in;
Pr[ae]tors, proconsuls to their provinces
Hasting, or on return, in robes of state;
Lictors and rods, the ensigns of their power,
Legions and cohorts, turms of horse and wings;
Or embassies from regions far remote,
In various habits on the Appian Road."

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I have myself seen in the museum of the _Collegio Romano_ at Rome, a
rude caricature which had been scratched upon the wall of the barracks
of Nero's palace, representing a man with an ass's head upon a cross,
and beneath it the inscription, _"Alexomenos sebete Theon"_ "Alexomenos
worships his God." Evidently some Roman soldier had scratched this in an
idle hour in derision of the worship of our Lord by his Christian
fellow-soldier. Tertullian also refers to the same calumny; and Lucian,
a pagan writer, speaks of our Lord as "a crucified impostor." It is
almost impossible for us to conceive the contempt and detestation in
which crucifixion was held by the Romans. It was a punishment reserved
for the worst of felons, or the vilest of slaves.--ED.

[2] All these calumnies, and others still worse, are recorded by pagan
writers concerning the early Christians. Their celebration of the Lord's
Supper in the private meetings became the ground of the last-mentioned
distorted accusation.--ED.

[3] "Graeculus esuriens," the term applied by Juvenal to those foreign
adventurers who sought to worm their way into the employment and
confidence of great Roman houses.

[4] _Regina Viarum_, as the Romans called it.

[5] It is a circular structure sixty-five feet in diameter, built upon a
square base of still larger size. After two thousand years it still
defies the gnawing tooth of Time.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER II

IN C[AE]SAR'S PALACE.

Passing beneath the even then grim and hoary archway of the Porta
Capena, or Capuan Gate, with the dripping aqueduct above it, the
centurion and his secretary traversed rapidly the crowded streets of a
fashionable suburb--now mere mouldering mounds of desolation--to the
Imperial Palace on the Palatine Hill. This eminence, which is now a
mass of crumbling ruins, honey-combed with galleries and subterranean
corridors through what was once the stately apartments of the Lords of
the World, where wandering tourists peer and explore and artists sketch
the falling arch or fading fresco of the banquet halls and chambers of a
long line of emperors, was then the scene of life and