But our attention is not long arrested by these objects; it is soon riveted on the Forum below and in front of us, to which the Sacred Way leads by a downward slope, the Clivus sacer.  At the north-western end it is closed in by the Capitoline hill, with its double summit, the arx to the right, and the great temple of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva facing south-east towards the Aventine.  It is of this view that Virgil must have been thinking when he wrote of the happy lot of the countryman who

  nec ferrea iura
  insanumque forum aut populi tabularia vidit.[28]

For the Forum is crowded with bustling human figures, intent on the business of politics, or of the law-courts (ferrea iura), or of money-making, and just beyond it, immediately under the Capitol, are the record-offices (tabularia) of the Roman Empire.  The whole Sacra via from this point is crowded; here Horace a generation later was to meet his immortal “bore,” from whom he only escaped when the “ferrea iura” laid a strong hand on that terrible companion.  Down below, at the entrance to the Forum by the arch of Fabius (fornix Fabiana), the jostling was great.  “If I am knocked about in the crowd at the arch,” says Cicero, to illustrate a point in a speech of this time, “I do not accuse some one at the top of the via Sacra, but the man who jostles me."[29]

The Forum—­for from this point we can take it all in, geologically and historically—­lies in a deep hollow, to the original level of which excavation has now at last reached.  This hollow was formed by a stream which came down between the Esquiline and the Quirinal beyond it, and made its exit towards the river on the other side by way of the Velabrum.  As the city extended itself, amalgamating with another community on the Quirinal, this hollow became a common meeting-place and market, and the stream was in due time drained by that Cloaca which we saw debouching into the Tiber near the bridge we crossed.  The upper course of this stream, between Esquiline and Quirinal, is a densely populated quarter known as the Argiletum, and higher up as the Subura,[30] where artisans and shops abounded.  The lower part of its course, where it has become an invisible drain, is also a crowded street, the vicus Tuscus, leading to the Velabrum, and so to our starting-point at the Forum Boarium.

Let us now descend the Clivus sacer, crossing to the right-hand side of the slope, which the via Sacra now follows, and reach the Forum by the fornix Fabiana.  Close by to our left is the round temple of Vesta, where the sacred fire of the State is kept ever burning by its guardians, the Vestal Virgins, and here too is their dwelling, the Atrium Vestae, and also that of the Pontifex Maximus (Regia), in whose potestas they were; these three buildings, then insignificant to look at, constituted the religious focus of the oldest Rome.[31] A little farther again to the left is the temple of Castor and the spring of Juturna,