Close to the northern angle of the Palatine, immediately beyond the church of S. Maria Liberatrice, the Curia Hostilia, so called from having been originally built by Tullus Hostilius, is supposed to have been situated. The term curia was originally applied by Romulus topographically, at the same time that he appointed a senate of 100 members, a body guard for himself of 100 celeres, and endowed the Romans with a constitution after the Lacedaemonian model.¹ The people then being divided into three tribes, and each tribe into ten curiae with a portion of land including a temple allotted to each, the land so allotted was distinguished by the title, which in the latter period of the Republic, as in the instance of the Curia or senate-house of Pompey, was transferred to the building. As regards the Curia Hostilia, in which at first no persons of inferior authority to the senate were allowed to sit, notwithstanding that such buildings were used at a later period as places of meeting for other civic authorities, there are no accounts of its rerstoration previous to 80 years before the Christian era, when it was rebuilt by Sylla (sic), and soon afterwards, on the occasion of the insurrection, when the Roman people tore up its benches to make a funeral pile for Publius Clodius, having been wilfully set on fire and burnt to the ground, it was rebuilt by Augustus, and, in consequence of the foundations having been previously laid by Julius Caesar, was called the Curia Julia. The site of the original building is at all events memorable as the spot where Tarquin committed the murder of Servius Tullius, who was precipitated from the tops of the steps tothe bottom, and afterwards his dead body overdriven in the Vicus Sceleratus by the chariot of his daughter Tullia.

George Head, Rome: A Tour of Many Days, (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849), 116.