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Roman Architecture. 51 40,000 spectators. Csesar enlarged and beautified the Circus Maximus, built by Tarquin the elder, of which but a few ruins remain. These, and many other buildings, were, however, only steps in the advance towards that golden age of Rome, when Roman architects so entirely freed themselves from their old trammels as almost to have created a national style of architecture. The finest monument of this time is the Pantheon of Rome (Fig. 26), built by Agrippa (a.d. 13), which is one of the grandest buildings of the ancient world.- It is even now in a sufficiently good state of preservation for us to be able to judge of what it was. Its plan and the section of its dome exhibit the circular form of which the people of ancient Italy were so enam- oured. Externally the effect is rather spoilt by the com- bination of the rectangular temple and the rotunda, but the interior is extremely beautiful, although it has been much spoilt by inappropriate alterations of a date later than the original building. The costly columns of yellow marble, with capitals and bases of white marble, and the marble slabs of the lower walls, however, still serve to give some idea of its pristine splendour. We must also mention the theatre of Marcellus, much of which still remains in the present Orsini palace, and the ruins of the handsome tomb of Augustus, — the enclosure walls of which have alone been preserved, — as monuments of this age and that immediately succeeding it. After the death of the Emperor Augustus — whose boast it was that he had converted a brick into a marble city — the zeal for building seems to have cooled, and not to have been again revived for a considerable time. With the Flavii (a.d. 69) a second golden age of Roman architecture commenced. E 2