At this point starts the Sacra via,[27] so called because it is the way to the most sacred spots of the ancient Roman city,--the temples of Vesta and the Penates, and the Regia, once the dwelling of the Rex, now of the Pontifex Maximus; and it will lead us, in a walk of about eight hundred yards, through the Forum to the Capitol. It varied in breadth, and took by no means a straight course, and later on was crowded, cramped, and deflected by numerous temples and other buildings; but as yet, so far as we can guess, it was fairly free and open. We follow it and ascend the slope till we come to a point known as the _summa sacra via_, just where the arch of Titus now stands, and where then was the temple of Jupiter Stator, and where also a shrine of the public Penates and another of the Lares (of which no trace is now left) warn us that we are close on the penetralia of the Roman State. Here a way to the left leads up to the Palatine the residence then of many of the leading men of Rome, Cicero being one of them. But our attention is not long arrested by these objects; it is soon riveted on the Forum below and in front of us, to which the Sacred Way leads by a downward slope, the Clivus sacer. At the north-western end it is closed in by the Capitoline hill, with its double summit, the arx to the right, and the great temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva facing south-east towards the Aventine. It is of this view that Virgil must have been thinking when he wrote of the happy lot of the countryman who nec ferrea iura insanumque forum aut populi tabularia vidit.[28] For the Forum is crowded with bustling human figures, intent on the business of politics, or of the law-courts (ferrea iura), or of money-making, and just beyond it, immediately under the Capitol, are the record-offices (tabularia) of the Roman Empire. The whole Sacra via from this point is crowded; here Horace a generation later was to meet his immortal "bore," from whom he only escaped when the "ferrea iura" laid a strong hand on that terrible companion. Down below, at the entrance to the Forum by the arch of Fabius (fornix Fabiana), the jostling was great. "If I am knocked about in the crowd at the arch," says Cicero, to illustrate a point in a speech of this time, "I do not accuse some one at the top of the via Sacra, but the man who jostles me."[29]