Greek Texts & Translations

ing the advantages of every other place. Thus, notwithstanding the prodigious increase of the city, there has been plenty of food, and also of wood and stone for ceaseless building, rendered necessary by the falling down of houses, and on account of conflagrations, and of the sales, which seem never to cease. These sales are a kind of voluntary falling down of houses, each owner knocking down and rebuilding one part or another, according to his individual taste. For these purposes the numerous quarries, the forests, and the rivers which convey the materials, offer wonderful facilities. Of these rivers, the first is the Teverone, ^note which flows from Alba, a city of the Latins near to the country of the Marsi, and from thence through the plain below this [city], till it unites with the Tiber. After this come the Nera ^note and the Timia, ^note which passing through Ombrica fall into the Tiber, and the Chiana, ^note which flows through Tyrrhenia and the territory of Clusiumn. ^note Augustus Caesar endeavoured to avert from the city damages of the kind alluded to, and instituted a company of freedmen, who should be ready to lend their assistance in cases of con- flagration; ^note whilst, as a preventive against the falling of houses, he decreed that all new buildings should not be carried so high as formerly, and that those erected along the public ways should not exceed seventy feet in height. ^note But these improvements must have ceased only for the facilities afforded by the quarries, the forests, and the ease of transport. 8

These advantages accrued to the city from the nature of the country; but the foresight of the Romans added others