ide a vast archway or niche, one of which forms the gateway.
Within we find a huge cruciform chamber lighted by six square
openings. The upper story, now reached by two stairways, built with
ancient materials in 1774, is circular, having about it eighteen blind
arches and over it a vast circular roof hewn out of a single block of
Istrian stone that weighs, it is said, two hundred tons. It may be
that this upper story, smaller as it is than the lower, was of old
surrounded by a colonnade, and it may be that the twelve projections
upon the vast monolith of the roof once upheld statutes of the twelve
Apostles. We do not know.[1]

[Footnote 1: On the other hand, these projections are thought by many
to have been used as rings for the ropes by which the roof was hauled
up an inclined bank of earth into place They each bear the name of an
Apostle, and are similar to the small abutting arches round the dome
of S. Sophia at Salonica]

Here in this mighty tomb, which is known in Ravenna as _La Rotonda_,
abandoned now in an unkempt garden, Theodoric, who expected to found a
line of kings who would one day lie beside him; as long as he lay
there at all, lay there alone. Not for long, however, did he enjoy
that solitude. Already, when Agnellus wrote his _Liber Pontificalis_,
the tomb was empty. He tells us that the porphyry urn, which had
served as sepulchre for the Gothic king, then stood at the door of the
Benedictine monastery close by, and that it was empty. And it seemed
to him, he says, that the body of the king had been thrown out of the
mausoleum because a heretic and a barbarian, as we may suppose, was
not worthy of it. At any rate the body of Theodoric was no longer in
the mausoleum in the beginning of the ninth century, and it is certain
that it had been ejected thence many years before. In the year 1854 a
gang of navvies who were excavating a dock between the railway station
and the Corsini Canal, some two hundred yards perhaps from the
mausoleum, and on the site of an old cemetery, came upon a skeleton
"armed with a golden cuirass, a sword by its side, and a golden helmet
upon its head. In the hilt of the sword and in the helmet large jewels
were blazing." Most of this booty they disposed of, but a few pieces
were recovered and these are now in the Museo. It might seem that this
can have been none other than the body of the great Gothic king.
Indeed Dr. Ricci finds the ornament upon the armour to be similar to
the de