It is said that the earliest vaulted bridge of the Romans was erected under the elder Tarquin, about six hundred years before the Birth of Christ. Emiland Gauthey says, for example, “Pont Salaro, à Rome, sur le Teverone. Cet ouvrage, composé de trois arches en plein cintre, de 16,6 à 21 mètres, et de deux arches plus petites, de 6,8 mètres, fut élevé sous Tarquin l’ancien, six cents ans avant J. C.” Yet there is no evidence to justify this dogmatism. The bridge may have been a timber one, like the Pons Sublicius. It carried the Via Salaria over the Anio (_Teverone_) about two and a half miles from Rome, and was called usually the Pons Salarus. Livy speaks of it under another name, Pons Anienis, and makes it the theatre of an immortal fight, the one between Manlius and a gigantic Gaul, B.C. 361. In single combat Manlius killed the barbarian, and took a chain (_torques_) from the dead body, and put it around his own neck, as a proof of his victory, winning by this act the surname of Torquatus. The Pons Salarus does not appear again in early history. By the year B.C. 361 it may have been made into an arched bridge of stone, though it was not till B.C. 313 that the first aqueduct to Rome was constructed. In any case, however, we learn from an inscription, which Sir William Smith accepted as authentic, that the Pons Salarus was rebuilt in the sixth century A.D., by Narses, general and statesman, in the reign of Justinian. If in this reconstruction any earlier work was preserved, we must look for it in the smallest arches described by Gauthey, for we find narrow spans in the earliest Roman aqueducts. Those of the Marcian are only eight metres. The Ponte Salaro existed till 1867, when it was blown up during a panic caused by Garibaldi’s march to Rome. A fortified castle stood above one side of the central arch, rising from the footway, whose width was more than eight metres. The bridge was about a hundred metres long, and its vaults were built with exceedingly heavy stones remarkable for their bossage work. A woodcut of this late Roman bridge is given by Professor Fleeming Jenkin, but it differs from the illustration in Emiland Gauthey’s “Traité de la Construction des Ponts,” Paris, 1809-16, Vol. I. [Illustration: PONTE ROTTO AT ROME, ANCIENTLY THE PONS PALATINUS OR SENATORIUS]