eader
will get an approximate idea of the "home" of the Roman emperors in its
full pride and glory. I have deliberately excluded from my description
the residence or private house of Augustus, because he himself had
deliberately excluded from it any trace of that grandeur he had so
lavishly bestowed on the buildings which constituted the approach to
it....

During the rule of Claudius, the successor of Caligula, little or
nothing was done toward the enlargement or the embellishment of the
palace of the Caesars. Nero, however, the successor of Claudius,
conceived the gigantic plan of renewing and of rebuilding from the very
foundations, not only the imperial residence, but the whole metropolis.
In the rebuilding of the city the emperor secured for himself the lion's
share; and his Golden House, of which we possess such beautiful remains,
occupied the whole extent from the Palatine to the Quirinal, where now
the central railway station has been erected. Its area amounted to
nearly a square mile, and this enormous district was appropriated, or
rather usurped, by the emperor, right in the center of a city numbering
about two million inhabitants.

Of the wonders of the Golden House it is enough to say that there were
comprised within the precincts of the enchanting residence waterfalls
supplied by an aqueduct fifty miles long, lakes and rivers shaded by
dense masses of foliage, with harbors and docks for the imperial
galleys; a vestibule containing a bronze colossus one hundred and twenty
feet high; porticos three thousand feet long; farms and vineyards,
pasture grounds and woods teeming with the rarest and costliest kind of
game, zoological and botanical gardens; sulfur baths supplied from
springs twelve miles distant; sea baths supplied from the waters of the
Mediterranean, sixteen miles distant at the nearest point; thousands of
columns crowned with capitals of Corinthian gilt metal; thousands of
statues stolen from Greece and Asia Minor; walls encrusted with gems and
mother-of-pearl; banqueting-halls with ivory ceilings, from which rare
flowers and precious perfumes could fall gently on the recumbent
guests.

More marvelous still was the ceiling of the state dining-room. It was
spherical in shape, and cut in ivory, to represent the constellated
skies, and kept in constant motion by machinery in imitation of the
movements of the stars and planets. All these details sound like
fairy-tales, like the dream of a fertile i