unknown, but it may be estimated with some approach to accuracy at considerably over a million of inhabitants.[1] The suburbs also are extremely populous, and for many miles around the capital, both in Europe and Asia, are covered with opulent country villas, farmhouses, and innumerable habitations of meaner residents.[2] In this district are situated immense reservoirs for water, and many of the valleys are spanned by imposing aqueducts raised by a double series of lofty arches to a great height.[3] At a distance of thirty-two miles westwards from the city is situated the Long Wall, a
- [Footnote: i, p. 25, et seq. An imperfect, but so far the only comprehensive work;
cf. Finlay, Hist. Greece, i, p. 432, et seq. Mommsen's work also gives some space to the subject. False coining and money-clipping were of course prevalent in this age and punishable capitally, but there was also a class of magnates who arrogated to themselves the right of coining, a privilege conceded in earlier times, and who maintained private mints for the purpose. In spite of legal enactments some of them persisted in the practice, and their penalty was to be aggregated with all their apparatus and operatives to the Imperial mints, there to exert their skill indefinitely for the government; Cod. Theod., IX, xxi, xxii. Their lot suggests the Miltonic fate of Mulciber:
Nor aught availed him now
To have built in heaven high towers; nor did he 'scape
By all his engines, but was headlong sent
With his industrious crew to build in hell.
Paradise Lost, I.
]
- ↑ In 1885, a "guess" census taken by the Turkish authorities put it at 873,565, but the modern city is much shrunk within the ancient walls; Grosvenor, op. cit., p. 8.
- ↑ The Avars, during an incursion made in 616, carried off 270,000 captives of both sexes from the vicinity of the city; Nicephorus CP., p. 16.
- ↑ The largest reservoir, now called the "Bendt of Belgrade," about ten miles N.W. of CP. is more than a mile long. The water is conveyed, as a rule, through subterranean pipes, and there is no visible aqueduct within six miles of the city. The so-called "Long Aqueduct" is about three-quarters of a mile in length.
