PREFACE.

THE Lectures on the Archæology of Rome which I now publish were given to the members of the British and American Archæological Society at Rome. The Society was gradually declining, and at Mr. Parker's suggestion I undertook to give a course of lectures in the winter of 1882, when Mr. Gladstone granted a sum of £100 to the Society.

To these lectures I have added accounts of the latest excavations and discoveries of the present year -1883-from the correspondence of the Times and the Athenæum.

H. M. W.

EARLY AND IMPERIAL ROME.

THE BEGINNINGS OF ROME.

IT is now a generally accepted view that all nations in their early development passed through an invariable sequence of phases: of these the most prominent were the hunting, the pastoral, and agricultural. In the hunting phase, man was unacquainted with every art but the imperfect one of fabricating, in a rude manner, arms and implements for the chase, dependent on chance alone, and the seasons, for the means of satisfying his wants. Living in a wild and uncultivated state, when his means of sustenance were few and precarious, man became a hunter from necessity, and nomadic in his habits. The man of the pastoral phase lived by the sustenance afforded by the animals, which he learned to preserve, domesticate, and multiply; he was a shepherd, a herdsman. In the further progress of his development, when no longer content