The ten “Bikini Girls” (38) come last, because these mosaics, which overlie another set, are obviously later than the rest. They owe their fame to the scantiness of their costumes, as brief as any to be seen on modern European beaches. Gentili thinks they are female athletes, being awarded prizes, but Pace may be nearer the truth in supposing that they are pantomime actresses, with tambourines and _maracas_, performing in a sort of aquacade, the blue _tesserae_ in which they stand representing water. There is ancient evidence for this curiously decadent art-form. Martial speaks of actresses dressed--or undressed--as Nereids swimming about in the Coliseum, and the Church fathers fulminate against such spectacles. When the orchestra of the most august of theaters, that of Dionysus in Athens, was remodelled in Roman times to hold water, we must suppose, since the space is too small for mock naval battles, that the place once sacred to the choruses of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides was thereafter used for the aquatic antics of just such actresses as the Piazza Armerina mosaics portray. Tastelessness and grandeur, conspicuous waste and a daring architectural plan: this paradoxical blend, so characteristic of the villa, explains both what is meant by decline and why it took the Empire so long to fall. * * * * * The villa at Piazza Armerina belongs to an age when Christians were persecuted: the motifs in the mosaics are almost aggressively pagan. But Maximian’s son-in-law Constantine became in the end a convert to Christianity, and built, beginning about A.D. 322, in honor of St. Peter, a great basilica church on the Vatican Hill, replaced in the Renaissance by the present building. In 1939, at the death of Pope Pius XI, who had asked to be buried in the crypt of St. Peter’s, excavations for his tomb created the occasion for transforming the crypt into a lower church. In lowering the floor level of the crypt for this purpose, the workmen came, only eight inches down, upon the pavement of Old St. Peter’s, Constantine’s church. This in turn rested upon mausolea with their tops sliced off, and their interiors rammed full of earth. At the direction of Pius XII, these mausolea were scientifically excavated.