Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/72

52 other purposes, each at its own hearth (curiæ veteres). There was the meeting-house of the "Leapers" (curia Saliorum, the place where the sacred shields of Mars were preserved, the sanctuary of the "Wolves" (Lupercal), and the residence of the priest of Jupiter. On and near this hill the legend of the founding of the city placed the scenes of its leading incidents, and the straw-covered house of Romulus, the shepherd's hut of his foster-father Faustulus, the sacred fig-tree towards which the cradle with the twins had floated, the cornelian cherry-tree that sprang from the shaft of the spear which the founder of the city had hurled from the Aventine over the valley of the Circus into this enclosure, and other such sacred relics were pointed out to the believer. Temples, in the proper sense of the term, were still at this period unknown, and accordingly the Palatine has nothing of that sort to show belonging to the primitive age. The meeting-places of the community were early transferred elsewhere, and therefore their original site is unknown; only it may be conjectured that the free space round the mundus, afterwards called the Area Apollinis, was the primitive place of assembly for the burgesses and the senate, and the stage erected over the mundus itself the primitive seat of justice of the Roman community.

The "festival of the Seven Mounts" (septimontium), again, preserved the memory of the more extended settlement which gradually formed round the Palatine. Suburbs grew up one after another, each protected by its own separate though weaker circumvallations, and joined on to the original ring-wall of the Palatine, as in fen districts the outer dikes are joined on to the main dike. The "Seven Rings" were the Palatine itself; the Cermalus, the declivity of the Palatine in the direction of the morass that in the earliest times extended between it and the Capitoline (Velabrum): the Velia, the ridge connecting the Palatine with the Esquiline, which in subsequent times was almost wholly obliterated by the buildings of the Empire; the Fagutal, the Oppius, and the Cispius, the three summits of the Esquiline; lastly, the Sucūsa, or Subūra, a fortress constructed outside of the earthen rampart which protected the new town on the Carinæ, in the low ground between the Esquiline and the Quirinal beneath S. Pietro in Vincoli. These additions, manifestly the results of a gradual growth, clearly suggest to a certain extent the earliest history of the Palatine