really marking the line of the ancient walls, the ridge in question would decide between the course assigned them by Niebuhr and that adopted by Bunsen. Another argument against the views of Niebuhr and Bunsen is justly derived, by Becker, from the passage of Ovid in which he speaks of the Forum Boarium as closely connected with the Circus on the one hand, and with the bridges on the other :—

Pontibus et magno juncta est celeberrima Circo

Area, quæ posito de bove nomen habet.-Fast. vi. 477. Without incurring the reproach above hinted at, of construing too strictly the terms used by a poet, it is difficult to believe that Ovid would have thus defined the position of the Forum in question, had it been separated from the bridges not only by a considerable suburb, but by the intervening walls of the city.

Immediately connected with the question just examined is that of the position of the Sublician bridge. Almost all topographers from the time of Flavio Biondo downwards have received without question the common and traditional opinion that the remains of piles still visible in the Tiber at low water, between the Marmorata and the Ripa Grande are the ruins of this celebrated bridge; not indeed of the original structure, as the piles are composed of large masses of travertine, and can certainly not be older than the Imperial period, but of a stone bridge which had at some time or other replaced the more ancient one of wood. From a passage quoted by Nibby 52, it appears that the tradition (if such it may be termed) is as old as the year 1484, when the bridge, which had been broken as much as 500 years before, was reduced to its present state, all the blocks of travertine which were readily available being converted by Pope Sixtus IV. into cannon balls. Before this time, as early as the beginning of the eleventh century, it is frequently mentioned as "pons fractus," but like the modern Ponte Rotto, without any addition indicating its more ancient

52 Roma Antica, tom. 1. p. 204. The passage taken from the contemporary diary of Stefano Infessura (ap. Muratori, Script. Rer. Ital. 1. p. 1178) is as follows:-"Insuper ai 23 di luglio furono mandati in campo per Papa Sisto venti carra di palle da bombarde di travertino attondate, le quali furono quat

trocento in numero.... e le dette palle furono fabbricate a Marmorata, dove che fu finito di distruggere un ponte di travertino rotto, il quale si chiamava il ponte di Orazio Cocles." See also the passages there cited from the Papal bulls of the eleventh century.

name.

Hence it may well be doubted whether the popular notion, that in the fifteenth century associated the broken bridge with the name of Horatius Cocles, had any other foundation than one of those vulgar misconceptions of an ancient story, of which so many instances are familiar to the Roman antiquarian. Marliano, though he accedes to the common opinion, does so with hesitation; and mainly in consequence of the statement of Appian that C. Gracchus, flying from the Aventine, crossed the Tiber by the Sublician bridge, a passage which certainly proves nothing. Later writers have for the most part adopted the same view without question; and M. Bunsen on this point agrees with the followers of Nardini. If indeed it be admitted that the Sublician bridge was without the city, the main objection to the position assigned to it at once falls to the ground; but it certainly seems difficult to conceive why the first bridge should be constructed at a point so inconvenient for all purposes of communication. Nardini, Nibby, and others, very reasonably assuming that the bridge must have been within the walls, were led to extend the latter beyond their true line, on purpose to include the spot where they placed the bridge; and thus to fix the site of the Porta Trigemina between the south-western angle of the Aventine, and the Tiber. But the position of this gate is so clearly defined by the passages of ancient authors, that no question can arise as to its being situated close to the foot of the Clivus Publicius (the salita which now goes up to Santa Sabina) and to the Salinæ, at the north-western angle of the Aventine 53, thus excluding the whole line of quay now called the Marmorata, and with it the supposed remains of the Sublician bridge. It was apparently this circumstance that led M. Becker to inquire into the real foundation for the received notion, which he very justly discarded on examination as altogether insufficient.

To determine where the Sublician bridge was really situated is a very difficult question, and one which in the absence of more satisfactory proofs we must be content to leave undetermined. If however we are justified in assuming that it was within the walls, the space is not very wide within which alone we can place it; and M. Becker can hardly be wrong in assigning its place between the modern Ponte Rotto, and the Porta Tri

53 See Bunsen, Beschreibung, 1. p. 634; Becker, Handbuch, p. 157.

gemina. There seems indeed little doubt that it was one of the bridges to which Ovid alludes in the passage above cited, as connected with the Forum Boarium. M. Preller, understanding M. Becker to place it exactly on the site of the Ponte Rotto, objects not without reason that the great strength of the stream at that precise point, which caused the repeated destruction of the modern bridge, renders it improbable that one should have been erected there in very early times. This argument is however much less cogent in regard to a wooden bridge than a stone one; and it may be added that the strength of the current at particular points must have been considerably modified by the changes effected on its banks higher up, especially by the formation of the island immediately above the point in question, which had certainly not assumed its present configuration at the time that the Sublician bridge was built. M. Becker has also pointed out that it was in fact repeatedly carried away; though on account of its sacred character, as well as of the great traffic across it, it was always restored. Whether in some of these restorations, the last-mentioned of which took place under Antoninus Pius, it entirely lost its original character, and was converted into a stone bridge, as has been generally supposed, is at least very doubtful; if it were not, we can hardly wonder that no vestiges of it should be still remaining 54.

To return from this digression. The position of the Porta -Flumentana is necessarily dependent entirely upon the question already discussed of the course of the walls from the Porta Carmentalis. Niebuhr, followed by Bunsen and Urlichs, places it somewhere in the middle of his supposed line between the Capitol and Aventine, so that the suburb "extra portam Flumentanam," which is repeatedly mentioned, and appears to

54 M. Becker considers the remains of piles below the Aventine to be those of the Emilian bridge, which had been erroneously identified with the Sublician by the earlier topographers, including the pseudo-Victor. It would rather appear to me to result from the passages which he has collected, that the Æmilian bridge stood near to the Sublician, in which case it may have been one of those indicated by Ovid. It may be as well here

to mention that the name of the Pons Palatinus, frequently given as the ancient appellation of the Ponte Rotto, is in fact a mere invention of the middle ages, which does not occur in any ancient author, nor even in the Notitia. It is wholly without authority that M. Platner (Beschreibung, 111. p. 346) has referred to this bridge the statement of Livy (XL. 51), which M. Becker considers as relating to the Pons Aemilius.

have been one of the first that arose outside the walls, lay between it and the Tiber. All other topographers concur in placing it in the cross line from the Carmentalis to the river, and close to the bank of the latter, as its name would seem to imply. That a suburb should have early formed outside this part of the walls, extending towards the Campus Martius and the Flaminian Circus, would appear very natural.

We have thus already two gates in the short strip of wall extending from the Capitol to the Tiber; but besides these, all the later Italian writers-Nibby, Canina, and Piale—concur in placing within the same narrow limits a third, the Porta Triumphalis: a gate, however, which appears to have been of a peculiar character, and is never mentioned except as connected with certain solemn occasions. The first and most important passage concerning it is in Cicero's oration against Piso (c. 23). "Cum ego Cælimontana porta introisse dixissem, sponsione me, ni Esquilina introisset, homo promptissimus lacessivit; quasi vero id aut ego scire debuerim, ut vestrum quispiam audierit, aut ad rem pertineat, qua tu porta introieris; modo ne triumphali, quæ porta Macedonicis semper proconsulibus ante te patuit." Again, it is mentioned both by Tacitus and Suetonius, that among the honours lavished on Augustus after his death, it was suggested that his funeral procession should pass through the Porta Triumphalis. Both these passages certainly point to the gate in question as one that was not an ordinary thoroughfare, but was reserved for particular occasions, especially those triumphal processions from which it derived its At the same time the term porta, as well as the general drift of the passage in Cicero, would seem to imply that it was really a gate, and not a mere triumphal arch, such as became so common in later times. No clue whatever to its situation is, however, given us by either of the above passages. On the other hand, M. Becker has inferred, from the description given by Josephus of the triumphal procession of Vespasian and Titus, that the Porta Triumphalis was near the entrance of the Flaminian Circus, through which the triumphal procession first moved before it entered the city itself, and was, therefore, not a real gate, but a mere archway. It seems, indeed, difficult to come to any other conclusion concerning the gate there mentioned; but, on the other hand, it is hard to believe that this can be the same as the Porta Triumphalis of Cicero. M.

name.

Urlichs is of opinion that Josephus, as a foreigner, had mistaken a triumphal arch through which the procession actually passed in the first instance, for the real Porta Triumphalis which must have stood at the entrance of the pomarium. This is not altogether improbable, but it seems on the whole more likely that the change of the name had actually taken place in common usage, and that Josephus only repeated what he had heard. For although it be certain that it was Trajan who first extended the pomoerium so as to include the Flaminian Circus, and that there could be no true porta, in the strict acceptation of the term, which did not give entrance within the pomoerium, yet if a gateway or arch had been erected at any point without the city, where the triumphal procession actually began, it would be a very natural change to transfer to this the name originally applied to the real entrance of the city.

But where then was the Porta Triumphalis of earlier times, alluded to by Cicero? On this point M. Bunsen has put forth a suggestion totally new, but which will hardly meet with general assent. Assuming, as we have already seen, that the walls of the city ran from the Capitol to the Aventine, across the low grounds between the two hills, he has not allowed them to take the direct line from the one to the other, but has drawn them from the foot of the Capitol to the angle of the Circus Maximus, and from thence across to the Aventine. By this means he makes the west end of the Circus itself, adjoining the Carceres, coincide with the wall of the city, and affirms that the Porta Triumphalis was no other than the principal entrance into the Circus, through which, undoubtedly, the triumphal procession did pass. It is evident that the line of wall thus conceived is open to all the objections which have already been urged against that suggested by Niebuhr; it narrows still more than the latter the space allotted to the Velabrum and Forum Boarium, but it also involves us in another and a much graver difficulty; namely, that the Circus Maximus, which could hardly have served as an ordinary thoroughfare, is thus interposed as an absolute barrier between the Forum Boarium and the Aventine, and it becomes impossible to reach the Clivus Publicius, which was the principal approach to the latter hill— crowded and populous as we know it to have been-except by going out of the city into the suburb, and re-entering it by the Porta Trigemina. Such a state of things would appear incre