ical monuments. Strabo describes the place as paved with marble,
enclosed with brass railings, and shaded by poplars. The marble
pavement was found at a depth of nineteen feet below the sidewalk of
the Corso. The first object to appear was the beautiful vase of
_alabastro cotognino_, now in the Vatican Museum (Galleria delle
Statue), three feet in height, one and one half in diameter, with a
cover ending in a lotus flower, the thickness of the marble being only
one inch. The vase had once contained the ashes of one of the imperial
personages in the mausoleum; either Alaric's barbarians or Roman
plunderers must have left it in the _ustrinum_, after looting its
contents.

The marble pedestals lining the borders of the square were of two
kinds: some were intended to indicate the spot on which each prince
had been cremated, others the place where the ashes had been
deposited. The former end with the formula HIC CREMATVS (or CREMATA)
EST, the latter with the words HIC SITVS (or SITA) EST.

Augustus was not the first member of the family to occupy the
mausoleum. He was preceded by Marcellus (28 B. C.) whose premature
fate is so admirably described by Virgil (AEneid, vi. 872); by Marcus
Agrippa, in 14 B. C.; by Octavia, the sister of Augustus, in the year
13; by Drusus the elder, in the year 9; and by Caius and Lucius,
nephews of Augustus. After Augustus, the interments of Livia,
Germanicus, Drusus, son of Tiberius, Agrippina the elder, Tiberius,
Antonia wife of Drusus, Claudius, Brittannicus, and Nerva are
registered in succession. Of these great and, in many cases, admirable
men and women, ten funeral cippi have been found in the _ustrinum_,
some by the Colonnas before they were superseded by the Orsinis in the
possession of the place, some in the excavations of 1777.

The fate of two of them cannot fail to impress the student of the
history of the ruins of Rome. The pedestal of Agrippina the elder,
daughter of Agrippa, wife of Germanicus, and mother of Caligula, and
that of her eldest son Nero, were hollowed out during the Middle Ages,
turned into standard measures for solids, and as such placed at the
disposal of the public in the portico of the city hall. The pedestal
of Nero perished during the renovation of the Conservatori Palace at
the time of Michelangelo; that of Agrippina is still there.

The fate of this noble woman is described by Tacitus in the sixth book
of the Annals; she was banished by Tiberius to the is