judge from the small cellular structure at the end of the Spina,
which was probably the chapel of the god Consus. This cell is half
beneath the soil, as it must have been in the circus itself; for
Dionysius[663] could not be persuaded to believe that this divinity was
the Roman Neptune, because his altar was underground.

28.

Great Nemesis!
Here, where the ancient paid thee homage long.
Stanza cxxxii. lines 2 and 3.

We read in Suetonius, that Augustus, from a warning received in a
dream,[664] counterfeited, once a year, the beggar, sitting before the
gate of his palace with his hand hollowed and stretched out for charity.
A statue formerly in the villa Borghese, and which should be now at
Paris, represents the Emperor in that posture of supplication. The
object of that self-degradation was the appeasement of Nemesis, the
perpetual attendant on good fortune, of whose power the Roman conquerors
were also reminded by certain symbols attached to their cars of triumph.
The symbols were the whip and the _crotalo_, which were discovered in
the Nemesis of the Vatican. The attitude of beggary made the above
statue pass for that of Belisarius: and until the criticism of
Winckelmann[665] had rectified the mistake, one fiction was called in to
support another. It was the same fear of the sudden termination of
prosperity, that made Amasis king of Egypt warn his friend Polycrates of
Samos, that the gods loved those whose lives were chequered with good
and evil fortunes. Nemesis was supposed to lie in wait particularly for
the prudent; that is, for those whose caution rendered them accessible
only to mere accidents; and her first altar was raised on the banks of
the Phrygian AEsepus by Adrastus, probably the prince of that name who
killed the son of Croesus by mistake. Hence the goddess was called
Adrastea.[666]

The Roman Nemesis was _sacred_ and _august_: there was a temple to her
in the Palatine under the name of Rhamnusia;[667] so great, indeed, was
the propensity of the ancients to trust to the revolution of events, and
to believe in the divinity of Fortune, that in the same Palatine there
was a temple to the Fortune of the day.[668] This is the last
superstition which retains its hold over the human heart; and, from
concentrating in one object the credulity so natural to man, has always
appeared strongest in thos