Boards in the bottom of the hold were removable to facilitate cleaning out the bilge. This was done with an endless belt of buckets, some of which were found, and are on display, restored, in the museum. Over the ribs of the hull was pine planking, then a thin coating of plaster, then a layer of wool treated with tar or pitch, finally lead sheathing clinched with large-headed copper nails. The second ship had outriggers supporting a platform for the oarsmen, and a bronze taffrail decorated with herms--miniature busts tapering into square shafts. A number of mechanical devices of great technical interest was found: pump-pistons; pulleys; wooden platforms (use unknown), one mounted on ball-bearings, another on roller-bearings; a double-action bronze stem-valve (perhaps for use in pumping out the bilge), which had been welded at a high temperature (1800° Fahrenheit); anchors, one with the knot tied by a Roman sailor still intact, another with a moveable stock, anticipating by over 1800 years a similar model patented by the British Admiralty in 1851. Its use is to cant the anchor, giving it a better bite in the mud. In 1944 the retreating Germans wantonly burned the ships in their museum. Their gear, stored in a safe place, survived. From careful drawings made at the time the ships were raised, models were made to one-fifth scale. They are now on display in the restored museum. The ships did not contain within themselves clear evidence about what they were used for. Whether they had some religious purpose in connection with the nearby Temple of Diana, or were used as pleasure-craft, or both, they reflect, like the cave at Sperlonga, the mad extravagance which increasingly characterized the Roman Empire on its road to absolutism. * * * * * In 1917, on Rome’s birthday, April 21, a landslip beside the Rome-Naples railway line outside the Porta Maggiore revealed, forty-two feet beneath the tracks, a hitherto unsuspected and most remarkable underground, vaulted, stucco-ornamented room, the so-called “basilica,” which will serve as a third example of archaeology’s contribution to our knowledge of the Julio-Claudian age. To protect the basilica against damage from seepage and vibration from trains--240 a day pass directly above it--it was enclosed in 1951–52, at a cost of over $500,000, in a great box of waterproof reinforced concrete with footings anchored nearly twenty-four feet beneath the level of the basilica pavement. [Illustration: FIG. 7.8 Rome, subterranean basilica at Porta Maggiore, general view. (Fototeca)]