Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/73

Rh Rome, especially when we compare with them the Servian division into regions, which was afterwards formed on the basis of this earliest arrangement.

The Palatine was the original seat of the Roman community, the oldest, and originally the only ring-wall. The urban settlement, however, began in Rome, as everywhere, not within, but under the protection of the stronghold, and the oldest settlements with which we are acquainted, and which afterwards formed the first and second regions in the Servian division of the city, lay in a circle around the Palatine. Such were that on the declivity of the Cermalus, including the "street of the Tuscans," a name which was probably a memorial of the commercial intercourse subsisting between the Cærites and Romans, an intercourse already perhaps carried on with vigour in the Palatine city; and the settlement of the Velia, both of which afterwards formed, along with the stronghold-hill itself, a region in the Servian city. Further, there were the suburb on the Cælian, which probably embraced only its extreme point above the Colosseum; that on the Carinæ, the spur which projects from the Esquiline towards the Palatine; and, lastly, the valley and outwork of the Subura, from which.the whole region afterwards derived its name. These two regions constituted together the incipient city; and the Suburan region, which stretched over the valley lying below the stronghold, perhaps from the Arch of Constantine to S. Pietro in Vincoli, appears to have been of higher standing, and was perhaps older than the settlements incorporated by the Servian arrangement in the Palatine region, because in the ranking of the regions the former takes precedence of the latter. A remarkable memorial of the distinction between these two portions of the city was preserved in one of the oldest sacred customs of the subsequent Rome, the sacrifice of the October horse yearly offered in the Campus Martius: down to a late period a struggle took place at this festival for the horse's head between the men of the Subura and those of the Via Sacra, and according as victory lay with the former or with the latter, the head was nailed either to the Mamilian Tower (site unknown) in the Subura, or to the king's palace under the Palatine. It was the two halves of the old city that thus competed with each other on equal terms. At that time, accordingly, the Esquiliæ (which name strictly used is exclusive of the Carinæ) were in