The Mamertine prisons[157] are supposed to be the oldest monuments of antiquity in Rome. Livy speaks of them as the work of Ancus Martius. “The state having undergone a vast increase,” says the historian, “and secret villanies being perpetrated, from the distinction between right and wrong being confounded, in so great a multitude of men, a prison was built in the middle of the city, overhanging the Forum, as a terror to the increasing boldness. These prisons are supposed to be called after their founder, Martius. They were enlarged by Servius Tullus; and the part which he added bore the name of Tullian. The front of this prison is open to the street; but above, and resting on it, is built the church of San Giuseppe Falegnani. It has an appearance of great solidity, being composed of immense masses of stone, put together without cement; almost every one of the blocks is upwards of nine feet long, and in height nearly three feet. The length of the front is forty-three feet; but its height does not exceed seventeen; along the upper part runs an inscription, intimating, that Caius Vibius Rufinus and Marcus Cocceius Nerva (who were consuls in the year 23), by a decree of the senate, repaired, enlarged, or did something to the prison. The traveller descends, by the aid of stairs, into the upper cell. Nearly in the middle of the vaulted roof he may perceive an aperture large enough to admit the passage of a man’s body; and directly under it, in the floor of the cell, he will see another opening of a similar character. This affords a direct communication with the lower prison; but he descends at another point by a second flight of steps, modern like the former. The second cell is of much smaller dimensions than the other, being only nineteen feet in length, by nine in breadth, and about six in height.” “It is faced,” says the Rev. Mr. Burgess, “with the same material as the upper one; and it is worthy of remark, as a proof of its high antiquity, that the stones are not disposed with that regularity which the rules of good masonry require; the joinings often coincide, or nearly so, instead of reposing over the middle of the interior block respectively.” Dr. Burton says, “that a more horrible place for the confinement of a human being than these prisons, can scarcely be imagined. Their condition in ancient times must have been still worse than it now is. The expressions ‘cell of groans,’ ‘house of sadness,’ ‘black prison,’ ‘cave of darkness,’ ‘place darkened with perpetual night;’ and many others, which are to be met with in the pages of the later Latin writers, sufficiently attest the character they bore in ancient times.”