see noted people borne past in litters, and finally to look in at the
jewellery-shops, the book-shops, the arches where coin was changed,
shops for silk, bronze, and all other articles with which the buildings
covering that part of the market placed opposite the Capitol were
filled.

One-half of the Forum, immediately under the rock of the Capitol, was
buried already in shade; but the columns of the temples, placed higher,
seemed golden in the sunshine and the blue. Those lying lower cast
lengthened shadows on marble slabs. The place was so filled with
columns everywhere that the eye was lost in them as in a forest.

Those buildings and columns seemed huddled together. They towered some
above others, they stretched toward the right and the left, they climbed
toward the height, and they clung to the wall of the Capitol, or some of
them clung to others, like greater and smaller, thicker and thinner,
white or gold colored tree-trunks, now blooming under architraves,
flowers of the acanthus, now surrounded with Ionic corners, now finished
with a simple Doric quadrangle. Above that forest gleamed colored
triglyphs; from tympans stood forth the sculptured forms of gods; from
the summits winged golden quadrigæ seemed ready to fly away through
space into the blue dome, fixed serenely above that crowded place of
temples. Through the middle of the market and along the edges of it
flowed a river of people; crowds passed under the arches of the basilica
of Julius Cæsar; crowds were sitting on the steps of Castor and Pollux,
or walking around the temple of Vesta, resembling on that great marble
background many-colored swarms of butterflies or beetles. Down immense
steps, from the side of the temple on the Capitol dedicated to Jupiter
Optimus Maximus, came new waves; at the rostra people listened to chance
orators; in one place and another rose the shouts of hawkers selling