When the buildings cluttering the site had been cleared away, the plan (Fig. 6.1) was found to be based upon that of Caesar’s Forum: a rectangular portico with a temple at the back. But the rectangle was enriched at the sides with curves, as at Palestrina earlier and in Bernini’s portico in front of St. Peter’s later. Each of the hemicycles had, let into the walls on two levels, niches two feet deep, big enough to hold statues of half life size. Excavations in the area of the south hemicycle as early as 1889 had turned up fragments of drapery in Carrara marble, and bits of inscriptions which, in combination with literary evidence, gave to the great Italian epigraphist Attilio Degrassi the clue to the subjects of the statues. The inscriptions, called _elogia_, recorded the _cursus honorum_, or public career, of a set of heroes, triumphing generals, or others who had deserved well of the Republic. Three examples are Aulus Postumius, who, with the help of the Great Twin Brethren Castor and Pollux (the household gods of the Julian clan), beat the Latins at the battle of Lake Regillus in 496, and built his divine helpers a temple in the Forum; Appius Claudius the Blind, who built the Appian Way (312 B.C.) and an aqueduct; and Sulla--nabobs and builders all. But there was space in the two levels of hemicycle niches, and in others hypothetically restored in the portico’s rectilinear wall, for over fifty statues with _elogia_. So Degrassi made a search for other stones similarly inscribed, some of which turned up in the most unlikely places.