Cori and Norba are alike cities set on hills, and neither of them has any fear of being hid. But they are set on hills in different senses. Cori occupies the upper part of the sloping hill, and the houses spread down the slope. Norba occupies a large table-land on the edge of the mountains, and its outer wall is carried along the upper rim of a steep and lofty cliff. No dwellings could ever have spread themselves downwards on the side which looks toward the marshes and the sea. But we should hardly have said the outer wall; for the height was so carefully fortified that outlying defences were placed at various points on the side of the cliff wherever the primitive engineers deemed such defences needful. Within the circuit, again, the _arx_ rose on several terraces; its highest point--crowned, we may believe, as usual, by a temple--must have formed a proud object indeed from the vast extent of land and sea which it looks down upon. No other of its ancient neighbours looks down so immediately on the great Pomptine flat as Norba does, as none looks down from so great a height. Cori rather occupies a hill thrown out in front of the mountain; Norba sits on the edge of the mountain itself, though of course at a much lower elevation than the huge masses further inland. The towers and temples of the city must have had a wonderful effect from the lands below; as it is, there is nothing to mark the place but the line of wall itself, which does not always stand out in a very marked way from the cliff. It is then perhaps in some sort well that the later Norma has taken the place of Norba. On the hill of Norba we see that Norma and Norba by no means join one another; there is a gap between them which, while we are on the mountain, might pass for a valley. But as we look from below, the winding outline of the hills puts this gap out of sight, and Norma and Norba become in appearance one whole. Norma looks like a continuation of Norba; it might pass for its still inhabited part, perhaps, as at Syracuse and Girgenti, for the elder stronghold within which the city had again shrunk up. From the points where the eye can take in ruined Ninfa at the foot of the cliff, and the further town of Sermoneta crowning a hill-top far lower than the height of Norba, the whole grouping is wonderful. The view from Norba itself takes in points with which we have become familiar since we first gazed on them from the height of the Latian Jupiter. But we see them in new groupings and new proportions; the islands, prisons for dangerous or discreditable members of the Imperial house, stand out in special prominence in front of the Circæan height--a height so nearly cut off from the mainland that it seems like the greatest of the island group. Nowhere do we better understand what men looked on as a great and strong city in days when they had not yet learned that an element of truer might lurked in what, judged by the standard of Norba, would seem a mere group of