uses of the state; and the third and most consid. erable part was divided into thirty portions, to answer to the thirty curiæ, or divisions of the people.

Rome, in its day of glory, abounded in magnificent temples, amphitheatres, and places for exercise and amusement; buildings for the assemblies of the people, public places, piazzas or porticoes, columns, triumphal arches, and trophies, aqueducts, public sewers, and highroads.

The forum was the most ancient public building in Rome; it was composed of a vast assemblage of sumptuous but irregular edifices, forming a spacious oblong square, entirely surrounded by a piazza terminated at each end by a triumphal arch. It was here that the assemblies of the people were held, and harangues delivered to the plebeians, or common people.

Here also justice was administered in vast halls appropriated to the different tribunals; it was, moreover, the residence of the chief bankers, and contained a variety of shops stored with a profusion of the most costly merchandise, and, consequently, was the mart for all important and commercial transactions. This being the emporium of law, politics, and trade, it became equally the resort of the man of business and the lawyer, and was the scene of the chief bustle of the city.

Of its present state we have the following authentic description: "Its temples are fallen; its sanctuaries have crumbled into dust; its colonnades encumber the pavements, now buried under their remains. The walls of the rostra, stripped of their ornaments and doomed to eternal silence; a few shattered porticoes, and here and there an insulated column standing in the midst of broken sh vast fragments of marble capitals, and cornices heaped together in masses; remind the traveller that the fields which he now traverses were once the Roman forum. So far have the modern Romans forgotten the theatre of their glory, and the imperial power of their ancestors, as to degrade it into a common market for cattle."

The aqueducts were by far the noblest proof of the grandeur of Rome. Some of these wonderful channels brought water from upwards of sixty miles, through rocks and mountains and over valleys, supported on arches in some places more than one hundred feet high, one row being placed above another.

The city was cleansed by means of sewers of stupendous magnitude, and of such solid workmanship that, after a lapse of more than two thousand years, though earthquakes have shaken the very foundations of the city, the principal drain is still entire.

The Romans paid extraordinary attention to the construction of roads. They were carried in various directions throughout the whole extent of the vast empire, and were formed with such solidity as

still to remain in many places in perfect repair.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Rome-Divisions of the People.

In the early ages of its history, when Rome was but thinly inhabited, whoever fixed their abode within its limits, obtained the right of citizens; but as the power and extent of the empire increased, and the dignity of a Roman citizen began to be more regarded, this privilege was more sparingly conferred.

The citizens were divided into three tribes, and each tribe into ten curiæ; but the number of tribes was afterwards augmented to thirty-five, and they were separately classed, in order to distinguish between the actual residents of the city and those subjects of the commonwealth who lived wholly without its limits.

The people were, at first, only separated into two ranks, the patrician and plebeian; but the order of equites, or knights, was afterwards added, and at a still later period, slaves were introduced. The population was, therefore, composed of four classes, -patricians, knights, plebeians, and slaves.

The patrician order consisted of those families whose ancestors had been members of the senate

in the earliest periods of the regal or consular government.

The equestrian order arose out of an institution ascribed to Romulus, who is said to have selected one hundred young men from each of the tribes, to serve on horseback as his personal guard.

The plebeian order was composed of the lowest class of freemen. They were divided into country plebeians and city plebeians. The latter consisted not only of the poorer mechanics and laborers, but of a multitude of idlers, whose turbulence was a constant source of disquietude to the govern

ment.

Among this degraded class arose seditions and conspiracies; and the final overthrow of the republic and the extinction of liberty, may be, to a considerable extent, attributed to the increasing strength, and number, and turpitude, of this description of the plebeians. This, however, can be applied only to the lowest class of them. Many of the most estimable citizens were to be found in that order, and not a few rose from it to high offices, and some to the first dignities of the state.

Men became slaves by being taken in war, by being born in a state of servitude, or by being reduced to that condition as a punishment; and they were not entitled to any privileges of freemen, nor considered as citizens.

They really possessed no political rights, and were by law rendered incapable of acquiring property, or of giving evidence in a court of justice; and were viewed in no other light than the chattels or property of their masters.

There was a constant market for slaves at Rome, and regular dealers in the trade of selling them. They were, usually, exposed in a state of nudity, and wore a label on the neck descriptive of their qualities, and seem to have been transferred in much the same manner as cattle.

Masters possessed absolute power over them, and were authorized to put them to death at pleasure, a right often most inhumanly exercised. The laws in regard to them were extremely harsh and rigorous, and one of them provided, that, if a master of a family were slain in his own house, and the murderers were not discovered, all his domestic slaves were liable to be put to death. Tacitus records an instance of four hundred having thus suffered in one family.

Slaves were frequently liberated by their masters, and at that time their heads were shaved and they received a cap as a badge of their liberty, of which it has become the emblem. They then assumed the name of their master, which they preferred to their own, and were ever after called his freedmen.

CHAPTER XXXV.

Rome-Form of Government.

TRADITION describes the original constitution of Rome, as having been purely monarchical; but it was essentially a military democracy, founded on the rude basis of a barbarous horde, submitting, for their common interest, to the dominion of one chieftain; and, by encroaching on the neighboring states, enlarging their territory and their power,