cannot be pictorially represented as a whole, on account of their vast
variety and extent, and therefore we come to the spectacle wholly
unprepared, and are at once startled into awe and astonishment.
Notwithstanding the wholesale pillage of centuries, enough in the way
of chambers and baths, marble statues, pillars, and works of art,
still remains in this mountainous mass of masonry to witness to the
unparalleled luxury by which the strength of the Roman youth was
enervated, and the foundations of the empire sapped. Shelley wrote on
the summit of one of the arches his "Prometheus Unbound;" and
certainly a fitter place in which to seek inspiration for such a theme
could not be found.

Beyond the Baths, on the same side of the road, is the most
interesting little church of the two saints Nereus and Achilles,
Christian slaves who suffered martyrdom in the reign of Diocletian. It
is supposed that the Nereus whose body reposes in this ancient church
is the person referred to by St. Paul in his greetings to the Roman
saints at the close of his Epistle--"Salute Nereus, and his sister,
and Olympas, and all the saints which are with them." Bolland, in his
_Acts of the Saints_, mentions that he was a servant in the household
of Flavia Domitilla, niece of the celebrated Christian lady of the
same name, whose mother was the sister of the Emperor Domitian, and
whose two sons were intended to succeed to the imperial throne. This
younger Domitilla, although so nearly related to the imperial family,
was banished to the island of Pontia, because of her refusal to
sacrifice to idols. Her two Christian servants, Nereus and Achilles,
accompanied her in her exile, and were afterwards burned alive, along
with their mistress, at Terracina, and their ashes deposited in the
same resting-place. It is a remarkable circumstance that this church
and the catacomb where they were buried at first, should have borne