y-headed Marcus Aurelius, with his
lifted brow and projecting eyes, from the full, round beauty of his
youth to the more haggard look of his latest years? Are there any modern
portraits more familiar than the pensive, wedge-like head of Augustus,
with his sharp-cut lips and nose,--or the dull phiz of Hadrian, with his
hair combed down over his low forehead,--or the vain, perking face of
Lucius Verus, with his thin nose, low brow, and profusion of curls,--or
the brutal bull head of Caracalla,--or the bestial, bloated features of
Vitellius?

These men, who were but lay-figures to us at school, mere pegs of names
to hang historic robes upon, thus interpreted by the living history of
their portraits, the incidental illustrations of the places where they
lived and moved and died, and the buildings and monuments they erected,
become like the men of yesterday. Art has made them our contemporaries.
They are as near to us as Pius VII. and Napoleon. I never drive out
of the old Nomentan Gate without remembering the ghastly flight of
Nero,--his recognition there by an old centurion,--his damp, drear
hiding-place underground, where, shuddering and quoting Greek, he waited
for his executioners,--and his subsequent terrible and cowardly death,
as narrated by Tacitus and Suetonius; and it seems nearer to me, more
vivid, and more actual, than the death of Rossi in the court of the
Cancelleria. I never drive by the Caesars' palaces, without recalling
the ghastly jest of Tiberius, when he sent for some fifteen of the
Senators at dead of night and commanded their presence; and when they,
trembling with fear, and expecting nothing less than that their heads
were all to fall, had been kept waiting for an hour, the door opened,
and he, nearly naked, appeared with a fiddle in his hand, and, after
fiddling and dancing to his quaking audience for an hour, dismissed them
to their homes uninjured. The air seems to keep a sort of spiritual
scent or trail of these old deeds, and to make them more real here than
elsewhere. The old horrors of the Amphitheatre can be made real to any
person of imaginative mind in the Colosseum. He has but to lend himself
to the contagion of the place, and he will see the circle of ten
thousand eager eyes thirsting for his blood, fill up the ruined benches
and arched tiers as of yore, and hear the savage murmur of human voices,
worse than the dull roar of the beasts below. The past still lives in
these old walls. It is