On the other side of the vestibule is a noble stair-case, on which is well painted the destruction of the city, by so dreadful a fire in the time of the Romans, that Seneca, who gives an account of it in a letter to his friend, says,
"Una nox fuit inter urbem maximam et nullum."
i.e. One night only intervened between a great city and nothing.
There is something awful in this scene, to see on one side of the stair-case the conflagration well executed; on the other, strong marks of the very fire which burnt so many ages ago; for there can be no doubt, but that the Bronze plate then stood in the Roman Hotel de Ville, and was burnt down with it, because it was dug up among the refuse of the old city on the mountain called Fourvire, on the other side of the river, where the original city was built.—In cutting the letters on this large plate of Bronze, they have, to gain room, made no distance between the words, but shewn the division only by a little touch thus < with the graver; and where a word eroded with a C, or G, they have put the touch within the concavity of the letter, otherwise it is admirably well executed.
Upon entering into the long gallery above stairs, you are shewn the late King and Queen's pictures at full length, surrounded with the heads of some hundred citizens; and in one corner of the room an ancient altar, the Taurabolium, dug up in 1704, near the same place where Claudius's harangue was found; it is of common stone, well executed, about four feet high, and one foot and a half square; on the front of it is the bull's head, in demi relief, adorned with a garland of corn; on the right side is the victimary knife[A] of a very singular form; and on the left the head of a ram, adorned as the bull's; near the point of the knife are the following words, cujus factum est; the top of the altar is hollowed out into the form of a shallow bason, in which, I suppose, incense was burnt and part of the victims.
[A] The knife, which is cut in demi relief, on the Taurobolium, is crooked upon the back, exactly in the same manner, and form, as may be seen on some of the medals of the Kings of Macedonia.
The Latin inscription under the bull's head, is very well cut, and very legible, by which it appears, that by the express order of Cybele, the reputed mother of the Gods, for the honour and health of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, father of his country, and for the preservation of his children, children, Lucius Æmilius Carpus[B] received the horns of the bull, by the ministration of Quintus Samius Secundus, transported them to the Vatican, and consecrated, at his own expence, this altar and the head of the bull[C]; but I will send the inscription, and a model[D] of the altar, as soon as I can have it made, as I find here a very ingenious sculptor and modeller; who, to my great serprize, says no one has hitherto been taken from it. And here let me observe, lest I forget it, to say, that Augustus lived three years in this city.
[B] Lucius Æmilius Carpus was a Priest, and a man of great riches: he was of the quality of Sacrovir, and probably one of the six Priests of the temple of Angustus.—Sextumvir Augustalii.
[C] Several inscriptions of this kind have been found both in Italy and Spain, but by far the greater number among the Gauls; and as the sacrifices to the Goddess Cybele were some of the least ancient of the Pagan rites, so they were the last which were suppressed on the establishment of Christianity. Since we find one of the Taurobolian inscriptions, with so recent a date as the time of the Emperor Valentinian the third. The silence of the Heathen writers on this head is very wonderful; for the only one who makes any mention of them is Julius Firmicus Maternus, in his dissertation on the errors of the Pagan religion; as Dalenius, in his elaborate account of the Taurobolium, has remarked.
The ceremony of the consecration of the High Priest of Cybele, which many learned men have mistaken for the consecration of the Roman Pontifex Maximus; which dignity, from the very earliest infancy of the Roman Empire, was always annexed to that of the Emperor himself.