times of its greatest splendour, was poor in comparison with the modern world; even in the second century after Christ, when it stood as metropolis at the head of an immense empire, Rome was smaller, less wealthy, less imposing, than a great metropolis of Europe or of America. Some sumptuous public edifices, beautiful private houses–that is all the splendour of the metropolis of the empire. He who goes to the Palatine may to-day refigure for himself, from the so-called House of Livia, the house of a rich Roman family of the time of Augustus, and convince himself that a well-to-do middle-class family would hardly occupy such a house to-day.
Moreover, the palaces of the Cæsars on the Palatine are a grandiose ruin that stirs the artist and makes the philosopher think; but if one sets himself to measure them, to conjecture from the remains the proportions of the entire edifices, he does not conjure up buildings that rival large modern constructions. The palace of Tiberius, for example, rose above a street only two metres wide–less than seven feet,–an alley like those where to-day in Italian cities live only the most miserable inhabitants. We have pictured to ourselves the imperial banquets of ancient Rome as functions of unheard of splendour; if
