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At midnight he heard the striking of the city's clocks through the windows, the lattices of which he had forgotten to close. The sound of the city brought back to him the words of the great prelate who had returned with him to San Ambrogio from his first audience with the Holy Father "Filius urbis et orbis." How bitterly the city had treated him! A knock sounded at his door.
Above all, the sacred fig-tree and other spots and notable objects in the city were associated with a great multitude of sextons' tales of the same nature as those out of which, upwards of a thousand years afterwards, there grew up on the same ground the Mirabilia Urbis.
In an interesting passage he complains of the comparative poverty of his subject as contrasted with that of Livy: "Ingentia illi bella, expugnationes urbium, fusos captosque reges libero egressu memorabant; nobis in arcto et inglorius labor. Immota quippe aut modice lacessita pax maestae urbis res et princeps proferendi imperii incuriosus;" but he certainly had no cause to complain.
Outside the railings the hollow square of crumbling houses, shells of a bygone gentry, leaned as if in ghostly gossip over the forgotten doings of the vanished quality. Sic transit gloria urbis. A block or two north of the Park, Dawe steered the editor again eastward, then, after covering a short distance, into a lofty but narrow flathouse burdened with a floridly over-decorated facade.
He saw within the city power divided between the præfectus urbis, the delegate of the Emperor, and the summus senator, the mouthpiece of the Roman commune. Within a month the prefect ceased to be an Imperial officer, and became the servant of the papacy, bound to it by fealty oaths, and receiving from it his office.
"Rex stetit ante fores, jurans prius urbis honores, Post homo fit papae, sumit quo dante coronam." Lothair, however, never saw this record of his visit.
Nevertheless, he went back to Rome, ad annum urbis condita, and found the fathers of the Federalists in the primeval aristocrats of that renowned city! He traced the flow of Federal blood down through successive ages and centuries, till he brought it into the veins of the American Tories, of whom, by the way, there were twenty in the Carolinas for one in Massachusetts.
On one side of the arch are the words, "Liberatori urbis," to the deliverer of the city; and on the other, "Fundatori quietis," to the founder of public tranquillity. Although erected to the honour of Constantine, this arch commemorates the victories of Trajan, some of the basso-relievos, &c. having been pilfered from one of the arches of Trajan.
Even the Genius, though rather vaguely, passes over to the state and we hear of the Genius populi Romani or the Genius urbis Romæ, with regard to which Servius quotes from an inscription on a shield the characteristic addition, sive mas sive femina: in much later times we find the exact counterpart of the domestic worship of the Genius of the pater familias in the cult of the Genius of the Emperor the foundation of the whole of the imperial worship.
The magical statue had been cast away, with other heathen idols, from the imperial bedchamber; but the Fortuna Urbis itself, the mystical divinity which the statue represented, still exercised an overwhelming influence over men's imagination.
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