... that grey crag where, girt with towers,
The fortress of Nequinum lowers
O'er the pale waves of Nar.
Marry, Narni is somewhat; but Rome is more. Rome, too, at each visit, presents fresh objects, old and new. The oldest and the newest seem to have come together, when one set of placards on the wall invites the Roman people to meet on the Capitol, and when the Quæstor Bacchus—it is taking a liberty with a living man and magistrate, but we cannot help Latinizing the Questore Bacco—puts out another set of placards to forbid the meeting. We are inclined to turn to others among our memories, to others among our lays. We might almost look for a secession; we might almost expect to see once more
... the tents which in old time whitened the Sacred Hill.
But those who were forbidden to meet on the Capitol did not secede even to the Aventine; the secession was done within doors, in the Sala Dante.
Veii.
The student of what M. Ampère calls "L'Histoire Romaine à Rome" must take care not to confine his studies to Rome only. The local history of Rome—and the local history of Rome is no small part of the œcumenical history—is not fully understood unless we fully take in the history and position of the elder sites among which Rome arose. With Rome we must compare and contrast the cities of her enemies and her allies, the cities which she swept away, the cities which she made part of herself, the cities which simply withered away before her. And first on the list may well come the city which was before all others the rival of Rome, and where she did indeed sweep with the besom of destruction. A short journey from the Flaminian Gate, a journey through a country which might almost pass for a border shire of England, with the heights of Wales in the distance, brings us to a city which has utterly perished, where no permanent human dwelling-place is left within the ancient circuit. In a basin, as it were, unseen until we are close beneath or above it, hedged in by surrounding hills as by a rampart, stands all that is left of the first great rival of Rome, an inland Carthage on the soil of Etruria. There once was Veii, the first great conquest of Rome, the Italian Troy, round whose ten years' siege wonders have gathered almost as round the Achaian warfare by the Hellespont. There are no monuments of the departed life of Veii such as are left of not a few cities which have passed out of the list of living things no less utterly. Of the greatest city of southern Etruria nothing remains beyond a site which can never be wiped out but by some convulsion of nature, a few scraps to show that man once dwelled there, and tombs not a few to show that those who dwelled there belonged to a race with whom death counted for more than life.