One Of The Most Comfortable Of These Galleries Was That In Which
Caligula Was Justly Done To Death, Or, If Not Caligula, It Was Some
Other Tyrant Who Deserved As Little To Live.
But for our guide I should
not have remembered his slaughter there, and how much satisfaction it
had given
Me when I first read of it in Goldsmith's _History of Rome;_
and really you must not acquaint yourself too early with such facts, for
you forget them just when you could turn them to account. History is apt
to forsake you in the scene of it and come lagging hack afterward; and
you cannot hope always to have an archaeologist at your elbow to remind
you of things you have forgotten or possibly have not known. Suetonius,
Plutarch, De Quincey, Gibbon, these are no bad preparations for a visit
to the Palatine, but it is better to have read them yesterday than the
day before if you wish to draw suddenly upon them for associations with
any specific spot. If I were to go again to the Palatine, I would take
care to fortify myself with such structural facts from Hare's _Walks in
Rome,_ or from Murray, or even from Baedeker, as that it was the home of
Augustus and Tiberius, Domitian and Nero and Caligula and Septimius
Severus and Germanicus, and a very few of their next friends, and that
it radically differed from the Forum in being exclusively private and
personal to the residents, while that was inclusively public and common
to the whole world.
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