a hundred times before he left school. Niebuhr seems also to have
forgotten that Martial has fellow culprits to keep him in
countenance. Horace has committed the same decided blunder; for
he give us, as a pure iambic line,--

"Minacis aut Etrusca Porsenæ dextram;"

Silius Italicus has repeatedly offended in the same way, as when
he says,--"Clusinum vulgus, cum, Porsena magne, jubebas." A
modern writer may be content to err in such company.

Niebuhr's supposition that each of the three defenders of the
bridge was the representative of one of the three patrician
tribes is both ingenious and probable, and has been adopted in
the following poem.

Horatius


A Lay Made About the Year Of The City CCCLX

I

Lars Porsena of Closium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,