have looked down on many a fierce struggle with the invading occupants of the opposite range of mountains. The walls of Anagni must have endured or yielded to many a fierce attack of their ever-threatening neighbours. As we look out from one of the heights of this region to another, we better understand the political relations of the endless little communities which thus lived on in one another's sight. The ally or the enemy was close at the door; there was not even any need to climb up an akropolis to see what was coming in the way of attack or deliverance. Rome and Veii could not see one another; between them therefore there could be long periods of simple peace, without warfare and without alliance. Rome and Tusculum could see one another; but they were not, so to speak, ostentatiously thrust into one another's sight. But look out from Segni, and your chief business is to look at Anagni; look out from Anagni, and your chief business is to look either at Segni or at Ferentino, according to which way you are looking. If in some lights the long circuit of Segni on its mountain-top is less clearly seen, the lesser hill of Gavignano shows itself in front as its symbol or substitute. Cities standing in this relation to one another could not fail to be either bitter enemies or close allies. They must be always doing something to one another in the way either of friendship or of enmity. It was then no small stroke of policy when Spurius Cassius, of whom it has been so truly said that he was the first Roman whose greatness is really historical, won the Hernican land and its head Anagnia to the alliance of Rome and Latium. He did indeed put a bit in the mouth of the advancing Volscian.