ous Septizonium,
the tower with the seven tiers of arcades, which only finally disappeared
in the sixteenth century. One of the palace terraces yet juts out upon
cyclopean arches and from it the view is splendid. But all the rest is a
commingling of massive yet crumbling walls, gaping depths whose ceilings
have fallen, endless corridors and vast halls of doubtful destination.
Well cared for by the new administration, swept and cleansed of weeds,
the ruins have lost their romantic wildness and assumed an aspect of bare
and mournful grandeur. However, flashes of living sunlight often gild the
ancient walls, penetrate by their breaches into the black halls, and
animate with their dazzlement the mute melancholy of all this dead
splendour now exhumed from the earth in which it slumbered for centuries.
Over the old ruddy masonry, stripped of its pompous marble covering, is
the purple mantle of the sunlight, draping the whole with imperial glory
once more.

For more than two hours already Pierre had been walking on, and yet he
still had to visit all the earlier palaces on the north and east of the
plateau. "We must go back," said the guide, "the gardens of the Villa
Mills and the convent of San Bonaventura stop the way. We shall only be
able to pass on this side when the excavations have made a clearance. Ah!
Monsieur l'Abbe, if you had walked over the Palatine merely some fifty
years ago! I've seen some plans of that time. There were only some
vineyards and little gardens with hedges then, a real campagna, where not
a soul was to be met. And to think that all these palaces were sleeping
underneath!"

Pierre followed him, and after again passing the house of Augustus, they
ascended the slope and reached the vast Flavian palace,* still half
buried by the neighbouring villa, and composed of a great number of halls
large and small, on the nature of which scholars are still arguing. The
aula regia, or throne-room, the basilica, or hall of justice, the
triclinium, or dining-room, and the peristylium seem certainties; but for
all the rest, and especially the small chambers of the private part of
the structure, only more or less fanciful conjectures can be offered.
Moreover, not a wall is entire; merely foundations peep out of the
ground, mutilated bases describing the plan of the edifice. The only ruin
preserved, as if by miracle, is the house on a lower level which some
assert to have been that of Livia,* a house which seems very