which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house. In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of Baiæ; it was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within however life seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant relaxations with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. Each passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the cliff has torn down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which must have resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty almost perfect arches.