lost work on the antiquities of his country. Many ages, he said, before his time, there were ballads in praise of illustrious men; and these ballads it was the fashion for the guests at banquets to sing in turn while the piper played. 'Would,' exclaims Cicero, 'that we still had the old ballads of which Cato speaks.' The testimony of Horace, though given incidentally, confirms the statements of Cato. The poet predicts that, under the peaceful administration of Augustus, the Romans will, over their full goblets, sing to the pipe, after the fashion of their fathers, the deeds of brave captains, and the ancient legends touching the origin of the city. He then comes to similar conclusions as those of Niebuhr. 'It is not difficult,' he writes, 'to trace the process by which the old songs were transmitted into the form which they now wear. Funeral panegyric and chronicle appear to have been the intermediate links which connected the lost ballads with the histories now extant. From a very early period it was the usage that an oration should be pronounced over the remains of a noble Roman. The orator, as we learn from Polybius, was expected, on such an occasion, to recapitulate all the services which the ancestors of the deceased had, from the earliest time, rendered to the commonwealth. There can be little doubt that the speaker on whom this duty was imposed would make use of all the stories suited to his purpose which were to be found in the popular lays. There can be as little doubt that the family of an eminent man would preserve a copy of the speech which had been pronounced over his corpse. The compilers of the early chronicles would have recourse to these speeches, and the great historians of a later period would have recourse to the chronicles. Such, or nearly such, he concludes, appears to have been the process by which the lost balladpoetry of Rome was transformed into history. To reverse that process, to transform some portions of early Roman history back into the poetry out of which they were made, is the object of his 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' He then gives as illustrations of these early ballads the well-known lays of Horatius and of the battle of Lake Regillus. In the first is the story told How well Horatius kept the bridge We may add another important authority, that of Dr. Arnold, which tends to confirm the early mythical history of early Roman times. In a striking passage of his 'History of Rome,' he compares Livy's legendary kings of Rome to those ' phantom kings' whose portraits adorn the walls of Holyrood. There they stand,' he writes, 'an unbroken line of monarchs ranging from Fergus, the first King of Scotland, contemporary of Alexander the Great, down to the last representative of the Stuart dynasty.' In Livy's legends and in the Holyrood portraits alike, Arnold sees an illustration of the instinctive desire of a nation to people with forms of imagination the void of the pre-historic past. We now turn to the traditional memorials on the Palatine of those early mythic times. The first we shall notice is one which is near this same spot, the Lupercal, or wolf cave, where the wolf, as the myth tells us, suckled the twins whose cradle had been left stranded amidst the willows and osiers, when the Tiber had retreated after an inundation. Virgil calls this cave 'Mavortis antrum,' the cave of Mars, doubtless because near this cave the god Mars first saw the Vestal virgin, Rhea Silvia. The Lupercal is described by Dionysius as having once been a large grotto, shaded with thick bushes and large trees, and containing a copious spring of water. This grotto was dedicated to Lupercus, an ancient Latin pastoral divinity, who was worshipped by shepherds as the protector of their flocks against wolves. A festival was held every year, on the 15th of February, in the Lupercal, in honour of Lupercus; the place contained an altar and a grove sacred to the god. The grotto was not easily identified in the time of Dionysius, who speaks of it as hidden by the numerous buildings erected on or near this spot,* but the festival was still continued in the time of Augustus, for it is mentioned in the inscription of Ancyra as having been restored by that Emperor. Gibbon tells us the festival of the Luper * Aldovrandi, who lived in the middle of the sixteenth century, tells us that a nymphæum, ornamented with marine shells, was discovered at the foot of that part of the Palatine near the church of S. Anastasia in his day. This was probably the Lupercal. It was afterwards destroyed. The site identified by Mr. Parker with the Lupercal was doubtless the reservoir of an aqueduct. calia, whose origin had preceded the foundation of Rome, was still celebrated in the reign of Anthemus, 472 A.D. This cave, it would appear, was connected with pre-Roman times, as it was associated with the early worship of the primitive pastoral inhabitants of the Palatine. The Lupercalia (or wolf festival), which was celebrated on the Palatine Hill, was probably a tradition from those primitive ages-a festival of countrymen and shepherds, which preserved the homely features of patriarchal simplicity. Near this cave, but somewhat lower, was the Ruminal fig-tree, which overshadowed the cradle of the twins when cast on shore, and which was preserved and held sacred for many years after. As a commemoration of this mythical history, the Ædiles Cnæus and Quintus Ogulnius erected in the year 296 B.C., according to Livy, a bronze statue of the she-wolf giving suck to Romulus and Remus near the Ruminal fig-tree, and it is not improbable that this bronze figure is actually the same with that now preserved in the Capitol. We have evidence that the bronze wolf remained near this spot for many years, as Venuti asserts that it was preserved in the church of San Teodoro till the sixteenth century; and Pancirolli, who wrote in 1615, says the wolf had been removed from that church to the Capitol not many years before his time. This myth of the wolf nature of the founder of the Roman race may in some way typify the hard and harsh features of the Roman people. 'The native ferocity,' writes Mr. Merivale, 'of the people is stamped upon its earliest traditions. The author of the race, it was said, was rejected and exposed by his natural guardians. The sustenance denied him by man was afforded him by the most savage beast of the desert. He grew up to slay his oppressor, to summon the injured and the outlawed to his standard, and wreak with them a wild vengeance upon mankind around him. In the same manner, the morose pride of the Roman people, and their antipathy to foreign habits, are strongly marked on every page of their history. They scorned the humanizing pursuits of commerce and the genial tendencies of social refinement. They were inflamed by a passion for destroying the monuments of their conquered enemies, their arts and their literature. They established the most odious distinctions between themselves and their subjects, insulted them by their legislation, and defamed them in their histories.' In this same corner was the sacred cornel tree supposed to have grown out of the lance of Romulus, which he threw across the valley of the Circus from the Aventine to the Palatine; the tree is said to have withered and died from the roots having been injured when Caligula caused steps to be made here. In this neighbourhood were steps which led down from the Palatine, and which were called 'scala Caci They were repaired in the reign of Caligula, when injury was done to the roots of the cornel tree. Somewhere on this spot where we are now standing was the hut of Romulus, which was made of wood, and thatched with reeds. Dionysius tells us that in his day the cottage of Romulus was in the corner |