s to keep
the sacred fire on the altar in the temple of Vesta from being
extinguished and to preserve a certain sacred pledge on which the very
existence of Rome was supposed to depend.(125) What this pledge was we
have no means of discovering; some supposed that it was the Trojan
Palladium; others, some traditional mystery brought by the Pelasgi from
Samothrace. One fact is certain: that the Palatine is regarded as the
oldest portion of the city and the original site and centre of the embryo
mistress of the world and mother of cities, the _Roma quadrata_, fragments
of whose walls have been brought to light.(126)

"Tradition relates that it was on the Palatine that Romulus marked out the
Pomoerium, a space around the walls of the city, on which it was unlawful
to erect buildings.... The next ceremony was the consecration of the
comitium, or place of public assembly. A vault was built under ground and
filled with the firstlings of all the natural productions that sustain
human life and with earth which each foreign settler had brought from his
home. This place was called _Mundus_" (History of Rome, Goldsmith's
abridgment, 21st edition, by W. C. Taylor, p. 13).

This fact furnishes evidence that the sacred central cosmical vault over
which a mound may have been formed by the earth contributed from different
quarters, was regarded as a synopsis of all, and that sanctity was also
attached to the central place of assembly where justice was administered
at regular intervals, weekly markets were held and religious rites were
celebrated.(127)

Tradition relates that, after the foundation of the central "Mundus," the
founder of Rome established the Sabine town which occupied the Quirinal
and part of the Capitoline hills. "The name of this town most probably was
Quirium ... the two cities were united on terms of equality and the
double-faced Janus, stamped on the earliest Roman coins was probably a
symbol of the double state." It is significant to find not only that Janus
was sometimes depicted with four faces instead of two, in which case he
was called Janus Quadrifrontis, but that references are also made to the
female form of Janus=Jana, the latter being identified with Diana.
Considering that it was from Quirium that the Roman youths obtained Sabine
wives by force, which had been refused to their entreaties, it would seem
as though, originally, as elsewhere, the men and women of the community
resided separately and that str