The Romans were emphatically the road-makers of the ancient world. An ingenious but somewhat fanciful writer of the present day has compared the literature of Rome to its great Viæ. One idea, he remarks, possessed its poets, orators, and historians—the supremacy of the City on the Seven Hills; and Lucan, Virgil, Livy, and Tacitus, various as were their idiosyncrasies, still present a formal monotony, which is not found to the same degree in any other literature. This censure is, perhaps, as regards the literature of the Roman people, rather overstated; but it applies literally to their roads, aqueducts, and tunnels. The State was the be-all and the end-all of social life: the wishes, the prejudices, the conveniences of private persons never entered into account with the planners and finishers of the Appian Way, or the Aqueduct of Alcantara. The vineyard of Naboth would have been taken from him by a single _senatûs consultum_, without the scruples of Ahab and without the crime of Jezebel. The Roman roads were originally constructed, like our own, of gravel and beaten stone; the surface was slightly arched, and the Macadamite principle was well understood by the contractors for the earliest of the Sabine highways, the Via Salaria {9}. But after the Romans had borrowed from Carthage the art of intessellation, their roads were formed of polygonal blocks of immense thickness, having the interstices at the angles well filled with flints, and in some instances, as at Pompeii, with wedges of iron and granite; so that they resembled on a plane the vertical face of a Cyclopean or polygonal wall. Upon the roads themselves were imposed the stately and sonorous epithets of Consular and Prætorian; and had the records of the western Republic perished as completely as those of its commercial rival, the Appian Road would have handed down to the remotest ages one of the names of the pertinacious censor of the Claudian house. To the Commonwealth, perpetually engaged in distant wars on its frontiers, it was of the utmost importance to possess the most rapid means of communicating with its provinces, and of conveying troops and ammunition. To the Empire it was no less essential to correspond easily with its vast circle of dependencies. The very life of the citizens, who, long before the age of Augustus, had ceased to be a corn-producing people, was sometimes dependent upon the facility of transit, and the rich plains of Lombardy and Gaul poured in their stores of wheat and millet, and of salted pork and beef, when the harvest of Egypt failed through an imperfect inundation of the Nile. But the convenience of travellers was as much consulted as the necessity of the subjects of Rome. A foot-pavement on each side was secured by a low wall against the intrusion or collision of wheel carriages. Stones to mount horses (for stirrups were unknown) {10} were placed at certain distances for the behoof of equestrians; and the