Belisarius had entrusted the guard of the mausoleum to his most valued lieutenant, Constantinus, ordering him also to cover the neighbouring walls of the city, which (perhaps on the left of the Aurelian Gate) remained undefended save by small outposts, the river in itself affording some protection. Meanwhile the Goths attempted to cross the Tiber in boats and Constantinus, leaving the more numerous forces in the Aurelian Gate and at the mausoleum as garrison, was forced to appear in person on the menaced spot. The Goths next advanced against the mausoleum. Should they be able to take this main work, they might hope to make themselves masters of the bridge and gate. They brought no machines, nothing but scaling ladders which they covered with their broad shields. A portico or covered colonnade led to the Vatican basilica from the neighbourhood of the tomb, and in this colonnade the approaching party sheltered themselves from the missiles rained down by the men stationed in the mausoleum. They crept along the narrow streets which surrounded the ruined circus of Hadrian so cautiously that the besieged in the fortress were unable to use the catapults against them. Then dashing forward, they shot a cloud of arrows on the battlements of the tomb and leaned their scaling ladders against it. Pressing forward on all sides they had nearly surrounded and scaled the mausoleum when despair suggested to the defenders to make use, as projectiles, of the many statues with which it was decorated, and forthwith they hurled these statues down upon the Goths. The broken masterpieces, statues of emperors, gods and heroes, dropped in heavy fragments upon the devoted heads of the assailants who were routed utterly. This wild scene around the grave of an emperor--a conflict which recalls the mythic battles of the giants--ended the struggle by the Aurelian Gate. His unsuccessful attack cost Vitiges the flower of his army. The cost to Rome was terrible. The mausoleum was robbed for ever of her rich and incomparable artistic treasures. Priceless statues chiselled by the hands of Praxiteles and Polycletus, things of great beauty, divine creations of gods and heroes, had been used as mere projectiles with which to crush barbarian soldiers, and lay broken and blood-bespattered beneath the rescued walls. They remained for long years where they fell, untouched, unearthed even, until in the seventeenth century Pope Urban VII, a Barberini, designing to improve the fortifications, deepened the ditch of the castle of St. Angelo, and the workmen discovered the famous statue of the Barberini Faun, now in the Glyptothek of Munich, where it still remains to prove how richly Hadrian had originally endowed and adorned his tomb.