From where the tired shepherds had halted on the high land to the southeast of the river, the empty cradle of unborn Rome would look very fair in the clear spring morning, and but short debate must have decided, for those men of few words, that here the gods meant them to stay. So here, as we can still trace, Romulus, the wolf’s nursling, marked (after enquiring of the wise men of Etruria as to the commands of the gods concerning the foundation of a city) the lines for his wall, ploughing, as the legend says, with white Campagna steers, on his chosen hill the Palatine, where the new altar, raised over a pit in which the first-fruits of the year and a handful of soil from each man’s former home had been buried, already sent up clouds of incense into the sweet spring air on that memorable 21st of April, 754 B.C. And Remus, his twin, wolf-nursed like him, was angry that his own hill, the Aventine, had not been awarded the honours, mocked at his brother’s commands, and sprang across the mystic furrow, to be instantly slain by Celer, Romulus’ faithful henchman, thus conferring the baptism of human blood which almost till our own times was prescribed by necromancers as the only means of rendering great strongholds stable and impregnable. It is strange to find that from the very birthday of Rome she knew how to levy tribute of the higher kind from other nations. When the frightened Alban shepherds, mostly men little regarded heretofore in the rich city of Alba Longa, spread their skin tents and then threw up their windowless cane huts on the banks of the Tiber, Etruria, a few score of miles to the north, possessed a written language, learned hierophants, bold and scientific architects, full-grown arts of surpassing beauty, marble amphitheatres, great cities supplied with indefectible streams of pure water, and a costly and complicated system of drainage. Rome sends humble enquiries to Etruria, beseeching to be taught how to address and propitiate the great gods. Etruria gladly condescends to reply, and in a given time, though not without much strife and bloodshed, Etruria becomes first a tributary and then a vassal of the adolescent Empress of the world, who, through all the centuries of her after history, repeats that requisition. Rough, practical, hard-handed, and strong, yet avid of beauty, she will have all that is fairest and most precious. Her Art consisted in appreciation; she resolved to possess; the world had to be conquered to give her what she desired, but the world gave—Greece her sculpture and painting and poetry, the Orient its silks and jewels and spices, the South its gold and grain, its wild beasts and hordes of slaves, the North its furs and warriors, the West its granite and lead; the seas swarmed with her laden fleets, and the whole known world became a vast diagram of white converging roads choked with spoils for Rome.