ers in the Stygian land--welcome me too, most pitiful of
men, ravished from life by no judgment of the Fates, but by a death
sudden, violent, the death-stroke of a wrath defiant of justice. But now
I stood in the first rank beside my lord! now he has left me and my
parents alike of hope! I am not fifteen, I have not reached my twentieth
year, and--wretched I--I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but
I pray my brother and my parents to weep for wretched ones no more."
Conjecture has coupled this wail of a strange fate with the human
sacrifices offered at the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a
slave and favourite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the Eastern
deity; but there is no ground whatever for either of the guesses.

Such as it is however the death-cry of Hypatus alone breaks the later
silence of Capri. The introduction of Christianity was marked by the
rise of the mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns of giallo
antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins of the Baths hard by, and
from this moment we may trace the progress of destruction in each
monument of the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved with a
mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the chapel of St. Michael is
erected out of a Roman building which occupied its site. We do not know
when the island ceased to form a part of the Imperial estate, but the
evidence of a charter of Gregory II., overlooked by the local
topographers, shows that at the opening of the eighth century the
"Insula Capreae cum monasterio St. Stefani" had passed like the rest of
the Imperial property in the South to become part of the demesne of the
Roman See. The change may have some relation to the subjection of Capri
to the spiritual jurisdiction of Sorrento, of whose bishopric it formed
a part till its own institution as a separate see in the tenth century.
The name of the "Bishop of Quails," which attached itself to the prelate
of Capri, points humorously to the chief source of his episcopal income,
the revenue derived from the capture of the flocks of these birds who
settle on the island in their two annual migrations in May and
September. From the close of the ninth century, when the island passed
out of the hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the
mainland; its ruin seems to have been completed by the raids of the
Saracens from their neighbouring settlement on the coast of Lucania; and
the two mediaeval fortresses of