When Jupiter in the Æneid consoles the weeping goddess, the mother of the hero, by revealing the future to her; how the empire of her son and his posterity was to rise from step to step, increasing still in glory and greatness, up to Rome, to which no limit and no term was assigned; the three years promised for Æneas apply, not to the interval between his landing and his death, but to the duration of the little Troy on the Latian shore, until the building of Lavinium, the city of the united nation; though the former period was also reckoned to consist of the same number of years.

Thirty years afterward his successor led the Latins from the unhealthy low grounds on the coast to the declivity of Monte Cavo, from the summit of which the eye commands a view more ample than the dominion of Rome before the Samnite wars; in the light of the setting sun it can reach Corsica and Sardinia, and sees the hill which is still illustrated by the name of Circe, like an island, beneath the first rays of her divine sire. The site where Alba stretched in a long street between the mountain and the lake, is still distinctly marked: along this whole extent the rock is cut away under it right down to the lake. These traces of man's ordering hand are more ancient than Rome.