perhaps of the capture of Suessa in the Pomptine plain, can be held to contain a nucleus of historical fact.  That the regal period laid not only the political foundations of Rome, but the foundations also of her external power, cannot be doubted; the position of the city of Rome as contradistinguished from, rather than forming part of, the league of Latin states is already decidedly marked at the beginning of the republic, and enables us to perceive that an energetic development of external power must have taken place in Rome during the time of the kings.  Certainly great deeds, uncommon achievements have in this case passed into oblivion; but the splendour of them lingers over the regal period of Rome, especially over the royal house of the Tarquins, like a distant evening twilight in which outlines disappear.

Enlargement of the City of Rome—­Servian Wall

While the Latin stock was thus tending towards union under the leadership of Rome and was at the same time extending its territory on the east and south, Rome itself, by the favour of fortune and the energy of its citizens, had been converted from a stirring commercial and rural town into the powerful capital of a flourishing country.  The remodelling of the Roman military system and the political reform of which it contained the germ, known to us by the name of the Servian constitution, stand in intimate connection with this internal change in the character of the Roman community.  But externally also the character of the city cannot but have changed with the influx of ampler resources, with the rising requirements of its position, and with the extension of its political horizon.  The amalgamation of the adjoining community on the Quirinal with that on the Palatine must have been already accomplished when the Servian reform, as it is called, took place; and after this reform had united and consolidated the military strength of the community, the burgesses could no longer rest content with entrenching the several hills, as one after another they were filled with buildings, and with possibly also keeping the island in the Tiber and the height on the opposite bank occupied so that they might command the course of the river.  The capital of Latium required another and more complete system of defence; they proceeded to construct the Servian wall.  The new continuous city-wall began at the river below the Aventine, and included that hill, on which there have been brought to light recently (1855) at two different places, the one on the western slope towards the river, the other on the opposite eastern slope, colossal remains of those primitive fortifications—­portions of wall as high as the walls of Alatri and Ferentino, built of large square hewn blocks of tufo in courses of unequal height—­emerging as it were from the tomb to testify to the might of an epoch, whose buildings subsist imperishably in these walls of rock, and whose intellectual achievements will continue