There is a passage in Herodian which is a little surprising. He says positively that the palace of the emperor was as large as all the rest of the city. This was Nero’s golden house, which is indeed represented by Suetonius and Pliny​[89] as of an enormous extent, but no power of imagination can make us conceive it to bear any proportion to such a city as London. We may observe that, had the historian been relating Nero’s extravagance, and had he made use of such an expression, it would have had much less weight, these rhetorical exaggerations being so apt to creep into an author’s style even when the most chaste and correct; but it is mentioned by Herodian only by the by, in relating the quarrels between Geta and Caracalla. It appears from the same historian that there was then much land uncultivated and put to no manner of use, and he ascribes it as a great praise to Pertinax that he allowed every one to take such land either in Italy or elsewhere and cultivate it as he pleased, without paying any taxes. Lands uncultivated and put to no manner of use! This is not heard of in any part of Christendom, except perhaps in some remote parts of Hungary, as I have been informed. And it surely corresponds very ill with that idea of the extreme populousness of antiquity so much insisted on. We learn from Vopiscus that there was in Etruria much fertile land uncultivated, which the Emperor Aurelian intended to convert into vineyards, in order to furnish the Roman people with a gratuitous distribution of wine: a very proper expedient to dispeople still further that capital and all the neighbouring territories. It may not be amiss to take notice of the account which Polybius gives of the great herds of swine to be met with in Tuscany and Lombardy, as well as in Greece, and of the method of feeding them which was then practised. “There are great herds of swine,” says he, “throughout all Italy, particularly in former times, through Etruria and Cisalpine Gaul. And a herd frequently contains a thousand or more swine. When one of these herds in feeding meets with another they mix together, and the swineherds have no other expedient to separate them than to go to different quarters, where they sound their horn, and these animals, being accustomed to that signal, run immediately each to the horn of his own keeper. Whereas in Greece, if the herds of swine happen to mix in the forests, he who has the greatest flock takes cunningly the opportunity of driving all away. And thieves are very apt to purloin the straggling hogs which have wandered to a great distance from their keeper in search of food.”