Marry, Narni is somewhat; but Rome is more. Rome, too, at each visit, presents fresh objects, old and new. The oldest and the newest seem to have come together, when one set of placards on the wall invites the Roman people to meet on the Capitol, and when the Quæstor Bacchus—it is taking a liberty with a living man and magistrate, but we cannot help Latinizing the Questore Bacco—puts out another set of placards to forbid the meeting. We are inclined to turn to others among our memories, to others among our lays. We might almost look for a secession; we might almost expect to see once more

But those who were forbidden to meet on the Capitol did not secede even to the Aventine; the secession was done within doors, in the Sala Dante.

Veii.

The student of what M. Ampère calls "L'Histoire Romaine à Rome" must take care not to confine his studies to Rome only. The local history of Rome—and the local history of Rome is no small part of the œcumenical history—is not fully understood unless we fully take in the history and position of the elder sites among which Rome arose. With Rome we must compare and contrast the cities of her enemies and her allies, the cities which she swept away, the cities which she made part of herself, the cities which simply withered away before her. And first on the list may well come the city which was before all others the rival of Rome, and where she did indeed sweep with the besom of destruction. A short journey from the Flaminian Gate, a journey through a country which might almost pass for a border shire of England, with the heights of Wales in the distance, brings us to a city which has utterly perished, where no permanent human dwelling-place is left within the ancient circuit. In a basin, as it were, unseen until we are close beneath or above it, hedged in by surrounding hills as by a rampart, stands all that is left of the first great rival of Rome, an inland Carthage on the soil of Etruria. There once was Veii, the first great conquest of Rome, the Italian Troy, round whose ten years' siege wonders have gathered almost as round the Achaian warfare by the Hellespont. There are no monuments of the departed life of Veii such as are left of not a few cities which have passed out of the list of living things no less utterly. Of the greatest city of southern Etruria nothing remains beyond a site which can never be wiped out but by some convulsion of nature, a few scraps to show that man once dwelled there, and tombs not a few to show that those who dwelled there belonged to a race with whom death counted for more than life.

A sight of the spot which once was Veii makes us better understand some points in early Italian history. We see why Veii was the rival of Rome, and why she was the unsuccessful rival of Rome. Above all, we understand better than anywhere else how deep must have been the hatred with which the old-established cities of Italy must have looked on the upstart settlement by the Tiber, which grew up to so strange a greatness and threatened to devour them one by one. Veii, the great border city of Etruria, was the only one among Rome's immediate neighbours which could contend with her on equal terms. Elsewhere, in her early history, Rome, as a single city, is of equal weight in peace or war with whole confederations.

The happy position of certain hills by the Tiber had enabled one lucky group of Latin settlements to coalesce into a single city as great as all the others put together. But at Veii we see the marks of what clearly was a great city, a city fully equal in extent to Rome. And when the ancient writers tell us that, in riches and splendour, in the character of its public and private buildings, Veii far surpassed Rome, it is only what we should expect from a great and ancient Etruscan city which had entered on the stage of decline when Rome was entering on the stage of youthful greatness. There was little fear of Veii overthrowing Rome; but both sides must have felt that a day would come when Rome would be very likely to overthrow Veii. Two cities so great and so near together could not go on together. Two cities, very great according to the standard of those times, considerable according even to a modern standard, cities of nations differing in blood, language, and everything else which can keep nations asunder, stood so near that the modern inquirer can drive from one to the other, spend several hours on its site, and drive back again, between an ordinary breakfast and dinner. Rivalry and bitter hatred were unavoidable. Veii must have felt all the deadly grief of being outstripped by a younger rival, while Rome must have felt that Veii was the great hindrance to any advance of her dominion on the right bank of her own river. No form of alliance, confederation, or dependence was possible; a death struggle must come sooner or later between the old Etruscan and the newer Latin city.

The site of Veii is that of a great city, a strong city, but not a city made, like Rome, for rule. We go far and wide, and we find nothing like the "great group of village communities by the Tiber." Veii is not a group, and she has no Tiber. The city stood high on the rocks, yet it can hardly be called a hill-city. A peninsular site rises above the steep and craggy banks of two small streams which make up the fateful Cremera; but the peninsula itself is nearly a table-land, a table-land surrounded by hills. The stream supplied the walls with an admirable natural fosse, and that was all. The vast space enclosed by the walls makes us naturally ask whether the city could have been laid out on so great a scale from the beginning. We may believe that, as in so many cases, the arx, a peninsula within a peninsula, was the original city, and that the rest was taken in afterwards. But, if so, it would seem as if it must have been taken in at a blow, as if Veii took a single leap from littleness to greatness, unlike the gradual growth of Rome or Syracuse. At all events, there is the undoubted extent of a great city, a city clearly of an earlier type than Rome, a city which may well have reached its present extent while Rome had not spread beyond the Palatine. Such a site marks a great advance on the occupation of inaccessible hill-tops; but Veii itself must have seemed an old-world city in the eyes of those who had the highway of the Tiber below their walls.

It is strange to step out the traces of a city whose position and extent are so unmistakably marked, but of which nothing is left which can be called a building, or even a ruin. The most memorable work in the circuit of Veii is a work not of building but of boring—the Ponte Sodo, hewn in the rock for the better passage of the guardian stream. Besides these, some small fragments of the Etruscan wall, the signs of a double gate, some masonry of the small Roman tower which in after times arose within the forsaken walls, are pretty well all that remains of the life of Veii. The remains of its death are more plentiful. There is the Roman columbarium, within the Etruscan site; there are the Etruscan tombs bored deep in all the surrounding hills. There is, above all, the famous painted tomb, shielding no such sculptures and inscriptions as those on which we gaze in the great Volumnian sepulchre, but within which one lucky eye was privileged for a moment to see the Lucumo himself, as he crumbled away at the entrance of the unaccustomed air. A scrap or two of his harness is there still; the arms are there; the strange-shaped beasts are there, in their primitive form and colouring; the guardian lions keep the door; but we have no written ænigma even to guess at. We can only feel our way to a date by marking the imperfect attempt at an arch, an earlier and ruder stage by far than the roof of Rome's Tullianum or its fellow at Tusculum. In the Volumnian tomb the main interest comes from the fact that it belongs to the very latest Etruscan times, to the transition from Etruscan to Roman life. In the Veientine tomb the main interest comes from the fact that it cannot be later than an early stage in Roman history, and that it may be as much earlier as we choose to think it. It is the same with all the little that is left of Veii. We know that, except the palpable remains of the Roman municipium, nothing can be later than B.C. 396, and that anything may be vastly earlier. In the history of Italy, the date when Rome doubled her territory by conquering a city a dozen miles from her gates passes for an early stage. The life of Rome is still before her. In Greece at the same date, the greatness of Athens, the truest greatness of Sparta, is past; the only fresh life that is to come is that of ephemeral Thebes and half-Hellenic Macedonia.

We turn from Veii, feeling how thoroughly true in its main outline, how utterly untrustworthy in its detail, is what passes for early Roman history. The legend of Veii counts for less than the legend of Troy, inasmuch as invention and combination are hardly genuine legend at all. But that Veii was and is not, that her fall was the rising point in Rome's destiny, that it was needful for the course of things which has stretched from that day to this that Veii should cease to be—all this we understand ten times the better when we turn from the living tale of Livy to the yet more living witness of the forsaken site.

Fidenæ.

From the villa of the White Hens we looked across to the arx of Fidenæ as one of the main points in the view. The hill of Castel Giubeleo seems planted there by the hand of nature as a border-defence of Latium against Etruscan attacks. Yet both strong sites and other things sometimes fail to discharge the exact functions which seem to have been laid upon them by the hand of nature. The post which seems designed as the Latin bulwark against the Etruscan does, as a matter of fact, play its chief part in history in the character of an Etruscan outpost on Latin soil. Whether Fidenæ was really such an outpost in the strict sense, whether it was a remnant of the wider Etruscan dominion of the days when the Tiber was not a border-stream, or whether it was a Latin town which, from whatever cause, chose to throw itself on the Etruscan side, it is not only as the enemy of Rome, but as the ally of Veii, that Fidenæ made itself memorable. If we accept the received story, the war which brought about the ruin of Fidenæ was caused because its people slew the envoys of Rome in obedience to the hasty, perhaps misinterpreted, words of a Veientine king. The king who thus took so little heed of the law of nations of course paid his forfeit, and the Royal spoils won from Lars Tolumnius by Aulus Cornelius Cossus formed one of the most cherished relics of the early days of Rome. We may believe the details of the story or not; but the spoils at least were real, if the witness of Augustus Cæsar is to be believed.

Each of the roads which lead out of Rome—since the railway came, there is practically only one way which leads into Rome—has its own special interest, and the Salarian way is certainly not inferior to the Cassian or the Flaminian. We leave the city by that which in its material fabric is the most modern, which in its associations is perhaps the most historic, of all the gates of Rome. The Salarian gate in the wall of Aurelian may be looked at as in some sort drawing to itself the memories of the neighbouring Colline gate in the wall of Servius. He who fought before the Colline gate, he who entered by the Colline gate, could hardly fail to march over the ground where in the new system of defence the Salarian gate was to arise. The Colline gate on the high ground of the Quirinal hill was the weakest point of Rome; it was therefore specially strengthened in the Servian line of defence. It was the point by which most of the early invaders of Rome marched in or strove to march in. There the revolted troops entered to put down the tyranny of the decemvirs; there the Gauls came in after the slaughter of the Allia; to that gate Hannibal drew near, and those who did not understand Hannibal said that he hurled his spear over it. Before the Colline gate Rome had for the last time to struggle for the dominion of Italy in the fight between Sulla and Pontius Telesinus. And when the Colline gate had given way to the Salarian, it was at the new entrance to Rome that the enemy came in whose coming declared that her political dominion over the world had ceased, but that her moral dominion was stronger than ever. "At midnight the Salarian gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet." And if these gates were a centre of fighting, they were also, in a strange and special way, a centre of burying. Along this road, as along others, we mark the broken tombs here and there, two pre-eminently just outside the present gate; but this quarter supplies one strange contrast in the matter of burials which is not to be found elsewhere. Outside the Colline gate was the living tomb of unchaste vestals; not far beyond the Salarian we come to the Christian cœmeterium Priscillae. We go on; we descend the hill, the northern slope of the Quirinal, and find ourselves in the alluvial ground of Tiber and Anio. We have now come near to the meeting of the streams; Anio is spanned by a bridge which at first sight might seem to be wholly a thing of yesterday, but which in truth has lived and gone through much from the earliest times to the latest. Broken down and rebuilt over and over again, from the wars of Narses to those of Garibaldi, its main arch is indeed of the newest workmanship; but if we go down to the banks we see the smaller side arches, which must have been ancient when they were crossed by Hannibal, perhaps hardly new when they were crossed by Cossus. A few steps further, and we come to another record of change; an ancient tomb has grown into a mediæval tower; the mediæval tower now proclaims itself as an "osteria"; but we feel hardly tempted to try its powers of entertainment. We are now fairly in the low ground; the hills of Rome lie behind us; the hills beyond Tiber which skirt the Flaminian way rise to our left; the hills of Fidenæ are before us. To the right lies the ground between the Salarian and the Nomentane road where Phaon had his villa and where his master Nero came by his end. Presently the road, and its companion the railway, pass close under hills to the right and, at one point, with Tiber close by them to the left. A little further on they pass between hills on either side, a loftier and isolated height to the left, a range of lower hills, broken by more than one stream and its valley to the right. We are in the heart of forsaken Fidenæ, in the pass which divides its soaring akropolis by the river from the body of the city on the inland side.

The arx of Fidenæ, now the hill of Castel Giubeleo, is not, indeed, a height like that of Tusculum or that of Cortona; but it comes nearer to them than anything to be found at Veii or Rome. A bend of the river leaves a rich alluvial flat between its bank and a hill which on that side rises steeply enough. Here the men of the faithless Latin city could look out to their friends beyond the river, over the mouth of the small but famous stream of Cremera, over the hills on either side, the Fabian outpost, the future home of Livia, far away, if not to Veii itself, yet to points further off than Veii. The view from the arx of Fidenæ and the view from the hill of Livia complete one another. Inland we see Rome on its hills; but we must again remark that when Fidenæ was, Rome sent up no lofty towers and cupolas to mark its place against the horizon. At our feet we see the lower hills occupied by the rest of the town, surely a modern settlement compared with the original arx. We go over its site and round its site, we mark its tombs, its cloaca, the place where its gates once were. The walk in the valley by the brook between the lower hill of Fidenæ and the hill which lies between Fidenæ and Rome brings the features of the place well out. It was no small gain for Veii to have such a confederate on Latin ground as the strong post which we are compassing. We can well understand why Rome on the first opportunity swept Fidenæ utterly away, while the existence of Veii had to be endured for a generation longer.

As at Veii, so at Fidenæ, the traces of the living are gone—yet more utterly at Fidenæ than at Veii. The traces of the dead are far more plentiful, though Fidenæ has nothing to set against the painted tomb of Veii. The city, doubtless, perished after the war in which Cossus won the spoils of Tolumnius. Strabo speaks of Fidenæ as a deserted place, the possession of a single man. Yet the potestas of Fidenæ—perhaps its dictator—may have lingered on, as such dignitaries have lingered on in the boroughs once threatened by Sir Charles Dilke.

Antemnæ.

It is one of the amiable features of the study of historical topography that its votaries are so easily pleased. Two places may have equal charms on utterly opposite grounds. The merit of one city is that it has lived on uninterruptedly from the earliest times till now. The merit of another city is that it ceased to live at all many ages back. One is precious because it contains a series of monuments of all ages. Another is equally precious because all its monuments are of one age. A third is as precious as either because it contains no monuments at all. This last kind of charm may seem paradoxical; but it will be acknowledged by every one who has given himself heartily to this kind of research. At Veii and at Fidenæ the great merit is that there is, speaking roughly, nothing to see there; in truth there is the more to see because there is nothing to see. No doubt Veii and Fidenæ untouched, as they stood under Lars Tolumnius, would be best of all; but we set that aside among the things which it is no use hoping for. And no doubt if we found the sites of Veii and Fidenæ full of Roman and mediæval monuments, we should doubtless be glad to see them; but, as they are not there, we are still more glad that they are away. But we turn from Veii and Fidenæ to a city compared with which Veii and Fidenæ might seem to have a wealth of monuments. It is, after all, an exaggeration to say that nothing is left of Veii or of Fidenæ. The sites are the main things; but there really is something to see beside the sites. But there is a city, at least the site of a city, much nearer to Rome than either of them, of which the great charm is that it does not contain a single monument of any kind or date. Here we can, even more truly than at Veii and at Fidenæ, say that the very ruins have perished; but it is just because the very ruins have perished yet more utterly than elsewhere that the spot has a strong and special attraction of its own.

We took a kind of Pisgah view of Antemnæ both from the road to the White Hens and from the road to Fidenæ. As we before said, it ought to be examined as one of the objects on this last road; only things are not always as they ought to be. We must therefore start afresh from the Flaminian gate and for the third time make our way to the Milvian bridge. This time as our course is to lead us to one of the oldest sites in Roman history, it may be well, by way of contrast, to let the bridge call up thoughts of warfare yet later than that of Constantine. It was on the Roman side of the Milvian bridge, when the bridge itself, which he had fortified, was betrayed to the Gothic enemy, that Belisarius, with another Maxentius at his side, withstood the host which Witigis had led from Narnia. Readers either of Procopius or of Gibbon must remember how every dart was aimed at the bay horse, and how the rider of the bay horse escaped without a wound. This time we keep ourselves, with Belisarius, on the Roman side of the bridge. We are therefore not tempted to have our thoughts carried off into quite another part of the world by the statue of a famous Bohemian saint, who is said by some Bohemian scholars to be a purely imaginary being. Our present business is not with Saint John Nepomuk, not even with Belisarius or with Constantine; we have to do with times before Rome was, when Tiber still parted the free Etruscan from the free Latin. We walk along his left bank, keeping within the bounds of Latium, but with the eye tempted at every moment to look across to the opposite, the Etruscan bank. Both banks are so quiet, both are so nearly forsaken, both come so easily within an ordinary walk from our Roman quarters, that it is hard to call up the days when Tiber was the boundary stream, not merely of separate commonwealths, not merely of distinct and hostile nations, but of nations between which there was no tie of origin, language, or religion. To be sold beyond the Tiber was the most frightful of all dooms which spared life and limb. If the debtor were sold to Ardea or Tusculum, he might win his freedom and become a denizen of a city of his own speech. To sell him beyond the Tiber was like handing him over to bondage among Turks or Moors. But our path keeps us on the Latin side, in a land which, when it was inhabited at all, was inhabited by men of an intelligible speech. We peer under a rocky cliff, the riverward slope of the hill which rises just outside the Flaminian Gate of Rome. On that hill Witigis held his headquarters when Belisarius and Saint Peter between them guarded the Pincian. But, we ask, why did not some city, why did not Rome itself, arise on a site which seems so thoroughly suited for the needs of an ancient settlement? But we have to go further for what we seek; no record tells of any settlement on the Monte Parioli. We pass on by a few tombs in the hill-side, and we more distinctly make out the shape of a grassy hill parted by a wide alluvial plain from the river on the eastern side by which we approach. That is the hill of Antemnæ, a vanished city whose legendary story may be summed up in a few but instructive words. Antemnæ was older than Rome. It was one of the towns whose daughters supplied objects for that great act of what our forefathers called Quenfang, what sociologists called exogamy, which secured that the Roman State should last more than one generation. War follows; Rome prevails; Hersilia, wife of Romulus, but so strangely mother of nobody, pleads for the conquered, and Antemnæ is merged, in Rome. We may be sure that this is the genuine story, rather than others which give Antemnæ a longer life. In sober history its sole record seems to be that in Strabo's day the town had wholly passed away, and that the site was, as now, like Fidenæ, the possession of a single man.

The story in Livy is well imagined. The city whose people Romulus spares at the prayer of his wife has a specially Roman character. Parted as the hill is from the Tiber on three sides, its northern point, the point of a rather long promontory, overhangs the river at the very point of its junction with the Anio. Hence, it would seem, the descriptive name Antemnae, the town before the rivers. Such a site belongs to the same class as the hills of Rome. Less isolated than the Palatine or the Aventine, it is as much isolated as the Capitoline was while it still clave to the Quirinal. Such a site, with a descriptive name, can hardly belong to the earliest times; it marks the same degree of progress as the settlement of Rome itself. Cut off as it was from the oldest Rome by the whole of the high ground within and without the Roman walls, such a settlement on the river, a settlement so like Rome itself, might well be felt to be a special rival, a rival which must cease to exist as a hostile post, but whose people might well be incorporated with their more successful kinsfolk.

Of a tale placed in a time which is purely legendary, the utmost that we can say is that the legend falls in with the appearances of the site. Antemnæ has utterly perished; there is not a scrap of wall; some stones which deceive the eye at a distance prove, on coming near, to be part of the rock peeping out through the sides of the otherwise green hill. We believe that no antiquities have been found there. But the site speaks for itself. It is a manifest fortress; the gates are as plain as if their openings were spanned by arches like those of Perugia or Trier. We look out on Fidenæ and its surroundings, on the old battlefields of kings and consuls and emperors; on the bridge of Narses and Garibaldi, on the line of march which brought the Gaul, the Carthaginian, the Samnite, and the Goth to the gates, and some of them within the gates, of Rome. We can look down on nearly the whole of Roman history from the site where once stood Virgil's "turrigeræ Antemnæ." But we are yet farther from being able to tell the towers thereof than we were at Veii and Fidenæ. At Antemnæ the ruins themselves have perished.

Ostia.

From the nearest neighbours and rivals of Rome, from the slight remains which mark the sites of Veii and Fidenæ, from the almost more instructive lack of remains which marks the site of Antemnæ, we may well pass to a spot which lies at a greater distance from Rome than any of them, but which never was Rome's rival or even neighbour, because it was from the beginning simply an outlying part of Rome itself. This is the forsaken haven of Rome at Ostia. The existence of Ostia at an early stage of the historic being of Rome is no small sign of what Rome already was, and it may well have had no small share in making Rome what she afterwards was to be. For an inland town like Rome to possess a haven of its own, existing solely as its haven, at once marked and strengthened the difference between Rome and other inland towns. For Ostia, it must be borne in mind, was the haven of Rome and nothing else. It was not a separate maritime city made into the haven of Rome by any process of conquest or confederation. Tradition makes Ostia spring into being because it was found that Rome needed a haven. And the tradition has nothing to contradict it and all likelihood to support it; the name of the place by itself might almost be accepted as proving its truth. The foundation of Ostia, too, is placed in a period which is eminently a traditional, as distinguished from a legendary, period. It is safer not to rule either that there was a personal Ancus Marcius or that there was not; but we may be pretty sure that the events assigned to his reign really happened, if we can only keep ourselves from attempting dates where there is no chronology. Tradition then calls Ancus the founder of Ostia. The really important point is that whoever founded Ostia founded it purely in the interest of Rome, and that in an age when Rome was still in the days of her early growth.

This at once marks a wide difference between Rome and other cities of that time. Even the most famous of the early seats of maritime enterprise had the port separate from the city, later than the city. Corinth herself had her two havens, apart alike from her mountain citadel and from the venerable columns at its foot. When Corinth started in life men shrank from the close neighbourhood of the sea. It marks a later stage when Corinthian enterprise planted colonies absolutely in the sea—Syracuse on her island, the elder Korkyra on her peninsula. It was not till long after Ostia had arisen that inland Athens yoked herself to the sea. But, as the site of Rome itself on the broad Tiber showed that men had even then learned to understand the value of sites widely different from Tusculum on her height or Veii with her encircling brooks, so the creation of Ostia proves yet more. Rome, far more distant from the sea than Corinth, Megara, or even Athens, had already learned that a hold on the sea was needful for her power. There could have been nothing like it in Italy. There were inland cities and there were maritime cities; but there was no inland city which had put forth a maritime outpost at such a distance. Indeed, no other city had put forth such an outpost at all, maritime or otherwise. For Ostia was not a colony, not a dependency. It had no separate being of its own. It was a limb of Rome transplanted to a distance of fifteen Italian miles from the main body.

Ostia, then, called into being because Rome stood on the Tiber, is eminently a child of the Tiber. But Father Tiber is unluckily one of those fathers who do not scruple to swallow up their own children. He has changed his course, and he has changed it in a way which is not a little dangerous for what is still left of Ostia. The diggings which have been carried on by the Italian Government are most praiseworthy, and they have brought to light much that is most interesting and instructive. But streets, storehouses, temples, theatres, will in vain be dug out if the ravenous river god is to gulp them down as soon as they are well dug out. At the present moment one street, with its pavement laid bare, with its buildings still standing on each side, leads in a perilous manner into the stream. That is to say, one end is gone; the rest will soon follow; the pieces of wall nearest to the stream are crumbling to their fall. Surely it would be well to imitate in the haven of Ancus the work done for the mother-city by his successor. Fence in the flood, as the elder Tarquin fenced it in beside the mouth of the cloaca maxima; make a strong wall of defence against the waters, and the remains which are left of Ostia may abide as long as the cloaca maxima itself.

And what is left of Ostia is indeed worth preserving. Only a small part of the town has as yet been dug out; but, even as it is, Ostia is becoming a fair rival to Pompeii. The interest, indeed, is of a somewhat different kind in the two places. Pompeii will come first with the artist and Ostia with the historian. Nothing of any moment ever happened at Pompeii except the destruction and the discovery of Pompeii itself. But a great deal happened at Ostia, and that at widely distant dates. It is perhaps needless to mention that one thing which is said to have happened at Ostia never happened either there or anywhere else—namely, destruction by the Saracens in the fifth century, which is recorded indeed in Murray's "Handbook," but which was certainly unknown to Procopius. Ostia, destroyed by Marius, restored by Sulla, was failing in the days of Strabo to discharge its duty as the haven of Rome. It had yielded to the same enemy which afterwards overcame Ravenna and Pisa; the silt of Father Tiber was too much for it. Yet, notwithstanding this misfortune, notwithstanding the change which it led to, when Claudius found it needful to transfer the harbour of Rome to Portus on the other side of the river, Ostia contrived to live on through all disadvantages. For it has many and great buildings later than Strabo and Claudius, among them an Imperial house with graceful columns, which contains the famous shrine of Mithras. There is abundant evidence that all through the second century of our æra great architectural works were carried on at Ostia. Besides the palace, there is the great central temple, be it of Jupiter or of Vulcan, standing so proudly on its steps. There is a theatre whose columns and inscriptions supply no small materials for study, a theatre of which it might be too much to say that it suggests those of Orange or Taormina, but which certainly suggests that of Arles.

In the sixth century Procopius describes Ostia as lacking walls, and he complains that the road from Ostia to Rome did not follow the course of the river, and was therefore useless as a towing-path. This is eminently true still. The road goes through scenery of various kinds, some rather English-looking, though none very striking; the Tiber makes a far less important feature than we might have looked for. But, if Ostia had no walls in the days of Belisarius, it had no lack of walls in earlier days. The most interesting, from one point of view, among the ruins of Ostia are the remains, forming part of two sides of a square, of the primitive wall, a dry wall of massive stones, belonging no doubt to the period of the first foundation. These were clearly ruinous when the later brick buildings were reared; the wall was broken down, and men built against and upon it; they plastered it; they chamfered its stones for the convenience of plastering, as best suited their purpose. The flourishing town of the second century may well have been wall-less. Rome herself at that date had no defence. The wall of Servius had ceased to serve any military purpose, and the wall of Aurelian was not yet.

The history of Ostia from the ninth century onwards, from the vain attempt of Gregory the Fourth to turn Ostia into Gregoriopolis, belongs to another, though almost adjacent, site. New Ostia, with its castle, its cathedral, its gateway, its one or two narrow streets, but with seemingly hardly a dozen inhabitants, is a sadder sight than old Ostia, with no inhabitant except the stalwart custode, who defends himself against Ostian air by daily doses of quinine. Yet the castle of Cardinal Estouteville ranks high among picturesque fortresses; the cathedral shows a mixture of classical and Gothic detail for which nothing in Rome prepares us; fragments of ancient work lie around; the staircase of the bishop's palace, the palace of the first among cardinals, is rich in ancient inscriptions. But we hasten on to the older site. There is something specially striking in its half-excavated state. We tread the ancient pavement, between the ancient houses, of a street dug out of a cornfield on either side. The wall of Ancus loses itself in a bank of earth. Here a house, there a temple, is dug out, leaving just space enough to see it among surrounding blades of corn. At Pompeii, too, the diggings are not finished; but there one part is dug, another is not; here we thread our way along what is dug with the far greater mass of the undug to right and left of us. So far we are content; the undug may soon be promoted to the state of the dug, and Mother Earth is a safe keeper of antiquities. It is otherwise with Father Tiber. When he is close on one side of us, there is, as our guide truly tells us, no small danger. He once, as Horace witnesses, set forth to destroy the monuments of Numa at Rome; he is clearly minded to do the like by the monuments of Numa's grandson at Ostia.

The Alban Mount.

What is the common point of connexion between all the lands and places which bear the name of Alba, Albania, or something like it? They lie so far apart, they are inhabited by people of such utterly different nations and languages, that it is strange if there be any point of connexion among them, while it is at least as strange if the name has settled down on so many remote spots by sheer accident only. We must not forget that our own land has an interest in the question: we dwell in the Isle of Albion, and its northern part is specially Albanach or Albany. An English lady living on the eastern shore of the Hadriatic was lately complimented by a Scotch lady because, being an Albanian, she spoke such good English. It was afterwards suggested to her that she might have answered with a tu quoque or something more; the Englishwoman was no Albanian; the Scotchwoman in a certain sense was. But have Albanians of either of these kinds anything to do either with the Duke of Alva—for in his tongue "non aliud est vivere quam bibere"—or with the Albania beyond the Euxine? Then again it is singular to read, say in Dionysios of Halikarnassos, the local wars of Rome and Alba Longa described under exactly the same gentile names as those by which Imperial Anna describes strife between the New Rome and those Ghegs and Tosks who have again begun to make themselves famous. It is Ῥωμαῖοι and Ἀλβανοί in both cases, without the change of jot or tittle. In this case, at least, we believe that philologers would deny the slightest kindred between the names; but the casual identity is thereby only made the more startling. A malicious critic might say that Anna's Romans were as unlike old Romans as her Albanians could be unlike the men of Alba Longa. But her Romans did at least claim to be Romans, sharers in the inheritance of the wolf and the eagle; while her Albanians certainly laid no claims to any rights in the Alban sow and her thirty pigs.

Rome, undutiful daughter, swept away her mother city so thoroughly that its site has become a matter of dispute. But the name lived on in derivative forms. Alba perished, but the Alban lake and the Alban mount kept their places, to play no small part in the history of Rome. There is the lake, there is the great drain for its waters, so strangely interwoven with the tale of Veii. There is the mount, with the road by which the chariot of Marcellus went up in triumph; there are still the displaced stones of the temple which was the religious centre of the Latin name. But for the fanaticism of the last Stewart, the pillared front of the Latin Jupiter might still form the proudest of crowns for the height on which the gazer from the walls of Rome fixes his eye more commonly than on any other. And, if Alba perished, she did in a manner rise again. The neighbourhood of dead Alba became as favourite a quarter for the villas of Roman nobles as the neighbourhood of living Tusculum. There the great Pompeius had a dwelling; there, according to one version of his story, his body—or perhaps only his head—found a stately tomb, though Hadrian could make his verse by the Alexandrian Shore to say that no tomb had been found for him who had so many temples. But of all villas on Alban ground, of all Albana, the Albanum of the Emperors, with its spacious gardens, its long terraces still to be traced, of course came to be the greatest. The walled station of the Imperial guards, the fellow of the Prætorian camp at Rome, became the kernel of a new town, and Albano still exists, an episcopal city, seat of a cardinal-bishop, and it still keeps its character as a summer retreat for those who, now as of old, seek to escape the smoke and wealth and noise of lordly Rome. Albano and Alba stand in somewhat the same relation as Spalato and Salona. In both cases the new city grew out of an Imperial dwelling-place in the neighborhood of the old. But there is this wide difference between them, that Alba has utterly perished, while Salona survives in ample ruins. Alba had vanished ages and ages before Albano arose. Spalato stood ready to be a city of refuge for those who fled from Salona in her day of overthrow.

The town of Albano itself contains a good many antiquities, the most prominent among which, that which greets the eye on the entrance from Rome, is the huge tower-like pile, so cruelly stripped of its hewn stone, which, truly or falsely, passes for the tomb of Cnæus Pompeius Magnus. More striking on a close examination, though spoiled in its effect by a Papal freak of restoration, is the tomb which hovers between the names of Aruns son of Porsena and the Horatii and Curiatii. Which of the two would Sir George Lewis have looked on as the more impossible? This is the tomb which so singularly forestalled the outline of the Glastonbury kitchen—before its chimneys perished—and thereby of the Museum laboratory at Oxford. A good deal of the wall of the camp, a good deal of an amphitheatre on the hill-side, and several other fragments of the earlier Imperial time, are still to be seen. But after all Albano really exists, not for its own sake, but as a starting-point for the Alban lake and the Alban mount, and hardly less as a starting-point for

Aricia has changed its site; the small modern town has flown up to the level of the arx, to be approached by Albano by almost the only work on which we do not grudge to see the name of Pius IX. The viaduct of that "Pontifex Optimus Maximus"—his votaries seem never quite to distinguish between him and Jupiter—is really a work worthy of Cæsars or consuls. Below it new Aricia has left the elder city, its fragments of walls and of the Appian Way, to be sought for in the valley below, the crater, so wise men tell us, of an extinct volcano, the biggest surely even in this region where craters meet us at every step. Scraps of primæval wall, hardly to be distinguished from the rocks, prepare us for what we are to see at places further out of the ordinary track; walls of the days of Sulla join on alike to what we have seen at Rome, and to what we are to see at Cori. But, after all, the "still glassy lake" to which the grove of the "rex nemorensis" has given the name of Nemi, is the true glory of Aricia. How well we remember being puzzled years and years ago with the thrilling run of the lines—

In these days the fault would be held to lie with the poet for venturing on an allusion which it might need a little research to take in. In those days we thought in such cases that the fault lay with ourselves; we admired without understanding till we lighted on the explanation which enabled us to understand as well. As such a process is a wholesome one, we will leave the lines without comment; not to speak of books of reference, the story will be found, in a somewhat grotesque form, in Dr. Merivale's chapter on the reign of Caius, better known as Caligula.

The ghastly priest has gone from Nemi; but the lake is there still, and the successors of the trees. Access is courteously granted by the present owner, who, we may believe, has never slain anybody, and who, we hope, may not be slain himself. But though we may admire Nemi from close by, we do not fully understand Nemi and its place among things, till we can look upon it in company with its greater fellow of Alba. That is, we must climb the Alban mount, or a good part of its height. But we go first to the Alban lake itself; and to do so we go along its rim and slide down the side of its crater. There we find the emissarius, so deftly cut in the rock, and which has done its work so well for so many ages. Who made it? Camillus, or some one long before Camillus? The men who built the great cloaca of Rome were quite capable of cutting the hole through the rock of Alba, without any message from Delphi or any design against the walls of Veii. Whoever the borer was, he did his work far more thoroughly than Claudius ages afterwards did his for the Fucine lake, which work it has been left for the Torlonia of our own day to finish. But no one, we may suppose, wished at any time to drain the Alban lake, but only to keep it in order. How needful such a work is we do not fully grasp till we can look down from above. Then we take in the strict accuracy of the name crater. We see the two lakes, greater and smaller, side by side, like two basins in the strictest sense, in which, at some time which geologists may fix, but which it is enough for history to say that it was long before the oldest primæval wall, the powers of water supplanted those of fire. We take in how the larger lake, with its narrow rim, in some parts of its circuit with its low rim, liable to be swollen, but with no natural outlet for its waters, might easily come to overflow, if artificial means had not been, in some early time, taken to check it.

But when we have wound our way by the rim of the lake, by the house which the so-called Prisoner of the Vatican never chooses to visit, by the rock which still bears his name, when we have crossed the so-called fields of Hannibal—yet another crater, science tells us—when we have climbed by the triumphal way to the height of Monte Cavo, we do indeed understand the geography and history of Rome and Latium better than we did before. The eye may range over the height of Tusculum and over the battle-ground of Regillus as far as the height of Præneste; it may range hither and thither over many points which have their charm both of history and of nature. But there are two sides to which the historical eye will be attracted before all others. Such a gazer will better take in the position of Rome, as he sees it, with its seven hills shrunk out of sight, a point—rather a line—in the Latin plain, with a wall of Etruscan hills beyond it. We see how utterly different was the position of Rome from the position of the elder cities; we see how she lies in the midst, at the very meeting-place of nations; we see how needful for her it was to make the barrier behind her her own; and we understand her wars with Veii better than before. But we look down too on the Latin plain itself: we look down, we believe, on the vanished site of Rome's mother at our feet; we look out on the great flat once fringed with cities, and on the great and wide sea beyond it. Here, standing forth as an advanced post of the land, we see where