The tomb of Caecilia Metella, wife of the rich and famous Crassus, claims our next attention; it is a beautiful structure, and still called Capo di Bove by the Italians, on account of its being ornamented with the oxhead and flowers which now flourish over every door in the new-built streets of London; but the original of which, as Livy tells us, and I believe Plutarch too, was this.  That Coratius, a Sabine farmer, who possessed a particularly fine cow, was advised by a soothsayer to sacrifice her to Diana upon the Aventine Hill; telling him, that the city where she now presided—­Diana—­should become mistress of the world, and he who presented her with that cow should become master over that city.  The poor Sabine went away to wash in the Tyber, and purify himself for these approaching honours[AF]; but in the mean time, a boy having heard the discourse, and reported it to Servius Tullius, he hastened to the spot, killed Coratius’s cow for him, sacrificed her to Diana, and hung her head with the horns on, and the garland just as she died, upon the temple door as an ornament.  From that time, it seems, the ornament called Caput Bovis was in a manner consecrated to Diana, and her particular votaries used it on their tombs.  Nor could one easily account for the decorations of many Roman sarcophagi, till one recollects that they were probably adapted to that divinity in whose temple they were to be placed, rather than to the particular person occupying the tomb, or than to our general ideas of death, time, and eternity.  It is probably for this reason that the immense sarcophagus lately dug up from under the temple of Bacchus without the walls, cut out of one solid piece of red porphyry, has such gay ornaments round it, relative to the sacrifices of Bacchus, &c.; and I fancy these stone coffins, if we may call them so, were often made ready and sold to any person who wished to bury their friend, and who chose some story representing the triumph of whatever deity they devoted themselves to.  Were the modern inhabitants of Rome who venerate St. Lorenzo, St. Sebastiano, &c. to place, not uncharacteristically at all—­a gridiron, or an arrow on their tombstone, it might puzzle succeeding antiquarians, and yet be nothing out of the way in the least.

[Footnote AF:  A circumstance alluded to and parodied by Ben Johnson in his Alchemist.  See the conduct of Dapper, &c.]

Of the Egyptian obelisks at Rome I will not strive to give any account, or even any idea.  They are too numerous, too wonderful, too learned for me to talk about; but I must not forbear to mention the broken thing which lies down somewhere in a heap of rubbish, and is said to be the greatest rarity in Rome, column, or obelisk and the greatest antiquity surely, if 1630 years before the birth of Christ be its date; as that was but two centuries after the invention of letters by Memnon, and just about the time that Joseph the favourite of Pharaoh died.  There is a sphinx upon it, however, mighty clearly expressed; and some one said, how strange it was, if the world was no older than we think it, that they should, in so early a stage of existence, represent, or even imagine to themselves a compound animal[AG]:  though the chimaera came in play when the world was pretty young too, and the Prophet Isaiah speaks of centaurs; but that was long after even Hesiod’s time.