Of a tale placed in a time which is purely legendary, the utmost that we can say is that the legend falls in with the appearances of the site. Antemnæ has utterly perished; there is not a scrap of wall; some stones which deceive the eye at a distance prove, on coming near, to be part of the rock peeping out through the sides of the otherwise green hill. We believe that no antiquities have been found there. But the site speaks for itself. It is a manifest fortress; the gates are as plain as if their openings were spanned by arches like those of Perugia or Trier. We look out on Fidenæ and its surroundings, on the old battlefields of kings and consuls and emperors; on the bridge of Narses and Garibaldi, on the line of march which brought the Gaul, the Carthaginian, the Samnite, and the Goth to the gates, and some of them within the gates, of Rome. We can look down on nearly the whole of Roman history from the site where once stood Virgil's "turrigeræ Antemnæ." But we are yet farther from being able to tell the towers thereof than we were at Veii and Fidenæ. At Antemnæ the ruins themselves have perished. Ostia. From the nearest neighbours and rivals of Rome, from the slight remains which mark the sites of Veii and Fidenæ, from the almost more instructive lack of remains which marks the site of Antemnæ, we may well pass to a spot which lies at a greater distance from Rome than any of them, but which never was Rome's rival or even neighbour, because it was from the beginning simply an outlying part of Rome itself. This is the forsaken haven of Rome at Ostia. The existence of Ostia at an early stage of the historic being of Rome is no small sign of what Rome already was, and it may well have had no small share in making Rome what she afterwards was to be. For an inland town like Rome to possess a haven of its own, existing solely as its haven, at once marked and strengthened the difference between Rome and other inland towns. For Ostia, it must be borne in mind, was the haven of Rome and nothing else. It was not a separate maritime city made into the haven of Rome by any process of conquest or confederation. Tradition makes Ostia spring into being because it was found that Rome needed a haven. And the tradition has nothing to contradict it and all likelihood to support it; the name of the place by itself might almost be accepted as proving its truth. The foundation of Ostia, too, is placed in a period which is eminently a traditional, as distinguished from a legendary, period. It is safer not to rule either that there was a personal Ancus Marcius or that there was not; but we may be pretty sure that the events assigned to his reign really happened, if we can only keep ourselves from attempting dates where there is no chronology. Tradition then calls Ancus the founder of Ostia. The really important point is that whoever founded Ostia founded it purely in the interest of Rome,