do you meet with a solitary peasant, looking like a
satyr in shaggy goat-skin breeches, and glaring wildly at you from his
great black eyes as he crosses the waste. Far as the eye can see there
is nothing but a melancholy plain, studded here and there with a ruin,
and populous only with the visionary forms of the past; and its
tragic beauty prepares your mind for passing into the solemn shadow of
the great Niobe of cities. But it was not thus in the brilliant days
of the Empire. For fifteen miles beyond the walls the Appian Way
stretched to the beautiful blue Alban hills, through a continuous
suburb of the city, adorned with all the charms of nature and art,
palatial villas and pleasure-gardens, groves and vineyards, temples
and far-extending aqueducts. These homes and fashionable haunts of the
living were interspersed in strange association with the tombs of the
dead. Through the gate a constant stream of human life passed in and
out; and crowds of chariots and horsemen and wayfarers thronged the
road from morning to night.

It is only seventeen years since the true point of commencement of the
Appian Way was discovered. For a long time the Porta Capena by which
it left Rome was supposed to be situated outside of the present walls,
in the valley of the Almo. But Dr. Parker, at the period indicated,
making some excavations in the narrowest part of the valley between
the Coelian and Aventine hills, came upon some massive remains of the
original wall of Servius Tullius, and in these he found the true site
of the Porta Capena. This discovery, confirming the supposition of
Ampere and others, cleared up much that was inexplicable in the
topography of this part of Rome, and enabled antiquarians to fix the
relative position of all the historical spots. The Via Appia is thus
shown to have extended upwards of three-quarters of a mile within the
present area of the city, over the space between the wall of Servius
Tullius and the wall of Aurelian. And this is still further confirmed
by the discovery, three hundred years ago, of the first milestone of
the Appian Way in a vineyard, a short distance beyond the modern gate
of St. Sebastian, marking exactly a Roman mile from that point to the
site of Dr. Parker's discovery. This milestone now forms one of the
ornaments on the balustrade at the head of the stairs of the Capitol.

The Appian Way shared in the vicissitudes of the city. After the fall
of the Western Empire, about the beg