(afterwards called the Capitoline Hill), for the strongest fortification was at the north end, where they have also made a large reservoir for rain-water, as expecting to be cut off from the supply of fresh water from the stream in the valley below.

It is evident that a peace was soon concluded between the inhabitants of the Palatine and the Capitol, and that the two hills were united in one city and enclosed in one wall, which made a very strong fortress; this could not be done with either of the hills separately, as each was too close to one of the others, and always connected with it at some point. Each of the hills has been separately fortified, but neither of them could be made a strong fortress, and for this reason the seven hills were united by the series of aggeres of Servius Tullius, of which there are extensive remains in many parts.

At the north-east corner also, at the point that is nearest to the hill of Saturn, and within a stone's throw of the nearest point, they had begun to raise their walls higher, and for that purpose had commenced a series of bastions to serve as buttresses to support the wall above; these bastions have been suddenly suspended when they had only got about ten feet from the ground, they have then been left alone for a time, and afterwards used as foundations for other buildings on the hill above. Each stone of the walls of the first period (that of the Kings) is a ton weight, and therefore it would not pay to move them, and they made excellent foundations. Over these bastions, after an interval of a few feet of rubble stone wall, are marble bases of columns, of the time of the Early Empire, evidently of a colonnade of some house. Experiments have been tried, which have shewn that arrows thrown from a catapult, or stones from a balista, would kill a man at the distance from the Capitoline to the Palatine Hill at this point, the raising of the walls was therefore quite necessary. Nevertheless it is a mark of genius in the person who proposed and began to do this, as it would probably have been the only stone wall in Europe at that period that was raised above the level of the top of the cliff. The invariable custom in all these early walls is to build them against the cliff only. On the Palatine there were no doubt wooden palisades at the edge of the cliff. On the Capitoline Hill, where the cliffs are much

b The fortification at this end would not have been required, if the inhabitants on the Palatine had also held possession of the Capitoline Hill as their citadel.

These experiments were made at

Compiegne, by M. Viollet-le-Duc, for Napoleon III.; he made a balista, ac. cording to the directions of Vitruvius, and was surprised to find what a powerful machine it was.

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higher, and supposed to be too high for scaling-ladders, there appears to have been neither parapet-wall nor palisades. The sudden suspension of the work could only have been caused by a sudden peace with the inhabitants of the Capitol (which agrees with the legends). There is no wall visible on the Capitol of the same early construction, although it has been thoroughly searched, and a good deal of excavation has been going on there also within the last five years. There are walls of the Kings on the Capitoline Hill, but these belong to the later period, not to the earliest. The walls of the Ærarium, and the west end of the Tabularium, are the earliest walls on that hill; next to these is the great wall against the cliff at the east end, part of which is now visible in the cellars of Ara Cœli; another part is behind the houses in the Via di Marforio, where the lofty cliff can be plainly seen from the back windows of the houses. Of about the same period as this are those of the earliest part of the Mamertine Prison below, and the subterranean passage connected with it, which corresponds exactly with the Cloaca Maxima. There is no temple on the Capitol, or anywhere else in Rome, of the same early character as the one on the Palatine. The walls in the Caffarelli gardens belong to the time of the Tarquins. In the prison of the time of the Kings, at the foot of the hill, at the south-east corner, the walls are of two periods, the earliest of the time of Ancus Martius, the other of Servius Tullius.

There is, however, one wall in Rome of which only a small portion is visible against the cliff of the Quirinal Hill (now in the Colonna gardens), which is of earlier character than the earliest wall of Roma Quadrata. This shews that the Quirinal was occupied by the Sabines at the time of the arrival of the settlers on the Palatine, who must have settled there originally with their consent, and afterwards quarrelled with them.

Geologists say that the Capitoline Hill was originally a promontory from the Quirinal, just in the same manner as the Velia was also a promontory from the Esquiline; the probability is, that both were cut off in the same manner, and at the same time, by a great foss; that of the Velia can still be seen, the other was enlarged by Trajan by cutting away the cliff of the Quirinal sufficiently to make the space wide enough for his Forum. This great foss seems to be one of a series that continued all round the two hills, and isolated them from all the adjacent country. It goes on

This was probably part of the wall of the Capitolium Vetus, which Varro

says was earlier than the other Capitolium on the hill of Saturn.

at the foot of the Quirinal, and passes by the Forum of Augustus, where the temple of Mars Ultor is evidently built up against that wall, on the inner side of this great foss, because that wall stood there when the temple was built. This part of the wall has been altered by Augustus, and three tiers of niches let into it for statues, but there are remains of two of the old towers, of the time of the early Kings, not altered.

The most probable history (as we have said) is that the connection was cut off by one of the great Fossæ Quiritium (recorded by Festus), after the two hills were united in one city, in the same manner as the Velia was cut off from the Esquiline by another of these great fossæ, which can still be distinctly traced, with the Via del Colosseo made in it. That the Sabines had possession of that hill at the time of the rape of the Sabine women and in the subsequent war, is distinctly stated, and they must always have required it to keep open their communication with the Tiber, by which they received their provisions. The two hills united and isolated from the adjacent country by these great fossæ made a very strong fortress, which could not be the case with any of the hills separately. Each of the hills was separately fortified, as we see by the remains, but not one of them would make a strong fortress separately; each is too close to one of the other hills in some part, therefore Servius Tullius enclosed the seven hills by his aggeres, and made a strong city of them. The Tarquins began a second outer wall of enceinte, that is, a wall of earth or a banke, but this was never completed; the aqueducts were carried upon it in the time of the Republic, and Aurelian afterwards built his wall upon it as far as it went.

The existing remains brought to light since the time of Niebuhr, indeed since 1860, and some of the most important at a more recent period, had been buried for more than two thousand years, and were not visible when Livy and Dionysius wrote, and probably not in the time of Fabius Pictor, as the Palatine had long been built upon, and the old walls used as foundations for the houses. The walls of Roma Quadrata were not visible, and these occupy about one-third of the Palatine at the north end (as has been said), and not the whole hill, as had been supposed. The southern part has not been fortified in the same manner at any early period, and there was an enormous foss across the hill on the south side of Roma Quadrata, which certainly appears to have been the citadel of the Romans, while that hill was a separate fortress, which it evidently was for some time, before the two hills were united'.

• Varro says that such a wall of earth was called MURUS.

Dionys., ii. 66. See the Plan and Section of the Foss.

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We find now that the legends by themselves do not make an intelligible history, nor can the existing remains by themselves be understood without the aid of the legends; but when the two are put together they make a clear and probable history of the city, but this is not consistent with the Roman settlers, originally three thousand men only, having taken possession of both these hills.

Many persons who have not paid attention to the subject, say that it is impossible to tell the date of a wall by the construction of it; those who have paid attention to the subject know better, especially such as have heard Professor Willis' Lectures at Canterbury and Winchester to the members of the Archæological Institute, or have read them when printed. The same principles that apply in England and France apply equally in Rome, only as the buildings there are more than a thousand years older, they are of course on a much larger scale, and the distinctions which in the north appear rather minute, and require some practice to see them, are very conspicuous in Rome, and visible from a considerable distance. Professor Willis pointed out that the width of the joints, or the thickness of the mortar between the stones, is often the best distinction between early and late Norman work, sometimes the only one, for there are many cases like S. Remi at Rheims, where all the ornamentation has been changed in the twelfth century, whilst the walls of the eleventh have been retained. At Winchester the outer walls of the transepts are of wide-jointed masonry, whilst the tower, and those central parts which were rebuilt with it thirty years afterwards, are of fine-jointed masonry. In Rome, in the earliest construction, the joints are wide enough to put a cane between them, in the later walls of the Kings a knife can hardly be put between them. In the time of the Empire the construction of each century is equally distinct, but that is not to the present purpose. The walls of Servius Tullius have a special character of their own, in the use of iron clamps to hold the stone together, which have rusted and fallen out, and left only the holes near the edges of the stones, but we have no remains of his time on the Capitoline Hill; the foss of his great agger was a hundred feet wide and twenty feet deep, as Dionysius

See Plates IV. and IX. of Construction. In the latter, the stones of that part of the great prison that was added by him, and called from him the Robur Tullianum, has been rebuilt by Tiberius, and these great blocks of tufa are formed into an arcade at the end of the Forum of Julius Cæsar, two arches of

tufa resting on a single great block of travertine, and at the edges of the blocks of tufa the holes for the iron clamps are left, but do not fit; they are not opposite to each other. Both of these Plates are Photo-engravings, in which no artist's tricks are possible.

says, and this has been found to be true by the excavations made by order of Signor Fiorelli, in 1877, near the railway station.

The great Fossæ Quiritium, and other fosse of the early Kings, were no doubt of the same dimensions. This applies to the foss which cut off the Velia from the Esquiline, and no doubt did apply to that which cut off the Capitol from the Quirinal, until Trajan enlarged it by cutting away part of the cliff of the Quirinal to make the space wide enough for his Forum. The foss between the two, outside that part of the Second Wall of Rome, which formed the eastern side of the Forum of Augustus, appears to have been of the same dimensions, although it has been greatly filled-up to make the level of the street more convenient for carriages.

ROMA QUADRATA.

It has long been assumed that ROMA QUADRATA included the whole of the Palatine Hill, although this is obviously not consistent with the boundaries of it given by Tacitus; even Niebuhr assumes this, and gives plausible reasons for it. The great excavations of Napoleon III. have shewn that this original settlement only occupied about one-third of the summit of the hill, by bringing to light the original walls (as before mentioned). The enormous foss which separated this from the rest of the hill shews that it was intended to be held as a distinct fortress in case of need. As the settlers increased rapidly in numbers, it soon became the arx, or citadel, or Capitol of the City, called also the Prætorium; for we are told that one reason for Augustus adhering to the "house of an ordinary citizen, named Hortensius," which he had bought, was because it was in the Prætorium, and near the house of Romulus. This was to flatter the popular tradition, but it marks the site. At Athens, in the same manner, the original city became afterwards the citadel, as Niebuhr mentions. It is incredible that the hill of Saturn could have been the capital of the original settlers on the Palatine, neither hill could be made safe against the attack of an enemy who had possession of the other; the lofty cliffs, which were their main defence, were of no avail against an enemy on the same level.

It should be borne in mind that the whole population must have been employed to build the walls of ROMA QUADRATA, and this could only have been done under a despotic commander, whether called king or not; also, that for building "the city on the two hills," the whole population of both hills must have been employed, Niebuhr's "History of Rome," by Hare and Thirlwall, vol. i. p. 288.