the naval and commercial prosperity of the
early middle ages; if Paestuni remains a monument of the oldest Hellenic
civilisation; Capri, at a few miles' distance, is dedicated to the Roman
emperor who made it his favourite residence, when, life-weary with the
world and all its shows, he turned these many peaks and slumbering caves
into a summer palace for the nursing of his brain-sick phantasy. Already
on landing, we are led to remember that from this shore was loosed the
galley bearing that great letter--_verbosa et grandis epistola_--which
undid Sejanus and shook Rome. Riding to Ana-Capri and the Salto di
Tiberio, exploring the remains of his favourite twelve villas, and
gliding over the smooth waters paved with the white marbles of his
baths, we are for ever attended by the same forbidding spectre. Here,
perchance, were the _sedes arcanarum libidinum_ whereof Suetonius
speaks; the Spintrian medals, found in these recesses, still bear
witness that the biographer trusted no mere fables for the picture he
has drawn. Here, too, below the Villa Jovis, gazing 700 feet sheer down
into the waves, we tread the very parapet whence fell the victims of
that maniac lust for blood. 'After long and exquisite torments,' says
the Roman writer, 'he ordered condemned prisoners to be cast into the
sea before his eyes; marines were stationed near to pound the fallen
corpses with poles and oars, lest haply breath should linger in their
limbs.' The Neapolitan Museum contains a little basrelief representing
Tiberius, with the well-known features of the Claudian house, seated
astride upon a donkey, with a girl before him. A slave is leading the
beast and its burden to a terminal statue under an olive-tree. This
curious relic, discovered some while since at Capri, haunted my fancy as
I climbed the olive-planted slopes to his high villa on the Arx Tiberii.
It is some relief, amid so much that is tragic in the associations of
this place, to have the horrible Tiberius burlesqued and brought into
donkey-riding relation with the tourist of to-day. And what an ironical
revenge of time it is that his famous Salto should be turned into a
restaurant, where the girls dance tarantella for a few coppers; that a
toothless hermit should occupy a cell upon the very summit of his Villa
Jovis; and that the Englishwoman's comfortable hotel should be called
_Timberio_ by the natives! A spiritualist might well believe that the
emperor's ghost was forced to haunt