Though, according to Gibbon, Petronell on the one side and Hainburg on the other, disputed with Altenburg the honour of being Carnuntum, excavations in the neighbourhood of the last-named place established its claim, despite the fact that each of the others has Roman relics to show. An amphitheatre and other buildings have been revealed, which are made the more interesting from the fact that it was at Carnuntum that Severus Septimus was proclaimed Emperor, and that it was at Carnuntum that the Emperor Marcus Aurelius spent three years, while the Germanic tribes of the Quadi and the Marcomanni were threatening, and from Carnuntum that the philosopher-emperor dated the second of those “Meditations,” that have given him a fame more enduring than his conquests. Here the Fourteenth Legion was stationed, and near here was the harbourage of the Roman Danube flotilla. In the museum, opened in 1904, are preserved many of the recovered links of the place with its Roman past. It was at Carnuntum, too, that Theodoric the Ostrogoth was born, it is said, two days after the death of Attila. The next town, Hainburg, backed by the high, flattened, conical Schlossberg, is another very old place, now first noticeable for its extensive Government tobacco factory. Its old walls and towers afford many picturesque bits. A sculptured figure on one of the gates is said to represent King Etzel, thus serving to keep alive the tradition that the ruins of the castle on the conical berg, are the remains of the one in which King Etzel and Kriemhilda rested on their journey from Vienna to the Hunnish King’s capital. After the earlier flat country through which the river has brought us from Vienna, the scenery has now become more picturesque with the rising ground on the right, and soon we see ahead of us the rocky frontier of the kingdom of Hungary, and the broad extent of the frontier boundary river, the March, flowing in on the left around it. FOOTNOTES: [11] “The Danube,” by William Beattie, M.D., 1844. III THE HUNGARIAN DANUBE CHAPTER VIII FROM THE OLD CAPITAL TO THE NEW “... Where kings have first been girt with Stephen’s sword, Have first worn Stephen’s crown.” _From the Magyar_