n down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense
calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall
juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in
the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years
the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled
from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still
stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which must have
resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern
fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens
which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of
Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty
almost perfect arches.

The importance of these remains has long been understood by the
archaeologists of Italy, and something of their ruin may be attributed to
the extensive excavations made by the Government of Naples a hundred
years ago. But far more of the terrible wreck is owing to the ravages of
time. With the death of Tiberius Capri sinks suddenly out of sight. Its
name had in fact become associated with infamy, and there is no real
ground for supposing that it remained as the pleasure-isle of later
Emperors. But the vast buildings can only slowly have mouldered into
decay; we find its Pharos flaming under Domitian, and the exile of two
Roman princesses, Crispina and Lucilla, by Commodus, proves that
Imperial villas still remained to shelter them. It is to the period
which immediately follows the residence of Tiberius that we may refer
one of the most curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the
Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singularly picturesque.
A stair cut in the rock leads steeply down a rift in the magnificent
cliffs to the mouth of a little cave, once shrouded by a portico whose
fragments lie scattered among the cacti and wild thyme. Within the walls
are lined with the characteristic reticulated Roman masonry, broken
chambers and doorways on either side are blocked by _debris_, and two
semicircular platforms rise one within the other to a niche in the
furthest recess of the cave where the bas-relief of the Eastern deity
which is now deposited in the Museum at Naples was found by the
excavators. Beside it lay a stone with a Greek inscription so strangely
pathetic that it must tell its own tale:--"Welcome into Hades, O noble
deities--dwell