Here, clustering round the hill on which stood the far-famed "Temple of Fortune," lay the old Latin town of the Praenestians; a little farther westward was the settlement founded some thirty odd years before by Sulla as a colony.

Farther out, and stretching off into the open country, lay the farmhouses and villas, gardens and orchards, where splendid nuts and roses, and also wine, grew in abundant measure.
A little stream ran close to the highway, and here an irrigating machine[1] was raising water for the fields.

Two men stood on the treadmill beside the large-bucketed wheel, and as they continued their endless walk the water dashed up into the trough and went splashing down the ditches into the thirsty gardens.

The workers were tall, bronze-skinned Libyans, who were stripped to the waist, showing their splendid chests and rippling muscles.

Beside the trough had just come two women, by their coarse and unpretentious dress evidently slaves, bearing large earthen water-pots which they were about to fill.