ADVERTISEMENT TO THE FIRST EDITION. THIS work has now been eight years in hand; had I been aware of the amount of labour that there was to be done, I should never have undertaken it at my age. I knew that there had been upwards of a hundred books on the Antiquities of Rome published before I began, and that some of them are deservedly of good reputation, but I also knew that in not one of them had the excellent method of Rickman and Willis,—the principles of the modern school of archæology, been applied to the buildings of Rome. I did not at first anticipate that the careful examination of the construction and details of each building, which is a necessary part of this system, would produce such a complete change of ideas, nor occupy so much time and labour; but I soon began to perceive that I had undertaken a far greater work than I had been aware of, and to doubt whether my life and health would be spared to complete it; I therefore adopted the plan of making each chapter complete in itself, so that if anything happened to me, others would be able to go on with it on the same plan. I soon saw, indeed, the great results obtained by the excavations of Napoleon III. on the Palatine Hill, combined with those previously made in the time of the first Napoleon, at the expense of the Duchess of Devonshire, which had brought to light the platforms of the Temples of Concord, of Saturn, &c., at the north end of the Forum Romanum. These excavations have now been combined and united by the works carried on by the Italian Government, and the whole early history of Rome is coming out more and more clearly month after month. But the historical topography of Rome is not confined to the Palatine and the Forum Romanum, to which the Government restricts its works; I saw the necessity of getting other excavations made and explorations carried on. I had begun my work on the plan of dividing Rome into districts, according to the Regiones of the Regionary Catalogue of the fourth century, but I encountered a formidable stumbling-block at the starting point :—the first Regio is called the Porta Capena, but the site of that gate was not known, and none of the objects in this Regio could be placed until that was ascertained. With some difficulty, and after considerable delay, arising from procrastination, I obtained permission to dig on the spot where I saw that the gate must have been, by following the line of the aqueducts that necessarily passed over it, to cross that deep valley between the Coelian and the Aventine, and I found it exactly in the line where I had said two years before it must be. This gave me greater confidence to persevere, and I had now found that the first Regio of the Early Empire was situated in the interval between this principal southern gate of the THE CITY of the Kings, and the great southern gate oF ROME on the Via Appia, just one mile distant, and on the line of the ancient earthworks called the mania, on which the Wall of Aurelian was afterwards built. This discovery also explained the plan of the fortifications of Servius Tullius; he made use of the previously-existing fortified villages on each of the seven hills, and combined them into one city, by connecting them together by means of a short agger and wall across the valley from one scarped cliff to another; (all fortifications of that period consist chiefly of scarped cliffs). On the eastern side only, where from the nature of the ground there would be no natural cliffs, he made his great agger a mile long (destroyed in 1872-3). Soon after that I heard that there was a vaulted chamber underground at the bottom of a well at the corner of the Circus Maximus. I went down into it, and examined it, and then took an architectural draughtsman down to have a plan and section made of it. I found that it was in part a natural cave, with a fine spring of water in it, and this with the situation indicated clearly that it was the Lupercal of Augustus. Soon after this I obtained the key of a cellar that I had long tried in vain to obtain, and here again I found from the construction of the walls of the time of the Kings, and the situation in the middle of the early City, that it must be a part of the great Prison of the Kings. I also found on examining the construction of the walls of the substructure of the great public building, on the southern slope of the Capitoline Hill, that it agreed with the account of it given by Varro, and the original part of it is one of the earliest buildings in Rome. I obtained permission to explore the subterranean chambers, and found them to be the Ærarium, or Public Treasury-under the Tabularium, or Public Record Office, with the Senaculum, or Senate-house behind it, and the Municipium over it. On the Palatine Hill, also, I had been able to trace the earliest wall of Rome, on three sides of an oblong space, at the north end of the Hill; evidently the ROMA QUADRATA of Tacitus and other authors, separated from the southern part of the hill by a wide and deep foss, which had been filled up to the level in the time of Domitian, but was brought to light again by the excavations of Signor Rosa for the Italian Government. All these recent excavations combined to prove the substantial truth of the first book of Livy, and the corresponding chapters of Dionysius, confirmed also incidentally by Varro, and Vitruvius, and Plutarch, and indeed by nearly all the writers of the early Empire. It must be remembered that in the time when Niebuhr and Bunsen wrote, these walls were not visible, still less when the earlier historians wrote; they had been used as foundations for the great palaces of the Cæsars and for other buildings, both before and after that period, in many succeeding generations. There could not be better foundations to build upon than these walls of the Kings, in which each stone is a ton weight. They have only been brought to light within the last few years, some important parts only in 1871 and 1872. Portions of the wall of Roma Quadrata can now be seen on three sides of it, and the great foss can be distinctly traced on investigation, though not seen at first sight, because walls of the time of Domitian have been built across it to make a level surface, on which stand the remains of a temple towards the west end, and of the great Basilica Jovis towards the east end. The cliffs on both sides of the foss are supported by walls of different periods. The construction of each period is soon ascertained by historical dated examples, and experience has taught the Archæologists that the construction of the same period was always the same, where the same building-materials are found. Construction thus becomes stronger evidence than books, because books are always liable to errors of transcribers, or the misunderstanding of a passage from the same word being used in different senses. It is no reproach to those who have gone before to say that the recent excavations and explorations have shewn them to be wrong in many points: if they could have seen what we now see, they would have arrived at the same conclusions that we do. Archæology differs from history in this respect, that it has to do only with existing remains explained by history, while that has to do with the things that have been, without regard to whether there are any visible remains or not. Antiquities are generally understood to mean objects of ancient art, one important part of archæological evidence, but a part only; the exact knowledge of the locality and the ancient earthworks are also important branches of archæological evidence. ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM, OXFORD, |