d of the warriors and their horses; we look upon the
ships of the time, canoes and quinqueremes; women of all ranks, priests
of all theogonies, sieges, and assaults. Such are the merits of this
sculptured host, that Polidoro da Caravaggio, Giulio Romano, Michael
Angelo, and all the artists of the Renaissance have drawn thence models
of style and picturesque grouping.

Trajan's Column is of pure Carrara marble. The shaft measures about
ninety-four English feet, by twelve in diameter at the base, and ten
below the capital, which is Doric and carved out of a single block; the
column is composed of thirty-four blocks, hollowed out internally and
cut into a winding stair. A series of bas-reliefs, divided from one
another by a narrow band, run spirally around the shaft parallel to the
inner staircase of a hundred and eighty-two steps, and describes
twenty-three circuits to reach the platform on which the statue is
placed. The foot and the pedestal are seventeen feet high; the torus, of
enormous diameter, is a monolith; the whole construction rises a hundred
and thirty-five feet from the ground. These thirty-four blocks,
measuring eleven meters in circumference by one in height, had--a task
of considerable precision--to have holes drilled in them for the screws
of the staircase, it being necessary to determine from the inside
precisely where these borings must be made in order not to break the
continuity of the bas-reliefs, executed by several different hands, and
which are more deeply worked in proportion as they gain in height, so as
to appear of an equal projection.

THE BATHS OF CARACALLA[14]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

You reach the Baths of Caracalla, the most imposing object after the
Coliseum that one sees in Rome. These colossal structures are so many
signs of their times. Imperial Rome plundered the entire Mediterranean
basin, Spain, Gaul, and two-thirds of England, for the benefit of a
hundred thousand idlers. She amused them in the Coliseum with massacres
of beasts and of men; in the Circus Maximus with combats of athletes and
with chariot races; in the theater of Marcellus with pantomimes, plays,
and the pageantry of arms and costume; she provided them with baths, to
which they resorted to gossip, to contemplate statues, to listen to
declaimers, to keep themselves cool in the heats of summer. All that had
been invented of the convenient, agreeable, and beautiful, all that
could be collected in the wor