for the veteran soldier who had been serving, perhaps for years,
beyond sea, found it hard to return to the monotonous life of
agriculture, or perhaps found his holding appropriated by some
powerful landholder with whom it would be hopeless to contest
possession. The wars too brought a steadily increasing population
of slaves to the city, many of whom in course of time would be
manumitted, would marry, and so increase the free population. These
are only a few of the many causes at work after the Punic wars which
crammed together in the site of Rome a population which, in the latter
part of the last century B.C., probably reached half a million or even
more.[16]

Let us now descend from the Janiculum, and try to imagine ourselves in
the Rome of Cicero's time, say in the last year of the Republic, 50
B.C., as we walk through the busy haunts of this crowded population.
We will not delay on the right bank of the Tiber, which had probably
long been the home of tradesmen in their gilds,[17] and where farther
down the rich were buying land for gardens[18] and suburban villas;
but cross by the Pons Aemilius, with the Tiber island on our left, and
the opening of the Cloaca maxima, which drained the water from the
Forum, facing us, as it still does, a little to our right. We find
ourselves close to the Forum Boarium, an open cattle-market, with
shops (tabernae) all around it, as we know from Livy's record of
a fire here, which burnt many of these shops and much valuable
merchandise.[19] Here by the river was in fact the market in the
modern sense of the word; the Forum Romanum, which we are making for,
was now the centre of political and judicial business, and of social
life.

We might go direct to the great Forum, up the Velabrum, or valley