Note H — THE LATERAN

The fate of the Roman obelisks presents one of the most baffling and fascinating problems of archæology. As no satisfactory explanation of their overthrow and mutilation has ever been given, possibly the theory that they were destroyed by the Romans of the Dark Ages, in search of bronze, is as good a working hypothesis as any other. The idea that they were wrecked by barbarians, and the assumption that they were thrown down by earthquakes are equally untenable. Much curious evidence goes to show that some of the principal obelisks were standing in the sixth and seventh centuries. One stood erect on its pedestal in Charlemagne’s time, while the fall of another can be placed as late as the tenth or eleventh century. Three of the principal obelisks show holes drilled in the shaft for the insertion of levers or crowbars, and have unmistakable marks of fire about the pedestal. Now, the Romans generally re-erected the obelisk, not directly upon its pedestal, but upon bronze crabs (as in the obelisk of the Vatican) or upon brass “dice” (as in the larger of the two obelisks in Constantinople). The Egyptians sheathed the pyramidion of the obelisk with “bright metal” to reflect the rays of the sun, and the Romans crowned the apex, sometimes if not always, with metal ornaments, like the ball upon the Vatican obelisk, which, until it was removed by Sixtus V, was supposed to contain the ashes of Julius Cæsar. The obelisk now in Central Park had been re-erected by the Romans at Alexandria, in this fashion, and one of the bronze crabs was brought to New York with the obelisk, and is now in the Metropolitan Museum. These bronze supports were firmly attached to the obelisk by heavy bronze dowels, one dowel running upward into each corner of the shaft, the other going down into each corner of the pedestal. Between the shaft and the pedestal there was therefore a space, perhaps some four inches in height, through which light was visible. This was seen in the Vatican obelisk, which was still in situ when Fontana drew his plans for changing its location, and in the Central Park obelisk, as described by an eye-witness of its removal. Three historians of Rome’s destruction—Fea, Dyer, and Gibbon—describe the almost incredible ingenuity, labor, and patience exerted by the Romans of the Dark Ages in their search for bronze and other metals. Wherever bronze could be obtained, it was stolen, stripped, or melted, on account of its value and the ease with which it could be transported. During the same historic period, all pagan monuments were deprived of whatever protection they had had as objects of religious veneration. The obelisks standing in spacious and lonely surroundings would have proved an easy prey to bands of clandestine or open marauders. The Roman method of blasting consisted in building a fire against the rock and pouring vinegar, or even water, upon the red-hot stone which then disintegrated. It would have been an easy matter to kindle great fires at every corner of the pedestal which, by the time this kind of destruction became popular, had already lost much of their original height through the gradual rise of the ground level. This method of blasting by fire would account for the all but universal gnawing away, or rough rounding off of the lower corners of the shaft, in which the bronze dowels were so firmly embedded. After the disintegration of the granite the partially melted bronze could be extracted from both shaft and pedestal, but not before the shaft had been thrown over, and this was evidently helped along by the use of levers. When the shaft was prone, it became possible to remove any bronze which had been attached to its summit. With perhaps only one exception, the fallen shafts were always found broken in three pieces, but there seems to be no record of any bronze found in Rome, near the original sites of the obelisks. What bronze there is was on the one Roman obelisk that had not been thrown down (the Vatican obelisk). The original site of this obelisk, in the centre of the old circus of Caligula and Nero, was close to the old Church of St. Peter, and it was furthermore protected, according to Lanciani, by the chapel at its base, called the Chapel of the Crucifixion. When, in 1586, Fontana removed this obelisk to its present position in the centre of the modern Piazza of modern St. Peter’s, he re-erected it upon its original classic Roman crabs, hiding them by the purely decorative Sixtine lions of Prospero Bresciano, as they had been hidden in earlier times by the bronze lions mentioned by Plutarch, and gone since the sack of Rome in 1527. The obelisk in Constantinople, referred to above, is still standing on its four brass “dice.”