338 THE DECLINE AND FALL [Chap, xli divided his troops into six camps, each of which was fortified with a ditch and rampart. On the Tuscan side of the river, a seventh encampment was formed in the field or circus of the Vatican, for the important purpose of commanding the Milvian bridge and the course of the Tiber ; but they approached with devotion the adjacent church of St. Peter ; and the threshold of the holy apostles was respected during the siege by a Christian enemy. In the ages of victory, as often as the senate decreed some distant conquest, the consul denounced hostilities, by un- barring in solemn pomp the gates of the temple of Janus. 95 Domestic war now rendered the admonition superfluous, and the ceremony was superseded by the establishment of a new religion. But the brazen temple of Janus was left standing in the forum ; of a size sufficient only to contain the statue of the god, five cubits in height, of a human form, but with two faces, directed to the east and west. The double gates were likewise of brass; and a fruitless effort to turn them on their rusty hinges revealed the scandalous secret that some Romans were still attached to the superstition of their ancestors. Repulses a Eighteen days were employed by the besiegers to provide sauftof the all the instruments of attack which antiquity had invented. Fascines were prepared to fill the ditches, scaling ladders to ascend the walls. The largest trees of the forest supplied the timbers of four battering rams ; their heads were armed with iron; they were suspended by ropes, and each of them was worked by the labour of fifty men. The lofty wooden turrets moved on wheels or rollers, and formed a spacious platform of the level of the rampart. On the morning of the nineteenth day, a general attack was made from the Praenestine gate to the Vatican : seven Gothic columns, with their military engines, advanced to the assault ; and the Romans who fined the ram- parts listened with doubt and anxiety to the cheerful assurances include the P. Pinciana, which was only a postern. But he might have included the P. Labicapa, which was adjacent to the P. Praenestina (together they form the modern P. Maggiore) ; as the camp which invested the one invested the other. Mr. J. H. Parker in his Archaeology of Rome has sought to determine the positions of the camps, which are also discussed by Hodgkin (Italy and her Invaders, iv., p. 146 sqq.).] 95 Procopius has given the best description of the temple of Janus, a national deity of Latium (Heyne, Excurs. v. ad 1. vii. ^Eneid.). It was once a gate in the primitive city of Romulus and Numa (Nardini, p. 13, 256, 329). Virgil has de- scribed the ancient rite, like a poet and an antiquarian.
