belongs to the very latest Etruscan times, to the transition from Etruscan to Roman life. In the Veientine tomb the main interest comes from the fact that it cannot be later than an early stage in Roman history, and that it may be as much earlier as we choose to think it. It is the same with all the little that is left of Veii. We know that, except the palpable remains of the Roman _municipium_, nothing can be later than B.C. 396, and that anything may be vastly earlier. In the history of Italy, the date when Rome doubled her territory by conquering a city a dozen miles from her gates passes for an early stage. The life of Rome is still before her. In Greece at the same date, the greatness of Athens, the truest greatness of Sparta, is past; the only fresh life that is to come is that of ephemeral Thebes and half-Hellenic Macedonia. We turn from Veii, feeling how thoroughly true in its main outline, how utterly untrustworthy in its detail, is what passes for early Roman history. The legend of Veii counts for less than the legend of Troy, inasmuch as invention and combination are hardly genuine legend at all. But that Veii was and is not, that her fall was the rising point in Rome's destiny, that it was needful for the course of things which has stretched from that day to this that Veii should cease to be--all this we understand ten times the better when we turn from the living tale of Livy to the yet more living witness of the forsaken site. Fidenæ. From the villa of the White Hens we looked across to the _arx_ of Fidenæ as one of the main points in the view. The hill of Castel Giubeleo seems planted there by the hand of nature as a border-defence of Latium against Etruscan attacks. Yet both strong sites and other things sometimes fail to discharge the exact functions which seem to have been laid upon them by the hand of nature. The post which seems designed as the Latin bulwark against the Etruscan does, as a matter of fact, play its chief part in history in the character of an Etruscan outpost on Latin soil. Whether Fidenæ was really such an outpost in the strict sense, whether it was a remnant of the wider Etruscan dominion of the days when the Tiber was not a border-stream, or whether it was a Latin town which, from whatever cause, chose to throw itself on the Etruscan side, it is not only as the enemy of Rome, but as the ally of Veii, that Fidenæ made itself memorable. If we accept the received story, the war which brought about the ruin of Fidenæ was caused because its people slew the envoys of Rome in obedience to the hasty, perhaps misinterpreted, words of a Veientine king. The king who thus took so little heed of the law of nations of course paid his forfeit, and the Royal spoils won from Lars Tolumnius by Aulus Cornelius Cossus formed one of the most cherished relics of the early days of Rome. We may believe the details of the story or not; but the spoils at least were real, if the witness of Augustus Cæsar is to be believed.