nothing more than a huge pedestal, which must necessarily be out of all proportion to the statue it carries on its summit, and the spiral band of sculptures with which the shaft is ornamented have their effect destroyed by the impossibility of seeing them in a horizontal line. It must not, however, be forgotten that the column of Trajan was erected partly to show the vast labour expended in levelling the sides of the Quirinal and Capitoline for the construction of his Forum, and that it was enclosed within a narrow court, and did not rise much above the buildings which immediately surrounded it. It is not known whether in the case of the column of Marcus Aurelius any buildings were thus placed close round it. The adjoining colonnades seem, as far as can be concluded from their remains, to have stood at some little distance.

Colossal columns were as genuine a creation of Imperial Rome as triumphal arches. In the Republican era some of the statues in the Comitium stood upon columns; but these were on a much smaller scale, and proportioned to the height of the statues themselves. Some columnar monuments, as the columna rostrata of Duilius, were made to carry symbolic ornaments or trophies instead of statues.

1 See the remarks in R and C. chap. vii. p. 146. The pillar of Antoninus Pius was a monolith of red syenite. See R. and C. chap. xiii. p. 333.

Q

A column of Numidian marble was erected in honour of Julius Cæsar in the Forum; and after his death honorary columns became very frequent in the Imperial age, not only at Rome, but in the provinces, as at Alexandria, Constantinople, Ancyra, and Cussy la Colonne, twelve miles from Beaune in Burgundy. They had the advantage, in an age of declining art, of concealing the defects of the statues erected at such a height above the eye; and when the Roman world afterwards became full of empty adulation, it was a cheap method of flattery to a patron to steal stones for a pedestal and a handsome column from the ruined temples, and erect them, with a fulsome inscription in his honour. Such is the column of Phocas in the Forum Romanum, a cento of fragments filched from some older buildings.*

Not more originality of design or elegance of taste is displayed in the decorations of the Roman tombs than in those of the triumphal arches and columns. The sarcophagus of Scipio Barbatus has been already noticed as an incongruous adaptation of Greek forms of ornamental work. Innumerable varieties of such adaptations might doubtless have been seen on all the principal roads leading out of Rome; but all these have now been stripped of their marble facings and reduced to mere cores of brick

1 See R. and C. chap. vi. p. 112.

2 Ibid. chap. vi. p. 117.

work. We may gain some idea of the forms they generally assumed from the tombs at the Gate of Pompeii, which are mostly built in square or cubical stages, and present pediments, pilasters, and columns in different combinations. The tomb of Mamia at Pompeii, as restored by Mazois, is the miniature frontispiece of a Greek temple, with columns, entablature, and pediment complete.1 Of this kind is also the tomb of Bibulus in the Via di Marforio at Rome, which has Doric pilasters and an Ionic entablature. Many tombs had a small peripteral or pseudo-peripteral cella mounted upon a cubical block. Such is the monument at S. Remy near Tarascon in France, which has a square base ornamented with bas-reliefs, and bearing a circular monopteral temple.

Egyptian forms were however sometimes employed, as in the pyramidal tombs of Cestius at the Porta S. Paolo, or Etruscan, as in the conical structure, commonly called the tomb of the Horatii and Curiatii near Albano. The bread-contractor's tomb, representing a pile of breadbaskets, which still stands at the outside of the Porta Maggiore, is an original but not a very pleasing design.2

1 See Dyer's Pompeii, p. 530.

2 See R. and C. chap. viii. 65, 197; Nibby, Viaggio, tom. ii. p. 143; Monumenti dell' Inst. 1837, plate xxxix. Compare with this strange device the tomb of Porsena figured in Monumenti dell' Inst. 1835. plate xiii. The cones probably represent the meta of the circus. Hence the popular name of the Meta Sudans.

Q2

Foreign architectural forms, especially those of the Greek temple, were also reproduced in the rock-hewn tombs of the Romans. Few of these are to be found in the neighbourhood of Rome, as might be anticipated from the nature of the rocks. There are, however, some on the Flaminian road, and one very remarkable instance is to be seen in the garden of the monastery of Palazzola, on the edge of the Alban lake.1 The rock-hewn tombs of Petra, once a much-frequented Roman station, present most extravagant instances of the Roman misapplication of columnar architecture. The façades of these tombs, exquisitely cut in rose-coloured sandstone, consist of a crowded medley of meaningless columns, half-columns, pilasters with curved or truncated entablatures, and pediments similar to those found in the Pantheon and in the still existing ruins of the eastern hemicycle of Trajan's Forum.

Far more characteristic of the Roman national taste in architecture are the huge cylindrical masses of stonework based upon square platforms, of which the mausolea of Augustus and Hadrian in Rome, and the tombs of Cæcilia Metella on the Appian Way and of Plautius on the bridge over the Anio at Tibur, are the most conspicuous examples. The ponderous walls of these massive

1 Nibby, Viaggio, tom. ii. p. 125.