_Augusteum._--“In front of the palace,” says Procopius, “there is a forum surrounded with columns. The Byzantines call this forum the Augusteum. On the eastern side stands the Senate-house.” Other writers speak of it as the Agora of the Milion, or simply as the Milion, from the building which adjoined it. Zonaras seems to call it the Proaulion of the Great Church. Round its sides were peristyles, and the buildings mentioned in the first chapter, most of which were rebuilt by Justinian. It was laid with a marble floor of long slabs, a portion of which was discovered many feet below the present level, together with the inscribed base of the silver statue of Eudoxia, when Fossati built the new government offices in 1848. “Outside the palace the public baths of Zeuxippus and the great porticoes and all the buildings on either hand as far as the Forum of Constantine are the work of the emperor Justinian.”[296] Large pillars have frequently been found which appear to have formed part of colonnades in the Augusteum. Gyllius saw seven large Corinthian columns, forty-six feet high over all and “twenty foot ten digits apart.” On the shaft of one was cut the name of Constantine, with the signal of the cross he saw in the heavens, and the inscription ΕΝ ΤΟΥΤΩ ΝΙΚΑ. These, he seems to suggest, may have belonged to the Milion. On this is built up a characteristic piece of restoration by Paspates, who sees in the seven columns, standing over twenty feet apart, and obviously in a straight line, “a square building resting on seven columns,” to which he adds an upper range of pillars supporting a domed chamber. Bondelmontius, who is also cited for these columns, says there were six, and _all in a row_. They were almost certainly a part of the nine columns seen by Clavijo[297] before the Fall, when he was told that “a great palace used to stand on the top of them, where the patriarch and his clergy held their meetings.”