If Calvo had been like some men of his day, he would have thought, when his bridges were burned, that the gods were angry with him for omitting some ceremony. But he was a man who noticed all that he saw and put two and two together; and he noticed in the course of time that lightning was much more likely to strike where iron was. He observed the path of it once when it did strike, and saw that it ripped the wood all to splinters and set it on fire trying to get at the iron, which it melted.
It is of course true that iron expands and shrinks with heat and cold, and when iron bolts are used in wood, the iron and the wood do not fit as well together after a few seasons, on this account. So Calvo planned his bridges without iron, and they were all made of dovetailed wooden timbers, as many old wooden bridges were which remain to this day. Calvo’s observa[pg 232]tions about his bridges tended to make others think as he did. No iron was ever used in any of the temples or sacred buildings of Rome, even long after it was in common use for weapons, tools and other things.
The way in which the bridge over the Tiber was built was much like the way in which Cæsar built bridges, hundreds of years later. It was so constructed that if necessary it could be removed at short notice. It was never struck by lightning or burned, and it remained until—long after Calvo was dead—another pontiff built a new and greater bridge, using all his knowledge and all else that had been learned in five generations.
XX
THE THREE TRIBES
The hill on which the Sabines settled took its name from their word for themselves, Quirites, the People with the Spears. It came to be known as the Quirinal. The level place between this hill and the Palatine, where the treaty was made, was called the Comitium,—the place where they came together. Here in after years was the Forum, the place for public debate on all questions concerning the government of Rome. Any open place for public discussion was called a forum—there were nineteen in different parts of Rome at one time—but this one was the great Forum Romanum, where the finest temples and the most famous statues were. Assemblies of the people, or of the fraternities, to vote on public questions were also called by the name of Comitium.
Between these two great hills and a big bend in the river was a great level space that was used [pg 234]for a sort of parade ground, and this was called the Campus Martius, the field of Mars.
Romulus himself lived with his wife Emilia in a house which he built on the slope of the Palatine near the river and not far from the bridge, at a point sometimes called the Fair Shore. Here he had a garden, fig trees and vines, and beehives; and here he used to sit at evening and watch the flight of the birds across the river. His little son, whom he called Aquila as a pet name, because an eagle perched upon the house on the night the boy was born, used to watch with wondering eyes his father’s ways with live creatures of all kinds. A countryman who tended the garden, who had been a boy on the Square Hill when Romulus was a tall young man, said that they used to get Romulus to find honeycombs and take them out, because bees never stung him.