ived by Augustus, who sacrificed his prisoners of
war at the altar of Julius Caesar; and were afterwards--though
occasionally renewed for particular purposes under some subsequent
reigns--wholly abandoned as part of the ceremonies of Paganism during
the later periods of the empire.

The sacrifices perpetrated in private were much longer practised. They
were connected with the most secret mysteries of the mythology; were
concealed from the supervision of government; and lasted probably until
the general extinction of heathen superstition in Italy and the
provinces.

Many and various were the receptacles constructed for the private
immolation of human victims in different parts of the empire--in its
crowded cities as well as in its solitary woods--and among all, one of
the most remarkable and the longest preserved was the great cavity
pierced in the wall of the temple which Ulpius had chosen for his
solitary lurking-place in Rome.

It was not merely as a place of concealment for the act of immolation,
and for the corpse of the victim, that the vault had been built. A
sanguinary artifice had complicated the manner of its construction, by
placing in the cavity itself the instrument of the sacrifice; by making
it, as it were, not merely the receptacle, but the devourer also of its
human prey. At the bottom of the flight of steps leading down into it
(the top of which, as we have already observed, was alone visible from
the entrance in the temple recess) was fixed the image of a dragon
formed in brass.

The body of the monster, protruding opposite the steps almost at a
right angle from the wall, was moved in all directions by steel
springs, which communicated with one of the lower stairs, and also with
a sword placed in the throat of the image to represent the dragon's
tongue. The walls around the steps narrowed so as barely to admit the
passage of the human body when they approached the dragon. At the
slightest pressure on the stair with which the spring communicated, the
body of the monster bent forward, and the sword instantly protruded
from its throat, at such a height from the steps as ensure that it
should transfix in a vital part the person who descended. The corpse,
then dropping by its own weight off the sword, fell through a tunnelled
opening beneath the dragon, running downward in an opposite direction
to that taken by the steps above, and was deposited on an iron grating
washed by the waters of the Ti