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Updated: June 24, 2025
For the more effective government of the city of Rome he established there a permanent prefecture and brought together in a camp before the Viminal gate the nine praetorian cohorts. Unhappily this Praetorian Guard, which might serve to overawe the city mobs, might also interfere in the affairs of government. Indeed, a little later it had to be counted with in the choice of emperors.
The -pagani- are, undoubtedly, the residents of the Aventine and Janiculum not included in the tribes, and the analogous -collegia- of the Capitol and the Circus valley. The enumeration of the Seven Mounts familiar to us, viz. Palatine, Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, Viminal, Quirinal, Capitoline, is not given by any ancient author.
The portion of the Servian wall near the Viminal gate, discovered in the year 1862 at the Villa Negroni, rests on a foundation of huge blocks of tufo of 3 to 4 metres in height and breadth, on which was then raised the outer wall from blocks of the same material and of the same size as those elsewhere employed in the wall.
The slender spire and two little domes of Sta. Maria Maggiore alone indicated the summit of the Esquiline, right in front and far away at the other end of the city; whilst on the heights of the neighbouring Viminal, Pierre only perceived a confused mass of whitish blocks, steeped in light and streaked with fine brown lines recent erections, no doubt, which at that distance suggested an abandoned stone quarry.
This again was excelled by that of Aquillius on the Viminal, which for some time was the most splendid in Rome, until Lucullus occupied nearly the whole of the Pincian Hill with his gardens and galleries of art, which contained some of the chefs d'oeuvre of antiquity.
A few minutes brought him through the Cyprian lane and the Suburra to the Virbian slope, by which he gained the Viminal hill, and the Hortensian villa; at the door of which, in a handsome street leading through the Quirinal gate to the Flaminian way, or great northern road of Italy, stood the carpentum, drawn by a pair of noble mules, awaiting its fair freight.
The ring-wall further embraced the Caelian and the whole space of the Esquiline, Viminal, and Quirinal, where a structure likewise but recently brought to light on a great scale on the outside composed of blocks of peperino and protected by a moat in front, on the inside forming a huge earthen rampart sloped towards the city and imposing even at the present day supplied the want of natural means of defence.
However, the street ever ascended and broadened, and on the summit of the Viminal, on the Piazza delle Terme, when he passed the ruins of Diocletian's baths, he could breathe as his lungs listed. No, no, the human day could not finish, it was eternal, and the stages of civilisation would follow and follow without end!
In the middle of the city, between the Capitol on one side, and the Quirinal, the Viminal, and the Esquiline on the other, as also between the Palatine and the Cælian hill, where the streets were most densely occupied, the fire began in so many places at once that whole crowds of people, while fleeing in one direction, struck unexpectedly on a new wall of fire in front of them, and died a dreadful death in a deluge of flame.
It was not only on the castle fields, but at the Porta San Giovanni, the Porta San Lorenzo, the Villa Ludovisi, and on the heights of the Viminal and the Esquiline that unfinished, empty districts were already crumbling amidst the weeds of their deserted streets. After two thousand years of prodigious fertility the soil really seemed to be exhausted.
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