Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/137

Rh excited the astonishment of posterity as a marvellous work of regal Rome, must rather be reckoned to belong to the following epoch, for is the material employed, and we many accounts of new structures of the kind in the times of the republic; but the scheme itself belongs beyond all doubt to the regal period, although to a later epoch probably than the designing of the Servian wall and the Capitoline stronghold. The spots thus drained or dried supplied large open spaces such as were required to meet the public wants of the newly enlarged city. The assembling-place of the community, which had hitherto been the Area Capitolina at the stronghold itself, was now transferred to the flat space, where the ground falls from the stronghold towards the city (comitium), and which stretches thence between the Palatine and the Carinæ, in the direction of the Velia. At that side of the comitium which adjoined the stronghold, and upon the wall which arose above the comitium in the fashion of a balcony, the members of the senate and the guests of the city had a place of honour assigned to them on occasions of festivals and assemblies of the people; and not far from this there soon came to be built a special Senate-house, which derived from its builder the name of the Curia Hostilia. The platform for the judgment-seat (tribunal), and the stage whence the burgesses were addressed (the later rostra), were erected on the comitium itself. Its prolongation in the direction of the Velia became the new market (forum Romanum). On the west side of the Forum, beneath the Palatine, rose the community-house, which included the official residence of the king (regia) and the common hearth of the city, the rotunda forming the temple of Vesta; at no distance, on the south side of the Forum, there was a second round building erected connected with the former, the store-room of the community or temple of the Penates, which still stands at the present day as the porch of the church Santi Cosma e Damiano. It is a significant feature in the new city, now united in a way very different from the settlement of the "seven mounts," that, over and above the thirty hearths of the curies, which the Palatine e had been content with associating in one building, the an Home presented such a single hearth for the city at large. Along the two longer sides of the Forum butchers'