Before him, in the hollow at his feet, on which the morning rays dwelt lovingly, streaming in through the deep valley to the right over the city walls, lay the long street of the Carinæ, the noblest and most sumptuous of Rome, adorned with many residences of the patrician order, and among others, those of Pompey, Cæsar, and the great Latin orator. This broad and noble thoroughfare, from its great width, and the long rows of marble columns, which decked its palaces, all glittering in the misty sunbeams, shewed like a waving line of light among the crowded buildings of the narrower ways, that ran parallel to it along the valley and up the easy slope of the Cælian mount, with the Minervium, in which Arvina stood, leading directly downward to its centre. Beyond this sparkling line, rose the twin summits Oppius and Cispius, of the Esquiline hill, still decked with the dark foliage of the ancestral groves of oak and sweet-chesnut, said to derive their origin from Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, and green with the long grass and towering cypresses of the plebeian cemetery, across which the young man had come home, from the villa of his lady-love, but a few hours before. Beyond the double hill-tops, a heavy purple shadow indicated the deep basin through which ran the ill-famed Suburra, and the "Wicked-Street", so named from the tradition, that therein Tullia compelled her trembling charioteer to lash his reluctant steeds over the yet warm body of her murdered father. And beyond this again the lofty ridge of the Quirinal mount stood out in fair relief with all its gorgeous load of palaces and columns; and the great temple of the city’s founder, the god Romulus Quirinus; and the stupendous range of walls and turrets, along its northern verge, flashing out splendidly to the new-risen sun.