shows a circus, supposed, however, by some to represent the Circus Maximus. It gives a very good idea of that place of exercise. The soil has been but little raised, if we may judge from the small cellular structure at the end of the Spina, which was probably the chapel of the god Consus. This cell is half beneath the soil, as it must have been in the circus itself; for Dionysius[1] could not be persuaded to believe that this divinity was the Roman Neptune, because his altar was underground.
28.
Great Nemesis!
Here, where the ancient paid thee homage long.
We read in Suetonius, that Augustus, from a warning received in a dream,[2] counterfeited, once a year, the beggar, sitting before the gate of his palace with his hand hollowed and stretched out for charity. A statue formerly in the villa Borghese, and which should be now at Paris, represents the Emperor in that posture of supplication. The object of that self-degradation was the appeasement of Nemesis, the perpetual attendant on good fortune, of whose power the Roman conquerors were also reminded by certain symbols attached to their cars of triumph. The symbols were the whip and the crotalo, which were discovered in the Nemesis of the Vatican. The attitude of beggary made the above statue pass for that of Belisarius: and until the criticism of Winckelmann[3] had rectified the mistake, one fiction was called in to support another. It was the same fear of the sudden
- ↑ Antiq. Rom., Oxf., 1704, lib. ii. cap. xxxi. vol. i. p. 97.
- ↑ Sueton., in Vit. Augusti, cap. xci. Casaubon, in the note, refers to Plutarch's Lives of Camillus and Æmilius Paulus, and also to his apophthegms, for the character of this deity. The hollowed hand was reckoned the last degree of degradation; and when the dead body of the præfect Rufinus was borne about in triumph by the people, the indignity was increased by putting his hand in that position.
- ↑ Storia delle Arti, etc., Rome, 1783, lib. xii. cap. iii. tom. ii. p. 422. Visconti calls the statue, however, a Cybele. It is given in the Musco Pio-Clement., tom. i. par. xl. The Abate Fea (Spiegazione dei Rami. Storia, etc., iii. 513) calls it a Crisippo.
