The Evolution of Architecture. 331 



In the rage for architectural beauty everything short of the 

 ideal was swept away as proudly as the Saxon churches of 

 England by her Norman conquerors. Happily the Eoman 

 conquerors of Greece did not destroy, they stole her temples 

 and her statues. Of the latter, 70,000 have already been ex- 

 humed in Eome. The worst they did was to debase the 

 architecture of Greece on her own soil. They dijd not know 

 the best, and so they left the/ Parthenon, " the glory that 

 was Greece," to shame " the- grandeur that was Eome " for 

 twenty centuries of wondering time. 



The origins of Eoman architecture are much more clearly 

 defined than those of Greece, and its borrowings were much 

 more conspicuous. These were from the Etruscans, their 

 next neighbors on the north, and from the Greeks, who, long 

 before their conquest by the Eomans, had covered southern 

 Italy, called Magna Graecia, with great examples of their 

 architectural taste and skill ; that of Psestum witnessing to 

 us how glorious they could be. The general popular im- 

 pression credits Greece with much too large a part of 

 Eoman architecture. The Grecian part was superficial, 

 decorative, and this part has obscured the other, the funda- 

 mental, the structural, in which Eome achieved a very great 

 distinction. But here again she was no more original than 

 in her use of Grecian elements. We penetrate the secret of 

 her greatness, if I may say so without offense, by way of the 

 Cloaca Maxima, the gigantic sewer built for her by Etruscan 

 engineers under Tarquinius, well named Superbus, if for no 

 other reason than because he built this sewer, without which 

 the seven-hilled city would have sunk into the ooze of the 

 surrounding plains. It would have been a fortunate thing 

 for Eome if she could have developed her architecture 

 wholly from this root. Then it might have had its own 

 appropriate decoration, which, if less beautiful than that it 

 borrowed from the Greeks, would have been more rational 

 and organic. It made use of the Greek forms in the main 

 only to debase them and to hide the structures which were 

 characteristic of its genius and could not have been too 

 obviously revealed. It made use of its Etruscan origins so 

 freely, so boldly, so splendidly that the credit of its ulti- 

 mate performance can no more be given to the Etruscans 

 than the credit of Greek architecture can be given to the 

 Egyptians or Iranians. Great architects in the aesthetic 

 sense the Eomans never were, and here the comparison with 

 Greece was greatly to their disadvantage. But they were 



