We took a kind of Pisgah view of Antemnæ both from the road to the White Hens and from the road to Fidenæ. As we before said, it ought to be examined as one of the objects on this last road; only things are not always as they ought to be. We must therefore start afresh from the Flaminian gate and for the third time make our way to the Milvian bridge. This time as our course is to lead us to one of the oldest sites in Roman history, it may be well, by way of contrast, to let the bridge call up thoughts of warfare yet later than that of Constantine. It was on the Roman side of the Milvian bridge, when the bridge itself, which he had fortified, was betrayed to the Gothic enemy, that Belisarius, with another Maxentius at his side, withstood the host which Witigis had led from Narnia. Readers either of Procopius or of Gibbon must remember how every dart was aimed at the bay horse, and how the rider of the bay horse escaped without a wound. This time we keep ourselves, with Belisarius, on the Roman side of the bridge. We are therefore not tempted to have our thoughts carried off into quite another part of the world by the statue of a famous Bohemian saint, who is said by some Bohemian scholars to be a purely imaginary being. Our present business is not with Saint John Nepomuk, not even with Belisarius or with Constantine; we have to do with times before Rome was, when Tiber still parted the free Etruscan from the free Latin. We walk along his left bank, keeping within the bounds of Latium, but with the eye tempted at every moment to look across to the opposite, the Etruscan bank. Both banks are so quiet, both are so nearly forsaken, both come so easily within an ordinary walk from our Roman quarters, that it is hard to call up the days when Tiber was the boundary stream, not merely of separate commonwealths, not merely of distinct and hostile nations, but of nations between which there was no tie of origin, language, or religion. To be sold beyond the Tiber was the most frightful of all dooms which spared life and limb. If the debtor were sold to Ardea or Tusculum, he might win his freedom and become a denizen of a city of his own speech. To sell him beyond the Tiber was like handing him over to bondage among Turks or Moors. But our path keeps us on the Latin side, in a land which, when it was inhabited at all, was inhabited by men of an intelligible speech. We peer under a rocky cliff, the riverward slope of the hill which rises just outside the Flaminian Gate of Rome. On that hill Witigis held his headquarters when Belisarius and Saint Peter between them guarded the Pincian. But, we ask, why did not some city, why did not Rome itself, arise on a site which seems so thoroughly suited for the needs of an ancient settlement? But we have to go further for what we seek; no record tells of any settlement on the Monte Parioli. We pass on by a few tombs in the hill-side, and we more distinctly make out the shape of a grassy hill parted by a wide alluvial plain from the river on the eastern side by which we approach. That is the hill of Antemnæ, a vanished city whose legendary story may be summed up in a few but instructive words. Antemnæ was older than Rome. It was one of the towns whose daughters supplied objects for that great act of what our forefathers called _Quenfang_, what sociologists called _exogamy_, which secured that the Roman State should last more than one generation. War follows; Rome prevails; Hersilia, wife of Romulus, but so strangely mother of nobody, pleads for the conquered, and Antemnæ is merged, in Rome. We may be sure that this is the genuine story, rather than others which give Antemnæ a longer life. In sober history its sole record seems to be that in Strabo's day the town had wholly passed away, and that the site was, as now, like Fidenæ, the possession of a single man.