Trajan’s buildings are works, which are not only to be noticed in the topography of Rome, but belong to history as great achievements. Apollodorus of Damascus was his great architect, whose likeness I had the pleasure of discovering: it is the figure of a man in a Greek dress, presenting to the Emperor, who is seated, a drawing on a scroll; and it is on the bas reliefs of the arch of Constantine, the upper part of which is undoubtedly taken from the arch of Trajan. In the early times of the republic, art had the finish of the Etruscan school, owing to Etruscan artists; before the first Punic War, painting also flourished in Rome. Then followed the imitation of the Greeks, of which we cannot give a positive opinion. In the reign of Augustus, the material began to be of paramount importance, notwithstanding which the style was still grand: instead of the good freestone from the quarries of the neighbourhood, people would have nothing but marble. In the temple of Mars Ultor, all the columns are of marble. Otherwise Augustus, on the whole, still built many great works of the stone of the country; and this was yet done even as late as Claudius. But in the course of time, the taste for foreign marbles became more and more decided: Phrygian, Numidian, and other marbles were now used. In Nero’s days, Greek architecture with marble pillars was in fashion; and the material was looked upon as the chief thing, which in architecture is perfectly absurd. With the exception of the Colosseum, all the buildings of Titus and Domitian’s time are overdone; though highly finished, they want distinctness of character: the impression of grandeur is quite lost. Under Trajan, architecture acquires new splendour and dignity; which was owing to that Greek whom we have named: in a new form, it went to work with the treasures of the whole of the immense empire; so that it never signified whether it cost some millions more or less. Trajan either made or completed noble highways; he paved the Via Appia from Capua to Brundusium with basalt; he drained the Pontine marshes as far as they can be drained, and built the harbour of Centumcellæ (Civita Vecchia); the conviction must even then have been come to, that the Tiber was continually filling the harbours of Ostia and Portus with silt. He built baths at the hot springs of Civita Vecchia, and made the mole and harbour of Ancona: for the Tyrrhenian maritime towns were entirely destroyed, though it is not known when. The greatest of his buildings are at Rome, such as the _Forum Ulpium_ and therein the _Columna Cochlis_. The slope of the Quirinal Hill, which reached almost as far as the Capitol, was for a considerable length lowered upwards of a hundred and forty feet (it may be that I do not quite remember the exact measure[47]): this height is marked by the pillar. It was his object to place the government offices in his Forum. The _Forum Ulpium_, like the _Forum Augusti_ before it, was not, as formerly, an open space, which