Hitherto the chambers which we have visited were open to the public; beyond this, none but his immediate family and attendants could follow the emperor. We now enter the _Peristyle_, a courtyard, which was open to the sky, but surrounded with arcades ornamented with statues, where we may imagine that the empresses amused themselves with their birds and flowers. Hence, by a narrow staircase, we can descend into what is perhaps the most interesting portion of the whole, the one unearthed fragment of the actual _Palace of Augustus_, which still retains remains of gilding and fresco, and an artistic group in stucco. An original window remains, and it will be recollected on looking at it, that when this was built it was not subterranean, but merely in the hollow of the valley, afterwards filled up. In these actual rooms may have lived Livia, who in turn inhabited three houses on the Palatine, first that of her first husband Nero Drusus, whom Augustus compelled her to divorce; then the imperial house of Augustus; and lastly that of Tiberius, the son by her first husband, whom she was the means of raising to the throne. We now reach the _Triclinium_ or dining-room, surrounded by a skirting of pavonazzetto with a cornice of giallo. Tacitus describes a scene in the imperial triclinium, in which the Emperor Tiberius is represented as reclining at dinner, having on one side his aged mother, the Empress Livia, and on the other his niece Agrippina, widow of Germanicus and granddaughter of the great Augustus.[110] It was while the imperial family were seated at a banquet in the triclinium, in the time of Nero, that his young step-brother Britannicus (son of Claudius and Messalina) swallowed the cup of poison which the emperor had caused Locusta to prepare and sank back dead upon his couch, his wretched sisters Antonia and Octavia, also seated at the ghastly feast, not daring to give expression to their grief and horror,--and Nero merely desiring the attendants to carry the boy out, and saying that it was a fit to which he was subject.[111] Here it was that Marcia the concubine presented the cup of drugged wine to the wicked Commodus, on his return from a wild beast hunt, and produced the heavy slumber during which he was strangled by the wrestler Narcissus. In this very room also his successor Pertinax, who had spent his short reign of three months in trying to reform the State, resuscitate the finances, and to heal, as far as possible, 'the wounds inflicted by the hand of tyranny,' received the news that the guard, impatient of unwonted discipline, had risen against him, and going forth to meet his assassins, fell, covered with wounds, just in front of the palace.[112]