Cavaliere Rosa's arrangement of the basilica may be right as a representation of the ancient building. But the bases are not, what any one who is not specially informed would take them to be, the bases of the ancient building itself.

But the interest of the remains which have been brought to light by the diggings made under the official care of Cavaliere Rosa is quite rivalled by the interest of the results of the diggings which had been carried on by the private enterprise of our countryman, Mr. Parker. Let me here do justice to all sides. I have spoken my mind as to Mr. Parker's book on the Archæology of Rome, so far as the primitive antiquities are concerned, in an article in the British Quarterly Review which, as it bears my initials, it cannot be any breach of literary etiquette to speak of as my

own.

Before that article was written, I had seen some of Mr. Parker's diggings in his company; since then I have seen more; and I am bound to say that Mr. Parker has done himself great injustice. His discoveries are far more valuable than any one would think from Mr. Parker's own way of speaking of them. No one has ever taken more pains to hide his own light under a bushel. No one has so truly built a foundation of gold, silver, and precious stones, and then so carefully covered it over with wood, hay, and stubble that no one can be expected to see the precious foundation itself. As long as Mr. Parker attaches the names of mythical kings to the remains which he brings to lightas long as he numbers his pieces of wall with the dates of exact years, ages before there was any trustworthy Roman chronology-as long as he tells us stories about wolves and apples, and about the founder

of Rome being "the natural son of a princess of Alba by a soldier who was complimented with the name of Mars," above all, as long as he goes on sneering at the German school," and disputing against some imaginary sect which denies that kings ever reigned at Rome-so long as he does all this, Mr. Parker's discoveries will never win the attention from scholars which they really deserve.

The

the most eminent of German scholars refused to come with him to look at his diggings. Now, if Mr. Parker asked the German scholar to come and see the place where real twins were suckled by a real wolf, if he asked him to come and see a building of A. U. C. 1, and another building of A. U. C. 4, I do not wonder at the German scholar not caring to go. But if, without attempting to fix names and dates where names and dates are not to be had, he had said, "Come and see the wall of a primitive hill-fort on the Palatine, and another wall, later but still very early, which seems as if it had taken in both the Palatine and the Capitoline," then I conceive that the German scholar would have been delighted to go to look at Mr. Parker's facts, and to see how far they bore out Mr. Parker's theories. Let me add my own experience with regard to one of Mr. Parker's discoveries. In the preface to his book Mr. Parker said that the site of the Porta Capena was unknown till he found it out. statement puzzled me, because the site of the Porta Capena was one of the few things about which all inquirers seemed agreed. Every body put it in the same place, in the valley between the Colian and the Aventine. There was not a word in the body of Mr. Parker's book which described the exact nature of his discovery, or which pointed to any other place than that in which every body had put the gate before him. And in the small ground-plan in his book the gate seemed to be marked in the same place in which it was marked in all earlier ground-plans. Mr. Parker's claims to discovery in this case seemed to me wholly unintelligible, until I went to the place with Mr. Parker himself. I then found that those claims were perfectly justified. I found, what I should never have found from his book, that he really had found a new site, and that beyond all doubt the real site, of the Porta Capena. There it was, as plain as could be, dug out by the zeal of Mr. Parker at his own cost. The explanation of the difficulty was that, though he had been the first to find the real site, yet the site that he had found

that the very small scale of his groundplan did not show the difference,1 while there was not a word in his text to tell us what he had found or where he had found it. Had I not had the advantage of going over the ground with Mr. Parker himself, I should have gone on believing that Mr. Parker had fancied himself to have made a discovery when he had made none. As it was, he had made a very real discovery; but he must not be angry with me if I say that he had taken every means to keep people from knowing about it. Mr. Parker had, I believe, announced the discovery in some lecture which I had not heard or in some article which I had not read. But there was nothing about it in his book, save the dark allusion in the preface. As one who have myself given a good many lectures and written a good many articles, I may be allowed to say that no man has a right to expect any other man to know all about all his lectures and articles. When a man writes a book on a subject, he should put into his book all that he has to say on that subject. All Mr. Parker's readers cannot hope for the privilege, for which I am sincerely thankful, of going over the ground with Mr. Parker himself.

I think it right to put all this upon record, because, on the one hand, it is only fair that the real importance of Mr. Parker's discoveries should be clearly understood, and on the other hand, it should be no less clearly understood, that, while they throw a great light on the præ-historic times of Rome, they are of no value whatever for the futile task of calling up again the old legends with which Mr. Parker has so unluckily mixed them up. We see the defences of the earliest Latin settlement on the Palatine; but that does not bring us any the nearer to believing that the founder of that settlement was suckled by a wolf, or that he bore the impossible name of Romulus. I will not insult scholars by going about to disprove the

1 Since Mr. Parker's book appeared, a new and large plan of Rome has been published, in which the distance-not a very great one

legend; but I do wish scholars fully to understand that Mr. Parker's researches among the walls have absolutely nothing to do with the legend, that they have a real importance of their own, and that, instead of contradicting, they thoroughly confirm the latest conclusions of modern scholarship. The Palatine Hill is just like the hill of Orange and the other hills with which I in a late article compared the hill of Orange; it is a hill one end of which was cut off and fortified to form the dwelling-place of a village community. Tradition and probability unite in telling us that the other hills were also the dwelling-places of like communities, and Mr. Parker has done good service in bringing to light several pieces of their primitive fortifications. The grandest fragment of all is that most striking piece of wall on the Aventine, dug out at Mr. Parker's own cost. The prodigious depth to which he had to dig to reach the foundations, the size of the stones, the general grandeur of the whole piece of defence, is quite as impressive in its own way as any of the later monuments of Rome. And, without attempting to give names or dates, there can be no doubt that it is really a primitive piece of fortification; it has been covered up and built up against by various buildings of the Imperial period in a way which showed it was then no longer cared for, or indeed known. Those buildings it has happily survived, and it still stands in all its grandeur, the noblest relic of præ-historic times that Rome itself can show.

Another relic which has been brought to light by the personal zeal and liberality of Mr. Parker is that curious series of passages attached to the ancient prison, the prison which, without any ancient authority, has been for some centuries known as Mamertine. I must confess that I had much rather not commit myself to any interpretation of them. It is certain that the prison was a prison in the later days of the republic, and that it was farther adapted to the purposes of a prison in the time of Tiberius. But, though it became a prison, it seems to have begun as a well-house, and this last

name Tullianum. When the old meaning of the word tullius ceased to be understood, the name would be sure to get mixed up with the name of the legendary king Servius. I do not know enough of the arrangements either of primæval prisons or of primæval well-houses to decide for myself as to the purposes of these passages, and I have not heard the views of any one about them except Mr. Parker's own. But, whatever the passages were made for, there they are, and they are beyond all doubt the remains of very early times. They belong to the same. series as the Cloaca Maxima and the Tullianum itself, the series which teaches us the stages by which the great inIvention of the arch was felt after and found in Latium, as it was independently felt after and found in several other parts of the world. We may be equally thankful to Mr. Parker for this discovery, whether we accept his interpretation of it or not. And it would be a sad loss if any of the endless changes which are going on in the streets of Rome should cause his discovery to be swept away.

These three important remains then, the Porta Capena, the wall on the Aventine, and the passages joining on to the Tullianum, are all, I believe I am right in saying, in the strictest sense discoveries of Mr. Parker's, things which he has dug out at his own cost. There are other things about which I know not whether they are, in the same strict sense, discoveries of Mr. Parker's, but which are certainly things which he has brought to light in the sense of calling special attention to them. Here again we need not always accept the discoveries as proving what Mr. Parker wishes to make them prove; still there they are real discoveries, real relics of the earliest times, which at any rate stand ready to prove something. He has pointed out some undoubtedly early pieces of wall under the church of Saint Anastasia and behind the church of Saint Mary in Cosmedin, in the Colonna garden, and in the garden of Mr. Spithöver near the site of the Colline gate. Mr. Parker's theory of a wall which took in the Palatine and the Capitoline is quite worth weighing,

startling. It almost takes one's breath away to be told that the wall of the Forum of Nerva against which the colonnacce are built, and the wall of the Forum of Augustus close by the temple of Mars Ultor, are works of the time represented by the legendary Titus Tatius. The temple of Mars is a puzzle anyhow. The wall comes so near to the temple as greatly to mar its effect. If Augustus found the wall there, why did he build his temple so close up against it? If he built the wall himself, why did he build it so close up against the temple? We may perhaps be helped a little by the statement of Suetonius that he somewhat spoiled the proportions of his forum in order not to interfere with private property. Still, in any case, it is strange that this huge wall should even have been left, still more that it should have been built new in Augustus' time, right in the middle of, the city. To me it is an objection to Mr. Parker's theory that he carries his second wall round the Palatine and Capitoline only. Surely a wall which meant to take in the first Latin and the Sabine settlement ought to take in at least part of the Quirinal. All genuine tradition-a most important source of præ-historic knowledge, and one quite distinct from mere legend-makes the Quirinal the main Sabine settlement. The Capitoline hill, which, before the changes of Trajan, was far more closely joined on to the Quirinal than it is now, was rather the citadel. To my mind the existence of a Vetus Capitolium on the Quirinal distinctly proves this, and I cannot believe that a wall meant to take in the settlements of the Ramnes and the Titienses should fail to take that Vetus Capitolium in.

The diggings in the Forum Romanum had been going on prosperously when I was at Rome; but to me at least their interest is much slighter than that of the walls. They bring to light, not the history of Rome itself, but only the history of some of its particular buildings. But there is one work of digging which does not touch the history of the 1 Suet. Aug. 56. "Forum angustius fecit, non ausus extorquere possessoribus proximas.

city itself, but only that of one of its buildings, which still is of such importance every way, that, though it does not come within my own special line of study, I cannot help saying a little about it. I mean the great underground works which have been brought to light in the Flavian Amphitheatre, and which have been the subject of many letters, and of some controversy, in the English papers. What I say about this matter I would ask to have taken simply as the observations of an outsider who keeps his eyes open. My main objects at Rome and elsewhere are primarily the cities themselves, their walls and whatever else sets forth their extent and history. In the second place, among particular buildings, I look mainly to the churches, above all to the churches of Roman and

Romanesque date. I look, as every intelligent man must necessarily look, at every amphitheatre and at every castle that I come to, and I try, as well as I can, to compare one amphitheatre and one castle with another. But there is a special learning about amphitheatres, just as there is about castles, of which I do not profess to be master. I should much like to see all that has lately been brought to light in the Colosseum thoroughly discussed by some one, if we can find such an one, who is engineer, antiquary, and scholar, all at once. Till then, it would be a help to me and to others who wish to know something about the matter, if those who write about it, and who profess to quote Greek and Latin authors, would give us intelligible and accurate references. It is hard to have to turn over page after page of some writer who is referred to in a vague way, and perhaps at the end not to find what one wants, when, if only chapter and verse had been given, one could find all about it at once. Mr. Parker, for instance, in one of his occasional papers, tells us, most truly as regards the caution in the first part of the sentence:

"Care must be taken not to fall into the ignorant, though common, blunder of confusing the area or soil of the Colosseum with the arena, which was removed when the naval

description by Dion Cassius, himself a Roman Senator, who describes what he saw in the time of Commodus."

Now Dion does give a most vivid account of what he himself saw in the Colosseum under Commodus in l. lxxii. c. 17-21. But I do not there find anything about a naval fight. He does describe naval fights, one of them in the Colosseum, in lxii. 15 and lxvi. 25, but these were long before his own time. So again an anonymous French writer tells us how "l'histoire conte qu'un jour, sous le règne de Carin, l'arène brûla tout un jour. Une arène brûler! la chose est impossible." I do not know why the burning of an arena should be said to be impossible, but, after much searching in Vopiscus' life of Carinus, the nearest thing I can find is in c. 19., where the words are "pegma praeterea, cujus flaminis scena conflagravit." So again Mr. S. Russell Forbes, who describes himself as "author of 'Rambles in Rome,'" and who writes to the Times, first vaguely but safely refers to the classics" in a lump, and then goes on to quote Herodian and Calpurnius, but again without any reference. Calpurnius I unluckily have not at hand; but, when Mr. Forbes quotes Herodian as saying that "the lions which Commodus killed sprang from the subterraneous parts of the arena," my difficulty in understanding what the subterraneous parts of an arena can be is not lessened when I turn to the nearest thing that I can find in Herodian. Where he certainly speaks of under-ground places, but does not call them "parts of the arena I may in all these cases have been so unlucky as to miss the particular passage to which the disputants wished to send me but, if they had given me clearer finger-posts, I should not have lost my way.

It is well known that diggings were made in the area of the Colosseum early in the present century, and a view of the building as it appeared at that time will be found in a book which I was very fond of as a boy, the volume on

1 Ι. 15, 7. λεόντων δὲ πότε ἐξ ὑπογαίων ἑκατὸν ἀναρριφθέντων ἰσαρίθμοις ἀκοντίοις πάντας

the elephant in the Library of Entertaining Knowledge (p. 309). But they had been so thoroughly covered up that in 1873 I fancy a good many people had no idea that there was anything beneath the ground. I had myself but a very vague remembrance of the woodcut which I had been used to look at years before. The first notice that I had that anything was going on in the way of a second excavation was in a letter which appeared in the Times last autumn, dated from Rome, September 13. From that I first learned that large substructures had been brought to light by Cavaliere Rosa, and that the diggings had been carried out far more thoroughly than those which had been made sixty or seventy years before. But the writer, who did not give his name, seems not to have understood what the arena was, and he does not seem to have thought of comparing the amphitheatre at Rome with any of the other amphitheatres where substructures are to be seen. He seems to have fancied

that the shows went on at the bottom of the underground works now brought to light. He seems not to have understood that the arena certainly was, as Mr. Parker has very truly pointed out, a boarded floor covered with sand. No one, I think, who has compared the Colosseum with the amphitheatres at Capua, Puteoli, Tusculum, Pompeii, Arles, and Nîmes,-I do not mention Verona, for I have not seen it since I was set thinking about the matter-will believe that the shows of gladiators and wild beasts went on, as they must have done according to this theory, at the bottom of a deep hole. In all the amphitheatres which I have mentioned, it is plain, for one reason or another, that the arena must have been placed on a level very much the same as the present level of the ground. This is clear at Arles above all others, because there there are no underground works at all, and there never could have been any, because the rock comes close to the surface. In all the others there are underground works of some kind or another. I leave it to those who make

out the exact object of every concentric wall and of every cross wall that cuts into them. But, when we find something of the kind in so many places, we cannot possibly doubt that these underground works were part of the general design of the amphitheatres, and that those in the Colosseum were not built by the Frangipani or anybody else when the amphitheatre was used as a fortress. This theory would suppose the existence of local Frangipani in all the other towns which I have spoken of. At Arles aud Nîmes indeed the amphitheatres were undoubtedly turned into fortresses, but we can there see something of the process, and it did not consist in making underground buildings, but in carrying up the outer walls into towers. It is quite possible that, as some antiquaries say, the brickwork in these underground buildings must be later than the original building of the Flavian æra; for there is in the Colosseum itself an inscription of the time of Theodosius which distinctly speaks of large repairs having been done in the arena, seats, and other parts of the building. I am sorry that I did not copy the exact words, but any one in Rome may see it as he goes in from the side of the Forum. I would risk the guess that any work which is too late to belong to the original building was done then. One thing is quite certain; one use of the underground buildings was to keep the beasts in, till the actual moment when they were wanted for the show. This is made perfectly clear by the passage in Herodian which I quoted before, where the lions which Commodus killed are said to have come from underground. The arena on which Commodus stood must have been pretty much on the level of the ground before the diggings began, and the lions must have been brought up, by trap-doors or otherwise, from the underground works. Had Commodus stood down at the bottom of the present diggings, there would have been no underground place from which lions or anything else could have come up. This one passage seems to me to prove of itself that the old notions were right