arinae, in the depression between the Esquiline and the Quirinal
beneath S. Pietro in Vincoli. These additions, manifestly the
results of a gradual growth, clearly reveal to a certain extent the
earliest history of the Palatine Rome, especially when we compare
with them the Servian arrangement of districts which was afterwards
formed on the basis of this earliest division.
Oldest Settlements in the Palatine and Suburan Regions
The Palatine was the original seat of the Roman community, the oldest
and originally the only ring-wall. The urban settlement, however,
began at Rome as well as elsewhere not within, but under the
protection of, the stronghold; and the oldest settlements with
which we are acquainted, and which afterwards formed the first and
second regions in the Servian division of the city, lay in a circle
round the Palatine. These included the settlement on the declivity
of the Cermalus with the "street of the Tuscans"--a name in which
there may have been preserved a reminiscence of the commercial
intercourse between the Caerites and Romans already perhaps carried
on with vigour in the Palatine city--and the settlement on the
Velia; both of which subsequently along with the stronghold-hill
itself constituted one region in the Servian city. Further, there
were the component elements of the subsequent second region--the
suburb on the Caelian, which probably embraced only its extreme point
above the Colosseum; that on the Carinae, the spur which projects
from the Esquiline towards the Palatine; and, lastly, the valley
and outwork of the Subura, from which the whole region received
its name. These two regions jointly constituted the incipient city;
and the Suburan district of it, which extended at the base of the
stronghold, nearly from the Arch of Constantine to S. Pietro in
Vincoli, and over the valley beneath, appears to have been more
considerable and perhaps older than the settlements incorporated
by the Servian arrangement in the Palatine district, because in the
order of the regions the former takes precedence of the latter. A
remarkable memorial of the distinction between these two portions
of the city was preserved in one of the oldest sacred customs of
the later Rome, the sacrifice of the October horse yearly offered
in the -Campus Martius-: down to a late period a struggle took
place at this festival for the horse's head between the men of the
Subura and those of the Via Sacra, and according as
|