tier upon tier, broken half-way by a wide passage, while at the very top of all was a broad promenade running right round the building from pole to pole of the magnet. This was forty feet above the ground, and the benches and promenades were composed of gleaming marble raised upon arches of brick. There was room here for eighty thousand spectators to assemble in comfort, and one seems to hear ringing down the ages the frenzied shouts of the multitudes which for centuries continued to throng this mighty building, of which now scarce one stone stands upon another. Mr. Grosvenor very justly says that “no theatre, no palace, no public building has to-day a promenade so magnificent.... Within was all the pomp and pageantry of all possible imperial and popular contest and display; without, piled high around, were the countless imposing structures ‘of that city which for more than half a thousand years was the most elegant, the most civilised, almost the only civilised and polished city in the world.’ Beyond was the Golden Horn, crowded with shipping; the Bosphorus in its winding beauty; the Marmora, studded with islands and fringing the Asiatic coast, the long line of the Arganthonius Mountains and the peaks of the Bithynian Olympus, glittering with eternal snow—all combining in a panorama which even now no other city of mankind can rival.” [Illustration: PLAN OF THE HIPPODROME. FROM GROSVENOR’S “CONSTANTINOPLE.” ] In the middle of the arena stood the spina, a marble wall, four feet high and six hundred feet long, with the Goal of the Blues at the northern end facing the throne, and that of the Greens facing the sphendone. The spina was decorated with the choicest statuary, including the three surviving monuments. Of these the Egyptian obelisk, belonging to the reign of Thotmes III., had already stood for more centuries in Egypt than have elapsed since Constantine transported it to his new capital. When it arrived, the engineers could not raise it into position and it remained prone until, in 381, one Proclus, a præfect of the city, succeeded in erecting it upon copper cubes. The shattered column belongs to a much later epoch than that of Constantine. It was set up by Constantine VIII. Porphyrogenitus, and once glittered in the sun, for it was covered with plates of burnished brass. The third, and by far the most interesting monument of the three, is the famous column of twisted serpents from Delphi. Its romantic history never grows dull by repetition. For this is that serpent column of Corinthian brass which was dedicated to Apollo by the thankful and exultant Greeks after the battle of Platæa, when the hosts of the Persian Xerxes were thrust back from the soil of Greece never to return. It bears upon its coils the names of the thirty-one Greek cities which fought for freedom, and there is still to be seen, inscribed in slightly larger characters than the