Morris, L: Greatness and Decline of Venice

Excerpt from The Greatness and Decline of Venice: A Prize Essay, Read in the Theatre, Oxford, June 16th, 1858

Few educated men are not familiar with at least the most striking features of that long and splendid pageant which is known to us as the History of Rome. The simple fables which are so closely interwoven with the dawning narrative, the stories of the twin-brothers and their mysterious foster mother, - of the good King Servius and the wicked Tullia, - of the proud Tarquin and the chaste Lucretia, - of the Horatii and their bloody duel, - of Curtius and his magnificent self-sacrifice, - of Cincinnatus and his grand simplicity; these and many others, coming as they do much nearer to us than the stories of Arthur, or Alfred, or coeur-de-lion, impress themselves upon our minds with a Vividness and reality which no frigid rationalism can ever completely efface. Later studies bring out with distinctness the rising fortunes of the Commonwealth to the full effulgence of the Empire under Augustus, and so through all the painful chronicle of its decline, until the advent of the Goths. But when the curtain has fallen upon the Western Empire, and the play is apparently played out, few care to await its rise upon that great life-drama which, during the mediaeval period, was acted again upon the old classic ground. Many do not even suspect that Italy, during that most critical period, was the theatre of great events, of struggles for liberty as glorious and more obstinate than those of the populus and the plebs, of factions and proscrip tions as fierce and sanguinary as those of Marius and Sylla, of tyrants as depraved and cruel as the worst of the Caesars, of great names and large patriotism, of pure art and wide-spread com merce, all with a greater claim upon our sympathies than those of Rome, because, while she stands on the further side of that great gulf which yawns between the old order and the new, the Italian republics stand upon this side, the history of Rome is that of a vanished yesterday, the story of mediaeval Italy is that of the dawn of to-day.

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