"Until the fire set by Nero, Rome was not a beautiful city in the modern sense of the word. After it had been burned by the Gauls, it was rebuilt without a pre-established plan, and as if by chance. The neighborhoods were irregular; the narrow, winding streets; the tall houses, mostly leaning against each other, and until the times of the Pyrrhic War ( eighty four years before the Christian era) the roofs of the wooden ones, contributed to making it poorer , the darker the appearance, and the city remained more or less so in the following centuries. At the court of Philip of Macedonia, one hundred and seventy-four years before the birth of Christ, the party opposed to the Romans mocked the mean appearance of the capital of Italy."