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Stephen considered what course he should pursue, received two other Prankish envoys in Rome, consented to go to Pavia on behalf of the emperor, and determined at the same time to visit Pepin in the north. He set out for Pavia upon October 13, 753, leaving Rome with a vast concourse of people, which accompanied him some distance along the Way, out of the Flaminian Gate.
Will the reader go back with me to the point where we began our excursion through Rome, the Flaminian Gate? I invite the reader's special attention to a building on the right. It stands a few paces outside the gate. The building possesses no architectural attractions, but it is illustrative of a great principle.
Up the Flaminian Way beyond this enclosure we go under a triumphal arch erected by the late Emperor Claudius to record his conquest of Britain, where he subdued "eleven kings" without Roman loss. Keeping straight on we pass, this time on our right, another large enclosure surrounded by arcades, where is now the east side of the Piazza Colonna.
There were casinos and wine houses on the slopes of Monte Mario whose summit was occupied even at that time by a villa belonging to the Mellini and on the hills beyond the Flaminian Way. Nicholas V had restored the bridge over the Tiber, and also begun a tower nearby, which Calixtus III completed.
They passed under the windows of my own apartment in the Via Babuino. I have seen as many as twenty-four led away of a morning. They were put by half-dozens into carts, to which they were tied by twos, and chained together, as if they had been brigands. Thus they moved on to the Flaminian gate, each cart escorted by a couple of mounted gendarmes.
A bubbling runnel by the side of one of those modern Appian or Flaminian highways is but like a kennel; the little hill is diminished to a hillock the romantic hillock to a molehill, almost too small for sight.
The slow length of a sickly and desponding host was heavily dragged along the Flaminian way; from whence the Barbarians were sometimes compelled to deviate, lest they should encounter the hostile garrisons that guarded the high road to Rimini and Ravenna.
Wiseman's encyclical, dated 'from without the Flaminian Gate', in which he announced the new departure, was greeted in England by a storm of indignation, culminating in the famous and furibund letter of Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, against the insolence of the 'Papal Aggression'. Though the particular point against which the outcry was raised the English territorial titles of the new Roman bishops was an insignificant one, the instinct of Lord John and of the English people was in reality sound enough.
Fabia and Perilla's husband, Fidus Cornelius, smiled at each other in mutual appreciation of a youth shared equally, it seemed to them, by the other three with the new-born spring. It was Ovid's birthday and they were celebrating it in their country place at the juncture of the Flaminian and Clodian roads.
The means of communication, of which we now make such a boast, were far more vast and extensive in those days. What were the Great Western and the London and Birmingham to the Appian and Flaminian roads? After two thousand five hundred years, parts of these are still used. A man under the Antonines might travel from Paris to Antioch with as much ease and security as we go from London to York.
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