ts of the Janiculum on the west of the city, or the
gardens of the Pincio on the east. The old monuments and the old
churches still rise above the dreary wastes of modern streets, and from
the spot whence Messalina looked down upon the cypresses of the first
Emperor's mausoleum, the traveller of today descries the cheap metallic
roof which makes a circus of the ancient tomb.

For it was in the gardens of Lucullus that Mark Antony's
great-grandchild felt the tribune's sword in her throat, and in the neat
drives and walks of the Pincio, where pretty women in smart carriages
laugh over today's gossip and tomorrow's fashion, and the immaculate
dandy idles away an hour and a cigarette, the memory of Messalina calls
up a tragedy of shades. Less than thirty years after Augustus had
breathed out his old age in peace, Rome was ruled again by terror and
blood, and the triumph of a woman's sins was the beginning of the end of
the Julian race. The great historian who writes of her guesses that
posterity may call the truth a fable, and tells the tale so tersely and
soberly from first to last, that the strength of his words suggests a
whole mystery of evil. Without Tiberius, there could have been no
Messalina, nor, without her, could Nero have been possible; and the
worst of the three is the woman--the archpriestess of all conceivable
crime. Tacitus gives Tiberius one redeeming touch. Often the old Emperor
came almost to Rome, even to the gardens by the Tiber, and then turned
back to the rocks of Capri and the solitude of the sea, in mortal shame
of his monstrous deeds, as if not daring to show himself in the city.
With Nero, the measure was full, and the world rose and destroyed him.
Messalina knew no shame, and the Romans submitted to her, and but for a
court intrigue and a frightened favourite she might have lived out her
life unhurt. In the eyes of the historian and of the people of her time
her greatest misdeed was that while her husband Claudius, the Emperor,
was alive she publicly celebrated her marriage with the handsome Silius,
using all outward legal forms. Our modern laws of divorce have so far
accustomed our minds to such deeds that, although we miss the legal
formalities which would necessarily precede such an act in our time, we
secretly wonder at the effect it produced upon the men of that day, and
are inclined to smile at the epithets of 'impious' and 'sacrilegious'
which it called down upon Messalina, whose many other