Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 7 | Page 9

same kind of plain, modest life, spending all his leisure hours
in arranging his collections of natural history, more especially the
palaeo-ethnological or prehistoric, for which the ossiferous caverns of
the Island of Capri supplied him with abundant materials.
It was only after the victory of Actium that, finding himself master of
the world, he thought it expedient to give up, in a certain measure, his
former habits, and live in better style. Having bought through his
agents some of the aristocratic palaces adjoining the old house of
Hortensius, among them the historical palace of Catiline, he built a new
and very handsome residence, but declared at the same time that he
considered it as public property, not as his own. The solemn dedication
of the palace took place on January 14th, of the year 26 before Christ.
Here he lived, sleeping always in the same small cubiculum, for
twenty-eight years; that is to say, until the third year after Christ, when
the palace was almost destroyed by fire.

As soon as the news of the disaster spread throughout the empire, an
almost incredible amount of money was subscribed at once, by all
orders of citizens, to provide him with a new residence; and altho, with
his usual moderation, he would consent to accept only one denarius
from each individual subscribed, it is easy to imagine how many
millions he must have realized in spite of his modesty. A new,
magnificent palace rose from the ruins of the old one, but it does not
appear that the plan and arrangement were changed; otherwise
Augustus could not have continued to sleep in the same room during
the last ten years of his life, as we are told positively that he did.
The work of Augustus was continued by his successor and kinsman,
Tiberius, who built a new wing near the northwest corner of the hill,
overlooking the Velabrum. Caligula filled with new structures the
whole space between the "domus Tiberiana" and the Roman forum.
Nero, likewise, occupied with a new palace the south-east corner of the
hill, overlooking the valley, where the Coliseum was afterward built.
Domitian rebuilt the "domus Augustana," injured by fire, adding to its
accommodations a stadium for gymnastic sports. The same emperor
raised an altogether new palace, in the space between the house of
Augustus, on one side, and those of Caligula and Tiberius on the other.
Septimius Severus and his son restored the whole group of imperial
buildings, adding a new wing at the southwest corner, known under the
name of Septizonium. The latest additions, of no special importance,
took place under Julia Mamaea and Heliogabalus.
Every emperor, to a certain extent, enlarged, altered, destroyed, and
reconstructed the work of his predecessors; cutting new openings,
walling up old ones, subdividing large rooms into smaller apartments,
and changing their destination. One section alone of the imperial
Palatine buildings remained unaltered, and kept the former simplicity
of its plans down to the fall of the Empire--the section built by
Augustus across the center of the hill, which comprised the main
entrance, the portico surrounding the temple of Apollo, the temple itself,
the Greek and Latin libraries, the shrine of Vesta, and the imperial
residence.

The architectural group raised by Augustus on the Palatine, formed, as
it were, the vestibule to his own imperial residence. We know with
absolute certainty that it contained at least one hundred and twenty
columns of the rarest kinds of marbles and breccias, fifty-two of which
were of Numidian marble, with capitals of gilt bronze; a group of
Lysias, comprising one chariot, four horses and two drivers, all cut in a
single block of marble; the Hercules of Lysippus; the Apollo of Scopas;
the Latona of Cephisodotos, the Diana of Timotheos; the bas-reliefs of
the pediment by Bupalos and Anthermos; the quadriga of the sun in gilt
bronze; exquisite ivory carvings; a bronze colossus fifty feet high;
hundreds of medallions in gold, silver, and bronze; gold and silver plate;
a collection of gems and cameos; and, lastly, candelabras which had
been the property of Alexander the Great, and the admiration of the
East.
Has the world ever seen a collection of greater artistic and material
value exhibited in a single building? And we must recollect that the
group built by Augustus comprises only a very modest section of the
Palatine; that to his palace we must join the palaces of Tiberius,
Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, Domitian, Septimius Serverus, Julia
Mamaea, and Heliogabalus; that each one of these imperial residences
equalled the residence of Augustus, if not in pure taste, certainly in
wealth, in luxury, in magnificence, in the number and value of works of
art collected and stolen from Greece and the East, from Egypt and
Persia. By multiplying eight or ten times the list I have