Both in former and recent times many attempts have been made to give an historical character to the legend that the three different communities which composed the ancient Roman nation once dwelt within separate walls on the Seven Hills; but the scientific inquirer is obliged to banish it to the same regions as the battle of the Palatine and the graceful story of Tarpeia. There exists, it is true, a real and very decided distinction between the fortification of the Capitol and the erection of the town walls. The Capitol is in name and fact the Acra of Rome, the town with one gate and a town fountain, the carefully fenced “spring house” (tullianum). That this fortification dates far back to a time when as yet there was no settlement at all in this neighbourhood, is shown by a custom which was scrupulously observed down to a late period, and according to which private houses did not and perhaps were not allowed to stand on the twin peaks of the Capitol. On the other hand the town contained a treasure chamber with the archives, the prison, and the oldest place of assembly for the councillors as well as the citizens. The space between the two peaks of the Capitoline Hill, the sanctuary of the angry Jupiter (_Vediovis_) or as it was called in the later hellenising period, the Asylum, was covered with a wood and evidently originally intended to shelter the peasants and their flocks when flood or war drove them from the plain. In Rome, as everywhere else, the urban settlement must have begun not within but below the citadel; when it was considerable enough to call for the protection of a wall and moat, the town proper first came into being outside the Capitol, and to this, again, suburbs were added, and as these also prospered and required to be defended, new walls were added and in the marshes a new dike, until a whole series of such separate circumvallations surrounded the citadel. It was the memory of this which was preserved in the “festival of the Seven Hills” (_Septimontium_), whose celebration was continued long after the ancient fortifications had ceased to exist.