for peace and marching away northwards again
through the starved and harried hills and valleys of Etruria to their
own country. And six centuries passed away before an enemy entered Rome
again.

But the Gauls left wreck and ruin and scarcely one stone upon another in
the great desolation; they swept away all records of history, then and
there, and the general destruction was absolute, so that the Rome of the
Republic and of the Empire, the centre and capital of the world, began
to exist from that day. Unwillingly the people bore back Juno's image
from Veii, where they had taken refuge and would have stayed, and built
houses, and would have called that place Rome. But the nobles had their
own way, and the great construction began, of which there was to be no
end for many hundreds of years, in peace and war, mostly while hard
fighting was going on abroad.

[Illustration: ETRUSCAN BRIDGE AT VEII]

They built hurriedly at first, for shelter, and as best they could,
crowding their little houses in narrow streets with small care for
symmetry or adornment. The second Rome must have seemed but a poor
village compared with the solidly built city which the Gauls had burnt,
and it was long before the present could compare with the past. In haste
men seized on fragments of all sorts, blocks of stone, cracked and
defaced in the flames, charred beams that could still serve, a door
here, a window there, and such bits of metal as they could pick up. An
irregular, crowded town sprang up, and a few rough temples, no doubt as
pied and meanly pieced as many of those early churches built of odds and
ends of ruin, which stand to this day.

It is not impossible that the motley character of Rome, of which all
writers speak in one way or another, had its first cause in that second
building of the city. Rome without ruins would hardly seem Rome at all,
and all was ruined in that first inroad of the savage Gauls,--houses,
temples, public places. When the Romans came back from Veii they must
have found the Forum not altogether unlike what it is today, but
blackened with smoke, half choked with mouldering humanity, strewn with
charred timbers, broken roof tiles and the wreck of much household
furniture; a sorrowful confusion reeking with vapours of death, and
pestilential with decay. It was no wonder that the poor plebeians lost
heart and would have chosen to go back to the clear streets and cleaner
air of Veii. Their little houses were lost an