It strikes me that there are several serious objections to this explanation. In the first place, it is impossible to believe that traces would not exist of these walls had they ever been built, when the walls constructed a little more than a century later are standing almost perfect. Allowing that _all_ of the present wall is not as old as Honorius, which probably is the case, a part certainly is. There is a portion of the present wall that is called the _Muro Torto_, or the Crooked Wall, from the circumstance that it is so much out of the perpendicular as to excite apprehensions of its falling on the stranger who passes beneath it. Now there is a writer of the time of Belisarius, (530–40,) who says that this wall was exactly in such a condition in his day. It is difficult to believe that this should be the fact, and that all traces of the wall of Aurelian, which was built only two centuries and a half earlier, should have been lost. But it may be said this was a part of Aurelian’s wall, for it is the foundation of Domitian’s gardens, of unusual thickness and strength, and was made use of for the new city wall on that account, and that the wall of Aurelian still contained a circuit of fifty miles. If the _Muro Torto_ be in truth a part of Aurelian’s wall, then are not all traces of his wall lost; and it is very improbable that an emperor who was about to increase the walls of the city, which, exceedingly irregular, had a circuit of less than eight miles, to a circuit of more than forty-five of our miles, should choose to extend the town so short a distance towards the north, the quarter that was the most agreeable and the most healthy, and yet as far in the other directions as would be necessary to make up the required distance. In point of fact, the space between the wall of Servius and the present wall is much greater in this direction than in any other; the object having been, probably, to include the whole of the Campus Martius and the Pincian Hill.