and indistinguishable gardens under the woods, women and girls are gathering strawberries and loading them up in great wicker baskets for the market of Rome.  The sound of sawing comes from a few old houses by the lake-side, that once were mills turned by the nymph Egeria’s stream, where Ovid drank.  Opposite, across the lake, on the top of the old crater’s edge, stands a brown village—­the church tower, unoccupied “palace,” huddled walls and roofs piled up the steep, as Italian villages are made.  That is Genzano.  On the precipitous crag high above our heads stands a more ancient village, with fortress tower, unoccupied castle, crumbling gates, and the walls and roofs of dwellings huddled around them.  That is Nemi, the village of the sacred wood.

Except where the rock is too steep for growth, the slopes of the deep hollow are covered with trees and bushes on every side.  But the trees are thickest where the slope falls most gently—­so gently that from the foot of the crater to the water’s edge the ground for a few hundred yards might almost be called a bit of plain.  Under the trees there the best strawberries grow, and there stood the temple of mysterious and blood-stained rites.  Prowling continually round and round one of the trees, the ghastly priest was for centuries there to be seen: 

  “The priest who slew the slayer,
  And shall himself be slain.”

No one can tell in what prehistoric age the succession of murdering and murdered priests first began that vigil for their lives.  It continued with recurrent slaughter through Rome’s greatest years.  About the time when Virgil was still alive, or perhaps just after Christ himself was born, the geographer Strabo appears actually to have seen that living assassin and victim lurking in the wood; for he vividly describes him “with sword always drawn, turning his eyes on every side, ready to defend himself against an onslaught.”  Possibly the priest suspected Strabo himself for his outlandish look and tongue, for only a runaway slave might murder and succeed him.  Possibly it was that self-same priest whom Caligula, a few years after Christ’s death, hired a stalwart ruffian to finish off, because he was growing old and decrepit, having defended himself from onslaughts too long.  Upon the lake the Emperor constructed two fine house-boats, devoted to the habits that house-boats generally induce (you may still fish up bits of their splendour from the bottom, if you have luck), and very likely it was annoying to watch the old man still doddering round his tree with drawn sword.  One would like to ask whether the crazy tyrant was aware how well he was fulfilling the ancient rite by ordaining the slaughter of decrepitude.  And one would like to ask also whether the stalwart ruffian himself took up the line of consecrated and ghastly succession.  Someone, at all events, took it up; for in the bland age of the Antonines the priest was still there, pacing with drawn sword, turning his eyes in every direction, lest his successor should spring upon him unawares.