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marble twenty feet high; and was composed often pieces of porphyry, each of which measuredabout ten feet in height, and about thirty-threein circumference.* On the summit of the pillar,above one hundred and twenty feet from theground, stood the colossal statue of Apollo. Itwas of bronze, had been transported either fromAthens, or from a town of Phrygia , and was sup-posed to be the work of Phidias . The artist hadrepresented the god of day, or, as it was after-wards interpreted, the emperor Constantine him-self, with a sceptre in his right hand, the globeof the world in his left, and a crown of rays glit-tering on his head/ The Circus, or Hippo-drome, wasastately building, aboutfour hundredpaces in length, and one hundred in breadth/The space between the two metce or goals wasfilled with statues and obelisks; and we may stillremark a very singular fragment of antiquity;the bodies of three serpents, twisted into onepillar of brass. Their triple heads had once sup-ported the golden tripod which, after the defeat,of Xerxes , was consecrated in the temple of
* The most tolerable account of this column is given by Pocock.Description of the East, vol. ii, part ii, p. 131. But it is still in manyinstances perplexed and unsatisfactory.
1 Ducange Const. 1. i, c. 24. p. 70, and his notes ad Alexiad. p. 382.The statue of Constantine or Apollo was thrown down under the reignof Alexis Comnenus.
1 Tournefort (Lettre xn) computes tire Atmeidan at four hundredpaces. If he means geometrical paces of five feet each, it was three-hundred toisea in length, about forty more than the great circus ofRome . See d’Anville Mesures Itineraires, p. 73.
CHAP.
XVII.