where he could be shown by his friendly host, almost at a glance,
every essential feature of the site, every spot most hallowed by
antiquity in the minds of his readers. Rowing up the river, which
graciously slackened its swift current, Aeneas presently caught sight
of the walls and citadel, and landed just beyond the point where
the Aventine hill falls steeply almost to the water's edge. Here in
historical times was the dockyard of Rome; and here, when the poet was
a child, Cato had landed with the spoils of Cyprus, as the nearest
point of the river for the conveyance of that ill-gotten gain to the
treasury under the Capitol.[3] Virgil imagines the bank clothed with
wood, and in the wood--where afterwards was the Forum Boarium, a
crowded haunt--Aeneas finds Evander sacrificing at the Ara maxima of
Hercules, of all spots the best starting-point for a walk through the
heart of the ancient city. To the right was the Aventine, rising to
about a hundred and thirty feet above the river, and this was the
first of the hills of Rome to be impressed on the mind of the
stranger, by the tale of Hercules and Cacus which Evander tells his
guest. In front, but close by, was the long western flank of the
Palatine hill, where, when the tale had been told and the rites of
Hercules completed, Aeneas was to be shown the cave of the Lupercal;
and again to the left, approaching the river within two hundred yards,
was the Capitol to be:

Hinc ad Tarpeiam sedem et Capitolia ducit,
Aurea nunc, olim silvestribus horrida dumis.

Below it the hero is shown the shrine of the prophetic nymph Carmenta,
with the Porta Carmentalis leading into the Campus Martius; then the
hollow destined one day to be the Forum Romanum, and beyond it, in
the valley of the little stream that here found its way down from the