was only destroyed in 1582; and we know that the great sea port
had one weakness, the scarcity of good water for drinking purposes.
Martial 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]