Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck. Hill-side and valley are filled with a mass of dÉbris that brings home to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of arsenals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which linked together the ruins of Imperial villas; every garden is watered from Roman cisterns; dig where he will, the excavator is rewarded by the discovery of vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic pavements, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a handful of Roman coins to part with for a few soldi. The churches of the island and the royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at the close of the last century. The main archÆological interest of the island however lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these but in the huge masses of ruin which lie scattered so thickly over it. The Pharos which guided the Alexandrian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on one of its headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous fragment of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-citadel still looks from the summit of a mighty cliff across the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of Anacapri, which in the absence of any other date to which it is possible to assign them, we are forced to refer to the same period of construction, hewn as they were to the height of a thousand feet in the solid rock, vied in boldness with almost any achievement of Roman engineering. The smallness of the space—for the lower part of the island within which these relics are crowded is little more than a mile and a half either way—adds to the sense of wonder which the size and number of these creations excite. All that remains too, it must be remembered, is the work of but a few years. There is no ground for believing that anything of importance was added after the death of Tiberius or begun before the old age of Augustus.

We catch glimpses indeed of the history of the island long before its purchase by the aged Emperor. Its commanding position at the mouth of the great Campanian bay raised it into importance at a very early period. The Teleboes whom tradition named as its first inhabitants have left only a trace of their existence in the verse of Vergil; but in the great strife between the Hellenic and Tyrrhenian races for the commercial monopoly of Southern Italy Capri, like Sorrento, was seized as a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the Phoenicians in their common war against the Greeks may perhaps explain the vague legends of a Semitic settlement on the island. The Hellenic victory of CumÆ however settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the fate of the coast; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis when the "new city" rose in the midst of the bay to which it has since given its name. The most enduring trace of its Greek colonization is to be found in the Greek type of countenance and form which endears Capri to artists; but like the cities of the mainland it preserved its Greek manners and speech long after it had passed with Neapolis into the grasp of Rome. The greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating from the Imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time of Augustus however it played in Roman story but the humble part of lighting the great corn-fleet from Egypt through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius tells us of the joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its Pharos as they neared the land, the greeting they addressed to its cliff, while on the other hand they poured their libations to the goddess whose white temple gleamed from the headland of Sorrento. Its higher destinies began with a chance visit of Augustus when age and weakness had driven him to seek a summer retreat on the Campanian shore. A happy omen, the revival of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate air of the place itself so charmed the Emperor that he forced Naples to accept Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his favourite refuge from the excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old man's life in his short holidays there, his delight in idly listening to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings with which Suetonius tells us he furnished the island, and the progress of which after his death may possibly have been the inducement which drew his successor to its shores.

It is with the name of the second CÆsar rather than of the first that Capri is destined to be associated. While the jests and Greek verses of Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but an obscure island off the Campanian coast became the centre of the government of the world. The spell of the Eternal City was suddenly broken, and it was never thoroughly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constantinople, became afterwards her rivals or supplanters as the seat of empire, it was because Capri had led the way. For the first time too, as Dean Merivale has pointed out, the world was made to see in its bare nakedness the fact that it had a single master. All the disguises which Augustus had flung around his personal rule were cast aside; Senate, Consuls, the Roman people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A single senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek scholars, were all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The figure of the Emperor stood out bare and alone on its solitary rock. But, great as the change really was, the skill of Tacitus has thrown over the retirement of Tiberius a character of strangeness which, as we have said, hardly belongs to it. What in fact distinguished it from the retirement of Augustus to the same spot was simply the persistence of his successor in never returning to Rome.

Capri in itself was nothing but a part of the great pleasure resort which Roman luxury created round the shores of the Bay of Naples. From its cliffs the Emperor could see through the pure, transparent air the villas and watering-places which fringed the coast from Misenum to Sorrentum, the groves and lakes of BaisÆ, the white line of Neapolis, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, the blue sea dappled with the painted sails of pleasure-boats as they wooed the summer air. The whole bay was a Roman Brighton, and the withdrawal of Tiberius from the world was much the same sort of withdrawal from the world as the seclusion of George IV. at the Pavilion. Of the viler pleasures which are commonly attributed to him in his retreat we need say nothing, for it is only by ingenious conjectures that any of the remains at Capri have been made to confirm them. The taste of Tiberius was as coarse as the taste of his fellow Romans, and the scenes which were common at BaiÆ—the drunkards wandering along the shore, the songs of the revellers, the drinking-toasts of the sailors, the boats with their gaudy cargo of noisy girls, the coarse jokes of the bathers among the rose-leaves which strewed the water—were probably as common in the revels at Capri. But for the more revolting details of the old man's life we have only the scandal of Rome to rely on, and scandal was easily quickened by the veil of solitude and secrecy which Tiberius flung around his retirement. The tale of his cruelties, of the fisherman tortured for having climbed the cliff which the Emperor deemed inaccessible, of criminals dashed into the sea down the steep of the "Salto di Timberio," rest on the gossip of Suetonius alone. But in all this mass of gossip there is little that throws any real light on the character of the island or of the buildings whose remains excite our interest there; we can only guess at its far wilder condition from a story which shows us the Imperial litter fairly brought to a standstill by the thick brushwood, and the wrath of Tiberius venting itself in a ruthless thrashing of the centurion who served as his guide. The story is curious because it shows that, in spite of the rapidity with which the Imperial work had been carried on, the island when Tiberius arrived was still in many parts hidden with rough and impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of hanging gardens which turned almost the whole of it into a vast pleasure-ground was mainly of his own creation.

It would of course be impossible to pass in review the numberless sites where either chance or research has detected traces of the work of Tiberius. "Duodecim villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says Tacitus; and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be identified to-day, some basking in the sunshine by the shore, some placed in sheltered nooks where the cool sea-breeze tempered the summer heat, the grander ones crowning the summit of the hills. We can trace the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore, the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy the scene to which these ruins belonged, fill the gardens with the fountains and statues whose fragments lie profusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of marble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist on the ruined walls, we shall form some inadequate conception of the luxury and grace which Tiberius flung around his retirement.

By a singular piece of good fortune the one great wreck which towers above all the rest is the spot with which the Emperor himself is historically associated. Through the nine terrible months during which the conspiracy of Sejanus was in progress, he never left, Seutonius tells us, the Villa Jovis; and the villa still stands on a huge promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, from which his eye could watch every galley that brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and from Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beauty with the view on which Tiberius looked. The promontory of Massa lies across the blue reach of sea, almost as it seems under one's hand yet really a few miles off, its northern side falling in brown slopes dotted with white villas to the orange gardens of Sorrento, its southern rushing steeply down to the hidden bays of Amalfi and Salerno. To the right the distant line of Apennines, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain of PÆstum, runs southward in a dim succession of capes and headlands; to the left the sunny bow of the Bay of Naples gleams clear and distinct through the brilliant air till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again to the cliff of Anacapri with the busy little Marina at its feet. A tiny chapel in charge of a hermit now crowns the plateau which forms the highest point of the Villa Jovis; on three sides of the height the cliff falls in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the sea, on the fourth the terrace walls are formed of fragments of brick and marble which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house.

In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of BaiÆ; it was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within however life seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant relaxations with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. Each passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the cliff has torn down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which must have resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty almost perfect arches.

The importance of these remains has long been understood by the archÆologists of Italy, and something of their ruin may be attributed to the extensive excavations made by the Government of Naples a hundred years ago. But far more of the terrible wreck is owing to the ravages of time. With the death of Tiberius Capri sinks suddenly out of sight. Its name had in fact become associated with infamy, and there is no real ground for supposing that it remained as the pleasure-isle of later Emperors. But the vast buildings can only slowly have mouldered into decay; we find its Pharos flaming under Domitian, and the exile of two Roman princesses, Crispina and Lucilla, by Commodus, proves that Imperial villas still remained to shelter them. It is to the period which immediately follows the residence of Tiberius that we may refer one of the most curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singularly picturesque. A stair cut in the rock leads steeply down a rift in the magnificent cliffs to the mouth of a little cave, once shrouded by a portico whose fragments lie scattered among the cacti and wild thyme. Within the walls are lined with the characteristic reticulated Roman masonry, broken chambers and doorways on either side are blocked by dÉbris, and two semicircular platforms rise one within the other to a niche in the furthest recess of the cave where the bas-relief of the Eastern deity which is now deposited in the Museum at Naples was found by the excavators. Beside it lay a stone with a Greek inscription so strangely pathetic that it must tell its own tale:—"Welcome into Hades, O noble deities—dwellers in the Stygian land—welcome me too, most pitiful of men, ravished from life by no judgment of the Fates, but by a death sudden, violent, the death-stroke of a wrath defiant of justice. But now I stood in the first rank beside my lord! now he has left me and my parents alike of hope! I am not fifteen, I have not reached my twentieth year, and—wretched I—I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but I pray my brother and my parents to weep for wretched ones no more." Conjecture has coupled this wail of a strange fate with the human sacrifices offered at the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a slave and favourite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the Eastern deity; but there is no ground whatever for either of the guesses.

Such as it is however the death-cry of Hypatus alone breaks the later silence of Capri. The introduction of Christianity was marked by the rise of the mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns of giallo antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins of the Baths hard by, and from this moment we may trace the progress of destruction in each monument of the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved with a mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the chapel of St. Michael is erected out of a Roman building which occupied its site. We do not know when the island ceased to form a part of the Imperial estate, but the evidence of a charter of Gregory II., overlooked by the local topographers, shows that at the opening of the eighth century the "Insula CapreÆ cum monasterio St. Stefani" had passed like the rest of the Imperial property in the South to become part of the demesne of the Roman See. The change may have some relation to the subjection of Capri to the spiritual jurisdiction of Sorrento, of whose bishopric it formed a part till its own institution as a separate see in the tenth century. The name of the "Bishop of Quails," which attached itself to the prelate of Capri, points humorously to the chief source of his episcopal income, the revenue derived from the capture of the flocks of these birds who settle on the island in their two annual migrations in May and September. From the close of the ninth century, when the island passed out of the hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the mainland; its ruin seems to have been completed by the raids of the Saracens from their neighbouring settlement on the coast of Lucania; and the two mediÆval fortresses of Anacapri and Castiglione which bear the name of Barbarossa simply indicate that the Algerian pirate of the sixteenth century was the most dreaded of the long train of Moslem marauders who had made Capri their prey through the middle ages. Every raid and every fortress removed some monument of the Roman rule, and the fight which wrested the isle from Sir Hudson Lowe at the beginning of the present century put the coping-stone on the work of destruction. But in spite of the ravages of time and of man enough has been left to give a special archÆological interest to the little rock-refuge of Capri.