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The same revolution is perceptible in the ancient historians. Horace, the poet of a cultivated and corrupt epoch, praises, under the shady groves of Tibur, the calm and happiness of the country, and he might be termed the true founder of this sentimental poetry, of which he has remained the unsurpassed model.

He could not bear even the winter's sun; and at home, never walked in the open air without a broad-brimmed hat on his head. He usually travelled in a litter, and by night: and so slow, that he was two days in going to Praeneste or Tibur. And if he could go to any place by sea, he preferred that mode of travelling.

To guard the entrance to the river with his ships, and to isolate Rome from every inland district of Italy, seemed to the Gothic king the only sure way of preparing his final triumph. But time pressed; however beset with difficulties, Belisarius would not linger for ever beyond Hadria. The resistance of Tibur excited Totila's impatience, and at length stirred his wrath.

The event excited no less astonishment than horror, contrasting as it did with Totila's humanity throughout the war. Some offered as explanation the fact that many Goths lived at Tibur, whose indifference or hostility had angered the king; others surmised that this was Totila's warning after the failure of his proclamation to the Romans.

It was only known that her treatment was to be lenient. But on the day after, it became public in the city, that the Emperor had bestowed upon her his magnificent villa, not far from Hadrian's at Tibur, and at the close of the first day of the triumph a chariot of Aurelian in waiting had conveyed her there. This was to me transporting news, as it will be to you.

So Basil rode southward, and happily was far away when Tibur opened its gates to the Goth. For more than half a year he and Venantius were busy in maintaining the Gothic rule throughout Lucania and Apulia, where certain Roman nobles endeavoured to raise an army of the peasantry in aid of the Greek invasion constantly expected upon the Adriatic shore.

In Propertius, Virgil, and others, we find also traces of this mode of feeling; less of it is found in Ovid, who would have required for that more abundance of heart, and who in his exile at Tomes sorrowfully regrets the happiness that Horace so readily dispensed with in his villa at Tibur. It is in the fundamental idea of poetry that the poet is everywhere the guardian of nature.

The summits of the last offshoots of the Sabine range form natural fastnesses of the Latin plain; and the canton-strongholds there gave rise at a later period to the considerable towns of Tibur and Praeneste.

And the profound mysteries of the Nile were degraded by a hundred meretricious and frivolous admixtures from the creeds of Cephisus and of Tibur.

XXI. He completed the works which were left unfinished by Tiberius, namely, the temple of Augustus, and the theatre of Pompey . He began, likewise, the aqueduct from the neighbourhood of Tibur , and an amphitheatre near the Septa ; of which works, one was completed by his successor Claudius, and the other remained as he left it.