houses as if they were to live for ever, but gave themselves up to luxury as if they were to die tomorrow."[1]
If from the contemplation of such greater monuments as have thus far occupied our attention, we turn to places and objects of secondary importance, we shall find the same results.
Wherever, for example, a town is celebrated for one signal remnant of antiquity, it is sure to be a public edifice. Thus Verona, Aries, Nismes, Taormina in Sicily, and Pola in Istria, have theatres; Nismes, moreover, its maison carrée; Ancona, the triumphal arch of Trajan; Rimini and Fano (Fanum Fortunæ), their arches of Augustus; Volterra, a gate; Cora and Assisi,[2] elegant porticoes; Tibur, its most graceful templet, crowning a richly-coloured rock; while Palestrina, with its Roman palace and cathedral, is seated at ease on the terraces of Sylla's Temple of Fortune. It is everywhere the same; only public buildings have hitherto defied time and its accidents; and form the monuments of buried cities and of their extinct races.
This has then become a law, so much the more general and certain, for its only exception. Fortunately for antiquarian science, but most unhappily for the poor inhabitants of Pompeii, their city was not left to the pining and wasting action of time; but
- ↑ Diog. Laert. viii. 2, § 63. See all the authorities on this subject, brought together in Dr. Smith's 'Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography,' vol. i., Agrigentum.
- ↑ If I remember right, after more than twenty years, the vestibule at Assisi contains an inscription, advertisement, or epitaph, of one who is styled "medicus, chirurgus, oculista, dentista," evidently a general practitioner.
