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Updated: June 9, 2025
An immense circuit of buildings; cut out, girt with a high ring-wall, from the lanes and streets of the quarter, which is a dim and crowded one. Gateway as to a fortified place; then a spacious court, like the square of a city; broad staircases, passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture all round.
Still deeper exasperation prevailed among the burgess-bodies affected by the Sullan confiscations whether they like those of Pompeii, lived on their property curtailed by the Sullan colonists, within the same ring-wall with the latter, and at perpetual variance with them; or, like the Arretines and Volaterrans, retained actual possession of their territory, but had the Damocles' sword of confiscation suspended over them by the Roman people; or, as was the case in Etruria especially, were reduced to be beggars in their former abodes, or robbers in the woods.
The Seven Mounts Suburbs grew up one after another, each protected by its own separate though weaker circumvallation and joined to the original ring-wall of the Palatine, as in fen districts the outer dikes are joined on to the main dike.
Most of the towns thus established were formed not by bringing colonists from a distance, but by the suppression of villages and the collection of their inhabitants within the new ring-wall; only in Nicopolis Pompeius settled the invalids and veterans of his army, who preferred to establish a home for themselves there at once rather than afterwards in Italy.
It was a matter of comparatively slight moment that, while the old structure was falling to pieces, they were with the most painstaking gravity watching over every old ornamental scroll and every speck of rust in the constitution; after all it was simply ridiculous, when the genteel lords had scruples of conscience as to calling their deliberative assembly beyond the sacred soil of the city the senate, and cautiously gave it the title of the "three hundred"; or when they instituted tedious investigations in state law as to whether and how a curiate law could be legitimately enacted elsewhere than within the ring-wall of Rome.
No worship was equally popular among the lower orders of the population in the capital: when the senate ordered the temples of Isis constructed within the ring-wall to be pulled down, no labourer ventured to lay the first hand on them, and the consul Lucius Paullus was himself obliged to apply the first stroke of the axe ; a wager might be laid, that the more loose any woman was, the more piously she worshipped Isis.
Tradition indeed assigns the different works to different kings the senate-house to Tullus Hostilius, the Janiculum and the wooden bridge to Ancus Marcius, the great Cloaca, the Circus, and the temple of Jupiter to the elder Tarquinius, the temple of Diana and the ring-wall to Servius Tullius.
Earliest Limits of the Roman Territory Let us notice first of all the earliest boundaries of the Roman territory. Towards the east the towns of Antemnae, Fidenae, Caenina, and Gabii lie in the immediate neighbourhood, some of them not five miles distant from the Servian ring-wall; and the boundary of the canton must have been in the close vicinity of the city gates.
According to the previous arrangement the only legal distinction in the empire was that drawn between the city which was surrounded by the ring-wall, and the country beyond the -pomerium-; the new arrangement substituted for the city the new Italy henceforth, as in perpetual peace, withdrawn from the regular -imperium-, and placed in contrast to it the continental and transmarine territories, which were, on the other hand, necessarily placed under military commandants the provinces as they were henceforth called.
It was the magnificent structure ascribed to king Servius Tullius that first surrounded not merely those two cities of the Palatine and Quirinal, but also the heights of the Capitol and the Aventine which were not comprehended within their enclosure, with a single great ring-wall, and thereby created the new Rome the Rome of history.
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