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Nothing can be more plainly traced a proper agger or vallum, with its corresponding ditch or fossa. Indistinctly! why, Heaven help you, the lassie, my niece, as light-headed a goose as womankind affords, saw the traces of the ditch at once.
The most ancient fortification of completed Rome, the so-called Servian wall and agger, enclosed a singularly large space, larger, we are told, than the walls of any old city in Italy; it is likely that a good part of this space was long unoccupied by houses, and served to shelter the cattle of the farmers living outside, when an enemy was threatening attack.
Nothing can be more plainly traced a proper agger or vallum, with its corresponding ditch or fossa. Indistinctly! why, Heaven help you, the lassie, my niece, as light-headed a goose as womankind affords, saw the traces of the ditch at once.
This, so far as it went, was well; but, then, Steinar and I had always thought alike, which robbed his judgment of something of its worth. Whilst I was pondering over these things, although it was still so early that my father and Athalbrand were yet in bed sleeping off the fumes of the liquor they had drunk, I heard Steinar himself talking to the messengers from Agger in the hall.
The weather was cold and wet, but the legions worked with such a will that in twenty-five days they had raised their bank at last, a hundred yards in width and eighty feet high. As the work drew near its end Caesar himself lay out all night among the men, encouraging them. One morning at daybreak he observed that the agger was smoking. The ingenious Gauls had undermined it and set it on fire.
The inhabitants of the Loire country were skilled artisans, trained in mines and iron works. The walls, built of alternate layers of stone and timber, were forty feet in thickness, and could neither be burnt nor driven in with the ram. The town could be taken only with the help of an agger a bank of turf and fagots raised against the wall of sufficient height to overtop the fortifications.
The tufa blocks employed by Servius Tullius for the building of the city walls, and of the agger, appear to be of three qualities yellowish, reddish, and gray; the first, soft and easily broken up, seems to have been quarried from the Little Aventine, near the church of St. Saba.
They were set into an arch of one of the great stairs leading to the avenue or boulevard established in Imperial times on the top of the agger of Servius.
I thought that this was because he felt sad at the news of the death of his father and brethren, since, although he had never known them, blood still calls to blood; and so, I believe, did most there present. At any rate my father and mother tried to cheer him and in the end bade the men of Agger draw near to tell him the tale of his heritage.
Steinar, Lord of Agger, will care for her, I think." That night there was a feast at Aar, and I sat at it with Iduna by my side. Beautiful she was indeed in her garment of blue, over which streamed her yellow hair, bright as the gold rings that tinkled on her rounded arms.
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