"We can show what the earliest Rome was, the Rome of Romulus on the Palatine, and how it grew to be the City of the Seven Hills. The City itself, crowded with the wrecks of twenty-five centuries, preserves to-day few memorials of its earliest age; but excavations made on two sites, one close to Rome, one a little further north in Etruria, explain the process very clearly. The traveller who approaches Rome by the Via Salaria sees, just where Tiber and Anio join, a modern fort on an isolated rock. Here was Antemnae, destroyed (according to legend) by Roman jealousy very soon after Rome itself was founded. The legend seems to be true, at least in substance. On this hilltop excavations have shown a little village within a wall of stone: it had its temple and senate-house, its water-cistern, and square huts, thatched or timbered, for dwelling-houses. The relics found there shew that the site was abandoned, never to be again inhabited, about the time at which the legend fixes the fall of Antemnae. Here we have Rome's earliest rival. From the rival we may guess what the earliest Rome was like on the Palatine rock, and what all the little Italian towns were in their infancy." _F. Haverfield, Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane, part 2, pages 302-303 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons)._ ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Italy: The Etruscans. "During the decade which is now ending, archaeology has thrown some light on this strange people. Researches in North Italy prove that it never entered the Peninsula from the north. Researches in Etruria itself prove that the earliest Etruscan civilization resembled that which prevailed in the Eastern Mediterranean in the last days of the Aegean period. After all, the old legends were right. The ancients told how the Etruscans came from the east: archaeological evidence is now accumulating to confirm the legends. Precisely when they came or why is still obscure, nor can we identify them yet with any special tribe in pre-historic Greece, Pelasgian or other. Probably they were driven from their old homes, like the Phoenicians who built Carthage and the Phocaeans who built Marseilles." _F. Haverfield, Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane, part 2, page 305 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons)._ ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Italy: Sunken Roman vessels in Lake Nemi. "A discovery during 1895 which made a great sensation throughout Italy, was that of the famous Roman vessels which had been sunk for so many centuries at the bottom of Lake Nemi, the existence of which has been known or suspected ever since the fifteenth century, notwithstanding many sceptics." _American Journal of Archœology July-September, 1896._ ARCHÆOLOGICAL RESEARCH: Syria: Ruined cities of the Roman Province.