The form is graceful, though the pilasters and architectural ornaments seem somewhat misplaced. It is covered with sculptures from top to bottom. These, however, as is generally the case with Roman funereal monuments, have no reference to death, nor to the life or actions of the person to whom the monument is sacred, but are more like the scenes painted on a wall or ornamental stele anywhere. The principal object on the face represented in the woodcut is the sun, but the subjects are varied on each face, and, though much time-worn, they still give a very perfect idea of the rich ornamentation of the monuments of the last age of the Empire.
232. Monument at Igel, near Trèves. (From Schmidt’s ‘Antiquities of Trèves.’)
The Tour Magne at Nîmes is too important a monument to be passed over, though in its present ruined state it is almost more difficult to explain than any other Roman remains that have reached our times. It consists of an octagonal tower 50 ft. in diameter, and now about 120 ft. high. The basement is extended beyond this tower on every side by a series of arches supporting a terrace to which access was obtained by an external flight of steps, or rather an inclined plane. From the marks in the walls it seems evident that this terrace originally supported a peristyle, or, possibly, a range of chambers. Within the basement is a great chamber covered by a dome of rubble masonry, to which no access could be obtained from without, but the interior may have been reached through the eye of the dome. From the terrace an important flight of steps led upwards to—what? It is almost impossible to refrain from answering, to a cella, like those which crowned the tomb temples of Assyria. That the main object of the building was sepulchral seems hardly doubtful, but we have no other instance in Europe of a tomb with such a staircase leading to a chamber above it.
That Marseilles was a Phœnician and then a Phocian colony long before Roman times seems generally to be admitted, and that in the Temple of Diana (Woodcuts Nos. [188] and [189]) and in this building there is an Etruscan or Eastern element which can hardly be mistaken, and may lead to very important ethnographical indications when more fully investigated and better understood.
Eastern Tombs.
This scarcity of tombs in the western part of the Roman Empire is to a great extent made up for in the East; but the history of those erected under the Roman rule in that part of the world is as yet so little known that it is not easy either to classify or to describe them; and as nearly all those which have been preserved are cut in the rock, it is sometimes difficult—as with other rock-cut objects all over the world—to understand the form of building from which they were copied.
The three principal groups of tombs of the Roman epoch are those of Petra, Cyrene, and Jerusalem. Though many other important tombs exist in those countries, they are so little known that they must be passed over for the present.
From the time when Abraham was laid in the cave of Machpelah until after the Christian era, we know that burying in the rock was not the exception but the general practice among the nations of this part of the East. So far as can be known, the example was set by Egypt, which was the parent of much of their civilisation. In Egypt the façades of their rock-cut tombs were—with the solitary exception of those of Beni Hasan[[190]]—ornamented so simply and unobtrusively as rather to belie than to announce their internal magnificence. All the oldest Asiatic tombs seem to have been mere holes in the rock, wholly without architectural decorations.
