The stuccoes of the vault were in excellent condition when found. (They have since suffered from dampness, now being corrected by air-conditioning.) Also, they show no traces of addition or repairs, but the wall-panels were desecrated in antiquity by vandals, the consoles for offerings ripped off, the lamps and chapel gear carried away. It looks as though the chapel had had a short life, and the cult a violent end. Will history provide a date? Tacitus mentions in his _Annals_ a rich Roman, Titus Statilius Taurus, known to have owned property near the basilica, who fell foul of Claudius, was accused of practicing _magicas superstitiones_, and escaped his sentence by committing suicide in A.D. 53. The style of the stuccoes fits this date, the décor of the basilica fits the cult, its state when found fits Tacitus’ story. We may suppose that everything within reach was looted, the chamber filled in, and probably never seen again until the spring day 1864 years later when the landslide by the railway revealed its existence. * * * * * In 1907 the German archaeologist F. Weege, following in the footsteps of Renaissance explorers of 1488, made his way through a hole in the wall of the Baths of Trajan, near the Coliseum, to find himself in a labyrinth of underground vaulted corridors and rooms partly filled with rubble, which had once been part of an Imperial palace, the Golden House of Nero. Setting lighted candles at every turning to guide his way back, he explored as many as he could of the eighty-eight rooms of this small part of the palace-complex, sometimes crawling with lighted candle over rubble that filled a room nearly to the vault, while spiders and centipedes, and other nameless creatures scuttled away from him into the darkness. The rooms had been filled with rubble by Trajan, with a twofold purpose: to make a firm substructure for his baths, and to continue the work of the Flavians in damning the memory of the conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste of the hated Nero. Thirteen hundred and eighty-four years later, when the underground rooms were rediscovered, among the visitors was Raphael, who decorated a loggia in the Vatican Palace in the style of the fantastic paintings on Nero’s walls. Since the buried rooms were grottoes, the paintings were “grotesques”--as often, the word has survived, while its history has been forgotten. Other visitors were Caravaggio, Velasquez, Michelangelo, and Raphael’s teacher, Perugino. The names of many a famous artist are scrawled right across the face of the ornaments of the vaults. An Italian poem, written not long after the discovery of America, speaks of artists’ underground picnics in the Golden House. The picnickers crawled on their bellies to enjoy their subterranean meal of bread, ham, apples, and wine.