How strange it seemed to awake in the morning and feel that we were really in the city that once ruled the world! Yes, we are on the very spot. Around us are the Seven Hills. We go to the top of the Capitol and count them all. We look down to the river bank where Romulus and Remus were cast ashore, like Moses in the bulrushes, left to die, and where, according to the old legend, they were suckled by a wolf; and where Romulus, when grown to man's estate, began to build a city. Antiquarians still trace the line of his ancient wall. On the Capitol Hill is the Tarpeian Rock, from which traitors were hurled. And under the hill, buried in the earth, one still sees the massive arch of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer, built by the Tarquins, through which all the waste of Rome has flowed into the Tiber for twenty-five hundred years; and there are the pillars of the ancient bridge—so they tell us—held by a hero who must have been a Hercules, of whom and his deed Macaulay writes in his "Lays of Ancient Rome" how, long after, in the traditions of the people,
"Still was the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge,
In the brave days of old."
Looking around the horizon every summit recalls historical memories. There are the Sabine Hills, where lived the tribe from which the early Romans (who were at first, like some of our border settlements, wholly a community of men,) helped themselves to wives. Yonder, to the south, are the Alban Hills; and there, in what seems the hollow of a mountain, Hannibal encamped with his army, looking down upon Rome. In the same direction lies the Appian Way, lined for miles with tombs of the illustrious dead. Along that way often came the legions returning from distant conquests, "bringing many captives home to Rome," with camels and elephants bearing the spoils of Africa and the East.
These recollections increase in interest as we come down to the time of the Cæsars. This is the culminating point of Roman history, as then the empire reached its highest point of power and glory. Julius Cæsar is the greatest character of ancient Rome, as soldier and ruler, the leader of armies, and the man whose very presence awed the Roman Senate. Such was the magic of his name that it was said peculiar omens and portents accompanied his death. As Shakespeare has it:
"In the most high and palmy state of Rome,
A little ere the mighty Julius fell,
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets."