[Illustration:  FIG. 17.—­THE ROSTRA:  BACK VIEW. (Probable restoration for A.D. 64.)]

Let us now stand at F and look about us toward the Capitol, noting only the chief features of the scene.  The reader would do well to consider the plan along with the frontispiece to this book.  We are upon an open space paved with marble slabs, round which stand sundry honorary statues and various minor monuments into which we need not now enquire.  Facing us, toward the far end, is a platform about 80 feet long and 11 feet in height, with marble facing.  A trellis-work rail, or pierced screen, runs along it at either side, and also extends along the front for one-third of the distance from either end.  The one-third in the middle of the front is open.  This platform is approached by a flight of steps at the back, while in the sheer face are set as ornaments rows of bronze “beaks” or “rams” cut from ships captured in war.  From these “beaks” the platform obtains its name—­the Rostra.  It is the platform for harangues delivered to the Roman people—­the Roman citizens who are politely assumed to be the body politic—­and the open space on the front is the position for the orator.  It is from this stand that important announcements are made to the people at large.  An emperor or his nominee may speak from it; a magistrate may deliver some pronouncement; a political exhortation may be uttered; in the case of a public funeral, or even of the private obsequies in some eminent family, an oration over the deceased may be spoken with that finished and animated elocution which the Romans so zealously cultivated, and which the Italians still affect with no little success.  It is not indeed the same platform as was used by Cicero and the orators of the republic:  this stood elsewhere, and doubtless the substance of public speaking had declined deplorably since that day.  Nevertheless many a torrent of rich and sonorous Latin must have streamed over the Forum from that noble standing-place, and it must still have been worth while for a Roman to develop both his speaking voice and his oratorical art.  Still further back, to the right behind the Rostra, there stands the Temple of Concord, where the Senate in older times gathered on more than one occasion to listen to Cicero, and where the emperors have formed practically a gallery of works of art; to the left is the Temple of Saturn, long used as the Roman Treasury, of which eight pillars still remain as perhaps the most conspicuous feature among the existing ruins.  Another object in the background to the left, at the rear of the Rostra, will be a stone pillar coated with gilded bronze, upon which the first emperor, Augustus, inscribed the names of the great roads leading out from Rome into the length and breadth of the empire, with a list of the chief towns to which those roads would take you, and their distances.  The name of this pillar is the “Golden Milestone.”  Behind these objects, running along the high face