This river bounded Latium. On its banks are still seen some ruins of the ancient Minturnæ. After Manlius Torquatus, in what some will call a phrenzy of virtue, had offered up his son as a sacrifice to military discipline; and his colleague Decius, immediately after, devoted himself in a battle against the Latins; the broken army of that people assembled at Minturnæ, and were a second time defeated by Manlius, and their lands divided by the senate among the citizens of Rome. The first battle was fought near Mount Vesuvius, and the second between Sinuessa and Minturnæ. In the morasses of Minturnæ, Caius Marius, in the seventieth year of his age, was taken, and brought a prisoner to that city, whose magistrates ordered an assassin to put him to death, whom the fierce veteran disarmed with a look. What mortal, says Juvenal, would have been thought more fortunate than Marius, had he breathed out his aspiring soul, surrounded by the captives he had made, his victorious troops, and all the pomp of war, as he descended from his Teutonic chariot, after his triumph over the Cimbri. ——Quid ilio cive tulisset Natura in terris, quid Roma beatius unquam? Si circumducto captivorum agmine, et omni Bellorum pompâ, animam exhalâsset opimam, Cum de Teutonico vellet descendere curru. Several writers, in their remarks on Italy, observe, that it was on the banks of the Liris that Pyrrhus gained his dear-bought victory over the Romans. They have fallen into this mistake, by confounding the Liris with the Siris, a river in Magna Græcia, near Heraclea; in the neighbourhood of which Pyrrhus defeated the Romans by the means of his elephants. Leaving Garilagno, which is the modern name of the Liris, we pass the rising ground where the ancient Sinuessa was situated; the city where Horace met his friends Plotius, Varius, and Virgil. The friendly glow with which this admirable painter has adorned their characters, conveys an amiable idea of his own. ——Animæ, quales neque candidiores Terra tulit; neque queis me sit devinctior alter. O, qui complexus et gaudia quanta fuerunt! Nil ego contulerim jucundo sanus amico. Do you not share in the happiness of such a company? And are you not rejoiced that they happened to meet near the Ager Falernus, where they could have the best Massic and Falernian wines? New Capua, through which the road from Rome to Naples lies, is a small town of no importance. The ancient city of that name was situated two miles distant from the new. The ruins of the amphitheatre, which are still to be seen, give some idea of the ancient grandeur of that city. Before the amphitheatre of Vespasian was built, there was none in Rome of equal size with this. Old Capua is said, at one period, to have vied in magnificence with Rome and Carthage: Altera dicta olim Carthago, atque altera Roma, Nunc prostrata jacet, proprioque sepulta sepulchro.