ved as his guide. The story is curious because it shows that, in
spite of the rapidity with which the Imperial work had been carried on,
the island when Tiberius arrived was still in many parts hidden with
rough and impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of hanging
gardens which turned almost the whole of it into a vast pleasure-ground
was mainly of his own creation.

It would of course be impossible to pass in review the numberless sites
where either chance or research has detected traces of the work of
Tiberius. "Duodecim villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says
Tacitus; and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be
identified to-day, some basking in the sunshine by the shore, some
placed in sheltered nooks where the cool sea-breeze tempered the summer
heat, the grander ones crowning the summit of the hills. We can trace
the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic
which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and
arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make
room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the
cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the
slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore,
the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on
the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the
Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy the scene to which these ruins
belonged, fill the gardens with the fountains and statues whose
fragments lie profusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of
marble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist on the
ruined walls, we shall form some inadequate conception of the luxury
and grace which Tiberius flung around his retirement.

By a singular piece of good fortune the one great wreck which towers
above all the rest is the spot with which the Emperor himself is
historically associated. Through the nine terrible months during which
the conspiracy of Sejanus was in progress, he never left, Seutonius
tells us, the Villa Jovis; and the villa still stands on a huge
promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, from which his eye could
watch every galley that brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and
from Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beauty with the view
on which Tiberius looked. The promontory of Massa lies across the blue
reach of sea, almos