48

422 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Hardly less indicative of their character did we find the ruins of those
stupendous Baths of Titus, Diocletian and Caracalla, in whose spacious
apartments, designed to fulfill every conceivable condition of ease and lux-
ury, one needs not to consult Gibbon for the causes of the decline and fall of
the Roman Empire. The lap of luxury and the pursuit of ease and pleasure
are death to manly courage, energy, will and enterprise.

None of the splendid arches, recalling as they do the glories of Rome's
triumphs, can, by the reflective mind, be contemplated with a deeper, sadder
interest than is indelibly associated with that of Titus, commemorating the
destruction of the unhappy Jews and making public to a pagan city the des-
ecration of all that was most sacred to the religion of that despised people.
This arch is an object which must forever be a painful one to every Jew, since
it reminds him of the loss of his beloved Jerusalem. Surely one who has
never suffered a like scorn can adequately feel for their humiliation, as they,
for their abasement, were forced to pass beneath that arch whose sculptured
sides portrayed the sacred vessels tom, in the profanation of their Temple,
from its Holy of Holies.

Among other objects calling up ancient events in the history of Rome,
stands the Column of Trajan, after which Napoleon's monument in Paris was
modelled. It tells of the many battles fought and won by Trajan, and is a
beautiful column. Though now slowly yielding to the wasting touch of Time,
we may still say of it as was once said by the great Daniel Webster of Bunker
Hill Monument, "It looks, it speaks, it acts." It certainly is a memorial of the
past, a monitor of the present, though it may not be a hope of the future. In
sight of the palaces of the Caesars and the Temple of the Vestal Virgins and
the Capitoline Hill, darkening the horizon with its somber and time defying
walls, rises the immense and towering form of the Coliseum – an ancient
hell of human horrors, where the elite of Rome enjoyed the sport of seemg
men tom to pieces by hungry and infuriated lions and tigers and by each
other. No building more elaborate, vast and wonderful than this has risen
since the Tower of Babel.

While the old part of Rome has antiquities of its own, the new part has
antiquities from abroad. There are here fourteen obelisks from Egypt, one of
the finest of which adorns the square in front of St. Peter's.

The streets of Rome except in the newest part, are generally very narrow.
and the houses on either side of them being very high, there is much more
shade than sunshine in them, and hence the remarkably chilly atmosphere of
which strangers complain. Yet the city is not without redeeming and com-
pensating features. It has many fine open spaces and public squares, supplied