TREVES

The town whose native name is Trier, but which is called in English Treves, is yet again, like Aix-la-Chapelle, one of the essential historical points of Europe. It was the city in which the later Roman Emperors set up their thrones in order to stand against the frontiers and to watch the business of the barbarians.

Not that they, or anyone in the Roman Empire, regarded the barbarians as capable of destroying the Empire (nor did they destroy it); not that they or anybody else thought there would come barbarian conquests (nor did any such barbarian conquests come—they are the figment of the imaginations of dons, who, for some odd reason, love to exaggerate the barbarian), but because the Roman army, of which they were the chiefs and which was holding all Europe together, had become largely recruited from Slavs and Germans, and because other Germans and Slavs continually raided. The Emperors went to Treves because from Treves they could better watch the loyalty of federate troops under their command, who had brethren beyond the Rhine, and the barbarian raids which constantly threatened. Rome, be it remembered, was pushing outwards in influence much more than the barbarian was pushing in. The coasts from Calais up to the Elbe had learned to build boats after the Roman fashion, which made them formidable at sea, and already, under Julian the Apostate, the valley of the Main beyond the Rhine had plenty of good stone houses, built in the civilised fashion. It was this double movement, the influence of Rome beyond the Rhine, already apparent, and the German and Slav troops with the Roman army and the raids from those beyond, which made the later Emperors so often act from Treves and take Treves as their seat of government.

The era of this official greatness in Treves was not long; perhaps a hundred years; and even so, only intermittently during those hundred years. But it was long enough to impress the little town with imperial greatness, with the Roman grandeur. When a seat of government is thus planted in a place, even for short, interrupted periods, economic power of demand concentrates in the place and expresses itself in buildings—so it was with eighteenth-century Dublin, so it was with Santiago, in Galicia; so it was with Avignon. Treves, holding the court now and again for short periods of the last Roman Emperors in the West, built great things with the money of that court. By a most happy accident, most of those great things remain.

For its size there is, perhaps, no place in Europe where the impression of our foundation, our roots in the old Græco-Roman society, is more evident to the eye. Not only does Treves preserve magnificent ruins, which are the finest Northern monuments of our Roman origins, but there is also about it an unbroken continuity. It has gone on from the Roman day to this, changing, but still itself. On each occasion, whenever I return to walk about its streets or to admire the very lovely statue, which was made only the other day out of limestone and is on the north-east pillar of the choir in Our Lady’s Church, I feel, more than in any other town of Western Europe, more even than in little Pons, or in Pevensey (where also I feel it acutely), my lineage and your lineage.

The great evidence of the past in Treves, the stones of which all its citizens are most justly proud, the witness of antiquity, is the Black Gate, the _Porta Nigra_. It stands looking westward, down the Moselle valley, accepting the great route from Cologne and forming the most ancient entry into the city. Such evidences of the greatness of that ancient society once stood everywhere. Elsewhere, for the most part, they have been destroyed, save where the desert or some accident has preserved them. Timgad has its fine triumphal arch above the roadway; Orange its entry under similar Roman masonry; but Treves has something enormous and magnificent to show by way of a portal or introduction to the town and by way of making us understand what the town in the height of its glory must have been.

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The _Porta Nigra_ was originally a great four-storied building, ended and flanked by two big bastions, the road entry into Treves from Cologne and the Germanies passing through the round arches in its centre, while, above this, barrack rooms, or perhaps the quarters of civilian servants took up the space.

It is astonishing how little it has lost in nearly two thousand years, especially seeing that Treves has been raided again and again, although I think, not as badly sacked as have been other cities. The south tower has been somewhat ruined, the metal clamps of the stone have been robbed by the soldiery of this, that and the other power, notably, it is said, by the French in the revolutionary wars; yet the structure remains, strong, erect, imposing, not apparently changeable. It impresses the mind much as an object of nature may impress the mind, a mountain or an ancient tree. I think if I had to show a man anywhere in Europe some external, concrete, material thing which would make him realise the nature of our long past, and if I had only one thing to show him, I would show him the _Porta Nigra_ at Treves.

But Treves has much more to show. It is curious to note the Basilica which Constantine put up and which was, happily, I think, restored as a garrison church for the Prussian garrison before the war. I say ‘happily’ because this restoration has left us the building intact—there has been no destruction. Yet it is not a happy but an unhappy thing to see a place turned entirely from its old use and forming a kind of mixed body, half of the whole modern, half ancient. Not that the thing has been badly done—far from it—the proportions have been exactly observed; one side is old and the other side is new; but, in the new part, even the size of the Roman bricks has been copied accurately. It is quite a feather in the cap of the Prussian administration that this most ancient thing should have a modern use and should have been maintained alive. When I see its high arch of brick, I think of those ruined semi-domes in the Forum of Rome which also bear the name of the Basilica of Constantine.

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Outside the city, to the south and east, lies the flattened ruin of the amphitheatre, yet there also, in spite of the decay of its ancient height, one feels the strength of the past, and I, for my part, many years ago, sat me down on one of the lower benches, which is covered now with earth, and pondered upon that arena; wondering what the sight was like when Constantine the Great, newly arrived from York, threw to the lions scores upon scores of Rhineland men who had attempted to raid the Empire; while, no doubt, their brother Rhineland men, who had taken service in the Roman armies, were watching, amused or impassive, under their Roman uniforms, the spectacle of such a sacrifice. The garrison and the victims were both Franks, but they felt no common bond.

Treves has, like all towns with any continuity, a mass of the Dark Ages, of the Middle Ages and of the modern centuries. Much more than most towns, it suffers no jerk at any point between them. You may stand outside its ancient cathedral and look curiously at the Roman stones of its base, just as you may look curiously at them at Aix-la-Chapelle. You may distinguish in the structure the arches of the first Christian time, of the later centuries of the Dark Ages, and you may note, exactly adjoining, the new Gothic of the Middle Ages in Our Lady’s Church. Across one of the streets an archway, bearing a stone crucifix, powerfully reminds the onlooker of the religious struggle following upon the reformation: quite a modern thing. The fountains, the public places, the remnants of the fortifications, everything in Treves is continuous: a series covering two thousand years.

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But of all its monuments I feel the old palace of the Cæsars most. It is in complete ruin, it is as ruined as the Roman wall of Silchester, or the Thermes in Paris. Though its broken arches stand high into the air, yet those halls are quite empty, unroofed, a mass of weeds and grass and trees, with the small Roman brick hanging together by its cement.

There it was that the great tragedy of Priscillian was played out. That magician, around whom such dark accusations lay, but who boasted the pride of a Christian bishop in the beginnings of the Christian Empire, was dragged up here to be tried. Here was he condemned; hence did he go up to his death; and it was at the gates of this mighty structure, then in its glory, that one of the greatest of all our European race, Martin of Tours, stood apart against the trial and conviction—insisting that no matter what the man had done, magician or no magician, he was a Christian bishop and could not be condemned by a lay tribunal, even though that tribunal were imperial. It is a marvellous story, full of the change between the old pagan and lay conception of the state and the new theocracy. Here was it played out, and these ruined brick arches of the Cæsars’ palace make me live it over again.