The Forum nowadays is an austere, even at first sight a forbidding place. It looks much more attractive in a painting by Claude Lorraine or a print by Piranesi, with a double row of olives planted down the middle, romantic broken columns, oxen and peasants scattered about the flowered greensward in picturesque confusion, and the Arch of Septimius Severus buried up to its middle. But picturesqueness is not everything. The Forum is history, stark history; every stone is soaked in blood. To understand that history, mere picturesqueness had to be sacrificed; Boni’s graves are not picturesque; they are informative. From them the historical imagination can create a picture of Rome’s beginnings which no Piranesi print could rival. Sixteen feet of picturesqueness had to be cleared before Boni could reach the necropolis level. The cremation tombs are small circular wells, most of them containing, as in the Alban Hills tombs, a _dolium_ or large jar, covered by tufa slabs. In the _dolia_ were found ash-containers, often in the shape of miniatures of huts like the full-sized ones on the Palatine. The oblong graves contained rough sarcophagi of tufa, or coffins made of hollowed-out oak logs. Both types of tomb contained, intact on discovery, tomb furniture not differing much between the types, and not differing much from the finds in the bottom two levels of Puglisi’s Palatine hut; _i.e._, rough _impasto_, decorated with incised spirals, parallel lines (done with a comb) or zigzags; _bucchero_, some _fibulae_ inlaid with amber, glass beads, tiny enamel plaques, remains of funeral offerings of food. It is all very humble, a far cry from the Regolini-Galassi treasure, though some of the tombs are of the same date. The finds show that the necropolis was in use from the ninth to the sixth centuries B.C. The site was, as we saw, on the edge of a swamp; when the swamp was drained, the cemetery went out of use, and huts, of which more later, were built over it. In the necropolis, sometimes inhumation graves cut into cremation ones, sometimes vice versa. There is thus no ground for assuming that the cremation graves are older, especially as the grave-contents of the two types are so similar. The difference is not one of time but of funeral practice, as today; it suggests two different populations living peacefully together. The cremators were related to the people whose graves were found so long ago in the Alban Hills, and, as we have seen, to the Palatine hut-dwellers. Who were the inhumers? We know that other Roman hills than the Palatine were inhabited from very early times, though the natural features of the Palatine seem to give it priority: plenty of fodder, abundant water within easy reach, a retreat made safe at night by the hill and the river for the people and their livestock.