days of the Empire.[1] On the Quirinal hill, to the north-east, there settled yet another community, or group of communities, with its own worships and its own citadel, and in due time a fusion took place between this and its neighbours on the seven mounts. The whole area occupied by all these settlements, together with the Cœlian and Aventine hills, was eventually encircled by one great wall and foss, ascribed to Servius Tullius, of which fragments are still to be seen; a single arx or citadel was fortified on the small and steep Capitoline hill, which had perhaps been hitherto unoccupied; the worships were fused together, though always retaining traces of a distinct origin, and in the end there arose on the Capitoline a new and splendid temple to mark the completed union of the component parts of a great city. But long before that temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva had been erected by Etruscan conquerors, Rome had grown into a City-State, with its king's house, its sacred hearth or temple of Vesta, and its open market-place, placed together in a central position between the Palatine, Esquiline, and Quirinal.[2]
Such then, in briefest outline, were the beginnings of the πόλις, — of the City-State of Greece and Italy. From the cities thus formed there were born innumerable others, which had not to go through the same slow processes of growth, but sprang at once,
- ↑ Plutarch, Quæst. Rom. 69; Suetonius, Vita Domitiani, 4.
- ↑ The position of the Regia and Vesta-temple between the Palatine and Esquiline hills seem to suggest that they also formed the centre-point of the united communities of the Septem montes, before the final union with the settlement on the Quirinal.
