May festival of the goddess, when the farmers brought them the first
fruits of the earth. It has no intrinsic literary merit, but it carries us
back beyond the great wars with Carthage for supremacy in the western
Mediterranean, beyond the contest with Pyrrhus for overlordship in
Southern Italy, beyond the struggle for life with the Samnites in Central
Italy, beyond even the founding of the city on the Tiber, to a people who
lived by tilling the soil and tending their flocks and herds.

But we have turned away from the dedicatory verses. On the bridges which
span our streams we sometimes record the names of the commissioners or the
engineers, or the bridge builders responsible for the structure. Perhaps
we are wise in thinking these prosaic inscriptions suitable for our ugly
iron bridges. Their more picturesque stone structures tempted the Romans
now and then to drop into verse, and to go beyond a bare statement of the
facts of construction. Over the Anio in Italy, on a bridge which Narses,
the great general of Justinian, restored, the Roman, as he passed, read in
graceful verse:[62] "We go on our way with the swift-moving waters of the
torrent beneath our feet, and we delight on hearing the roar of the angry
water. Go then joyfully at your ease, Quirites, and let the echoing
murmur of the stream sing ever of Narses. He who could subdue the
unyielding spirit of the Goths has taught the rivers to bear a stern
yoke."

It is an interesting thing to find that the prettiest of the dedicatory
poems are in honor of the forest-god Silvanus. One of these poems, Titus
Pomponius Victor, the agent of the Cæsars, left inscribed upon a
tablet[63] high up in the Grecian Alps. It reads: "Silvanus, half-enclosed
in the sacred ash-tree, guardian mighty art thou of this pleasaunce in the
heights. To thee we consecrate in verse these thanks, because across the
fields and Alpine tops, and through thy guests in sweetly smelling groves,