58 ARCHITECTURE. 
~ All these facts must suggest the conviction that the Romans had no part 
in the erection of the buildings of Palmyra and Baalbec, and that they were 
not executed by the Seleucides is evident by a glance at the cities of Seleucns, 
Antiocha, and Damascus, which only contain fragments of small columns. 
The magnificent edifices of Syria are not therefore copies of Roman build- 
ings, but in many respects their prototypes, and it is not unlikely that the 
Corinthian style of architecture originated in Pheenicia. 
6. Roman ARCHITECTURE TO THE Time oF CoNSTANTINE THE GREAT. 
. The higher architectonic art was introduced into Italy from foreign coun- 
tries, especially into Etruria by Pheenician colonists, and into the southern 
parts by Grecian settlers ; and as both these people at first practised the art 
in the manner of their respective countries, we find in the oldest Italian 
monuments the Doric and Tuscan orders separately, but at a later period 
an amalgamation or rather mixture of the two. This is clearly perceptible 
in the plans of temples. The Tuscan temple is nearly an exact square, the 
Grecian a quadrangle with a length about double its breadth. The Etruscans 
introduced into Italy the art of arching, which they had learned from the 
Pheenicians, and as early as the 6th century B. c. arched the Cloaca Maxima, 
when in Greece no trace of a regular vault wasas yet found. We shall con- 
sider the ancient architecture of Rome in three periods: that of the kings, 
of the republic, and of the emperors. 
A. The Period of the Kings. 
Of the oldest edifices of central Italy few or no traces are left; and, though 
the city of Aigille, in the neighborhood of Rome, in the time of the first 
Roman kings, formed a state of as much consequence as Rome itself, and the 
Tyrrhenians at that age were renowned for their skill in naval affairs as well 
as for the comfort of their dwellings, we are so completely without reliable 
information about their structures that with regard to the oldest Italian archi- 
tectural history we can consider only the edifices of Rome. This unimportant 
colony had under the three first kings gradually risen to be a large city, so that 
Ancus Marcius, the fourth king, was compelled, on account of the increase 
of the population, to extend the confines of the city beyond the Tiber, so as 
to include the Aventine and Janiculan hills, which he furnished with walls 
and entrenchments, and connected with the city by a wooden bridge. He 
also founded the port of Ostia, extended the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, 
which Romulus had built, and caused the first prisons to be built in the 
quarries, leaving their completion to Servius Tullius. Remains of these 
prisons are still found in the neighborhood of the Forum, but they are of a 
more recent restoration of the same. The older Tarquin improved the walls 
of the city, founded the Forum for public assemblies of the mass of the peo- 
ple, and the large racecourse (Circus Mazximus), besides beginning the work 
of the great system of sewers. He caused the top of the Tarpeian rock to 
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