To the Palace and Propylæa of Augustus, with their open spaces, and shrubs, and flowers, and fountains, Tiberius had added a separate palace, known as the Domus Tiberiana, which overlooked the Velabrum; and Gaius--more commonly known by his nickname of Caligula--had filled with buildings the entire space between the Palace and the Forum. He had also purchased the House of Gelotius, and in that humble annex had delighted to spend nights of riotous orgies with the grooms and charioteers of his favourite green faction. Since his time it had been utilised as a training-school for the imperial pages, whose scribblings, sometimes matter-of-fact, sometimes humorous and satirical, can still be traced on the fast-crumbling walls. Vast as was the whole composite structure, it received immense additions from the restless extravagance of Nero, Domitian, and later emperors. But if it surpassed all the other buildings of imperial Rome in magnificence, it surpassed them also in misery and guilt. Here, in the days of Augustus, the Empress Livia had plotted the murder and removal of all who stood in the way of her son’s succession. Here in the days of Tiberius the conscious walls had witnessed the deadly intrigues of Ælius Sejanus. In A.D. 23, that daring and cruel conspirator had secured the poisoning of Drusus, the only son of Tiberius, by insinuating himself into the affections of Livia, his faithless wife. Here in A.D. 33, the younger Drusus, son of the hero Germanicus, was slowly starved to death by order of Tiberius. In one of the subterranean vaults he had poured out his mad reproaches against the tyrant, had writhed under the savage rebukes of the centurion, and had been beaten by the brutal slaves who guarded his dungeon. For nine days he had lingered on, chewing in his agony the tow with which his mattress was stuffed. Here the young Tiberius Gemellus, grandson of Tiberius, piteously ignorant how to kill himself, had been shown how to drive the poniard into his throat by the tribune sent for that purpose by his cousin and adoptive brother, Caligula. Chamber after chamber in that huge structure had witnessed the wild and brutal freaks of that madman-emperor and the tortures which he inflicted upon nobles and senators, whose mouths he ordered to be gagged with their own bloodstained garments. Here he had been visited with the dire vengeance of his crimes; for in the covered gallery which he had built as a passage between his palace and the theatre, he had been smitten by the fierce sword of the tribune Cassius Chærea. Hard by--the stains of blood were still upon the wall--his empress, the blue-eyed Cæsonia, had been stabbed in the throat as she wailed and wept over the dead body of her lord; and her little infant, Julia Drusilla, had been dashed against the stones. Such was the Palace of pagan Rome in the days of Christ and His Apostles.