of Egypt. He kept the springs of this abundance ever flowing, chiefly by gifts and legacies from the wealthiest of his subjects, and by taxation on the foreign territories of Rome, and such popular imposts on the citizens as legacy duties. From this revenue, estimated at forty millions, he economically defrayed the charges of government, and obtained popularity by his munificent employment of the people on public works, useful and ornamental, which flattered the national vanity by adorning the Eternal City with preeminent splendour. Augustus, when keeper of the national conscience, as Supreme Pontiff, restored and rebuilt several temples with singular magnificence. Apollo, the sun-god, was the especial object of his worship; the courtiers insinuated that their patron was inspired by an effluence from this glorious being, and whenever they entered into his presence they adroitly flattered him by dropping their eyes to the ground, as if dazzled by the encounter with his celestial radiance. To Apollo, then, he erected a superb temple on the Palatine Hill, which, besides its dazzling columns of Parian marble, was renowned for the library which he there collected for the use of the citizens. While the consuls and nobles vied with each other in imitating the Emperor in repairing or erecting the shrines of the gods, his favourite minister Agrippa cast them all into the shade, by his single magnificent temple to the patron deities of the imperial family. This wonder of architecture still stands almost unchanged from its original form and arrangements. The most conspicuous place in the interior, fronting the entrance, was occupied by the image of Jupiter the Avenger, who had punished the murderers of Cæsar; the principal niches on either side were filled with images of Mars, Venus, and Romulus, of Æneas, of Julius Cæsar himself, who was now deified and worshipped, and of other gods and heroes stand

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THEIR BATHS.

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ing around. The courtly founder had reserved one niche for the image of Augustus himself, and when the Emperor declined the extravagant compliment as rather premature, he placed it on one side of the door of entrance, and erected his own statue as its companion on the other. Its name Pantheon is generally supposed to have been derived from its dedication to all the gods, but it was more probably suggested by its circular walls, its unusual height and the ample dome which surmounts it, reminding the admiring worshipper, when his eye, which ever way it turned, encountered a new divinity, of the palace of the Olympian deities suspended in the sky.

Whilst the first Emperor repressed by severe sumptuary laws the extravagance of the nobles, because it cast a shade over the economy which his necessities and tastes required, he cherished the most luxurious tastes amongst the populace, and strained every nerve to satiate them with enjoyments which might corrupt and destroy the lingering remains of the simple and honest, frugal and self-denying habits of their laborious republican ancestors.

In a warm climate, the nervous system is surprisingly exhilarated by the action of air and water upon the body, by the unusual lightness and coolness, the disembarrassment of the limbs, and elasticity of the circulation. The Romans of early days selected the Field of Mars for the scene of their games, for the convenience of the stream of the Tiber, in which the wearied combatants might wash off the sweat and dust, and return home in the full glow of recruited health and vigour. But the youth of Rome were now no longer satisfied with these simple ablutions. They resorted to warm and vapour baths, to the use of perfumes and cosmetics, to enhance the pleasure of the refreshment. By this and other devices, they sought an appetite for the rich banquet which

crowned the evening, and at which they abandoned themselves to all the luxury of languor; slaves relieving them from every effort, however trifling-carving for them, supplying every costly dish with such nice fragments as could be raised to the mouth with the fingers only, filling the wine-cup with choice Falernian, and pouring perfumed water on their hands at every remove.

Hence, one of the earliest modes of bribing electors was, by a candidate's subsidising the owners of the multitudinous common baths, and giving the people unlimited access to them. So the favourite minister of Augustus won unbounded popularity for his master, by constructing magnificent public baths, or Thermæ, in which the citizens might assemble, without payment, in large numbers, and combine the pleasure of purification with the exercise of gymnastic sports, whilst their tastes might be cultivated by gazing at paintings and sculptures, and by listening to music and singing. These Therma were the common resort of all the idlers of the city; their name soon became legion, and from dawn to midnight they resounded with the shouts and laughter of successive troops of bathers, who, when emerged from the water, and resigned to the minute manipulations of the barbers—for the fashion of this period forbade the slightest down on the chin, and required the hair to be frizzled in long curls on the neck -gazed in dreamy, voluptuous languor upon the brilliant decorations around, or listened with charmed ear to the singers and minstrels, and even to the poets, who presumed upon their helplessness to recite to them their choicest compositions.

For the charms of music, harmonious lays, and graceful motion to melody, the Romans had always a genuine, though perhaps before their close intercourse with polished Greece, a rude taste; so the theatre was one of their earliest institu

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THEIR THEATRES.

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tions, and the performances and expenses were provided gratuitously by the magistrates, whose first object was to seat the greatest number possible, the next, that they should be safely and pleasantly entertained. But an assembly of 30,000 spectators, gathering excitement from the consciousness of their own multitude, could not very long sit tamely under the blaze of an Italian sun, tempered only by an awning; and in the steam and dust of their own creating, allayed only by streams of perfumed water and jets d'eau rising to the height of the building, to hear the bombastic dialogue of ancient tragedy, or the dull jokes of the comic muse, declaimed from brass-lipped masks by human puppets staggering on the stilted buskin. The vast proportions of their theatres also invited grander and more exciting displays; so processions often swept before their eyes of horses and chariots, of wild and unfamiliar animals. The long show of a mimic triumph often wound its way across the stage; the spoils of captured cities, and the figures of the cities themselves, were represented in painting or sculpture. The boards were occupied during the interludes by crowds of rope-dancers, conjurors, clowns, and tumblers, who walked on their hands, or stood on their heads; let themselves be whirled aloft by machinery, or danced on stilts, or exhibited feats of tossing cups and balls. Augustus gave an extraordinary impulse to this taste, by erecting a new and vast theatre. Romulus himself, said the story of his life, had trained his subjects to war, by making them celebrate games of riding, hunting, and charioteering, in the valley beneath his cabin on the Palatine ; and one of the earliest erections in Rome was the Circus, a very large oblong inclosure, strewn with sand, whence it was called the arena, chiefly used for chariot-racing, boxing, wrestling, and races. So passionately fond were the people of these games, that they could sit without flagging through

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a hundred heats; and, to vary the sport, multitudes of wild animals were let loose in the Circus, to be transfixed with spears and arrows. Victorious generals bringing back, to grace their triumph, from the teeming East, its strange monsters-lions and elephants, giraffes and hippopotami—first commenced this exhibition of wild beasts; and soon they grew into deadly encounters between those savage monsters and condemned criminals, or slaves and hired swordsmen called gladiators. Indeed the eagerness with which the Romans crowded to witness these horrible spectacles, to gloat over the expression of conflicting passions, to watch the last ebbings of life, and hail with acclamations some murderous blow, or to doom to death some gladiator who begged his life at their hands, by merely turning down their thumbs-all this close to the dying and the dead-not only heightened their natural ferocity, but fostered that passion for the sight of bloody sports, which continued for centuries to vie at Rome with the excitement of the race, as an equally harmless amusement.

Cæsar owed much of his popularity to his exhibition of a fight between 320 pairs of gladiators, who flooded the arena with their gore; and Augustus perpetuated the ghastly spectacle, by erecting a superb stone amphitheatre in the Field of Mars, the model of all the structures that bear that name. Cæsar had also laid out, at vast cost, gardens on the right bank of the Tiber; and Augustus again surpassed him by the excavation of a noble basin by their side, for the exhibition of naval engagements, which he surrounded with groves, and walks, and gushing fountains. The old kings truly built for eternity,' rude and solid; and Niebuhr admits that their city main drain, for carrying off the inundations of the Tiber, the Cloaca Maxima, by the stupendous stones of which it is constructed, and its enormous size, sufficient for the passage of a waggon loaded with hay, proves that there were giants