The line of the mound or rampart may still be distinctly traced, and the course and extent of the walls can be sufficiently ascertained; but very few remains are left of the actual building. But the masonry with which the bank of the Tiber was built up, a work ascribed to the elder Tarquinius, and resembling the works of the Babylonian kings along the banks of the Euphrates, is still visible. So also are the massy substructions of the Capitoline temple, which were made in order to form a level surface for the building to stand on, upon one of the two summits of the Capitoline Hill. Above all, enough is still to be seen of the great cloaca or drain, to assure us that the accounts left us of it are not exaggerated. The foundations of this work were laid about forty feet under ground, its branches were carried under a great part of the city, and brought at last into one grand trunk which ran down into the Tiber exactly to the west of the Palatine Hill. It thus drained the waters of the low grounds on both sides of the Palatine; of the Velabrum, between the Palatine and the Aventine; and of the site of the Forum between the Palatine and the Capitoline. The stone employed in the cloaca is in itself a mark of the great antiquity of the work; it is not the peperino of Gabii and the Alban hills, which was the common building stone in the time of the commonwealth; much less the travertino, or limestone of the neighbourhood of Tibur, the material used in the great works of the early emperors; but it is the stone found in Rome itself, a mass of volcanic materials coarsely cemented together, which afterwards was supplanted by the finer quality of the peperino. Such a work as the cloaca proves the greatness of the power which effected it, as well as the character of its government. It was wrought by task-work, like the great works of Egypt; and stories were long current of the misery and degradation which it brought upon the people during its progress. But this task-work for these vast objects shows a strong and despotic government, which had at its command the whole resources of the people; and such a government could hardly have existed, unless it had been based upon some considerable extent of dominion.