In this period of partial servitude it would have contracted the habit of idleness, the most prominent curse of slavery. Later on it was raised to municipal rank, had its own coin and commerce, and developed a racial preference for the arts of war rather than for those of peace. Finally, when Augustus came to reign, he raised Toledo to the rank of a colony, and transmitted to the town the privileges of Merida, making the Carpetanian capital the centre for the collection of tribute. But whatever difference these honours may have made in the town's private history, whatever amount of added prosperity they may have brought it, we are not permitted by the historians to obtain a clearer or more striking figure of Toledo as a colony of Rome than we had of Toledo in its first stage of stipendary town. Here and there an inscription exists as testimony of her advanced rank, such as. L. Terentius Gn. pomp. F. P. P. Bassino Totelano Quaestori Q. Q. Redidili Primo Flamini perpetuo Toleti Et Totius Hispanae Quod hic Termas et viam. Of the baths and the Roman way nothing now remains. Cristobal Lozano, in his _Reyes Nueves de Toledo_, devotes a chapter to the Roman glories of the town, speaks of the Circo Maximo, the temple of Hercules, the Naumachia and amphitheatre, and tells us that the bullfights of Spain date from this period. The temple he describes as being 300 feet in length and 200 feet in width; it was situated in the Vega, and was an object of devotion to the entire province of Carpetania. The celebrated cave of Hercules into which Rodrigo, the last of the Gothic kings, is supposed to have penetrated before the fatal battle of Guadalete, Lozano describes at greater length. The cave is as legendary as Rodrigo's sombre experience therein. It covered the prodigious extent of three leagues, and was composed of thousands of arches, pillars and columns. It was said to have been used as a secret treasury, but was built by Hercules as a royal subterranean palace, and here in prehistoric days the arts of magic were studied. The Romans enlarged it, and during the persecutions it served the Christians as church and oratory and cemetery. Part of it lay under the spell of enchantment by the order of Hercules, and when Spain was flooded with barbarians, and the Goths swept the classic Romans out of Toledo, Hercules hermetically sealed the doors, and tradition asserted that whoever should succeed in bursting open these doors would learn his doom and wed calamity. No Gothic king, until Rodrigo, was strong-minded enough to risk such dreadful peril, and the doors remained sealed. But the unfortunate Rodrigo was as brave as he was curious. He burst through the magic doorway, on which was written