circled with laurel. Twice he tried to place it on Cæsar's head, and twice did Cæsar, with well-feigned reluctance, like a bishop his new mitre, reject the bauble. Thunders of applause attended each rejection. There could be no mistake about the popular feeling; but Cæsar, who was evidently vexed, pretended to mistake it, and, baring his neck, desired any one who wished to strike. There were some who wished, but the opportunity had not yet come. Cæsar's further attempts to gain a crown through prophecies from the Sibylline books that none but a king could subdue the Parthians, steeled the hearts and hands of his assassins. On the ides of March the senate met in Pompey's Curia, and there, beneath the statue of his former rival,1 Cæsar fell by their daggers. When the murder had been perpetrated, the assassins, brandishing aloft a cap of liberty on the point of a sword, and protected by a body of gladiators, mounted up to the Capitol, whither they were followed by several senators, and amongst them by Cicero. Here Brutus addressed the people who had assembled; and imagining from the applause which followed his speech that his deed was universally popular, he ventured, in company with the other conspirators, to descend into the Forum. Another oration of Brutus was again favourably received; but a speech of Cinna's, in which he abused Cæsar's memory, drew forth such unequivocal marks of displeasure and anger from the crowd, that the conspirators again hastily retired into the Capitol. Lepidus, Cæsar's master of the horse, who commanded a large body of veterans, occupied the Forum during the night with his troops, and next day the consul Antony, feeling himself more secure he had 1 Said to be the identical statue now in the Palazzo Spada. After Cæsar's murder, the Curia was walled up, as a locus sceleratus. Augustus, however, caused the statue of Pompey to be re-erected under a marble arch in front of his portico; a situation which corresponds with the place where the statue was found. Suet. Cæs. 88, Octav. 31; Dion Cass. xliv. 16, 52; Cic. De Div. ii. 9. hid himself after the murder, no one knew where, in the garb of a slave-ventured to appear again in public, having previously secured Lepidus by a promise to make him Pontifex Maximus, and to give his daughter in marriage to Lepidus' son. Antony now seized all Cæsar's papers and the public treasure, and convened the senate in the Temple of Tellus, where the posture of affairs was discussed. On the following day Antony and his colleague Dolabella assembled the people in the Forum, where the will of Cæsar was read, and by its liberal bequests to the people and to some of his assassins excited a universal enthusiasm in his favour. This feeling became almost uncontrollable a few days after at the sight of Cæsar's body now borne in funeral procession into the Forum; when Antony, mounting the Rostra, and ordering the bloody corpse with all its gaping wounds to be displayed, in a touching and memorable funeral oration still further excited the passions of the multitude.1 Instead of suffering the body to be carried into the Campus Martius, where a funeral pile had been prepared, the mob extemporised one at the eastern extremity of the Forum by pulling down some neighbouring booths. While the body was still consuming, some of the mob snatched burning brands from the pyre, and, rushing with them through the streets, set fire to the houses of the chief conspirators, and to Pompey's Curia, where Cæsar had met his death. With this scene, so far as the city of Rome is concerned, was closed that period of lawlessness and violence which ushered in the Empire. The battles still to be fought occurred at a distance from the capital; they belong to the province of the historian, and not to the more humble one of an historiographer of the city. There is, however, one bloody episode still to be recorded. The reader will obtain a more vivid impression of the scene from One of the first Shakspeare's Julius Cæsar than from any extant historian. uses made by Antony of the license to slay which he had acquired by his triumvirate with Octavius and Lepidus, was to put on his list of proscriptions the name of Cicero. His myrmidons surprised and slew the aged and eloquent senator at his villa near Formiæ, and cutting off the head and hands carried them to Rome as the most acceptable present which they could bring to their master. There was the head which had conceived, the mouth which had uttered, the hands which had penned, the Philippics! Antony was seated in the Forum-administering justice! -when these ghastly relics were laid before him. He gloated on them with delight, then carried them to Fulvia, his wife, that she also might share his satisfaction. With impotent female rage, Fulvia insulted the head that had ceased to hear, pierced with her bodkin the tongue. that could no longer speak! Then, by command of Antony, the bleeding relics were nailed to the Rostra and there left to moulder. The brutal, blundering Antony could not have chosen for them either a more appropriate monument, or one that more evidently stultified himself. It illustrated at once the eloquence of his victim, and the deep and lasting pain and mortification it had caused him. SECTION III. THE REIGN OF AUGUSTUS CÆSAR. THE battles of Philippi and death of Cassius and Brutus destroyed the senatorial or constitutional party, and after Antony and Octavian had four times divided the world, the last time without any competitor, the latter by his victory over Antony at Actium, B. c. 31, became undisputed master of the Roman Empire. In the following year he crushed Antony's remaining power in Egypt, and compelled the ex-triumvir to put an end to his own life; after which, having settled the affairs of the East, he returned to Rome in B. C. 29. He now obtained the perpetual title of Imperator, or emperor, and celebrated three magnificent triumphs for his victories in Dalmatia, at Actium, and in Egypt. Peace having been thus restored throughout the Empire, the Temple of Janus was closed for the first time. since more than two centuries. Octavian, or, as we shall henceforth call him, Augustus, which title he received a year or two after, could now apply himself to the restoration of order and the promotion of the works of peace; a task for which his genius naturally fitted him. These works included many improvements in Rome, to which part of his labours the design of this narrative entirely confines us. His lengthened reign and the immense resources which he commanded, enabled him not only to carry out many new and magnificent designs, but also to restore and perfect an immense number of previously existing monuments, so that it was his boast that, having found Rome brick, he left it marble.1 After all his labours, however, much remained to be done by his successors before the city attained its highest point of beauty and grandeur. In order to convey some conception of what he effected, we will endeavour, so far as the materials for it admit, to draw a slight sketch of the state of Rome at his accession. On the whole, in comparison with many modern capitals, and perhaps a few ancient ones, Rome offered not in the time of Augustus that magnificent aspect which the imagination might naturally look for in the mistress of the world, though certain portions of the city no doubt displayed great architectural splendour. What first strikes the eye on entering a large capital are long and spacious streets, extensive squares and places. These of themselves, and without any regard to the architectural taste displayed in them, fill the eye and excite an involuntary admiration. Such, for instance, are the quays and boulevards at Paris, the Rue de Rivoli, the Place de la Concorde; in London such streets as Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly, and the numerous squares in their vicinity; at Berlin, the Linden and the Schloss Platz. In places like these Rome must have been totally deficient. The very nature of the ground on which it stood prevented their existence. A complex of hills intersected by narrow winding valleys could not possibly offer space either for a handsome street or a spacious piazza. The Vicus Longus, which ran along the valley between the Quirinal and Viminal hills, ascended the height, and perhaps proceeded as far as the Porta Collina,2 was probably, as may be inferred both from its situation and its name, one of the longest streets in Rome, yet it could hardly have exceeded three-quarters of a mile in length. It appears, too, from Livy's account of the sacellum erected in it to Pudicitia Plebeia, not to 1 Suet. Aug. 28. 2 Valerius Maximus (ii. 5, § 6) speaks of a Summus Vicus Longus, which shows that it ascended the elevated ground at the junction of |