It was originally brought to Rome in the early days of the Christian era. Twenty-seven years after Constantine had transferred the seat of government to his own new capital of Byzantium, his successor, Constantine II, visited Rome. He visited Rome like any foreign prince and was profoundly impressed by the magnificence and majesty of his discarded capital. A not unnatural instinct prompted him to leave some memorial of himself among the monuments and trophies of his heroic predecessors; and for this purpose he sent for the obelisk which Thotmes III had originally placed before the great temple of Thebes. It was brought to Rome and placed in the Circus Maximus. Its subsequent history and the causes of the fall of this last of the imperial obelisks are still lost in the mystery which hangs over so much of mediæval Rome.[H] The original pedestal had been too damaged by fire to admit of using it again; so Sixtus V gave permission to Domenico Fontana to make the new pedestal out of the materials of an old arch which Domenico was to destroy for this purpose. The permission was given in writing, for Domenico Fontana had found that it was necessary to be armed with written instructions from the Pope whenever he began one of his devastating raids upon the antiquities of the city. The city government had endured such pillage and destruction at the hands of the great Pope’s great architect that all the past vandalism of private individuals seemed slight in comparison. They protested in vain against most of the destruction upon which Sixtus V had set his heart, and neither princes nor magistrates could save the old pontifical residence of the Lateran which had stood since the seventh century on this very piazza. It was a marvellous rambling pile of buildings--churches, monasteries, shrines, loggias, colonnades, oratories, banqueting rooms and halls filled with mosaics, pictures, and frescoes--and, according to a great authority, the most wonderful museum of mediæval art that ever existed. This priceless record of the past was ruthlessly demolished and razed to the ground in a few months’ time by order of Pope Sixtus V. It is difficult to understand his motives for this particular action, since it was not the history of Paganism but of his own predecessors that he was destroying. The populace never forgot, or forgave him this destruction, involving as it did the loss of the Oratory of the Holy Cross. An exquisite example of early Christian architecture, built in the shape of a Greek cross, this oratory was held in peculiar veneration by all classes; and the Roman people might not unnaturally conclude that the wanton destruction of anything at once so beautiful and so sacred as this oratory could only be ascribed to the promptings of the devil himself. Posterity can hardly accept Pope Sixtus V’s fountain, even with its obelisk, as an adequate substitute for the three fountains of rare marble in the atrium of this