The story in Livy is well imagined. The city whose people Romulus spares at the prayer of his wife has a specially Roman character. Parted as the hill is from the Tiber on three sides, its northern point, the point of a rather long promontory, overhangs the river at the very point of its junction with the Anio. Hence, it would seem, the descriptive name _Antemnae_, the town before the rivers. Such a site belongs to the same class as the hills of Rome. Less isolated than the Palatine or the Aventine, it is as much isolated as the Capitoline was while it still clave to the Quirinal. Such a site, with a descriptive name, can hardly belong to the earliest times; it marks the same degree of progress as the settlement of Rome itself. Cut off as it was from the oldest Rome by the whole of the high ground within and without the Roman walls, such a settlement on the river, a settlement so like Rome itself, might well be felt to be a special rival, a rival which must cease to exist as a hostile post, but whose people might well be incorporated with their more successful kinsfolk.
Of a tale placed in a time which is purely legendary, the utmost that we can say is that the legend falls in with the appearances of the site. Antemnæ has utterly perished; there is not a scrap of wall; some stones which deceive the eye at a distance prove, on coming near, to be part of the rock peeping out through the sides of the otherwise green hill. We believe that no antiquities have been found there. But the site speaks for itself. It is a manifest fortress; the gates are as plain as if their openings were spanned by arches like those of Perugia or Trier. We look out on Fidenæ and its surroundings, on the old battlefields of kings and consuls and emperors; on the bridge of Narses and Garibaldi, on the line of march which brought the Gaul, the Carthaginian, the Samnite, and the Goth to the gates, and some of them within the gates, of Rome. We can look down on nearly the whole of Roman history from the site where once stood Virgil's "turrigeræ Antemnæ." But we are yet farther from being able to tell the towers thereof than we were at Veii and Fidenæ. At Antemnæ the ruins themselves have perished.