[274] The Via Moneta led from the Flavian amphitheatre to the Porta Querquetulana.
[275] The way of Stephanus. See (Suet Dom. 17,) where it is related of Stephanus, that he was accused of embezzling money. That such incredible forgeries of wills really occurred, is frequently explicitly stated by the ancient authors. Pliny (Ep. II, 11,) gives an amazing example of the insolence with which influential persons conducted their bribery.
[276] The Vestal Virgins. It was believed, that the vestal virgins possessed the power of detaining runaway slaves, by certain spells, within the city limits.
[277] Factories and prisons. Ergastulum was the name given to a kind of prison where slaves, who had been guilty of any fault were kept at specially hard labor. The arrangement, of these ergastula in many respects resembled our modern prisons.
[278] Thousands and thousands answer to it. See the passages in the letter of Pliny, who as the Christians’ foe, reports to the emperor: “This superstition has not only spread over the city, but through the villages and surrounding country.” (Pliny, Ep. X, 98.)
[279] Nazarene Gracchus. Quintus here perceives, like Thrax Barbatus, in the carpenter’s son of Nazareth a real representative of the people’s rights, and therefore a companion of Tiberius and Caius Sempronius Gracchus, the two tribunes of the people (about the middle of the second century B.C.)
[280] Mons Janiculus. Now Monte Gianicolo, on the right bank of the Tiber.
[281] Statue of Venus. A statue of the Venus Genitrix (Generator, mother, so called as the ancestress of the race of Julius Caesar, who erected a temple to her under this name) has been found among the ruins of the imperial palace on the Palatine, also an Eros, swinging a jar.
[282] Mediolanum, now Milan.
[283] The woes of Queen Dido, even at that time a famous episode in Virgil’s Aeneid. That the sorrows of Dido were specially popular is shown in Juv. Sat. VI, 434, which runs: