leaving Capua they would arrive at Terracina, seventy-five miles from Rome, and next morning continuing their way, in two and a half miles they would cross the stream which flows from the fountain of Feronia.

"And where Feronia's grove and temple stand."-Virgil En. viii: 800. Feronia was an ancient Italian divinity, whose principal shrine was situated at Terracina near Mount Soracte. The grove was on the edge of the Pontine marshes, and Mr. Forbes tells us that no road through them existed in St. Pauls' day, it having been subsequently made by Trajan in his third consulship. Trajan, the best of all the Roman emperors, was born at Italica, near Seville, in Spain, on the 18th September, A. D. 52, and was the first foreigner that ever reigned in Rome. He succeeded Nerva in A. D. 98, or thirty-seven years after Paul's visit to the imperial city. In A. D. 91, he was consul, but was afterwards adopted as his successor by the Emperor Nerva. A canal which is still to be seen ran through the marshes, and passengers and merchandise had to be towed in barges from the grove of Feronia through the canal up to Appii Forum. It was in this manner, therefore, that the party to which Paul belonged had to travel for a distance of some twenty odd miles.

It

Appii Forum was founded by Appius Claudius Cæcus, the constructor of the Appian Way. Horace, the Roman poet, calls the town busy and noisy, and full of sailors and surly landlords. was a place of some considerable importance, as the canal brought up a great deal of merchandise for the imperial city, all of which had to pass through it, consequently the sailors (or bargemen) and landlords spoken of by Horace were always much in evidence. All that is left of this once flourishing town is composed of a few fragments of ruins and an ancient milestone.

That Paul must have been acquainted with some of the Roman Christians before his arrival at Rome, or at least have known them well by reputation, is scarcely to be doubted, for in concluding his epistle to the Romans written from Corinth, in A. D. 58, he salutes many of them by name. He certainly knew Aquila and his wife Priscilla for they were formerly together at Corinth (Acts xviii: 2),. and he also took them with him when he sailed into Syria (verse: 18). It is highly probable, therefore, that the little band of the

brethren who greeted Paul both at Appii Forum and at Tres Tiburnæ, contained some whom he had seen and known previously, and their affectionate welcomes must have been most gratifying to the chained prisoner in his then distressing circumstances.

Thus mutually comforted, they journeyed on to the great capital of the then dominant Roman empire. The Appian Way for some miles out of the city was a street of stately tombs, and monuments of illustrious dead, some of which were ancient even in the days of St. Paul. In Rome, as elsewhere in days gone by, burial places were always situated outside the walls. It was so in Pompeii where ran the famous "Street of Tombs," and it was also so in Greece and in Palestine, and we can all readily recall to mind the instance described in the seventh chapter of St. Luke's Gospel, in which Jesus and his disciples, while passing through Judea, arrived at the gate of the city of Nain, and saw the people carrying out the corpse of a young man to be buried, the only son of a disconsolate mother, who, bathed in tears, was amongst the mourners. Our Lord, it will be remembered, was so moved with compassion at the sight that he told her not to weep, and, advancing to the bier, he raised the dead youth to life again.

Tombs formed a special feature in ancient communities. They were not crowded into church yards or into cemeteries as in these later days, but were always placed when possible in the most conspicuous localities by the sides of public roads. Roman tombs were characterized by their impressive magnificence, so that the long line of sculptured grandeur of these stately marble sepulchres must by their very solemnity have made a deep impression upòn Paul and his companions, and left a feeling of admiration for the beautiful designs both of these monuments for the dead, and also for the many splendid temples, and fine country seats of the wealthy Roman patricians which they met with day by day on their way Romewards. I think, with Dr. Farrar, that it is not unnatural to suppose that some of the brethren who had gone to meet Paul, may have been fully conversant with the names, and perhaps the histories, of these structures, and may thus have helped to lighten the tedium of the journey by pointing out to him those of them which claimed the most attention, either by their appearance, or by their special historical characteristics. Several of these old

tombs still exist, although in a condition more or less ruinous, but to us they possess considerable attraction, if only on the ground that they are the very same upon which the great Apostle and his friends cast their eyes with curiosity and interest on their sad journey to Rome.

On leaving the Appii Forum, the party to which Paul was attached would pass beneath the walls of Lanuvium, founded by Eneas, the birthplace of P. Sulpicius Quirinus who is mentioned by St. Luke (chap. ii: 2) as Cyrenius, the Governor of Syria, at the time when the Emperor Augustus made a decree that all the world should be taxed. The slope of the Alban hills would then be ascended, and from the vale of Aricia the Apostle would get his first glimpse of Rome, far away in the Campagna beyond, its buildings glistening in the summer sun. Descending the fine causeway of the Via Appia, the massive ruins of which still excite our admiration, and passing by the tomb of Aruns the son of Lars Porsena of Clusium (immortalized in Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome), and by the Villa of Pompey, which afterward belonged to the Emperor Domitian, and is now called the town of Albano, the company would enter what must be described as a street of tombs.*

Dr. Farrar in his Life and Work of St. Paul writes in respect to this journey on the Appian way as follows: "Perhaps as they left the Alban hills on the right, the brethren would tell the Apostle the grim annals of the little temple which had been built beside

-the still, glassy lake which sleeps

Beneath Aricia's trees

Those trees in whose dim shadow

The ghastly priest doth reign,

The priest who slew the slayer
And shall himself be slain."

The allusion here is to the grove and temple of Diana Aracina on the borders of Lake Nemorensis in the neighborhood of Aricia, a town of Latium at the foot of Mount Alba on the Appian Way about sixteen miles from Rome. Dr. Smith in his classical dictionary tells us that it was here that Diana was worshiped with barbarous customs, her priest, called rex nemorensis, being always

*The Footsteps of St. Paul in Rome, by S. Russel-Forbes.