Wanderings in the Roman campagna . Front of the lower terrace of the Sanctuary, twelve liundred feet lon^ The lower terrace had a frontage of twelve hundredfeet, and the whole establishment covered an area ofabout eighty acres. Such figures of length, breadth,and surface do not mean much liy themselves; but if wecover that space with structures of stone and marbleexquisitely cut and carved; with colonnades of the cost-liest breccia, crowned with capitals of gilt metal; withhundreds of statues chiselled or cast by Greek artists;if we consider that the only mosaic floor yet exhumed. THE TEMPLE O
Wanderings in the Roman campagna . Front of the lower terrace of the Sanctuary, twelve liundred feet lon^ The lower terrace had a frontage of twelve hundredfeet, and the whole establishment covered an area ofabout eighty acres. Such figures of length, breadth,and surface do not mean much liy themselves; but if wecover that space with structures of stone and marbleexquisitely cut and carved; with colonnades of the cost-liest breccia, crowned with capitals of gilt metal; withhundreds of statues chiselled or cast by Greek artists;if we consider that the only mosaic floor yet exhumed. THE TEMPLE OF FORTUNE, DETAIL. INTERIOR THE LAND OF GREGORY THE GREAT 235 at Palestrina is the finest in the world, we may graspthe idea of the milHons which must have been lavishedupon and absorbed by the building and ornamentingof the great sanctuary. To be sure, comparisons withmodern undertakings of the same nature may be mis-leading, because the value and the potentiality of moneywere altogether different in those days; yet I cannot helprecalling the fact that the rebuilding of St. Peters hascost the pontifical treasury about eight million pounds,and St. Peters does not cover, annexes included, twothirds of the area of the temple of Fortune. Now every penny spent on that structure, from thetime of Sulla to that of the Antonines, was drawn out ofthe purses of credulous pilgrims seeking to learn theirfate by means of the celebrated sortes by the few which have come down to us, theanswers must have been eminently unsatisfactory. Livymentions the following, given
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookpublisherbos, booksubjectart
