ween them should be settled by three
champions chosen from each side. Every one knows the story of the
Horatii and the Curiatii: how these hapless brothers and cousins
fought in sight of both armies with a bravery worthy of the stake; and
how, at length, when two of the Roman heroes were slain, and all the
Albans were wounded, the third Roman, who was unhurt, feigned to fly,
and thus separating his enemies, who followed him as well as their
failing strength would permit, easily despatched them one after the
other, and thus gained the victory for the Roman cause. This terrible
tragedy, which terminated the independent existence of the Alban
power, took place in the fields around here; and on the right-hand
side of the road are three huge circular mounds, overgrown with long
rich grass, planted with tall cypress and ilex trees, and surrounded
at the foot with a wall of huge peperino blocks, which antiquarians
have determined to be the tombs of the five slaughtered
combatants--the farther mound being that of the two Horatii, the
second that of one of the Curiatii, and the third that of the other
two Curiatii. These tombs are situated exactly where we should have
expected to find them from the description of Livy; and they are
evidently of far older date than any of the neighbouring tombs of the
imperial period. Their form and construction carry us back in
imagination to the earliest days of Rome, when Etruscan architecture
was universally adopted as a model. For more than twenty-five
centuries the huge tent-like mounds have stood, so strikingly
different in character from all the other sepulchral monuments of the
Appian Way; preserved by the reverential care of successive
generations. The modern Romans have not been behind the ancient in the
pride with which they have regarded these monuments. They have
planted them with the splendid cypress-trees which now add so much to
their picturesqueness, and annually repair the ravages of time. I
climbed up the steep sides through the long slippery grass to the
summits of two of the mounds, and had a grand view of the whole scene
of the tragic story, bathed in the dim misty light which always broods
over the melancholy Campagna like the spectral presence of the past.
The sunshine strove in vain to gild the dark shadows which the
cypresses threw over the mound at my feet, and the lonely wind wailed
wildly through their closely-huddled shivering branches around me.

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