It was in that same struggle which culminated in the execution of Lorenzo Colonna, the Protonotary, that Pope Sixtus the Fourth destroyed the last remains of the Sublician Bridge, at the foot of the Aventine. So, at least, tradition says. From that bridge the Roman pontiffs had taken their title, 'Pontifex,' a bridge-maker, because it was one of their chief duties to keep it in repair, when it was the only means of crossing the Tiber, and the safety of the city might depend upon it at any time; and for many centuries the bridge was built of oak, and without nails or bolts of iron, in memory of the first bridge which Horatius had kept. Now those who love to ponder on coincidences may see one in this, that the last remnant of the once oaken bridge, kept whole by the heathen Pontifex, was destroyed by the Christian Pontifex, whose name was 'of the oak'--for so 'della Rovere' may be translated if one please. Years ago, one might still distinctly see in the Tiber the remains of piers, when the water was low, at the foot of the Aventine, a little above the Ripa Grande; and those who saw them looked on the very last vestige of the Sublician Bridge, that is to say, of the stone structure which in later times took the place of the wooden one; and that last trace has been destroyed to deepen the little harbour. In older days there were strange superstitions and ceremonies connected with the bridge that had meant so much to Rome. Strangest of all was the procession on the Ides of May,--the fifteenth of that month,--when the Pontiffs and the Vestals came to the bridge in solemn state, with men who bore thirty effigies made of bulrushes in likeness to men's bodies, and threw them into the river, one after the other, with prayers and hymns; but what the images meant no man knows. Most generally it was believed in Rome that they took the place of human beings, once sacrificed to the river in the spring. Ovid protests against the mere thought, but the industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to prove that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber for one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise sacrificed until the year of the city 657, when, Cnaeus Cornelius Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a law that no man should be sacrificed thereafter. The question is one for scholars; but considering the savage temper of the Romans, their dark superstitions, the abundance of victims always at hand, and the frequency of human sacrifices among nations only one degree more barbarous, there is no reason for considering the story very improbable. [Illustration: THE RIPA GRANDE AND SITE OF THE SUBLICIAN BRIDGE]