e vestibule was a pot of burning ilex, and
stretching out through the portals a branch of cypress warned the
pontiffs from the contamination of the sight of death.

At high noon on the seventh day the funeral crossed the city. First
were the flaming torches; the statues of the House of Octavia; senators
in blue; knights in scarlet; magistrates; lictors; the pick of the
praetorian guard. Then, to the alternating choruses of boys and girls,
the rotting body passed down the Sacred Way. Behind it Tiberius in a
travelling-cloak, his hands unringed, marched meditating on the
curiosities of life, while to the rear there straggled a troop of
dancing satyrs, led by a mime dressed in resemblance of Augustus, whose
defects he caricatured, whose vices he parodied and on whom the surging
crowd closed in.

On the Field of Mars the pyre had been erected, a great square
structure of resinous wood, the interior filled with coke and sawdust,
the exterior covered with illuminated cloths, on which, for base, a
tower rose, three storeys high. Into the first storey flowers and
perfumes were thrown, into the second the couch was raised, then a
torch was applied.

As the smoke ascended an eagle shot from the summit, circled a moment,
and disappeared. For the sum of a million sesterces a senator swore
that with the eagle he had seen the emperor's soul.

III

FABULOUS FIELDS

Mention Tiberius, and the name evokes a taciturn tyrant, devising in
the crypts of a palace infamies so monstrous that to describe them new
words were coined.

In the Borghese collection Tiberius is rather good-looking than
otherwise, not an Antinous certainly, but manifestly a dreamer; one
whose eyes must have been almost feline in their abstraction, and in
the corners of whose mouth you detect pride, no doubt, but melancholy
as well. The pride was congenital, the melancholy was not.

Under Tiberius there was quiet, a romancer wrote, and the phrase in its
significance passed into legend. During the dozen or more years that he
ruled in Rome, his common sense was obvious. The Tiber overflowed, the
senate looked for a remedy in the Sibyline Books. Tiberius set some
engineers to work. A citizen swore by Augustus and swore falsely. The
senate sought to punish him, not for perjury but for sacrilege. It is
for Augustus to punish, said Tiberius. The senate wanted to name a
month after him. Tiberius declined. "Supposing I were the thirteenth
Caesar, what would yo