PRAENESTE (mod. Palestrina), a very ancient city of Latium, lies 23 m. E. of Rome by the Via Praenestina (see below), on a spur of the Apennines facing the Alban hills. To the natural strength of the place and its commanding situation Praeneste owed in large measure its historical importance. Objects in metal and ivory discovered in the earliest graves prove that as early as the 8th or 7th century B.C. Praeneste had reached a consider able degree of civilization and stood in commercial relations not only with Etruria but with the East. In 499 B.C., according to Livy, it formed an alliance with Rome. After Rome had been weakened by the Gallic invasion (39o) Praeneste joined in a long struggle with Rome which culminated in the great Latin War in which the Romans were victorious, and Praeneste was punished by the loss of part of its territory. It continued in the position of a city in alliance with Rome down to the Social War, when it received the Roman franchise.
As an allied city it furnished contingents to the Roman army and possessed the right of exile (ins exilii), i.e., persons banished from Rome were allowed to reside at Praeneste. The nuts of Praeneste were famous and its roses were amongst the finest in Italy. The Latin spoken at Praeneste was somewhat peculiar, and was ridiculed by the Romans, e.g., by Plautus. In the civil wars the younger Marius was blockaded in the town by the Sullans (82 B.C.) ; and on its capture Marius slew himself, the male inhabitants were massacred in cold blood, and a military colony was settled on part of its territory, while the city was removed from the hill-side to the lower ground at the Madonna dell' Aquila, and the temple of Fortune enlarged so as to include the space occupied by the older city. Under the empire Praeneste, from its elevated situation and cool salubrious air, became a favourite summer resort of the wealthy Romans, whose villas studded the neighbourhood. Horace ranked it with Tibur and Baiae, though as a fact it never became so fashionable a resi dence as Tibur or the Alban hills. Still, Augustus resorted thither; here Tiberius recovered from a dangerous illness, and here Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius had villas. Amongst private owners were Pliny the younger and Symmachus.
But Praeneste was chiefly famed for its great temple of For tune and for its oracle, in connection with the temple, known as the "Praenestine lots" (sortes praenestinae). The oldest por tion of the sanctuary was, however, that situated on the lowest terrace but one. Here is a grotto in the natural rock, containing a beautiful coloured mosaic pavement, representing a sea-scene a temple of Poseidon on the shore, with various fish swimming in the sea. To the east of this was a basilica in two storeys. As
extended by Sulla the sanctuary of Fortune occupied a series of five vast terraces, which, resting on gigantic substructions of masonry and connected with each other by grand staircases, rose one above the other on the hill in the form of the side of a pyramid, crowned on the highest terrace by the small round temple of Fortune. This immense complex, probably by far the largest sanctuary in Italy, must have presented a most imposing aspect, visible as it was from a great part of Latium, from Rome, and even from the sea.
The modern town of Palestrina, a collection of narrow alleys, stands on the terraces once occupied by the temple of Fortune. On the summit of the hill (2,475 ft.), nearly a mile from the town, stood the ancient citadel, the site of which is now occupied by a few poor houses (Castel San Pietro) and a ruined mediaeval castle of the Colonna. Considerable portions of the southern wall of the ancient citadel, built in very massive Cyclopean masonry of blocks of limestone, are still to be seen; and the two walls, also ' polygonal, which formerly united the citadel with the town, can still be traced. The calendar set up by the grammarian M. Verrius Flaccus in the forum of Praeneste was discovered in i771. Exca vations made in the ancient necropolis, which lay on a plateau surrounded by valleys at the foot of the hill, have yielded impor tant results for the history of the art and manufactures of Prae neste. The famous Ficoroni casket, engraved with pictures of the arrival of the Argonauts in Bithynia and the victory of Pollux over Amycus, was found in 1738. Most of the objects discovered in the necropolis are preserved in the Roman collections, espe cially in the Villa Giulia, the Museo Pigorini (Collegio Romano) and the Vatican.
See E. Fernique, Preneste (Bibliotheque des ncoles Francaises, fasc. 17, 188o) Corp. inscr. etrusc. vol. ii.; R. S. Conway, Italic Dialects, i.
311 seq. (1897) ; T. Ashby in Papers of the British School at Rome, i. 532 seq.; H. C. Bradshaw, ibid. ix. 257 seq.; R. Delbriick, Hellenistische Bauten in Latium, p. 47 seq. (19o7) ; R. van Deman Magoffin, Topog raphy and Municipal History of Praeneste (Johns Hopkins University Studies, xxvi. 9, so; Baltimore, 1908) ; D. Randall-Maclver, Iron Age in Italy (1927) . (J. G. FR.; R. S. Co.; T. A.)