Benevento was a kind of curiosity on the historical map of Europe. But the city had its ups and downs before those days, and amongst other things it had gone through a somewhat grotesque change of name. It is hard to believe that a city placed so far inland can really have been of Greek origin; but legend attributed it to a Greek founder, and its oldest name had a Greek sound. Greek _Maloeis_, Samnite _Maluentum_, had, when it was read into Latin _Maloventum_, an ill sound; so, when the Samnite stronghold was changed into the Roman colony, it took the name of Beneventum, city of welcome. Beneventum, marked by Procopius as a strong city in a high place, stands low as compared with the true hill-cities. Still, as compared with Capua, it might itself pass for a hill-city. It has just that amount of rise above the river which there commonly is where there is a river, such a rise as may be seen in many an English town which is not as Durham or Lincoln. We miss the primæval walls of the hill-cities; but we find, on the other hand, works of Roman and mediæval art such as in the hill-cities we do not find. The arch of Trajan has vanished from Rome, except so far as it lives in the sculptures which were torn from it to enrich the arch of Constantine. But at Benevento, as at Ancona, the memorial of the conqueror of Dacia still abides. The Beneventan arch may indeed fairly take its place in the Roman series. It belongs essentially to the same class of designs as the arch of Severus and the arch of Constantine, while it has little in common with its own tall and slender fellow at Ancona. At the same time, since it has, in general effect at least, taken upon itself something of the position of a town-gate, since it bears the name of _Porta aurea_, to match the golden gate of Constantinople and the golden gate of Spalato, the arch of Beneventum has now a somewhat greater air of reality than triumphal arches commonly have. The weak point of that class of structures is that they are of no use. They do not, like a wall, a gateway, a house, a temple, a hall of council, serve any purpose in the ordinary economy of things. They are purely monumental, set up to commemorate something or somebody, but in no way to help on men's daily affairs, public or private. And yet they are not mere monuments, like a statue or an inscribed stone. A large building of this kind, having very much the air of a building which does serve some purpose, is a little deceptive. It is so like a real gateway that it calls up the thought of a real gateway, and leaves us a little disappointed at finding that the building, after all, never was of any use to anybody, and was set up simply to be looked at. There is, therefore, something a little unsatisfactory in the whole class of triumphal arches, and it may even be that a slightly ludicrous element is thrown in when we find that the immediate occasion for rearing this record of the life and exploits