Accordingly it is said that Cæsar intended to dig a canal for sea-ships, from the Tiber, above or below Rome, through the Pomptine marshes as far as Terracina.

[Footnote 56: In the Pomptine marshes, about twenty miles south of Rome and five from the coast.

Among the Volscians and in the Pomptine territory it could not even be purchased.

The minds of the enemy being so terrified by this calamity, that they felt a certain alarm, even after it had abated the Romans both augmented the number of their colonists at Velitrae, and despatched a new colony to the mountains Of Norba to serve as a stronghold in the Pomptine district.

After the death of his daughter in 45 he seems to have sold this house to Lepidus, and, unable to stay at Tusculum, where she died, he bought a small villa on a little islet called Astura, on the very edge of the Pomptine marshes, and in that melancholy and unwholesome neighbourhood he passed whole days in the woods giving way to his grief.

For many weeks he lived alone at Astura, on the edge of the Pomptine marshes, out of reach of all friends, forbidding even his young wife and her mother to come near him; brooding, as it would seem, on the survival of the godlike element in his daughter.