hill parted by a wide alluvial plain from the river on the eastern side by which we approach. That is the hill of Antemnæ, a vanished city whose legendary story may be summed up in a few but instructive words. Antemnæ was older than Rome. It was one of the towns whose daughters supplied objects for that great act of what our forefathers called _Quenfang_, what sociologists called _exogamy_, which secured that the Roman State should last more than one generation. War follows; Rome prevails; Hersilia, wife of Romulus, but so strangely mother of nobody, pleads for the conquered, and Antemnæ is merged, in Rome. We may be sure that this is the genuine story, rather than others which give Antemnæ a longer life. In sober history its sole record seems to be that in Strabo's day the town had wholly passed away, and that the site was, as now, like Fidenæ, the possession of a single man. The story in Livy is well imagined. The city whose people Romulus spares at the prayer of his wife has a specially Roman character. Parted as the hill is from the Tiber on three sides, its northern point, the point of a rather long promontory, overhangs the river at the very point of its junction with the Anio. Hence, it would seem, the descriptive name _Antemnae_, the town before the rivers. Such a site belongs to the same class as the hills of Rome. Less isolated than the Palatine or the Aventine, it is as much isolated as the Capitoline was while it still clave to the Quirinal. Such a site, with a descriptive name, can hardly belong to the earliest times; it marks the same degree of progress as the settlement of Rome itself. Cut off as it was from the oldest Rome by the whole of the high ground within and without the Roman walls, such a settlement on the river, a settlement so like Rome itself, might well be felt to be a special rival, a rival which must cease to exist as a hostile post, but whose people might well be incorporated with their more successful kinsfolk.