was confined to a few individuals, and at first obtained no public recognition.  On the contrary, for reasons that we are at a loss to find, this Greek cult seems to have reached very large proportions in the little town of Tibur (Tivoli), fourteen miles north-east of Rome.  There it dominated all other worship and lost so much of its foreign atmosphere that it became thoroughly latinised.  In the course of time the Roman state acknowledged this Tivoli cult of Hercules and accepted a branch of it as its own.  But the extraordinary thing about this acknowledgment is that the Romans felt it to be a Latin and not a foreign cult.  They showed this intimate and friendly feeling by permitting an altar to Hercules to be erected within the city proper, in the Forum Boarium.  But in order to understand the significance of this act a word of digression is necessary.

Under the old Roman regime every act of life was performed under the supervision of the gods, and this godly patronage was especially emphasised in acts which affected the life of the community.  No act was of greater importance for the community than the choice of a home, the location of a settlement.  Thus the founding of an ancient city was accompanied by sacred rites, chief among which was the ploughing of a furrow around the space which was ultimately to be enclosed by the wall.  This furrow formed a symbolic wall on very much the same principle as that on which the witch draws her circle.  The furrow was called the pomerium and was to the world of the gods what the city wall was to the world of men.  It did not however always coincide with the actual city wall, and the space it embraced was sometimes less, sometimes more, than that embraced by the city wall; and just as new walls covering larger territory could be built for the city, so a new pomerium line could be drawn.  As was becoming for a spiritual barrier there was nothing to mark it except the boundary stones through which the imaginary line passed.  The wall, which Servius built and which continued to be the outer wall of Rome for a period of eight or nine hundred years until the third Christian century, was at the time of its building coincident in the main with the line of the pomerium, with one very important exception:  namely that all the region of the Aventine, which was inside the limits of the political city and embraced by the Servian wall, lay outside the pomerium line and was in other words outside the religious city.  It continued thus all through the republic and into the empire until the reign of Claudius.  Originally the pomerium line played an important part in the religious world and it continued to do so until the middle of the republic, during the Second Punic War, when its sanctity was destroyed and it lost its real religious significance, though it remained as a formal institution.  As a divine barrier it served originally in the world of the gods very much the same purpose as the material wall of stone did