240 ANCIENT PAINTING AS AMONG THE LOST ARTS. 



all control, and raged for nine days. When it was over, the 

 greater part of Rome was in ashes ; and it is probable that half 

 the art specimens brought from Greece were destroyed in those 

 few fatal days. 



Another cause, which has served perhaps more than all others 

 to bury the marble and stone works of Rome, is the inundations 

 of the Tiber. This is one of the rivers that come directly down 

 from the Appenines, and like all mountain streams is peculiarly 

 liable to overflow. Repeatedly has the Tiber spread itself 

 through all the lower parts of the city, and swept or dissolved 

 into ruins every building that was not on a hill or the sides of a 

 hill. All the valleys, and the bed of the river itself, have been 

 filled up and actually raised from twenty to thirty feet. Visitors 

 to day go down into an excavation of at least twenty-five feet to 

 get to the old floor of the Forum and the paved streets of 

 ancient days. 



The famous hills of Rome have been raised to nearly the same 

 extent by successive layers of ruins, arising in this case from 

 alternations of periods of destruction and decay, w r ith those of 

 activity and reconstruction. On the Palatine, one descends first 

 into the marble palaces of the Caesars, then underneath to the 

 plainer brick structures of the ancient Republic, and finally down 

 to the tufa-stone foundations of the original " Roma Qnadrata." 



The great and wealthy city and center of Christian civilization 

 offered tempting rewards to the hungry and rude barbarians who 

 swarmed on the northern confines of the Empire in the early 

 centuries. In the year 410 of our era the Goths, under Alaric, 

 besieged and took possession of the city, pillaging it for five 

 days. Forty-five years later, the Yandals, under Genseric, plun- 

 dered and ravaged it for fifteen days. Again in 546, the Goths, 

 under Totila, starved the city into surrender, and then enforced 

 the extremest extortions. It is said that in some of these sieges, 

 the broken arms and limbs of statues were hurled at the enemy 

 from the walls like any other rubbish. 



But worse than all the barbarians, as the iconoclasts of art, 

 were the Christians themselves. When from poor and persecuted 

 hiders in caves and catacombs, they could at length proclaim 



