still very high above the plain below; second, pasturage,
for on the slope between the lower town and the arx is the necessary
space which the arx itself hardly supplies; and third, a more reasonable
nearness to the fertile land below. All the conditions necessary are
fulfilled by a cross wall in Praeneste, which up to this time has
remained mostly unknown, often neglected or wrongly described, and
wholly misunderstood. As we shall see, however, this very wall was the
lower boundary of the earliest Praeneste. The establishment of this
important fact will remove one of the many stumbling blocks over which
earlier writers on Praeneste have fallen.

It has been said above that the lowest part of the wall of the arx, and
the two walls from it down the mountain were built at the same time. The
accompanying plate (III) shows very plainly the course of the western
wall as it comes down the hill lining the edge of the slope where it
breaks off most sharply. Porta San Francesco, the modern gate, is above
the second tree from the right in the illustration, just where the wall
seems to turn suddenly. There is no trace of ancient wall after the gate
is passed. The white wall, as one proceeds from the gate to the right,
is the modern wall of the Franciscan monastery. All the writers on
Praeneste say that the ancient wall came on around the town where the
lower wall of the monastery now is, and followed the western limit of
the present town as far as the Porta San Martino.

Returning now to plate II we observe a thin white line of wall which
joins a black line running off at an angle to our left. This is also a
piece of the earliest cyclopean wall, and it is built just at the
eastern edge of the hill where it falls off very sharply.

Now if one follows the Via di San Francesco in from the gate of that
name (see plate III again) and then continues down a narrow street east
of the monastery as far as the open space in front of the church of
Santa Maria del Carmine, he will see that on his left above him the
slope of the mountain was not only precipitous by nature but that also
it has been rendered entirely unassailable by scarping.[32] From the
lower end of this steep escarpment there is a cyclopean wall, of the
same date as the upper side walls of the town, and the wall of the arx,
which runs entirely across the city to within a few yards of the wall on
the east, and to a point just below a portella, where the upper
cyclopean wall