mans. We learn, with surprise, how little they regarded their
oxen, save as working-animals,--whether the milk-white steers of
Clitumnus, or the dun Campanian cattle, whose descendants show their
long-horned stateliness to this day in the Roman forum. The sheep, too,
whether of Tarentum or of Canusium, were regarded as of value chiefly
for their wool and milk; and it is surely amazing, that men who could
appreciate the iambics of Horace and the eloquence of Cicero should
have shown so little fancy for a fat saddle of mutton or for a mottled
sirloin of beef.

I change from Columella to Virgil, and from Virgil back to some pleasant
Idyl of Tibullus, and from Tibullus to the pretty prate of Horace about
the Sabine Hills; I stroll through Pliny's villa, eying the clipped
box-trees; I hear the rattle in the tennis-court; I watch the tall Roman
girls--

"Grandes virgines proborum colonorum"--

marching along with their wicker-baskets filled with curds and
fresh-plucked thrushes, until there comes over me a confusion of times
and places.

--The sound of the battle of to-day dies; the fresh blood-stains
fade; and I seem to wake upon the heights of Tusculum, in the days of
Tiberius. The farm-flat below is a miniature Campagna, along which I
see stretching straight to the city the shining pavement of the Via
Tusculana. The spires yonder melt into mist, and in place of them I see
the marble house-walls of which Augustus boasted. As yet the grander
monuments of the Empire are not built; but there is a blotch of cliff
which may be the Tarpeian Rock, and beside it a huge hulk of building on
the Capitoline Hill, where sat the Roman Senate. A little hitherward are
the gay turrets of the villa of Maecenas, and of the princely houses on
the Palatine Hill, and in the foreground the stately tomb of Cecilia
Metella. I see the barriers of a hippodrome, (where now howling
jockeys make the twilight hideous); a _gestatio_, with its lines
of cherry-trees, is before me, and the velvety lavender-green of
olive-orchards covers the hills behind. Vines grow upon the slope
eastward,--

"Neve tibi ad solem vergant vineta cadentem,"--

twining around, and flinging off a great wealth of tendrils from their
supporting-poles (_pedamenta_). The figs begin to show the purple bloom
of fruitage, and the _villicus_, who has just now come in from the
_atriolum_, reports a good crop, and asks if it would not be well to
apply a few loads of marl (_tofa