lately excavated, where the Twins watered their steeds after the battle of the lake Regillus.  In front of us we can see over the heads of the crowd the Rostra at the farther end of the Forum, where an orator is perhaps addressing a crowd (contio) on some political question of the moment, and giving some occupation to the idlers in the throng; and to the right of the Rostra is the Comitium or assembling-place of the people, with the Curia, the ancient meeting-hall of the senate.  In Cicero’s day the mere shopman had been got rid of from the Forum, and his place is taken by the banker and money-lender, who do their business in tabernae stretching in rows along both sides of the open space.  Much public business, judicial and other, is done in the Basilicae,—­roofed halls with colonnades, of which there are already five, and a new one is arising on the south side, of which the ground-plan, as it was extended soon afterwards by Julius Caesar, is now completely laid bare.  But it is becoming evident that the business of the Empire cannot be much longer crowded into this narrow space of the Forum, which is only about two hundred yards long by seventy; and the next two generations will see new Fora laid out larger and more commodious, by Julius and Augustus in the direction of the Quirinal.

Now making our way towards the Capitol, we pass the famous temple or rather gate of the double-headed Janus, standing at the entrance to the Forum from the Argiletum and the Porta Esquilina; then the Comitium and Curia (which last was burnt by the mob in 52 B.C., at the funeral of Clodius), and reach the foot of the Clivus Capitolinus, just where was (and is) the ancient underground prison, called Tullianum, from the old word for a spring (tullus), the scene of the deaths of Jugurtha and many noble captives, and of the Catilinarian conspirators on December 5, 63.  Here the via Sacra turns, in front of the temple of Concordia, to ascend the Capitol.  Behind this temple, extending farther under the slope, is the Tabularium, already mentioned, which is still much as it was then; and below us to the south is the temple of Saturnus, the treasury (aerarium) of the Roman people.  Thus at this end of the Forum, under the Capitol, are the whole set of public offices, facing the ancient religious buildings around the Vesta temple at the other end.

The way now turns again to the right, and reaches the depression between the two summits of the Capitoline hill.  Leaving the arx on the left, we reach by a long flight of steps the greatest of all Roman temples, placed on a long platform with solid substructures of Etruscan workmanship, part of which is still to be seen in the garden of the German Embassy.  The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, with his companions Juno and Minerva, was in a special sense the religious centre of the State and its dominion.  Whatever view he might take of the gods and their cults, every Roman instinctively believed that this great Jupiter,