SECOND APPENDIX TO PRIMITIVE FORTIFICATIONS.

THE LUPERCAL OF AUGUSTUS,

THE CAVE OF PICUS AND FAUNUS(?), AND OF CACUS (?),

AND THE MAMERTINE PRISON.

NOTICE.

THE exact sites of the Lupercal or Wolf's Cave, the cave of Picus and Faunus, or Cacus (?) (used as the mouth of the aqueducts), and of the great Prison of the Kings of Rome, have all been ascertained within the last few years, and the construction is an important part of the evidence by which they are established. It seems, therefore, expedient to add them to this chapter, instead of waiting for the publication of the other parts of this work on the topographical arrangement in the Regiones, which must be delayed until the important excavations of the Forum Romanum, now going on, are completed, at least as far as to ascertain all the main points, a great deal of which has already been done.

The substance of these discoveries was given in a Lecture to the British Archæological Society of Rome, and printed for them in 1869, but this pamphlet has been out of print for some time, and the information is therefore not accessible, and the subject forms a necessary part of the present work, In the account of these I have had much assistance from Dr. Fabio Gori, who was in my employ for some years in directing the excavations, and drawing up an account of them. He was well acquainted with the records of excavations previously made in searching for statues, &c., of which memoirs were preserved by eye-witnesses, chiefly Flaminius Vacca, and which were collected and published by Fea in a volume called "Miscellanea," now difficult to obtain. I was not acquainted with this volume until afterwards. Dr. Gori also knew how to get access to the cellars and to the vineyards, which a stranger cannot do, and it was not until I had been in Rome several seasons that I understood how these things are managed. The relative position

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of Dr. Gori and myself is very much the same as that of Dr. Nibby and Sir William Gell fifty years ago, when the original work on the Campagna of Rome, as written in Italian by Dr. Nibby, but at the suggestion, and at the expense of Sir W. Gell, was published in full in Italian in three volumes in Rome, under the name of Dr. Nibby, while the English translation and abridgment of it was published in London, under the name of Sir William Gell. I might have adopted the same plan, but I have thought it preferable to put both names to it: we have worked together cordially, and it is often difficult to say to which of us any particular part belongs. In the case of the Mamertine Prison especially: we descended into the cellar together for the first time at my request, and there saw the tufa walls of the style usual in the time of the Kings of Rome, which led us to the conclusion that it must be part of the great Mamertine Prison. He was employed to examine the subterranean passage in 1867-68, and published an account of his explorations in a Roman Journal called Il Buonarrotti, and a few copies were printed separately. He gave an interesting and curious account of his adventures, in searching into this tunnel in company with his friend Signor de Mauro, an engineer, who made an excellent plan of the prison and the tunnel.

THE LUPERCAL.

AT the north-west corner of the Palatine Hill, near the church of S. Anastasia, and at the corner of the Via de' Cerchi and the Via de' Fienili, is a subterranean cave-reservoir, partly natural and partly built. It is covered by a vault faced with stucco, which has been richly ornamented, but a considerable part of this stucco has fallen down, owing to the vibration produced by the carriages in the Via de' Cerchi, a modern road which passes over it.

A part of this cave was under, or very near to, one corner of the Circus Maximus, near the Carceres. In this cave streams of pure and fine water gush out of the rock in great abundance, and are collected in a specus, which conveys them to near the church of S. Giorgio in Velabro and the Janus Quadrifrons, where it falls into the Cloaca Maxima, and so into the Tiber. This stream is called Acqua Argentina; the water is celebrated for its purity and for its medicinal qualities, which in the Middle Ages were considered as miraculous, as mentioned in the history of this church.

The name is supposed by some to be derived from the pure and silvery appearance of the water, by others from the circumstance that it ran through the Silversmiths' quarter, as is shewn by the inscription on the arch dedicated to Septimius Severus by the side of the church, and near the mouth of this stream.

The present entrance to this cave is down a well at the corner of the Via de' Cerchi and Via de' Fienili, and it is now used as a mill-head for a modern mill between the source and the mouth; from which cause, and from the falling down of masses of the stucco of the vault which obstruct the course of the water and cannot easily be removed, it is often knee-deep in water.

The situation of this cave agrees so exactly with the full description of the Lupercal given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and the casual notices of it by other classical authors, that it seems almost impossible to dispute its identity. Without pretending to discuss the question of the truth of the legend of the wolf and the children, it is sufficient to say that this is the cave rebuilt by Augustus, and in which the priests of Pan bathed themselves before rushing into the circus for the Lupercal games. Dionysius, writing about the antiquities of Rome during the time of the Arcadians and their