_Hippodrome._--The information in regard to the hippodrome brought together in the works before mentioned, and by Gyllius, cannot be recapitulated here.[285] As the ground fell away steeply towards the south, that end had to be raised high on vaults, and this retaining wall, perhaps forty feet high, forming a semicircular curve, still exists.[286] On either side rose the tiers of the marble seats. At the north end was the royal stand, called Kathisma, from which the emperors watched the games; this was raised above arched chambers, where the chariots for the arena were kept. The south-west end was called _Sphendone_--The Curve. A rough draft of Constantinople, made early in the fifteenth century for Bondelmontius, reproduced by Mordtmann, shows columns standing on the retaining wall around this curved end. A clear representation of this semicircle of columns is also given in the _Nuremberg Chronicle_. Banduri reproduces from Panvinius, who wrote in the middle of the sixteenth century, a drawing of the hippodrome which seems to have been made with considerable care. Beneath it is written, “The ruins of the circus or hippodrome of Constantinople as they were a hundred years before the capture of the city by the Turks.”[287] But that it should have been in a ruinous state at this time is not borne out by the accounts of writers like Clavijo and Bondelmontius, who described it in the generation before the Fall: on the contrary, we should suppose this to be one of the draughts for the Venice view of the city published about 1570, with which it agrees in many respects.[288] This bird’s-eye view shows the monuments on the Spina, the Grand Stand and its “Podium” of vaults, and also the high external retaining wall of the curve, above which the columns again appear, but set back from its face, so as to leave a passage outside the columns, the outer wall being finished with a battlement. It is true that in the engraving it is rendered as if these columns were attached to a wall, or rather as if a wall were built between the columns, for they appear both inside and out; but this interpretation cannot be given to a description of this colonnade by Gyllius.[289] “In the front of the hippodrome facing the Propontis there was a range of seventeen pillars of white marble standing when I first came to Constantinople, going round that part of the hippodrome which lies between south and west.” They stood on a low wall, about two feet six inches high towards the hippodrome, but outside it was fifty feet to the ground. They were of the Corinthian order, three feet five inches in diameter and twenty-eight feet high, standing eleven feet apart on pedestals; above them was an architrave to which rings were fixed for curtains. “Above was another range of pillars, which were remaining some time after the taking of the city by the Turks.” These last were only reported to Gyllius; and if we accept such a second tier we may suppose that it