The Marble Quay was that part of the embankment along the left bank of the Tiber which was used by the Emperors of Rome for embarking on their state barges and for landing from them whenever they took part in one of the gorgeous river processions. Also it was used by all members of the Imperial household for starting on excursions by water or when returning from them. It was situated below the north corner of the Aventine Hill, not far from the square end of the Circus Maximus, close to the round Temple of Hercules and near the meat market. Every trace of it has long since vanished, its precious marbles having offered most tempting plunder for builders of every century since the fall of Rome. In its glory it was a space about two hundred feet long and nearly a hundred feet wide, bounded by a gentle hollow curve along the river, and enclosed on the other three sides by magnificent colonnaded porticoes. The shafts of the columns were of black Lucullean marble and fully forty feet high. Their capitals and bases were of green porphyry, the entablature they carried of red porphyry and the wall behind them of yellow Numidian marble. The area was paved with slabs of pinkish and light greenish marble while the copings of the Quay and the steps leading down to the water were of coral red marble, a building material extremely rare and very costly. At noon on the fifteenth of August the area, lined all round just before the colonnade by a double rank of Pretorian guards, gorgeous in their trappings of red gloss leather, gilded metal and scarlet cloth, was thronged with Senators, Pontiffs and officials of the Imperial Court, to the number of nearly a thousand. Midway of the crowd, near the head of the middle water-stair, a part of the pavement, ringed about by the lucky dignitaries in the front row of spectators, was left free. In it, by the water-steps, were grouped a selection of Pontiffs, all the Flamens, four Vestals and the Emperor. The yellow river was almost free of craft; along the other bank some barges were being warped up-stream; nearby only patrol boats were visible. Brinnaria, standing alert and springily erect, her white habit dazzlingly fresh, fresh as the white flowers clasped at her bosom by her big pearl brooch, looked like a care-free young matron who had had a long night’s sleep and a good breakfast. Commodus, looking her up nd down, mentally contrasted her easy pose and the rosiness of her smiling face with the tense statuesqueness and austere, almost grim countenances of her three colleagues. He noticed that her three-strand pearl necklace seemed to become her more than theirs became the other three and that she wore her square, white headdress with an indefinable difference, that there was a difference in the very hang of her headband and in the way its tassels lay on her bosom. He noted two unusual adjuncts to her attire; a long, rough towel through her girdle and a gold sacrificial dipper thrust in beside it.