from the town of Ravenna to the east-south-east. We may perhaps have
some idea both of its situation and of its relation to Ravenna if we
say that it was to that city what the Porto di Lido is to Venice.

[Footnote 1: Pliny, iii. 20; cf. also Strabo, v. 7.]

It is very difficult, in looking upon Ravenna as we see it to-day, to
reconstruct it, even in the imagination, as it was when Augustus had
done with it. To begin with, the sea has retreated several miles from
the city, which is no longer within sight of it, while all that is
left of Classis, which is also now out of sight of the sea, is a
single decayed and deserted church, S. Apollinare in Classe. Strabo,
however, who wrote his _Geography_ a few years after Augustus had
chosen Ravenna for his port upon the Adriatic, has left us a
description both of it and the country in which it stood, from which
must be drawn any picture we would possess of so changed a place. He
speaks of it, as we have seen, as "a great city" situated in the
marshes, built entirely upon piles, and traversed by canals which were
everywhere crossed by bridges or ferry-boats. While at the full tide
he tells us it was swept by the sea and always by the river, and thus
the sewage was carried off and the air purified, and this so
thoroughly, that even before its establishment by Augustus the
district was considered so healthy that the Roman governors had chosen
it as a spot in which to train gladiators.[1] That river we know from
Pliny[2] was called the Bedesis; and the same writer tells us that
Augustus built a canal which brought the water of the Po to Ravenna.

[Footnote 1: Strabo, v. 7.]

[Footnote 2: Pliny, iii. 20.]