The retirement of the spot and the beauty of the landscape naturally tempted some of the luxurious Roman nobles to fix their summer residences by the lake.​[10] Here Lucius Caesar had a house to which, on a day in early summer, only two months after the murder of his illustrious namesake, he invited Cicero to meet the assassin Brutus.​[11] The emperors themselves appear to have been partial to a retreat where they could find repose from the cares of state and the bustle of the great city in the fresh air of the lake and the stillness of the woods. Here Julius Caesar built himself a costly villa, but pulled it down because it was not to his mind.​[12] Here Caligula had two magnificent barges, or rather floating palaces, launched for him on the lake;​[13] and it was while dallying in the woods of Nemi that the sluggard Vitellius received the tidings of revolt which woke him from his dream of pleasure and called him to arms.​[14] Vespasian had a monument dedicated to his honour in the {p6} grove by the senate and people of Aricia: Trajan condescended to fill the chief magistracy of the town; and Hadrian indulged his taste for architecture by restoring a structure which had been erected in the precinct by a prince of the royal house of Parthia.​[15] [Sidenote: Diana as the mistress of wild animals. Diana as the patroness of cattle. Analogy of St. Leonhard in Germany.] Such, then, was the sanctuary of Diana at Nemi, a fitting home for the “mistress of mountains, and forests green, and lonely glades, and sounding rivers,” as Catullus calls her.​[16] Multitudes of her statuettes, appropriately clad in the short tunic and high buskins of a huntress, with the quiver slung over her shoulder, have been found on the spot. Some of them represent her with her bow in her hand or her hound at her side.​[17] Bronze and iron spears, and images of stags and hinds, discovered within the precinct,​[18] may have been offerings of huntsmen to the huntress goddess for success in the chase. Similarly the bronze tridents, which have also come to light at Nemi, were perhaps presented by fishermen who had speared fish in the lake, or maybe by hunters who had stabbed boars in the forest.​[19] The wild boar was still hunted in Italy down to the end of the first century of our era; for the younger Pliny tells us how, with his usual charming affectation, he sat meditating and reading by the nets, while three fine boars fell into them.​[20] Indeed, some fourteen-hundred years later boar-hunting was a favourite pastime of Pope {p7} Leo the Tenth.​[21] A frieze of painted reliefs in terra-cotta, which was found in the sanctuary at Nemi, and may have adorned Diana’s temple, portrays the goddess in the character of what is called the Asiatic Artemis, with wings sprouting from her waist and a lion resting its paws on each of her shoulders.​[22] A few rude images of cows, oxen, horses, and pigs dug up on the site may perhaps indicate that Diana