yers and
hymns; but what the images meant no man knows. Most generally it was
believed in Rome that they took the place of human beings, once
sacrificed to the river in the spring. Ovid protests against the mere
thought, but the industrious Baracconi quotes Sextus Pompeius Festus to
prove that in very early times human victims were thrown into the Tiber
for one reason or another, and that human beings were otherwise
sacrificed until the year of the city 657, when, Cnaeus Cornelius
Lentulus and Publius Licinius Crassus being consuls, the Senate made a
law that no man should be sacrificed thereafter. The question is one for
scholars; but considering the savage temper of the Romans, their dark
superstitions, the abundance of victims always at hand, and the
frequency of human sacrifices among nations only one degree more
barbarous, there is no reason for considering the story very improbable.

[Illustration: THE RIPA GRANDE AND SITE OF THE SUBLICIAN BRIDGE]

Within the limits of this region the ancient Brotherhood of Saint John
Beheaded have had their church and place of meeting for centuries. It
was their chief function to help and comfort condemned criminals from
the midnight preceding their death until the end. To this confraternity
belonged Michelangelo, among other famous men whose names stand on the
rolls to this day; and doubtless the great master, hooded in black and
unrecognizable among the rest, and chanting the penitential psalms in
the voice that could speak so sharply, must have spent dark hours in
gloomy prisons, from midnight to dawn, beside pale-faced men who were
not to see the sun go down again; and in the morning, he must have stood
upon the very scaffold with the others, and seen the bright axe smite
out the poor life. But neither he nor any others of the brethren spoke
of these things except among themselves, and they alone knew who had
been of the band, when they bore the dead man to his rest at last, by
their little church, when they laid Beatrice Cenci before the altar in
Saint Peter's on the Janiculum, and Lucrezia in the quiet church of
Saint Gregory by the Aventine. They wrote down in their journal the
day, the hour, the name, the death; no more than that. And they went
back to their daily life in silence.

But for their good deeds they obtained the right of saving one man from
death each year, conceded them by Paul the Third, the Farnese Pope,
while Michelangelo was painting the Last Judgment--