On the first day of our trip I had arranged for us to do a three hour tour of the Colosseum, Roman forum and, the cherry on top, the supposed houses of Augustus and his wife Livia. I say "supposed" because of course this happened a long time ago and there were hundreds of years of imperial history after Augustus, during which very little of Rome would have remained unchanged. It would be remarkable if the house survived for that long. A mere hundred years after his death Suetonius was speaking of his house in the past tense, and it is unlikely that most of the structure survived Nero's fire.

However these remains are not aboveground and it is possible that they are indeed the remnants of the original house. This was my main reason for this part of the tour. I wanted to feel the presence of my old friends Augustus and Agrippa here.

Yet I didn't. The tour made sense in theory, but in practice it was a bad idea. Although it was very late in summer, the temperature was still over 30 degrees. We had climbed steep staircases in the Colosseum. We had walked the length of the Forum in the heat. We had walked up the hill in yet more heat. A couple of hours into the tour and we were all tired and wanting to sit down and drink something cold. The tour guide, who was quite knowledgeable, made the mistake of saying that Marcus Aurelius was at the Battle of Actium. Someone with her knowledge would not make a howler like that without being heat affected and dehydrated. Consequently none of us were in condition to fully appreciate what we were seeing, much less to try to imagine ourselves back in that time. It would have been much better to split the Colosseum part of the tour off onto a separate tour (since the Colosseum related to a later part of Roman history anyway) and make this a shorter tour focused on the forum (much of which we had to race through as it was) and the house.

I don't know whether my old friends looked upon these walls or not. It would be nice to think so, but it probably doesn't matter; their place in history remains unchanged.