Evening Star Newspaper, December 28, 1930, Page 76

THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 28, 1930. d ergil’s Lost City Foun'd at Last T wo Thousand Years After Roman Poet’s Birth, Italian Archeologists Have Un- covered Ruins of Buthrotum, the “New Troy,” Which Aeneas Visited-—AIl the Beautiful Buildings and Statues Are There, Just as Vergil Described. F BY IRENE DI ROBILANT. 4 | ROME, December 18, 1930. T was only a battered snag of a wall, standing half-hidden in the under- brush of the hills of Albania—the country east from Italy, across the Adriatic. To a chance passerby the wall might have appeared merely the remains of an old sheepfold, for there used to be shep- herds in the neighborhood. But because Luigi Ugolini, Italian archeolo- gist, knows a Roman stone when he sees it, as readily as you or I know a Roman nose, this half-tumbled pile of rough stone blocks has been the guide to the rediscovery of “New Troy,” one of the most interesting of the lost cities of antiquity. “New Troy” was the name given to the city of Buthrotum by the poet Vergil 2,000 years ago. He gave a glcwing description of the town on the Adriatic, and with a poet’s license .he incorporated so much of the legendary and the imaginative in his account that later genera- tions, ret finding any trace of the city, came to ©.. conclusion that it had neyver had any but an imaginary existence—that it was all a rainbow mirage of the poet's fertile brain. it remained for systematic twentieth century science to prove that the great Latin poet was not mooning when he talked of the New Troy; that the city had as solid, definite, brick-and- stone existence as had its namesake on the shores of the Aegean, which also was once thought to be the imaginary creation of an- other, poet’s mind, but was subsequently dug up and established as real. R it was no chance wandering of an indi- vidual scholar that brought the lost New Troy to light after 2,000 years of oblivion. Signor Ugolini was alone when he found it, but he was not idly wandering. He was on a defi- nite errand, and he was hunting, if not for Jost Troys in the bushes, at least for any traces of the lost Roman civilization of the ancient province of Illyria, which comprised the terri- tory now partly occupied by the modern King- dom of Albania. 8Bince 1923 there has been an Italian archeo- logical mission working in Albania, at the in- vitation and by the courtesy of the Albanian government. They have been carrying on ex- cavations on the acropolis, or hilltop civic cen- ter, of the town of Feniki. In 1924 Signor Ugolini, head of the expedi- tion, cdecided to journey on foot from Feniki to the southern coast to embark for Italy at the tiny port of Santi Quaranta. The country he traversed is very beautiful, with many roll- ing hills descending to the sea. But it is silent and desolate. Fever “and long droughts have driven the shepherds out toward the north, and the only living signs left of the one-time human occupancy are a few olive groves and some scattering laurel trees. For the rest, the coun- $ry appears to be a wilderness. Signor Ugolini’s route was by way of the Lake of Vivari, where there are ruins of a fort- ress which the Venetians once held against the Turks when Venice was an independent eity and a great maritime power. As he went about over the remains of this comparatively modern castle, he came upon occasional stones which , his expert eye instantly told him had been cut by stonemasons older than any Venetian. He also found a piece of wall half concealed in the shrubbery, and this he recognized to be of Roman build. He was sure he had made a find, but it was five years before he was able to realize his ambition to explore and excavate it thoroughly. At last, two years ago, the Italian archeologi- cal mission was sent to Santi Quaranta to search beneath the concealing earth for relics of imperial Rome. The ruins were cleared of the hampering growth of bushes and a long trench was ex- cavated along the wall. This turned out to be a part of the stage of a classical theater, dis- tinctly of Roman imperial age. In the pillars were openings in which statues had once stood. Further excavation brought to light four very beautiful sculptured works belonging to the best period of Greek art. One of them is considered to be undoubtedly the work of the great sculptor Praxiteles. It is a woman’s figure, over 6 feet high, with a perfect head and excellently carved drapery. Being of this heroic size, it is presumably the image of a goddess, but of which member of the Greco-Roman pantheon no guess has yet been hazarded. It has merely been given the tentative name, “The Goddess of Buthrotum.” As a gesture of international friendship and in recognition of the work in his country of the Italian archeological mission, Ahmed Zogu, the ruler of Albania, has presented the statue to Premier Mussolini. Another building that was probably built in Vergil's time was the Temple of Aesculapius, the god of medicine. This dates from the first century AD. In the inner room of this tem- ple were found 300 statuettes in terra cotta. THESE little statues were left at the shrine of the god by grateful worshipers who had recovered from various afflictions, and usu- ally represent in some way the illness or injury which Aesculapius had taken away from them. Naturally, many of them look rather funny to twentieth century eyes. This imperial Roman city Ugolini found is, of course, the “New Troy” that Vergil knew and wrote about. In the third book of his Aenead he tells of the landing on the Illyrian coast of his hero, Aeneas, son of King Priam of Troy, wandering homeless after the sack and ruin of the city. Aeneas saw a town built upon a hill at no great distance from the sea. He ap- proached it and asked the shepherds what its name was and how he could enter it. He learned that it was called Buthrotum, and when he reached the gateway he heard to his as- tonishment that it was named the “Scaean Gate,” like the great portal of his beloved Troy. The mystery was explnlngd when he discov- ered that the city had been built by one of his own numerous brothers, Helenus. Helenus had Decidedly Grecian. Stone steps of the amphitheater of Vergil's “New Troy™ Built about 300 B.C. been captured by the Greeks at the fall of Troy and brought into this strange land. He “made good” with his captors to such an extent that finally they elected him to be their king. Then he rebuilt the city to be as much like his old home as possible, and gave Trojan names to its chief landmarks. According to Vergil, Aeneas enjoyed the hos- pitality of Buthrotum for three days. The Bu- throtians must have given a full sized party in honor of their king’s kinsman if the poet's ac- count of the wine in golden goblets and the viands on silver platters is to be taken as a straight story. But finally the wandering hero went on his way again, and wound up by found- ing a colony of his own on the other side of the Italian peninsula, which eventually gave birth to the great center of culture known today as the City of Rome. All this is told in great detail in the Aeneid; but modern readers have long imagined that Vergil was just playing up some legendary stories about a town he knew as an agreeable place very much like Rome, only smaller; just as a modern New York writer might tell some fancy complimentary stories about Minneapolis or Dallas,; without bothering to find out whether they were strictly true or not. But as the spades of Signor Ugolini’'s diggers went deeper, they found that there might well ve a foundation of fact under Vergil's fiction after all. The town was pretty much as Vergil de- scribed it, even to the great gate. The wealth of marble and mosaics, and the presence of Greek statuary suggested a highly developed culture with its roots in the earlier Greek civilization. Sure enough, under the stratum of strictly Roman ruins they came upon a layer of Greek remains, on which the Romans had built with- out taking the trouble to clear them away. This was practically the universal practice in cities of antiquity. When a job of rebuilding was in hand after an earthquake or seige or fire, the contractors did not as a rule haul away the debris. They simply picked out the stones that would do for re-use, just as building wreckers save second-hand bricks today. Then the old contractors leveled the lot off, and built again on the site thus made artificially a foot or two higher. THUsueomestou. that almost every city in classic lands is a sort of archeological layer cake, with a frosting of modern buildings standing on top of many strata of ancient re- mains, the older always at the bottom. This is a great blessing for the scientists of the spade, for they can thus read their book backward as they go down through the ruins. The practice of saving choice bits of the old place serves the archeologist also, for if you find in a Roman wall stones cut in the pattern Greek stonecutters were accustomed to use, or if you find Greek statues in the garden of an overthrown Roman villa, you have some good connecting links between one culture and the one that went before it.. Thus in the Roman ruins of Buthrotum they found the statue by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles, and behind the theater was an older amphitheater of Greek construction. The Greek inscriptions carved on the stones are still legible; they inform citizens of certain rules and ordinances regarding traffic, sports and municipal elections. Some of the inscrip- vwions of Roman date are carved in both Latin wnd Greek, a testimony to the persistence of Greek speech both here and in other parts of the empire long after Roman arms had blotted out Greek independence. The gate which Vergil knew as the “Porta Scaea” was definitely of Greek construction, dating from about the fifth century B.C. The Italian party dug more than 12 feet of soil from above it, and worried great tree roots away from it, but the rugged arch still stands, intact after 2,400 years. The wall which it pierces was modified and partly rebuilt by the Romans, But the history of the New Troy does not begin with its Greek occupants. Deep be- neath the Greek level, Signor Ugolini’s party has come upon traces of New Stone Age cul- ture. As is frequently the case, these were”best preserved in a burial place. A beveled ax, several other tools and some ornaments were found that antedate the Illyrian settlement by at least 1,500 years. Thus the history of the Albanian people has suddenly been given a re- mote background; and the wide gaps that stand between that background and the earliest continuous record now available constitute a formidable challenge to archeologists. Nor did the history of Buthrotum stop with the fall of the Roman empire. During the Byzantine period, when the center of civiliza= tion shifted from Rome to Constantinople and remained there for many centuries, there was a prosperous Christian city where Vergil haa once known his New Troy. In the strata above the Roman remains the excavators found the ruins of an elaborate baptistery, or special pool for the administra= tion of baptism by immersion, which was & common rite in the early days of the Church, THE building that roofed over the pool was supported on 16 marble columns which had probably been taken from a Roman building, Jusi &s the Romans had once borrowed building materials from older Greek structures. The font, or pool, is itself well preserved. The mosaic pavement of Roman craftsman- ship must have been the chief pride of the congregation whose new members came to them through the waters of this font. There are two chief designs wrought out in the colored stone fragments. One of these consists of & vase with trailing grapevines, together with two peacocks, symbolic of the sacrament of the eucharist. The other is emblematic of the sacrament of baptism; it shows two stags ap- proaching a font, under a sign of salvation—a cross with palm leaves. After the period of Byzantine dominance, which came to an end when the Turks con- quered Constantinople at the close of the Middle Ages, Buthrotum fell to Venice, which built the walls of the fortress whose ruins at- tracted Signor ' Ugolini and led to the re- discovery. The discovery of New Troy comes at a most timely date, for Vergil was born October 15, 70 B.C, and 1930 is the 2,000th anniversary of his birth, which all the learned world s observing with special memerials.