During this period Nikopolis was planned and built; the Temple of Solomon was adorned with colonnades in the Greek Korinthian style, and at Nîmes (Nemausus) we possess the most complete remains of a prostylos pseudipteros temple of Roman architecture, with the purest Korinthian columns. Under Tiberius the camp of the prætorians was turned into a marble palace. Under Claudius harbours and moles were enlarged, built, and decorated. Nero burned Rome, to reconstruct it with greater pomp. The architects Celerus and Severus had to build the _golden houses_, of which the porticos were miles long. The dining-rooms surpassed in splendour anything dreamt of in Indian poetry. In the decoration of this palace, or rather cluster of palaces, we trace the greatest mistake an artist can be guilty of. The error is of Asiatic origin. It may be designated as a conscious ‘_lying_’ in the constructive elements. They tried to hide the costly material under a cheap disguise; a tendency as bad and objectionable, as a ‘lying’ in cheap substances to represent costly materials. The Romans used tortoise-shell as veneer for their furniture, and painted it to make it appear like wood; we, on the other hand, use wood, and paint it over to make it appear ‘giallo antico,’ (yellow marble), or any other costly stone. Ornamentation began to lose all symmetry and proportion. Confusion and profusion ruled supreme. The walls of the rooms looked like exhibitions of oriental carpets, tapestry, and jewelry. Art retrograded to the over-painted, over-decorated, over-ornamented shrouds, in which the mummies of old were buried. For a time art was carried with Asiatic splendour to a grave of tasteless pomposity. B. With the Flavians, down to Septimus Severus, a new spirit of artistic universalism pervaded the Roman world. The Greek element waned, and the circular forms of the Romans, ornamented with an indiscriminate mixture of Doric, Ionic, and Korinthian columns, predominated. The Colosseum, a Flavian amphitheatre, begun by Vespasian and finished by Titus, belongs to this period. Three rows of arcades, the first of Doric, the second of Ionic, and the third of Korinthian half-columns, with their entablatures, crowned with a fourth story, adorned with Korinthian pilasters, and furnished with windows, encompassed an oval, 600 feet long by 500 feet broad, capable of holding 80,000 spectators. The circus was so constructed that it could also be used as a naumachy. In this over-decorated pompous building, the great fights of the gladiators took place; here men and wild beasts met in deadly struggle; here men, if killed, were dragged away by ropes fixed in their bodies with iron hooks; here the Imperators sat with all the nobility of Rome, and delighted in sports, which, at a later period of Rome’s spiritual dominion, were only surpassed in _cruelty_ by the pious ‘auto-da-fés’ of misguided priests.