the founder gained his wealth. The effigies of the married pair have been placed against the wall by the road-side. It is collected from the style of workmanship and from the spelling of the Latin words, that the tomb belonged to the time of Julius Cæsar, or late Republican date. In any case it must have existed before Claudius reared his grand gateway as a monument of his great achievement in the aqueducts, and yet, though its position in front of one of the piers injured the architectural effect of the façade, it was not interfered with in any way by that Emperor. Among all the sepulchral monuments on the chief lines of roads outside the city, that of Cæcilia Metella is most conspicuous, from its commanding position and its fine proportions. It is situated on the Via Appia, two miles from the gate of that name, rising in a great circular tower constructed in the best style of the Republic. The base forms a square of about 100 feet, and this has been stripped of its casing of travertine, but the main body remains in its original condition. The chief mass is of concrete, and of immense thickness; and in the centre is the chamber for the sarcophagus, lined with brick, and approached by a passage, in which occurs a doorway also of travertine. A frieze of white marble, sculptured with festoons and bulls' heads alternately, runs round the whole, and above this is a simple cornice. The roof no longer exists, but it is proved by the inclination of the walls to have been in the form of a conical cap. From the ground to the cornice is a height of 42 feet, and to the apex of the roof was altogether 60 feet. On a marble tablet facing the Via Appia is the inscription, "Cæciliæ Q. Cretici F. Metellæ Crassi," that is to say, the noble lady interred here was Cæcilia, daughter of Quintus Cæcilius Metellus, whose agnomen was Creticus, from his capture of Crete, B.C. 67, and wife of Marcus Licinius Crassus, the triumvir with Pompey and Julius Cæsar, who was killed in the Parthian war, B.C. 53. Such a massive structure in a commanding situation was sure to be made a military post in mediæval times, and accordingly it became the tower or citadel to the fortress of a powerful family, the Gaetani, which was extended on both sides of the Appian way, so as completely to control the approach to the city by the great road from the south. A tomb offering features of unusual interest was discovered enclosed in the Porta Salaria, when the flanking towers added by Honorius to that gateway were pulled down in 1871. Among the monuments imbedded in this tower was one to Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, raised to a considerable height from the ground, so as to have been very conspicuous when first erected. It is in the form of a cippus, containing the effigy of the deceased in a central niche; the figure is draped in the toga, and holds a scroll in the left hand. Below is an inscription in Latin, stating that the monument is reared by the elder Maximus and his wife Licinia Januaria to their son, who died at the age of eleven years, after a successful competition against fifty-two composers in Greek verse, on the occasion of the third public contest of the kind, which had been instituted by Domitian, and was repeated every fourth year at the celebration of the Lustrum. Below the inscription are two epigrams in Greek elegiacs, not without merit, in praise of the youthful poet; and on each side of the figure are engraved the Greek hexameters to which the prize was adjudged. These, the inscription adds, are here recorded, lest the parents' estimate of their child should seem exaggerated. From the title placed at the head, "Καίριον of Sulpicius Maximus," it appears that the contest was for the production of a poem composed extempore upon a given subject, and on this occasion the subject proposed was, "What words would Jupiter use in rebuking Helios for entrusting his chariot to Phaethon?" The engraver, not allowing sufficiently for the length of the verses, was obliged to cram them towards the end into very narrow compass, and the concluding lines are finished upon the scroll held in the hand of the statue. THE COLOSSEUM, OR FLAVIAN AMPHITHEATRE. N ONE of the great Roman buildings has had more light thrown upon it in recent times than the Colosseum : the whole of it having been thoroughly laid open, we are better able to understand the history and mode of its construction. It is here proposed, not to give a general description of it, because that is sufficiently found in our school-books, but to supply such notices, gathered from the excavations, as may enable us to form a judgment as to its rise and progress, and to clear up difficulties hitherto felt with regard to the substructures and certain of the spectacles exhibited. The current tradition has been, that this vast edifice was all reared in ten years by the Emperors of the Flavian family; but this is not borne out by the examination of its parts, and especially those parts which hitherto were buried. Suetonius indeed mentions it among the works of Vespasian, but the author of the idea, he says, was Augustus. Julius Cæsar had accustomed the Roman people to spectacles in the Circus Maximus on a large scale, including the hunting of wild beasts and naval fights. For the latter of these exhibitions, Augustus made separate provision by the construction of his naumachia in the Transtiberine region; and he meditated also the building of an amphitheatre in the middle of the city. It was not, however, till the reign of Nero that the combination of athletic exhibitions with sea-fights could be carried out in such a position. The prolongation of the Claudian aqueduct across the Cœlian first furnished the supply of water to the site of the Colosseum, and from his reservoir on that hill the Stagnum Neronis was filled. We are told that this prince made a gymnasium and naumachia in connection with his Domus Aurea, or great palace. But there is no vestige of such constructions upon any part of the area occupied by these works upon the Esquiline Hill, the whole of which has been thoroughly explored; nor is there any spot suitable for the retention of a considerable body of water except this one, in the depression between the hills. The complete excavation made down to the pavement of the substructures reveals modes of building in very different styles, and plainly shews that the whole mass cannot be attributed to one date or a few years. It also enables us to understand the nature of the stagna, the relation of the arena to them, and the provisions for introducing and exhibiting wild beasts. First, then, it is seen, by the removal of earth filling the interior of the Colosseum to the depth of twenty-one feet, that the basement, containing complicated arrangements for the various uses of the theatre, is to a great extent composed of large blocks of tufa, which are evidently not of imperial date. There are plenty of instances of the adaptation of that material for foundations, when old sites were built over again, but not any of an original work reared by an emperor upon a new basement of tufa. The solution of this difficulty is most probably to be found, as has been proposed, in the conclusion that a previous structure of a similar kind existed on this site before the time of Vespasian or even of Nero. Pliny describes the theatre of M. Æmilius Scaurus, the step-son of Sylla, as the greatest work ever made by human hands, capable of containing eighty thousand people. The same number is recorded for the Flavian amphitheatre, and this is the only theatre in the world that would hold that number. Scaurus was curule ædile в.с. 58, |