the requirements of a great fleet.  Therefore the first act of Augustus, when he had chosen Ravenna as his naval base, was the construction of a proper port and harbour, and these came to be named, after the fleet they served and accommodated, Classis.  Classis was situated some two and a half miles from the town of Ravenna to the east-south-east.  We may perhaps have some idea both of its situation and of its relation to Ravenna if we say that it was to that city what the Porto di Lido is to Venice.

[Footnote 1:  Pliny, iii. 20; cf. also Strabo, v. 7.]

It is very difficult, in looking upon Ravenna as we see it to-day, to reconstruct it, even in the imagination, as it was when Augustus had done with it.  To begin with, the sea has retreated several miles from the city, which is no longer within sight of it, while all that is left of Classis, which is also now out of sight of the sea, is a single decayed and deserted church, S. Apollinare in Classe.  Strabo, however, who wrote his Geography a few years after Augustus had chosen Ravenna for his port upon the Adriatic, has left us a description both of it and the country in which it stood, from which must be drawn any picture we would possess of so changed a place.  He speaks of it, as we have seen, as “a great city” situated in the marshes, built entirely upon piles, and traversed by canals which were everywhere crossed by bridges or ferry-boats.  While at the full tide he tells us it was swept by the sea and always by the river, and thus the sewage was carried off and the air purified, and this so thoroughly, that even before its establishment by Augustus the district was considered so healthy that the Roman governors had chosen it as a spot in which to train gladiators.[1] That river we know from Pliny[2] was called the Bedesis; and the same writer tells us that Augustus built a canal which brought the water of the Po to Ravenna.

[Footnote 1:  Strabo, v. 7.]

[Footnote 2:  Pliny, iii. 20.]

Tacitus in his Annals[1] merely tells us that Italy was guarded on both sides by fleets at Misenum and Ravenna, and in his Histories[2] speaks of these places as the well known naval stations without stopping to describe them.  While Suetonius,[3] though he mentions the great achievement of Augustus, does not emphasise it and does not attempt to tell us what these ports were like.

[Footnote 1:  Tacitus, Ann. iv. 5.]

[Footnote 2:  Tacitus, Hist. ii. 100; iii. 6, 40.]

[Footnote 3:  Suetonius, Augustus.]

Perhaps the best description we have of Augustan Ravenna comes to us from a writer who certainly never saw the port in its great Roman days, but who probably followed a well established tradition in his description of it.  This is Jornandes, who was born about A.D. 500 and was first a notary at the Ostrogothic court and later became a monk and finally bishop of Crotona.  In his De Getarum Origins et Rebus Gestis he thus describes Ravenna: