ights of holding, transferring and selling
property, of marrying into another gens and of choosing a guardian, as
if she had received all from a husband by will; that she should be at
liberty to marry a man of free descent, and that he who should marry her
was to incur no degradation, and that all consuls and praetors in the
future should watch over her and see that no harm came to her, as long
as she lived. Her people made her an honourable Roman matron, and
perhaps the stern old senators thus rewarded her in order that the man
she had saved might marry her without shame. But whether he did or not,
no one knows.

[Illustration: CHURCH OF SAINT NEREUS AND SAINT ACHILLAEUS

From a print of the last century]

This is the first instance in which a religion, and the orgies were so
called by the Romans, was practised upon the Aventine in opposition to
that of the State. It was not the last. Under Domitian, Juvenal found a
host of Jews established there, on the eastern slope and about the
fountain of Egeria, and thirty years before him Saint Paul lived on the
Aventine in the Jewish house of Aquila and Priscilla where Santa Prisca
stands today. It is worth noting that Aquila, an eagle, the German
Adler, was already then a Jewish name. Little by little, however, the
Jews went back to the Tiber, and the Aventine became the stronghold of
the Christians; there they built many of their oldest churches, and
thence they carried out their dead to the near catacombs of Saint
Petronilla, the church better known as that of Saint Nereus and Saint
Achillaeus. And there are many other ancient churches on the hill, and on
the road that leads to Saint Sebastian's gate, and beyond the walls, on
the Appian Way as far as Saint Callixtus; lonely, peaceful shrines,
beautiful with the sculptures and pavements and mosaics of the Cosmas
family who lived and worked between six and seven hundred years ago. On
the other side of the hill, near the Circus, Saint Augustine taught
rhetoric for a living, though he knew no Greek and was perhaps no great
Latin scholar either--still an unbeliever then, an astrologer and a
follower after strange doctrines, one whom no man could have taken for a
future bishop and Father of the Church, who was to be author of two
hundred and thirty-two theological treatises, as well as of an
exposition of the Psalms and the Gospels. Here Saint Gregory the Great,
once Prefect of Rome, preached and prayed, and here the fierce
Hil