The excavations at that time were made for the purpose of finding marbles and building materials for the Church of St. Peter’s.  Two sides of the cella of the temple still remain, formed by large massive blocks of peperino, probably taken from the second wall of Rome, which must have passed very near to the east end of this temple; for the ancient Roman architects were as unscrupulous in appropriating the relics of former ages as their successors.  The roughness of these walls was hidden by an outer casing of marble, ornamented with pilasters, of which only the small capitals now remain.  Both the cella and the portico still retain a large portion of their magnificent marble entablature; and the frieze and cornice are richly covered with carvings of vases and candelabra, guarded by griffins, exquisite in design and execution.  The marble slabs that covered the whole outside of the temple had been burnt for lime in a kiln that stood in front of the portico in the sixteenth century, and in this lime-kiln were found fragments of statues, bas-reliefs, and inscriptions, which were about to be destroyed in that barbarous fashion.

The temple was originally begun by Antoninus Pius to the memory of his unworthy wife Faustina in the year 142 of our era, but being unfinished at his death, it was dedicated by the senate to both their names.  We see it represented in all its magnificence on some of the coins of this emperor.  In the year 1430 Pope Martin V. built over its remains a church called S. Lorenzo in Miranda, whose singular ugliness was in striking contrast to the grandeur of the venerable ruin which embraced it.  The floor of this church was ten feet above the original level of the temple, and its roof was carried twenty feet above its cornice.  It contained several tombs of the Roman apothecaries, to whose Corporation it belonged.  No one will regret that it has been removed; the excavations in front of it having reduced the level of the ground far below its doorway, and thus cut off the approach.  It is strange to think of the two different kinds of worship carried on at such widely separated intervals within this remarkable building, first a pagan temple and then a Christian church—­worship so different in name and yet so like in reality; for the divine honours paid to a mortal emperor and his wife were transferred in after ages to frail mortals such as Saint Laurence and the Virgin Mary.  We are reminded by the inscription above the portico of the temple, “Divo Antonino et Divae Faustina,” that the government of the Caesars had become an earthly omnipotence in the estimation of the Romans and the subject nations.  They looked alone to Caesar for all their good, and from him they feared their chiefest evil.  He had become to them their providence or their fate.  The adoration offered to him was not a mere act of homage or sign of fealty, but was most truly and in the highest sense a worship as to a divine being.