_Latium_ was the name of this country round about Rome, Latium--as though it were wide and spacious, suggesting the civilisation which was to spread from here, with its largeness, its spaciousness, its contempt of the trivial and restricted. The campagna (between Civita Vecchia and Terracina) embraces a tract of country some ninety miles in extent, with a maximum breadth between mountain and sea of forty miles, enclosing part of ancient Sabina, Etruria, and Latium, this last lying seawards, between the Alban hills and the Tiber. The _ager antiquus_, the Roman _ager_, however, was of much smaller extent, bounded by a point five miles out on the Via Appia, by the shrine of the Dea Dia towards the sea, by the _Massa Festi_ between the seventh and eighth milestones on the Via Labicana, the farthest point eastwards, and by the primitive mouth of the Tiber six miles from Rome on the Ostian Way; and these always remained its confines for ritual purposes. From here derived the original families whose chiefs became the Roman patricians and formed the nucleus of the Roman Senate--the so-called _gentes_. The extension of the campagna beyond the _ager antiquus_ to form the _ager publicus_ was the result of conquest, the territory thus acquired being let or assigned to private persons as tenants-at-will of the State, apportioned to poorer citizens in allotments, or colonised by Roman citizens. The hill-villages and towns, the _castelli romani_, are so-called not as is popularly supposed because they are near Rome, but because they too were colonised by Romans from the _ager_ under the protection of the great feudal barons to whose fiefs they belonged in the city. Thus _castello_, the baronial castle, easily came to denote the village which clustered round it.