Another inscription goes some way to explain both the quantity and the arrangement of the sculpture in the grotto. In ten lines of Latin verse it describes how a certain Faustinus adorned the cave with sculpture for the pleasure of his Imperial masters, choosing subjects which, Vergil himself would admit, outdid his own poetry. One of the subjects mentioned is Scylla, the fabulous cave-dwelling sea-monster, with a girdle of dogs’ heads about her loins, who guarded the straits of Messina. Now in the cave, carved in the living rock, at the right of the entrance, is the prow of a ship, set with blue, green, yellow, and red mosaic, and presenting some evidence of having once had a marble superstructure. To this ship Iacopi would assign some of his key figures: a bearded Ulysses in a seaman’s cap, his face expressing horror; a lovely archaic statuette of Athena (Fig. 7.3), grasped by a huge hand (Athena might be the figurehead); Scylla’s gigantic hand seizing a seaman by the hair, and a terrified mariner who has taken refuge from Scylla at the ship’s prow. A niche carved in the rock above the ship would be an appropriate vantage-point for Scylla herself; in one fragment one of her dog’s heads has bitten deep into a sailor’s shoulder. It is true that the mosaic names the ship _Argo_, but Iacopi explains this as a generic name for a ship, not necessarily referring to the one that bore the Argonauts. If Iacopi is right about this group, it was a baroque or even rococo effect that Faustinus arranged for his Imperial masters. But the Laocoön and Scylla groups by no means exhausted his fancy or his pocketbook: there was Menelaus with the body of Patroclus, Ganymede borne to heaven by an eagle (carved so as to be seen to best effect from below, and therefore possibly belonging to a pedimental treatment of the cave façade). There are heads of gods and heroes, satyrs and fauns, a charming Cupid trying on a satyr’s mask, a delightful head of a baby with ringlets over the ears--all in the fanciful, complex, sometimes tortured baroque style of Hellenistic Pergamum and Rhodes. These are all of fine crystalline Greek island marble, so that they may be Greek originals. The soapy native Carrara stone is normally used in Roman copies--and in too much modern American church sculpture. [Illustration: FIG. 7.3 Sperlonga, Cave “of Tiberius.” Head of archaic statuette of Athena. (Iacopi, _op. cit._, Fig. 11)] [Illustration: FIG. 7.4 Nemi, Braschi finds (1895) from ships. (G. Ucelli, _Le navi di Nemi_, p. 19)]