136 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
carried along the south side of the Palatine. This gives a far better 
defensive line, avoids the inclusion (which does not seem reasonable) of 
the place reserved for games and festivals within the area which had to 
be protected by a wall, and explains the non-inclusion of the Aventine 
within the pomoerium until the time of Claudius. 
Of the Cloaca Maxima little or nothing remains that belongs to the 
original structure ; and indeed in the time of Plautus it was called canalis,” 
and may have still been open at any rate for part of its course; for the 
whole this seems an almost impossibly insanitary supposition. 
We have, too, a number of branch drains which must have eventually 
led into it from the slopes of the Capitol—though conditions have been 
so altered that some of them now give into the open. I think they may 
be claimed as dating from the sixth or fifth century B.c., and as being 
thus by over a century the earliest Roman arches in existence. 
But in this connection I would like to remind you that here we are 
dealing with a soft volcanic stone—the kind of tufa known as cappellaccio. 
When Appius Claudius built the Via Appia in 312 B.c., and his engineers 
had to build an embankment wall to carry the road along a hillside, we 
may see that, where they had to deal with the hard local limestone, they 
did not waste labour either in making a curved arch for the culvert, 
contenting themselves with inclining the sides gradually and then putting 
a lintel over, or in making the courses of the embankment wall horizontal, 
A century ago both these peculiarities were taken to betoken a high 
antiquity, and some of our own countrymen, more especially Gell and 
Dodwell, searched out all the remains of Cyclopean construction they 
could find in Central and Southern Italy, and carefully drew and noted 
them. But the same adaptation of means to ends may be seen in modern 
railway embankments in Switzerland, and, as Choisy rightly remarked, 
is rather a geological fact than anything else. 
The course of the Cloaca Maxima, as shown on the map,? resembles, 
as Lanciani remarks, rather that of an Alpine torrent than of a carefully 
constructed drain; and its origin, from the canalisation of a stream 
meandering at the bottom of a flat valley, as the Tiber does at present, 
is sufficiently clear: though some of its windings are due to the erection 
of buildings under the Empire, e.g. the temple of Minerva in the Forum 
of Nerva. The mouth of the Cloaca, with its three concentric arches of 
volcanic tufa, which may be assigned to 100 B.c. or a little before,4 was 
much more picturesque before the construction of the modern embank- 
ment. 
It is now a mere dummy, as the Cloaca itself, which still performs its 
functions, has been conducted into the new main sewer (the Collettore, as 
it is called) which runs just inside the embankment. 
There is therefore no possibility of a repetition of the flooding of the 
Forum, as described by Horace— 
Vidimus flavum Tiberim retortis 
Latore Etrusco violenter undis 
Ive deiectum monumenta regis 
Templaque Vestae. (Od. I. ii, 138.)— 
2 Cure. 476. 
8 Lanciani, Ruins and Excavations, p. 29, fig. 14. 
‘Tenney, Frank, Roman Buildings of the Republic, 102 n. 9, 
