w pre-eminent was Rome, since all were subordinate to her! How
bewildering and bewitching to a traveller must have been the varied
wonders of the city! Go where he would, his eye rested on something
which was both a study and a marvel. Let him drive or walk about the
suburbs,--there were villas, tombs, aqueducts looking like our railroads
on arches, sculptured monuments, and gardens of surpassing beauty and
luxury. Let him approach the walls,--they were great fortifications
extending twenty-one miles in circuit, according to the measurement of
Ammon as adopted by Gibbon, and forty-five miles according to other
authorities. Let him enter any of the various gates that opened into the
city from the roads which radiated to all parts of Italy and the
world,--they were of monumental brass covered with bas-reliefs, on which
the victories of generals for a thousand years were commemorated. Let
him pass through any of the crowded thoroughfares,--he saw houses
towering scarcely ever less than seventy feet, as tall as those of
Edinburgh in its oldest sections. Most of the houses in which this vast
population lived, according to Strabo, possessed pipes which gave a
never-failing supply of water from the rivers that flowed into the city
through the aqueducts and out again through the sewers into the Tiber.
Let the traveller walk up the Via Sacra,--that short street, scarcely
half a mile in length,--and he passed the Flavian Amphitheatre, the
Temple of Venus and Rome, the Arch of Titus, the Temples of Peace, of
Vesta, and of Castor, the Forum Romanum, the Basilica Julia, the Arch
of Severus, the Temple of Saturn, and stood before the majestic ascent
to the Capitoline Jupiter, with its magnificent portico and ornamented
pediment, surpassing the facade of any modern church. On his left, as he
emerged from beneath the sculptured Arch of Titus, was the Palatine
Mount, nearly covered by the palace of the Caesars, the magnificent
residences of the higher nobility, and various temples, of which that of
Apollo was the most magnificent, built by Augustus, of solid white
marble from Luna. Here were the palaces of Vaccus, of Flaccus, of
Cicero, of Catiline, of Scaurus, of Antoninus, of Clodius, of Agrippa,
and of Hortensius. Still on his left, in the valley between the Palatine
and the Capitoline, though he could not see it, concealed from view by
the great Temples of Vesta and of Castor, and the still greater edifice
known as the Basilica Julia,