the Temple south, but in later times the Arx (north) was disused and forgotten, and the Temple (south) sometimes usurped its appellation, we will beg the reader's attention to the famous narrative of Tacitus, which all agree ought to be decisive. We speak in the interest of Tacitus himself; we are unwilling that any cloud of ambiguity should lie upon one of the most striking and graphic relations of the most picturesque writer of antiquity. The historian thus describes the assault of the Capitol by the soldiers of Vitellius :

'After skirting with rapid march the Forum and the temples which overhung it, they charge up the hill (1), to the foot of the gates of the Capitoline fortress (2). There were formerly porticos on the flank of the ascent, on the right as you mounted it (3), and the defenders, issuing on the roofs of these, overwhelmed the Vitellians with tiles and stones. The Vitellians were unprovided with any weapons but their swords, and they could not wait the arrival of engines and missiles. So they threw torches into the projecting portico, and followed the course of the fire. They would have burnt the gates of the Capitol and burst in, had not Sabinus flung a number of statues (4), the monuments of our ancestors, before them, and so blocked up the approach as with a wall. The Vitellians, repulsed here, now make their attack at other points of access (5), in the direction of the Grove of the Asylum, and again where the Tarpeian Rock is approached by the Hundred Steps. At both places the attack was unexpected; but that near the Asylum was the closest and fiercest. Nor could the assailants be checked, climbing as they did along the continuous edifices, which, in the security of peace, were allowed to rise aloft to the level of the Capitol itself (6). Whether it was the besiegers who set fire to the buildings or the besieged, as is more commonly reported, in order to check the enemy's advance has not been ascertained. The flames, however, spread from thence to the porticos attached to the houses: the eagles of the roof (the slanting rafters supporting the apex of the pediment), being old and dry wood, caught fire and fed the conflagration. Thus the Capitol, its gates (7) still shut, undefended and unstormed, was consumed to ashes.'

*

Upon

Tac. Hist. iii. 71. "Cito agmine forum et imminentia foro templa prætervecti erigunt aciem per adversum collem, usque ad primas Capitolina arcis fores. Erant antiquitus porticus in latere clivi, dextræ subeuntibus: in quarum tectum egressi saxis tegulisque Vitellianos obruebant. Neque illis manus, nisi gladiis, armatæ et arcessere tormenta, aut missilia tela, longum videbatur: faces in prominentem porticum jecere, et sequebantur ignem; ambustasque Capitolii fores penetrassent, ni Sabinus revulsas undique statuas, decora majorum, in ipso aditu, vice muri, objecisset. Tum diversos Capitolii aditus invadunt, juxta lacum Asyli, et qua Tarpeia rupes centum gradibus aditur. Improvisa utraque vis; propior atque acrior per Asylum ingruebat. Nec sisti poterant scandentes per conjuncta ædificia; quæ, ut in multa pace, in altum edita solum Capitolii æquabant. Hic ambigitur, ignem tectis oppugnatores injecerint, an obsessi, quæ crebrior fama est, quo nitentes ac progressos depellerent. Inde lapsus ignis in porticus appositas ædibus: mox sustinentes fastigium aquila vetere ligno traxerunt flammam

alueruntque.

Upon this passage we submit the following commentary with reference to the points we have numbered in the above extract. (1) The only access to the Capitol or the Arx from the Forum was by the Clivus Capitolinus, the line of the triumphal processions, which rose from before the Temple of Concord, climbed the face of the hill under the Tabularium from right to left, reached with a bend or zigzag perhaps the level or landing-place of the

alueruntque. Sic Capitolium, clausis foribus, indefensum et indireptum, conflagravit." Intermontium,

Intermontium, and then, as we conceive, bending again to the left, mounted to the foot of the gates (primæ fores) of the Capitoline Temple on the south-west summit. (2) The term 'fortress' (Arx) is here applied to the Temple, i. e. to the sacred precincts, surrounded no doubt with an outer wall and cloister, and rendered to some extent defensible, which embraced the triple fane of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva, and bore the comprehensive title of Capitolium, or as here the Arx Capitolina. (3) The latter part of the ascent from the level of the Intermontium would doubtless be skirted with porticos, or propylæa, on the right-hand side. On the left the cliff would descend from it. (4) The Capitol would of course abound with statues ; but we should not expect a bare fortification like the ancient Arx (if it is of the Arx proper that Tacitus is speaking) to furnish such precious materials for a hasty defence. (5) The Vitellians, we conceive, being repulsed at the front gates, descended the hill; one party diverged into the Intermontium, and renewed the assault from the steps which led from the Grove of the Asylum to the north side of the Temple: another re-entered the Forum, ran round the base of the Tarpeian Rock, and scaled the hill again by the Hundred Steps, so as to take the Temple on the south. (6) We may remark, in passing, the common error that this passage indicates the existence of houses at Rome of the height of the Capitoline Hill, that is, an hundred feet and upwards. Tacitus is speaking of houses which stood on the Intermontium, more than half way up the hill. (7) It will be observed that Tacitus has three times spoken of the gates: once of the Capitoline fortress as he calls it, and twice of the Capitol. From the context it appears, as we contend, indisputably, that these all refer to the same mass of building. The gates of the Capitol, then, were protected from the Vitellians by the statues : they were still closed when the fire reached them; and though the place was neither attacked nor defended, that is, by engines and military means, it was consumed by the accidental conflagration. If this commentary be correct, the locality can be no other than the southern summit, and this must have been, as we contend, the site of the Capitoline temple, but the Arx proper has nothing to do with it. The Arx of the Capitol, in the language of Tacitus, is the Capitol itself, and is altogether different from the original or proper Arx. The defensibility of the ancient temples generally (templa muris cincta, says Tacitus elsewhere) is sufficiently well known, and we need make no difficulty about the phrase here used. The defence of the temple of Camulodunum against the Iceni is a case in point. It was of course not in the cella of that temple, neither larger nor lighter

perhaps

perhaps than the Black Hole at Calcutta, that the Roman colonists took refuge, but in the precincts, however imperfectly fortified, which surrounded it.

Such, then, is our conception of the passage. Mr. Dyer, on the contrary, admits the attack to have been made on the southern hill, but uses this as an argument for placing upon it the primitive or proper Arx, which he maintains to be the Capitoline fortress of Tacitus. The temple, or Capitol, however, which caught fire in the attack, he supposes to be an entirely different building, and to have stood on the other summit; that is to say, about two hundred yards distant, beyond the Intermontium and many intervening edifices. This is highly improbable in itself, but we repeat that it is impossible that the gates' of Tacitus thrice repeated can, in the connexion in which they stand, be applied by him to two distinct and distant edifices.*

We forbear from further discussion of the authorities, which it is difficult to render interesting or even generally intelligible; but Mr. Dyer may be assured that we have not overlooked his appeals to them. It will be sufficient to add that the theory which we have sought to confirm is after all agreeable to what we might expect à priori to find. The old tradition affirmed that the Sabines occupied the northern, while the Romans held the southern eminence; but the palace of King Tatius, according to the legend, was situated in the Arx. The primitive Arx therefore was on the north. Again, when the two nations coalesced, the Arx, we are told, became the fortress of their common city: where should we expect this to be, but on the highest point, the xpa, as the Greeks called it, of the whole hill? Indeed in the Greek writers, who opposed the term axpa to Karov, the superior height of the former is clearly indi

*It may be worth while to show in a few words how groundless is another of Mr. Dyer's subsidiary arguments. Ovid has the line

'Qua fert sublimes alta Moneta gradus.'

Now the temple of Juno Moneta, says Mr. Dyer, is known to have been in the Arx; and he conceives this passage, which he fancies is obscure, to mean that this temple stood at the head of the well-known Centum Gradus, or Hundred Steps, and therefore on the southern summit. There is, however, no obscurity about the words, nor, if there were, would Mr. Dyer's interpretation, which is grammatically inadmissible, avail to clear it up. The use of fero' in the sense of 'effero,' to raise, if uncommon, is sufficiently established. Thus Virgil

Ovid means to say,

Sublimemque feres ad sidera cœli
Magnanimum Ænean.'

Where high Moneta rears her stair aloft.'

Probably the shrine of Juno was raised on a lofty basement, so as to be visible above the walls of the Arx. A prose writer would have said that the temple was raised aloft on steps, but the inversion may be pardoned in a poet.

cated,

cated, a distinction which is lost to us, but not perhaps to the Romans themselves, in the use of the Latin Arx.

On matters of this kind, uncertain as our conclusions must be at best, it is peculiarly desirable to speak with moderation, and we must not omit to express our disappointment at the bitterness with which Mr. Dyer almost throughout pursues his predecessor William Becker. There is nothing indeed to be said in defence of Becker's own tone in discussing these matters with his compeers, but with such a painful example before us there is the more reason for guarding ourselves against the same fault. With all his defects of temper, and with many slips in argument, Becker's manual of Roman topography is far the clearest, and on the whole the most satisfactory, of any, and Mr. Dyer himself acknowledges that without its help and guidance he could not have executed his own work. Mr. Dyer may be assured that he has placed the mere English scholar under similar obligations to himself, and though his conclusions on various points may not be always admissible, he has secured himself a reputation in this peculiar department of literature which can only be marred by indications of jealousy or ill-temper towards his rivals.

We might be tempted by our own personal interest in such questions, and with the advantage of so able and instructive a cicerone, to examine still further the details of Roman topography; to trace, as closely as we could, the limits of the ascertained, the probable, and the possible, fighting our way inch by inch among the ruins of the past, and doing battle with rival topographers to the right and to the left over the unburied bodies of palaces and temples. But we abstain from discussions unfitted for these pages, and turn to another branch of our author's subject, which may be more generally attractive-the history of the city itself,-not its civil and political, but its physical or material history, which Mr. Dyer has treated, after Bunsen and Niebuhr, with great clearness and precision. A poem of no great power made, as we remember, a sensation some thirty years ago, from its striking and original conception. The Pelican Island' of James Montgomery recorded the vision of a spirit who brooded over the waters of the Southern Pacific, and watched from age to age the growth of a coral island in the expanse of ocean, from the birth of the first madrepore which built its house at the bottom of the waves, to the production of a rock, a reef, an island, and a continent, the parent of cities and the abode of human souls. The charm of this fanciful poem lay in the desolateness of this long protracted vigil, gradually ripening under the eye of Providence to a moral and human interest, and closing in the sublimest aspirations, in devotional impulses and hopes of immortality.