odern Rieti), and was
originally the bed of a lake. Its waters are so strongly impregnated
with carbonate of lime that by their deposit of travertine they tend
to block their own channel. The drainage of Rosea has, therefore,
always been a matter of concern to the live stock industry of Reate,
and in B.C. 272 M. Curius Dentatus opened the first of several
successful artificial canals (the last dating from the sixteenth
century, A.D.), which still serve to lead the Velinus into the Nar at
the renowned Cascate delle Marmore. For two hundred years the people
of Interamna (the modern Terni) had complained that their situation
below the falls was endangered by Curius' canal, and finally in B.C.
54 the Roman Senate appointed the commission to which Appius Claudius
refers in the text, to hear the controversy. Cicero was retained as
counsel for the people of Reate, and during the hearing stopped, as
Appius Claudius did, with our friend Axius at his Reatine villa, and
wrote about the visit to the same Atticus whom we met in Varro's
second book, as follows (_ad Atticum_, IV, 15): "After this was over
the people of Reate summoned me to their Tempe to plead their
cause against the people of Interamna, before the Consul and ten
commissioners, the question being concerning the Veline lake, which,
drained by M. Curius by means of a channel cut through the mountain,
now flows into the Nar: by this means the famous Rosea has been
reclaimed from the swamp, though still fairly moist. I stopped with
Axius, who took me also to visit the Seven Waters." What was once
deemed a danger is a double source of profit to the modern folk of
Interamna. Tourists today crowd to see the same waterfall which Cicero
visited, taking a tram from the busy little industrial town of Terni:
and the waters which flow from Velinus now serve to generate power
with which armour plates are manufactured for the Italian navy on the
site of the ancient Interamna.]

[Footnote 161: Sicilian honey was famous for its flavour because of
the bee pasture of thyme which there abounded, especially at Hybla.
Theophrastus (H.P. III, 15, 5) explains that the honey of Corsica had
an acrid taste, because the bees pastured there largely on box trees.]

[Footnote 162: These denizens of the Roman villa are all enumerated by
Martial in his delightful verses (III, 38) upon Faustinus' villa at
Baiae. The picture of the barn yard is very true to life in all ages,
especially the touch of t