they have cultivated their vines and olives and consumed their products.  And all the time their home and their field of labour have been on a tomb!  I did not see the tenants of this curious dwelling during my visit; but if the skeleton at the Egyptian feast was a useful reminder of human mortality to the revellers, one would suppose that the thought of the peculiar character of their home would be sufficient to impart a soberer hue to their lives.  What is our earth itself but, on a vaster scale, a Casale Rotondo—­a garden in a sepulchre—­where the dust we tread on was once alive; and we reap our daily bread from human mould—­

    “Earth builds on the earth castles and towers,
    Earth says to the earth—­All shall be ours.”

At a distance of about seven minutes’ walk is an enormous circular tomb, with a medieval tower of lava stones erected upon it, called the Torre di Selce; but there is nothing to indicate who was interred in it, though it must have been a person of some celebrity at the time.  An inscription upon a tomb beside it naively tells the passer-by to respect the last resting-place of one who had a shop on the Via Sacra, where he sold jewellery and millinery, and was held in much estimation by his customers.  Beyond this point there is nothing of any special interest to arrest our attention, till we come to a considerable mass of ruins, consisting of broken Doric columns of peperino, part of a rough mosaic floor and brick pavement, and fragments of walls lined with tufa squares in the opus reticulatum pattern.  These remains are supposed to mark the spot on which stood the Temple of Hercules, erected by Domitian, and alluded to in one of the epigrams of the poet Martial.  Near this spot are the tomb of the consul Quintus Veranius, who died in Britain in the year 55 of our era; a lofty circular tomb, to some one unknown, with a rude shepherd’s hut on the top of it, to which the peasants have given the name of Torraccio; and the tomb of a marble contractor.  It may be remarked, in connection with this last mentioned tomb, that a Roman statuary had his workshops for the manufacture of sepulchral monuments and sarcophagi on the Appian Way, which were of great extent, judging from the quantity of sculpture, finished and unfinished, found on the spot.  All the sculpture was manifestly copied from Greek originals, for it is hardly conceivable that such groupings and expressions as we see in these bad copies could have been first executed by such inferior artists.  In this neighbourhood were the villa and farm of the poet Persius, and portions of the wall are still standing.  At the ninth milestone are the tomb and the remains of the villa of the Emperor Gallienus, slain by a conspiracy among his officers at the siege of Milan in the year 268.  This emperor has left nothing behind but the memory of his luxury and his vices.  When the site of the villa was excavated by an English artist, Gavin Hamilton, at the end of last century, the famous statue of the Discobolus and several other specimens of ancient sculpture were discovered, which are now in the Vatican Gallery.  The ground hereabouts produces a whitish efflorescence, and emits a most offensive sulphurous smell.  It exhibits the same evidences of recent volcanic activity as the neighbourhood of Lakes Tartarus and Solfatara on the way to Tivoli.