A donkey will spend his day in the doorway of a wine shop when he
might just as well be enjoying the more sanitary and less crowded
surroundings of a stable. It only goes to show what an ass a
donkey is.
Anon, as the fancy writers say, we skirted one of the many wrecked
aqueducts that go looping across country to the distant hills,
like great stone straddlebugs. In the vicinity of Rome you are
rarely out of sight of one of these aqueducts. The ancient Roman
rulers, you know, curried the favor of the populace by opening
baths. A modern ruler could win undying popularity by closing up
a few.
We slowed up at the Circus of Romulus and found it a very sad
circus, as such things go--no elevated stage, no hippodrome track,
no centerpole, no trapeze, and only one ring. P. T. Barnum would
have been ashamed to own it. A broken wall, following the lines
of an irregular oval; a cabbage patch where the arena had been;
and various tumble-down farmsheds built into the shattered masonry
--this was the Circus of Romulus. However, it was not the circus
of the original Romulus, but of a degenerate successor of the same
name who rose suddenly and fell abruptly after the Christian era
was well begun. Old John J. Romulus would not have stood for that
circus a minute.
No ride on the Appian Way is regarded as complete without half an
hour's stop at the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus; so we stopped.
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