The outward and visible sign of these primaeval Roman liberties is the tetragram S.P.Q.R.--_Senatus Populus Que Romanus_ (the Roman Senate and People), which took the place of the earlier formula _Populus Romanus et Quirites_, and it is of the Sabines, not of the humble conjunction, that that Q still reminds us. All down the centuries we may recognise those four letters--surmounted in imperial times by an eagle--crowning the standard of the Romans, carried far and wide not only through the streets of the city and to the uttermost ends of the earth, but in that religious perlustration of the _ager_ when the ambarvalia rites were celebrated at the Cluilian Trench which separated Rome from Alba Longa, the site of the combat between the Alban Curatii and the Roman Horatii. One of the finest remains in the Forum is the marble relief which represents the _suovetaurilia_, the sow, sheep, and bull sacrificed on this occasion. That Roman greatness which came to be synonymous with confines as large as the known world, had risen with the recognition of these sacred limits, limits which still define the Roman municipality--the symbol of Roman liberties. The Pragmatic Sanction and the world power of Rome! Can two things be more disparate? Yet the version which renders S.P.Q.R. into _Si Peu Que Rien_ must surely be laid at the door of "Gallicanism"--it points to an ecclesiastical not a political _diminutio capitis_. The tract of the city which we see from the terrace on the Pincian hill, looking towards the Janiculum, has been called the most historic plot of land in the world. Is it without reason that the furthest point of this unequalled panorama is the dome which Michael Angelo erected over the tomb of S. Peter? Three mighty civilisations--the Etruscan, the Roman, the Christian--resulted in the foundation of two world empires. Rome is now entering on a third existence, its existence as the capital of Italy, but has it suffered thereby no _diminutio capitis_? Is it not a fact that the classical and the ecclesiastical represented her only world-wide destinies, the only life of Rome which penetrated as truly beyond the city as within its classic confines? Has not the papacy, with all its faults, been the actual link connecting ancient and modern Rome, preserving unbroken the tradition which gave her, beyond her ritual boundaries, the government of the world without? [Illustration: S. PETER'S AND CASTEL SANT' ANGELO FROM THE TIBER See pages 16, 32, 239, 242.] CHAPTER II ROMAN BUILDING AND DECORATION