bedroom. The names of the conspirators are Saturius, the
head valet de chambre, Maximus, a freedman of a lower class,
Clodianus, an orderly, and Stephanus, who was the head of the party.
He was led to commit the crime in the hope that the embezzlements of
which he was guilty in his management of the property of Flavia
Domitilla, niece of the emperor, would never be discovered, or
punished. To avoid suspicion, he appeared for several days before the
attempt with his arm bandaged, and in a sling, so that he could carry
a concealed weapon with impunity even in the presence of his intended
victim. The boy stated at the inquest that Domitian died like a brave
man, fighting unarmed against his assailants. The moment he saw
Stephanus drawing his dagger he told the boy to hand him quickly the
poniard under the pillow of his bed, and to run for help; but he found
only the empty scabbard, and all the doors were locked. The emperor
fell at the seventh stroke.

The corpse was removed to a garden which his nurse Phyllis owned, on
the borders of the Via Latina; and the ashes were secretly mingled
with those of his niece Julia, another nursling of Phyllis, and
deposited in the family mausoleum on the Quirinal. The mausoleum,
which rose in the middle of the atrium of the old Flavian house, was
discovered and destroyed towards the middle of the sixteenth century.
Ligorio describes the structure as a round temple, with a pronaos of
six columns of the composite order. The excavations were made at the
expense of cardinal Sadoleto. He found among other things a beautiful
marble statue of Minerva, with a shield in the left hand and a lance
in the right. The villa of cardinal Sadoleto was afterwards bought by
messer Uberto Ubaldini, who levelled everything to the ground, and
uprooted the very foundations of the building. In so doing he
discovered several headless marble statues. Flaminio Vacca adds, that
the columns were of _bigio africano_, fourteen feet high.

* * * * *

The reader will easily understand, that were I to pass in review the
tombs of all the rulers of the Roman Empire, from Trajan to
Constantine, the present chapter would exceed the allotted length of
the entire book. The Mausoleum of Hadrian, on which the history of the
city is written century by century, down to our days; the Column of
Trajan, in the foundations of which the ashes of the best of Roman
princes are buried; the tomb of Geta, b