of those recently discovered at Praeneste, have been,
exactly like the —thesauroi—of
Orchomenos and Mycenae, roofed over with courses of
stone placed one above another, gradually overlapping,
and closed by a large stone cover. A very ancient
building at the city wall of Tusculum was roofed in
the same way, and so was originally the well-house
(-tullianum-) at the foot of the Capitol, till the
top was pulled down to make room for another building.
The gates constructed on the same system are entirely
similar in Arpinum and in Mycenae. The tunnel
which drains the Alban lake(18) presents the greatest
resemblance to that of lake Copais. What are
called Cyclopean ring-walls frequently occur in Italy,
especially in Etruria, Umbria, Latium, and Sabina,
and decidedly belong in point of design to the most
ancient buildings of Italy, although the greater portion
of those now extant were probably not executed till
a much later age, several of them certainly not till
the seventh century of the city. They are, just
like those of Greece, sometimes quite roughly formed
of large unwrought blocks of rock with smaller stones
inserted between them, sometimes disposed in square
horizontal courses,(19) sometimes composed of polygonal
dressed blocks fitting into each other. The selection
of one or other of these systems was doubtless ordinarily
determined by the material, and accordingly the polygonal
masonry does not occur in Rome, where in the most
ancient times tufo alone was employed for building.
The resemblance in the case of the two former and
simpler styles may perhaps be traceable to the similarity
of the materials employed and of the object in view
in building; but it can hardly be deemed accidental
that the artistic polygonal wall-masonry, and the
gate with the path leading up to it universally bending
to the left and so exposing the unshielded right side
of the assailant to the defenders, belong to the Italian
fortresses as well as to the Greek. The facts
are significant that in that portion of Italy which
was not reduced to subjection by the Hellenes but yet
was in lively intercourse with them, the true polygonal
masonry was at home, and it is found in Etruria only
at Pyrgi and at the towns, not very far distant from
it, of Cosa and Saturnia; as the design of the walls
of Pyrgi, especially when we take into account the
significant name ("towers"), may just as certainly
be ascribed to the Greeks as that of the walls of
Tiryns, in them most probably there still stands before
our eyes one of the models from which the Italians
learned how to build their walls. The temple
in fine, which in the period of the empire was called
the Tuscanic and was regarded as a kind of style co-ordinate
with the various Greek temple-structures, not only
generally resembled the Greek temple in being an enclosed
space (-cello-) usually quadrangular, over which walls
and columns raised aloft a sloping roof, but was also
in details, especially in the column itself and its