The Monument, or, Christopher Wren's Roman accent

John E. Moore

The dumbnesse of it (vnlesse the letters be worne quite away) speakes; that it was not any worke of the ROMANS. For they were wont to make stones vocall by inscriptions. - [Edmund Bolton], 1627(1)

Irridenda est eorum socordia, qui praesenti potentia credunt se [sic] extingui posse sequentis aevi memoriam. - [B. and Y.], 1683(2)

(The present political power being what it is, the stupidity is ludicrous of those who believe that the memory of the succeeding generation can be extinguished.)

The Monument, built in London to commemorate the Great Fire of 1666, has been relegated to the status of a minor work in the scholarly literature on Christopher Wren and his architecture. That interpretation, however, does not correspond to the structure's erstwhile importance as one of London's proudest landmarks: a skyscraper in its own time, it was the first and is still the tallest of all the colossal columns in that city [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. From the time of its unveiling in 1677, commentators - whether writing guidebooks in the eighteenth century or modern scholarly monographs - have been content to point out the relationship between the Monument and the triumphal columns of Roman antiquity and to analyze Caius Gabriel Cibber's west dado relief. The other three faces of the pedestal, consisting of Latin inscriptions dating to 1677-78, have been transcribed and translated in some cases, in most simply summarized. Wren, a polymath and a consummately trained humanist, and two other prominent scholars made up a committee whose task was to compose inscriptions for the Monument. More than a score of specific citations from Latin literature, most tellingly, passages from Tacitus's account of the Great Fire of Rome, appear in their work.

The extensive writing on the Monument constitutes an overlooked example of epigraphy in London, a city where monumental Latin inscriptions, in gracefully proportioned Roman majuscules, were rarely found on the exteriors of public buildings, whether secular or ecclesiastical. That lack of inscribed writing - "stones [made] vocall by inscriptions" distinguishes seventeenth-century London from other capital cities such as Rome, Turin, Paris, Vienna, or Prague, in which Latin inscriptions - long or short, votive or commemorative, and often quite tendentious - learnedly announce to readers in the street the cherished martial victories or building projects of their monarchs or proclaim the triumphant primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, among other things. The surviving Latin words on the Monument self-consciously recall both the inscriptions of ancient Rome and those carved during the reign of the great builder-pope Sixtus V (158590), whose interventions in the fabric of the Eternal City set the European (and European colonial) standard for urban design. These officially sanctioned texts, for an audience able to read Latin, powerfully imbue architectural and urban forms with an enhanced range of references and meanings.(3) The very words of the inscriptions on the Monument embody intimate, often verbatim connections to the admired and minutely studied history of ancient Rome, connections that have failed to be recognized or sought out.

In the 320 years that have elapsed since the inscriptions for the Monument were carved, commentators have almost without exception failed to link the fires of London and Rome, not least because the authors of the numerous poems, pamphlets, broadsides, and tomes that appeared in the aftermath of the former disaster largely did not themselves draw the comparison.(4) This lack of comparison requires explanation. How can it be that the analogy provided by the most spectacular conflagration of Greco-Roman antiquity did not occur to anyone? The Great Fire of 1666 brought the catastrophes of biblical and ancient history to the moralizing minds of many contemporary writers, who had for some ten years previous scanned history for minatory exempla. Sodom, Gomorrah, and Jerusalem were named as condign prefigurations of London's destruction. The flames consumed thousands of books that had just been expressly stored for safekeeping, causing one observer to remark that a loss of like scale had not occurred since the burning of the library at Alexandria.(5) Numerological portents were also brought to bear. It was noted that if the seven letters used to write Roman numerals were placed in descending order - MVCLXXI - they corresponded to the year of London's undoing. This coincidence prompted one author to suggest that to commemorate the fire, Londoners begin to count with Roman numerals in a different way, using that fateful year as a starting point.(6) Finally, in 1670 the Puritan divine Thomas Brooks remembered that "[t]here was a great fire in Rome in Nero's time... as all know, that have read the History of those times."(7) When it came to fashioning Latin inscriptions, Wren and his colleagues lost no time to return to and use just that history.

Forging direct links with the Roman past in explicitly linguistic terms was typical of humanist learning, historical writing, and political affairs in seventeenth-century Europe. Words, phrases, and narrative strategies borrowed from Latin literature, however, were not mean t to exist in a vacuum but to resonate and to call their origins to the minds of knowledgeable readers. Yet all texts, verbal and visual, come with contexts. An established line of inquiry exists among modern historians who have studied the contentious nature of reading and using Tacitus in seventeenth-century England.(8) Similar analysis has not been applied to works of architecture, but the Monument calls for it, since Tacitus's words figure so clearly on its pedestal. Although few artists knew Latin, Wren's redoubtable command of that language was a crucial determining factor in his practice as an architect, a fundamental point not made in the scholarly literature. Furthermore, I shall argue here that Latin epigraphy and history - the inscription on the Column of Trajan and a passage from the late fourth-century writer Ammianus Marcellinus - and not just the surviving triumphal columns of Roman antiquity inspired Wren to design elements of the Monument as he did. His process of conceptualization and his expressive ends will remain obscure if we fail to consider the inscriptions as elements integral, not incidental, to the work of art. In other words, the inscriptions on buildings call not only for more than mere transcription or translation but also a thorough linguistic and contextual analysis. Here, then, the principal tasks are: first, to broaden our understanding of the romanitas of the Monument, both visual and verbal; second, to reconstruct lost frames of reference; and third, to suggest why particular echoes of the Roman past, rather than enter the collective consciousness of learned contemporary observers, fell, if not on deaf ears, then certainly into oblivion.

The Monument: Genesis, Construction History, Formal Quotations, and Use

Today, Christopher Wren's Monument has to be retrieved from a densely built-up urban context. Once a dominant and immediately recognizable element of the London skyline, the fluted Tuscan Doric column still stands vigilant on Fish Street Hill, which passed in front of the church of St. Magnus the Martyr (rebuilt by Wren) and onto Old London Bridge. When London Bridge was rebuilt to the west, the Monument lost the prominent position it once occupied along the principal north-south axis within the City, where those on foot, on horseback, or in horse-drawn vehicles often came very close to it, yet it gained an attractive distant view.(9)

The Monument recalls, in the words of a Venetian envoy, "an accident [that would] be memorable through all the centuries."(10) At 25 Pudding Lane, on September 2, 1666, a fire broke out in the shop of baker Thomas Farynor, not to be extinguished until four days later, by which time five-sixths of the square-mile City had been reduced to rubble, with smoldering ashes still igniting six months afterward. Despite the widespread destruction, Londoners remained calm, thanks to "the prudence, vigilance, and charity" of Charles II and his privy council; indeed, the Tuscan resident minister remarked that only the ruins made one believe that there had been a fire at all.(11)

On February 14, 1671, the London Court of Common Council approved the "Draught or Modell... of the Pillar."(12) As foundation work was apparently complete in November 1671, construction must have begun soon thereafter.(13) On September 21, 1675, Robert Hooke, professor of geometry at Gresham College, a close friend and professional colleague of Wren, climbed to the viewing platform on top of the abacus. It took nearly four years to raise the column because the executing mason, Joshua Marshall, often had to wait for stones of proper dimensions to be procured.(14) A poem entitled "London's Index," purportedly written by a thirteen-year-old boy, celebrates the nearly complete Monument. Its very title evokes both a finger pointing insistently to the skies and a measure of extraordinary achievement. The poem must date to the second half of 1676, as it refers to the urn raised into position at the summit on July 15 of that year,(15) According to the author's literary conceits, the column, "London's Standard," surpasses "Rome's Amphitheatre" and three of the seven wonders of the ancient world, "Th' AEgyptian Pyramids," "The Rhodian Coloss," and "Mausolus Tomb."

So intent were the curious to experience the unique panorama from the top of the Monument that residents in the immediate vicinity complained to the City Lands Committee in June 1676 "of the danger of the falling of the Scaffolds ... by the Continuall concourse of people that come to see the same."(16) Workmen also found themselves constantly "letting up People and Weighting upon them," which caused delays in finishing the structure. The Court of Aldermen thus decreed, on August 8, 1676, that only workmen be granted access to the site and that the gate be kept shut.(17) Nicholas Olney was appointed custodian of the Monument for a term of twenty-one years beginning on March 25, 1677. For enjoying that profitable privilege, Olney was required by the thrifty, forward-looking Court to furnish the Chamber of London with fifty pounds per annum, funds that were earmarked to defray maintenance costs.(18) The same court also commissioned Marshall to pave the ground around the column "well and ornamentally."(19)

The Monument was erected on the former site of the church and churchyard of St. Margaret New Fish Street, the first church destroyed in the fire.(20) Although he never went to Italy, Wren - a graduate of the Westminster School and Wadham College, Oxford, professor of astronomy at Gresham College from 1657 to 1661, Savilian Professor of astronomy at Oxford from 1661 to 1673, and surveyor-general of the King's Works from March 1669 - scoured illustrated architectural treatises for inspiration.(21) An example is his work at the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford (1664-69), whose plan is based on a woodcut illustration of the Theater of Marcellus from Sebastiano Serlio's treatise Wren's education and intellectual interests also made him familiar with written sources that describe many aspects of Roman architecture, sources that he also used to advantage. For example, the Sheldonian, unlike its Roman model, had to have a permanent covering. Wren solved the problem by bringing back to life the velarium, mentioned only once in pagan Latin literature (Juvenal, Satires 4.122). He rose to the static and structural challenge of roofing, with no vertical supports, a capacious interior space, emulating the self-supporting canvas canopy that had once protected spectators from the elements at the Colosseum. To complete the reference, Robert Streeter's painted ceiling within depicts a velarium, partially drawn back by cavorting putti to suggest a blue sky and a heavenly apparition beyond.(22)

In Parentalia, the posthumous biography of Wren whose Latin title recalls both the ancient Roman annual feast for the family dead and a work of the late fourth-century writer Ausonius, the Monument is explicitly compared to two triumphal columns - that of Trajan and that of "Antoninus," or the Column of Marcus Aurelius [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED].(23) The text also invokes the Column of Theodosius at Constantinople, pointing out that Wren's column "much exceeds" all three in total height. In an entry dated October 8, 1677, Hooke writes in his diary that "[t]he Baker's ground [is] distant the length of the Piller."(24) Thus, at 202 feet, the very height of the column is charged with measurable meaning. The Monument stands in an exact relationship to a fateful location in the City's urban fabric, a point recorded in the north dado inscription: "at a distance eastward from this place of 202 feet, which is the height of this column, a fire broke out in the middle of the night" (HINC IN ORIENTEM PEDVM CCII INTERVALLO QVAE EST HVIVSCE COLVMNAE ALTITVDO ERVPIT DE MEDIA NOCTE INCENDIVM).(25) What has not been noted is that specific height is itself a locus classicus. Above the entrance to the burial chamber of the Column of Trajan, an inscription declares that for the "SPQR" (the Roman Senate and people), height signified "how lofty a hill and (what area of) ground was carried away for these mighty works.'"(26) Wren had ready access to this inscription in two books that he owned, Jean Jacques Boissard's Roman Antiquities, and Pietro Santi Bartoli's Colonna traiana.(27) Moreover, the building material of the Monument, white Portland stone, extracted in limited amounts from royal quarries on the homonymous isle, imitates, through texture and color, the marble used in ancient imperial prototypes and imbues the column with a silent, sturdy, and fireproof regal presence.(28) Other morphological and syntactic patterns that Wren discerned in the triumphal columns of Rome include clearly articulated architectural membering; tall pedestals; laurel swags and wreaths; figures of emblematic animals, whether eagles or dragons;(29) reliefs that narrate a ruler's illustrious acts in a complex blend of history and allegory; summits with symbolically charged gilt-bronze sculptures; and Latin inscriptions.

A heretofore unnoticed formal and functional link exists between the Monument and a fluted Tuscan Doric column built in Paris in the sixteenth century, the first of its kind in that city [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED]. Now rising to the immediate south of the Halle au Ble and connected to it, the column is the sole extant element of the Hotel de Soissons (formerly Hotel de la Reine). Frightened by a fortune-teller's prediction, Catherine de Medicis commissioned Jean Bullant to design the Hotel de la Reine for her in late 1572, interrupting the work he had already begun on her palace at the Tuileries two years earlier. According to tradition, the column, surmounted by an iron sphere, was used as a site for astrological observations and for the queen's mathematics lessons; even today, the column is known as the colonne astrologique.(30) Wren must have learned of those scientific and royal associations when he traveled to Paris in 1665, where he met the astronomer Adrien Auzout, six years before constructing his own "colossal speculatory column."(31) His monarch would later commission him to build an observatory at Greenwich in 1675, in conscious imitation of Louis XIV's Observatoire (1667-69), the work of the French medical doctor and architect Claude Perrault, whom Charles II had met in Paris and later apparently invited to come to England.(32) In fact, the Monument was originally used, as Wren had intended, for experiments with telescopes and air pumps carried out by the Royal Society, the stairwell serving for the emplacement of scientific instruments; however, the incessant vibrations of passing traffic quickly put an end to such activities.(33)

The Monument incorporates both striking similarities and important differences with respect to its models. In both the colonne astrologique and ancient Roman triumphal columns, the staircases were carved from the drums that made up the whole, so that a solid stone spindle remained behind. This structural detail is clearly shown in a pen-and-ink half elevation and half section of the Column of Trajan, one of a series of drawings related to the Monument preserved in the British Library [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. This drawing, in turn, is a careful tracing of an etched plate from Bartoli's Colonna traiana [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED].(34) The many exact correspondences between the two images demonstrate how Wren consulted the most detailed and up-to-date antiquarian studies available to him, and not merely to make up for never having been to Italy. Once Wren chose a columnar form for the Monument, he had little choice but to outfit it with a spiral staircase. The design of such a staircase was an issue taken up by sixteenth-century Italian practitioner-theorists like Sebastiano Serlio and Andrea Palladio, whose illustrated treatises were also in Wren's library. Both of these writers point to an ancient precedent in the spiral staircase believed to have formed part of the Portico of Pompey. Serlio provides an imaginary woodcut reconstruction of this spacious urban complex, depicting three such staircases without masonry spindles. Palladio offers several woodcut plans and sections of spiral staircases that the modern architect could realize in built form, be they circular or oval or with rectangular or curved stair treads. Both men praise Donato Bramante's spiral staircase in the Cortile del Belvedere (1505-12), while Palladio takes unabashed pride in his own, located at the monastery of S. Maria della Carita in Venice (1560-61), writing, "I made one spiral staircase with the stairwell empty . . . which turned out miraculously."(35)

Bartoli's monumental work, addressed to an international audience of scholars, antiquarians, amateurs, and artists, is dedicated to Louis XIV, whereas the Monument, physically embodying, as we shall see, numerous references to Charles II, does more than reproduce its Roman imperial prototype in exact graphic detail. The rejection of the masonry spindle must be understood as a proud departure from Wren's ancient Roman and sixteenth-century French models. Taking up Palladio's gauntlet, he also gave physical form to an experiment in stereotomy, an active theoretical and practical concern in seventeenth-century French architecture. In 1710, a German tourist much appreciated the geometric perfection of the 311 cantilevered steps of the spiral staircase, which he called "pretty as a snail floating free from a tree" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 6 OMITTED].(36) The highly polished black marble stair treads, most recently replaced in 1996, stand in a sharp (and very English) chromatic and textural contrast to the rough white Portland stone walls that support them.(37)

In its physical and visual dominance, the column much resembles its ancient model, which, according to a sixteenth-century Spanish writer, "rose high in the middle of the Forum of Trajan."(38) The column soon came to define the character of the surrounding square, Monument Yard, such that a tavern named the Monument opened less than a year after construction was complete.(39) Regular visiting hours changed with the seasons, and an admission fee was charged to those who wished to climb to the viewing platform.(40) From the top, spectators could admire, as a Frenchman wrote, "a forest of ships in the port and on the Thames," the distinctive spires of the City churches, and, in an Englishman's words, "that magnificent pile" of New St. Paul's.(41) This lookout point became the stage for several feats of derring-do and, sadly, six suicides, the first in 1788, the last in 1842, after which the viewing platform was encased with iron bars.(42)

The West Dado Relief

The lowermost section of the Monument consists of a forty-foot-tall pedestal whose west dado bears a mixed high- and low-relief composition by Cibber that depicts Charles II providing succor to a ravaged London [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 7 OMITTED].(43) One legible panel, that is to say, has replaced the spiraling reliefs of the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, most of whose details are largely illegible to viewers on site. And the story set out for the viewer is one not of martial victories but of destruction, on the left (the sinister) side of the relief, and rebuilding, on the right. In the center, images of Plenty and Peace hover in the sky above, mediating between foreground and background. On the Earth below and to the right, Charles II stands on a stone platform. He holds his left arm akimbo; with a baton of command in his right hand, he gestures toward a personification of Architecture, who, in humble submission, appears to listen to his orders, holding a square and compasses in the left hand and a scroll with plans in the right. Behind and to the right of Architecture stands the figure of Liberty, the brim of whose cap bears the word libertas. To the left of Architecture, a third female figure, representing Imagination (or Genius), wears a winged hat with "brainchildren" dancing on it, elements that have been taken to symbolize swiftness, fruitfulness, and good ideas.(44) On her garment hem are the Latin words non aliunde, "not from elsewhere," suggesting that only rational thought will restore London's former greatness. In the left hand, Imagination balances an image of Nature cast in the guise of the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus, an icon of abundance borne like a palladium. Immediately below, a beehive attests to busy, programmatic activity. To the left of center and above the image of Artemis is another emblem of Industry, a hand with an eye attached to a winged scepter, held aloft by a bare-breasted female.(45) The juxtaposition of milk and honey - literally present in two streets of London's Cheapside ward, Milk Street and Honey Lane - can be understood as a rebus for the promised land of Exodus 3:8, where the Hebrew people would find a refuge from torment and a place to thrive.(46) In 1665, in fact, London was ravaged by a plague that was likened to the one visited upon Egypt.

To the left of center, Father Time gently attempts to raise a personification of London. Seated on fractured masonry blocks and sunk in despondency, she weakly touches the sword that embodies her power and prestige. In this composition, Cibber reverses the role of Time, who often signifies death. Here he carries no scythe and, by his actions, indicates instead the beginning of a prosperous, long-lived future.(47) In the left background, flames from buildings surge outward in threatening curls; in the right, scaffolding surrounds a rising structure, at which masons, safe under the monarch's aegis, are hard at work. To the right of the king, a standing male holds out a laurel chaplet, the token of victory for centuries, which will serve as London's crown. This personage has traditionally been identified as James, duke of York, in whose honor the former New Amsterdam had just recently been renamed. Behind him stand representations of Justice "with a coronet," Fortitude "with a rein'd Lion," and "Envy peeping from her cell, and gnawing a heart."(48)

Clad in cloak, cuirass, kilt, greaves, and sandals, and wearing his own laurel crown, Charles II is cast as a Roman emperor, and almost all other figures are likewise clad in classicizing garb - all save the masons, whose clothing, a record of contemporary dress, has long been admired.(49) At the time Cibber carved the relief, a debate raged in French artistic circles about the propriety of depicting a monarch in modern or antique attire in scenes of modern history. To be sure, the choice of clothing on the Monument lends a deliberate and convenient air of timelessness to the royal personage. In 1676, the king resolved to wear no clothing imported from France, required his courtiers to do the same, and singled out for reproach those who, disobeying his proclamation, did not follow his lead. Rather than sell confiscated French cloth, he decided to have that expensive commodity burned by the public hangman.(50) Yet the concessions on cloth were superficial. To decrease the burden of his debts, and to increase his independence from Parliament's purse strings, he had signed no fewer than four secret treaties with Louis XIV in the years between 1670 and 1677. Viscerally mistrusted by many Englishmen, the Bourbon monarch was Charles II's cousin, model, and, to some extent, rival, as the Stuart king attempted to forge a version of absolute rule in the British Isles. Despite Parliament's desire to finance a war against the French crown, the king of Great Britain remained determined to have his way in the conduct of foreign policy.(51)

East and South Dado Inscriptions, and a Recast Quotation

from Suetonius Citations from antiquity to be identified in the Monument do not end with a comparison of its overall form to that of Roman triumphal columns, nor with a discussion of the iconography and symbolism of Cibber's west dado relief. The Latin inscriptions on the other three faces of the pedestal (see App. below) intrinsically make numerous references to the culture of the ancient world. Searching Latin texts for correct and varied uses of specific words, for phrase patterns, and, especially, for inspirational guidance was the defining activity of the humanist enterprise in early modern Europe. That process of imitation and emulation led those with the requisite training to absorb not only the broadest outlines but also the minutiae of Roman history, which was regularly invoked to enframe and explain contemporary events. For literati, the ancient past provided an ineluctable script for describing, analyzing, and understanding human activities, a script whose actors and actions changed to accommodate new circumstances. They were trained and disposed like Henry Cuffe, secretary to Robert Devereux, third earl of Essex, to "suit the wise observations of ancient times to the transactions of modern times"; in a similar vein, Cuffe's employer thought history offered modern readers "patternes either to follow or to flye."(52)

In the words of an act of Parliament passed in 1667, "the better to preserve the memory of this dreadful visitation; Be it further enacted that a Columne or Pillar of Brase or Stone be erected on or as neare unto the place where the said Fire so unhappily began as Conveniently as may be, in perpetuall Remembrance thereof, with such Inscription thereon, as hereafter by the Mayor and Court of Aldermen in that behalfe be directed."(53) On July 28, 1675, the City Lands Committee delegated "Mr Surveyor generall [Wren] and Mr Hook . . . to appoint Such persons as they think most fitting to make An Inscripcon for the said Columne, and after their consideracon and approbacon thereof to prsent the Same to the Ld Mayor & Court of Aldermen for their direccon therein According to the Act of Parliament for Rebuilding the Citty of London."(54) On his own, Wren wrote an inscription for the Monument, but it is not clear when he did so. On November 17, 1676, when the "Piller [was] lay[ed] open," Hooke elliptically writes, "Inscription mentioned," so it is possible that no progress had yet been made toward fulfilling the mandate of Parliament and the City Lands Committee.(55) A pen-and-ink elevation study is close in detail to the east dado as executed, especially with regard to the oval window surrounded by a wreath [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 8, 9 OMITTED].(56) In the drawing, the laurel leaves merge with the acanthus molding that enframes the whole inscription panel, whereas on the Monument, they are separated, and the window wreath is enlivened with fillets at the top. Squiggles in the drawing indicate the location of the inscription. Wren may originally have intended only the east dado to have writing, and his inscription would easily have fit in the proposed field. The relationship between Wren's inscription and the graphic conventions of the elevation suggest that he drew it himself. Changes, too, in the positioning of allusive relief carving speak to a revision in Wren's thinking, likely related in part to the completion of Cibber's west dado relief in September 1675.(57) In the drawing, the royal coat of arms stands above the inscription, in which the king is explicity named; today, the arms of the City are on the east, surmounted by a flaming ball. The actual positioning of the royal coat of arms above Cibber's relief is naturally connected to the sculpted representation of the king within, but it may also hint at a newly conceived spatial connection linking the real space between the Monument and the king's residence at Whitehall to the west.

Wren may have changed his thinking about the east dado elevation for a reason different from the symbolic import of a coat of arms. His inscription draft was rejected, perhaps because he used the regnal year in dating the Great Fire, perhaps because he identified "the king . . . and the greater part of England's nobles" as the ones who "set up the Monument."(58) Although an act of Parliament decreed the Monument, there is no mention in the inscriptions as carved of the length of Charles II's reign; thus, silence was willed by the City of London, the corporate body that had sided with the Roundheads in the Civil War and oversaw the construction of the Monument.

On October 4, 1677, the Court of Aldermen desired that Thomas Gale "consider of and devise a fitting inscription," and that he "consult with" Wren and Hooke; an entry in Hooke's diary confirms that all three men met the very next day.(59) Within three weeks of the first meeting of the inscription committee, the Court of Alderman, having heard from the lord mayor that Charles II had "very well approved" the inscription drafts, decreed that the inscriptions be carved "forthwith."(60) On October 25, the Court rewarded Gale with "a handsome peice [sic] of plate."(61) Gale, whom a contemporary French savant described as "exceed [ing] all men he ever knew both for modesty and versatility of learning," was formerly Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge; in 1672 he became master of St. Paul's School, where John Milton and Samuel Pepys had studied several decades earlier.(62)

None of the extant documents preserving the decisions of Parliament, the City Lands Committee, or the Court of Aldermen records a mandate to compose in Latin, a language known to rather few males in London and to almost no females. It is impossible to know whether individuals in those governing bodies and the members of the inscription committee simply took the use of Latin on a public monument for granted (as was long the case on the Continent) or whether the choice to write in Latin sprang from the committee's persuasive will. In any case, the formation of a committee made the task of writing similar to experiments in natural philosophy conducted at the Royal Society, in which Wren and Hooke played important founding and administrative roles, and to which Gale was elected on December 6, 1677, soon after completing his work as inscription committee chair.(63) Group effort in devising public writing of various types was also the norm in France, as demonstrated by the work of the Academie Royale des Inscriptions et Medailles (the "Petite Academie"), founded by Colbert in 1663. The shared enterprise of Wren, Hooke, and Gale likewise bears comparison with the design of an internationally renowned French building, the east facade of the Louvre (1667-70), the collective work of Claude Perrault, Louis Le Vau, and Charles Lebrun.

The east dado inscription of the Monument names the seven lord mayors of London under whose respective one-year terms of office the column was "begun" (INCEPTA) in 1671, "built higher" (PERDUCTA), and "brought to completion" (PERFECTA) in 1677 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED]. The permanent carving in stone of the names of government officials and their offices (here PV: or PRAE: VRB:, prefect of the city) and the grammatical form in which those names appear (the ablative absolute) evince the inscriptions on the public works of ancient Rome, inscriptions whose linguistic patterns and epigraphic qualities had been the subject of intense study among both humanists and artists since the fifteenth century and had been transmitted far and wide through manuscript copying and printed books.(64) Collections of inscriptions accessible to a learned public - like that owned by Thomas Howard, second earl of Arundel - also speak to the importance of epigraphy in scholarly and princely circles.(65)

The south dado inscription provides an account of the rebuilding schemes undertaken in the years after the Great Fire. Funds from a tax on coal were used for many projects, including the Monument itself. Seven churches and the "temple of St. Paul" were rebuilt "with every magnificence." Bridges, city gates, and prisons were made new, streets leveled and laid out according to a plan, houses constructed in ashlar masonry or brick with party walls and regular facade elevations. Property owners were enjoined to rebuild within the space of seven years, while legislation was enacted to reduce the number of potential law suits. Annual prayers commemorated the disaster, and Parliament "decreed that this column be set up."(66) The latter phrase is abbreviated to H.C.P.C - hanc columnam ponendam censuit - another testimony to the pervasive study of word patterns preserved in ancient Roman inscriptions and by the score in the epitaphs of London's churches.(67)

Acts of Parliament effected change, as did the fiercely independent City, jealous of its long-standing privileges in relation to the crown. Although the king was closely involved in the evaluation of proposals for rebuilding, he could supply little of the necessary funding from his own coffers and could never unilaterally impose his will. His name, his genealogy (C. MART. F., "son of Charles the martyr"), and his tides respectfully occupy the first two lines of the south dado inscription, but before the catalogue of building activities begins, Charles II accurately disappears as a grammatical entity, never to return.(68) In fact, most of the above-mentioned rebuilding activities are described with verbs in the passive voice, whose use deftly avoids laying undue stress on the economic and political realities.

In his Fumifugium, published in 1661, John Evelyn identified an unregulated and inadequate street plan and inflammable building materials as among the structural defects that beset the metropolis. His vision of a London to "be rendered Brick," and subsequently in "Stone and Marble," evokes a famous passage from Suetonius's biography of Augustus, in which readers learn that the emperor found Rome a city of brick and turned it into a city of marble.(69) His extensive campaign of urban development was meant, in part, to reduce the risk of flood and fire to which the capital had long been subjected. The memory of Augustus's beautification of Rome is indeed carried over to the Monument. In his own rejected draft inscription, Wren availed himself of Suetonius's text, two editions of which were in his library. The king found London a city of wood or daub ("ligneis aut luteis") and turned it into one partially of brick, partially of marble ("partim lateritiis, partim marmoreis aedificiis"), "as to seem to have come forth more beautiful from its ruins."(70) On the south dado, the inscription committee records that the walls of houses in London were rebuilt "in ashlar masonry or brick" (SAXO QVADRATO AVT COCTO LATERE). Differences in building materials and the extent of urban transformation speak to the respective financial resources that each monarch was able to marshal, as well as to the real power at his command.

The last sentence of the south dado inscription has received a skeptical dismissal, yet one must proceed cautiously in its analysis. The text states that "a three-year period brought to completion what was supposed to be the business of an age" (VNVM TRIENNIVM ABSOLVIT QVOD SECVLI OPVS CREDEBATVR).(71) Only a length of time, not a precisely delimited chronological period, is named, nor is a specific antecedent for the relative pronoun "what" (QVOD) provided. In any attempt to calculate the approximate time needed for recovery and renewal, the first few months after the Great Fire must be subtracted, as many dangerously dilapidated structures had still to be razed and much rubbish removed before any staking of boundaries, provisioning of materials, or actual construction could begin.

Nevertheless, contemporary witnesses attest to a rapid rate of transformation. For example, the Florentine scientist Lorenzo Magalotti, in London in February 1668, records in his Report on England that of 13,000 destroyed houses in 1666, "over 2000" were finished and inhabited; some five or six thousand others were more than half built, and over half of those would be habitable the following year.(72) On July 18, 1670, the Tuscan resident minister, Giovanni Salvetti Antelminelli, wrote that "this city is for the most part [re]built" and showed every sign of regaining its primary position "in a few years"; two months later, he described London as "more than two thirds rebuilt."(73) Pietro Mocenigo, the Venetian ambassador in London, left the capital on December 3, 1670.(74) In a speech he gave before the Senate on June 9, 1671, he praised the wealth of London, which boasted upward of 600,000 inhabitants, and "the marvel that when the city was rebuilt, the use of wood for the walls was replaced by that of stone, and the city is renewed, magnificent and sumptuous, after an interval that was no longer than was required for the removal of the debris left by the fire."(75) According to another foreign observer, in November 1671 the king attended the inaugural show of the new lord mayor, George Waterman, and "enjoyed inspecting the city, the handsomest part of which has been rebuilt with greater magnificence since the terrible fire."(76) At the same time, "as a perpetual memory" and at public expense, full-length portraits were unveiled in the Guildhall of the judges who had heard and dispatched, gratis and with alacrity, the cases brought before the specially appointed Fire Court.(77) It took many centuries for Rome to exercise its power and expand its empire, activities that are celebrated in the bas-reliefs on the two extant triumphal columns in that capital. As Evelyn proudly attests, London rose from its ashes quickly, grander in form than before; moreover, the restored English crown was actively laying secure foundations for an empire that spanned the Earth.(78) So the Monument, taller than any Roman triumphal column, could be understood to transcend its models in more ways than one.

North Dado Inscription: Citations from Seneca the Younger and Tacitus

A passage from Seneca the Younger that relates to a destructive fire in Roman antiquity was used in two instances by individuals or groups who had a deep interest in the Monument. The first to recast the ancient model was Thomas Brooks, who (as pointed out earlier) remembered that "there was a great fire in Rome in Nero's time," and who had once preached at the destroyed church of St. Margaret New Fish Street, on whose site the Monument came to be built. Some years afterward, the inscription committee turned to the same passage from Seneca, so that today the north dado inscription still bears a lapidary connection to the Roman philosopher.

Published in 1670, and thus before the erection of the Monument, Brooks's London's Lamentations speaks to the intellectual underpinnings of many religiously inspired works that appeared after the Great Fire, in which pagan and Judeo-Christian texts are used to flesh out and lend nuance to complex moral and theological arguments.(79) He writes that he had been working on the book for "some years," that delays in publication were not his fault, and that his absence from London for "several weeks" prevented him from thoroughly reading the galleys. Among those ejected from the established church after the 1662 Act of Uniformity, Brooks was a preacher without a parish for another reason, as his former church, St. Margaret, still lay in ruins.(80) Buried in his text is a reference to "a Pillar of Brass or Stone" - the very words used in the 1667 act of Parliament - whose impending erection was a guarantee that the church would never rise again. Although he is "far from questioning the lawfulness" of the yet-to-be-realized project, he feels that the "remembrance of Londons desolation by Fire" might also be effected through piety and righteous living.(81)

Brooks outfits the title page of London's Lamentations [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 10 OMITTED] with a recast Latin sentence from Seneca's Epistle 91 to Lucilius, which provides an account of the burning of Lyons in 65. Ruminations on the essential vanity and transitory nature of all things mortal are wholly characteristic of that Roman philosopher, who proverbially writes, in the same letter, "unequal we are born, equal we die [inpares nascimur, pares morimur]."(82) The fire at Lyons was like no other, destroying "many beautiful buildings [tot pulcherrima opera]" that had rendered the provincial capital justly famous. Seneca invokes earthquakes in Asia, Achaia, Syria, Macedonia, and Cyprus to summon up images of similarly destructive magnitude. With words that English readers of the Restoration period could hardly have failed to apply to their own recent history, Seneca writes that even kingdoms "that had stood firm against civil wars [quae domesticis bellis steterant regna]" tumbled as a result of the flames' ferocity. Liberalis, a friend of both Seneca and Lucilius, was gravely shaken by the disaster, its very unexpectedness perhaps the most difficult aspect to understand. Seneca calls the attention of his correspondent to the fleeting nature of time and the brevity with which it can destroy what took generations to build up, writing that "one night was the difference between a most renowned city and no city [una nox interfuit inter urbem maximam et nullam]." Brooks echoes this Senecan phrase pattern when he writes on his title page "una dies interest inter magnam Civitatem & nullam," and then translates his neo-Latin sentence into English.

In Parentalia, a sentence from the same letter of Seneca to Lucilius follows a transcription of Wren's rejected draft inscription for the Monument, along with a correct recasting by his son Christopher of Suetonius's observation that a change in building materials after the Great Fire of Rome constituted an index of imperial magnificence.(83) The letter also finds its echo in the north dado inscription, which notes that "the destruction was swift: a brief time saw the selfsame city most prosperous and nonexistent" (VELOX CLADES FUIT EXIGVVM TEMPVS EANDEM VIDIT CIVITATEM FLORENTISSIMAM ET NVLLAM). The morphology and syntax of the Senecan original - feminine singular noun in the accusative case, followed and modified by an adjective in the superlative degree, the conjunction "and [et]," and the final, unusually forceful adjective nullam - are preserved intact in the inscription. Moreover, Wren and his colleagues saw the superlative form "most prosperous" (FLORENTISSIMAM) only a few lines later in Seneca, who wonders "what it is that Fortune, when she felt like it, does not drag down from the height of prosperity [quid enim est, quod non fortuna, cum voluit, ex florentissimo detrahat]." Thus, the members of the inscription committee skillfully adapted words and phrase patterns from an ancient Roman source, carefully maintaining the spirit and sense of the original text, which is a vivid delineation of the quick and overwhelming changes wrought by fate.

Every English schoolchild today knows that "in 1666, London burned like rotten sticks." In the seventeenth century, grammar-school boys in Great Britain and elsewhere knew of the burning of Rome in 64; they learned as much by reading Tacitus. And that story, told in the Annals (15.38-44), is one of the most dramatic in all of Latin literature, a gripping tale of destruction and rebuilding, as well as a detailed record of large-scale architectural and urbanistic interventions in the ancient world.

"A disaster followed," the account begins, "whether due to chance or to the malice of the sovereign is uncertain - for each version has its sponsors - but graver and more terrible than any other that has befallen this city by the ravages of fire." The essence of Tacitus is already evident in the self-righteous weaving of fact, rumor, and innuendo. Most ancient historians had not facts to recount in chronological order but cautionary tales to tell and moral truths to propound. The fire broke out in the ample Circus Maximus. Generously fueled by inflammable goods stored in nearby shops and propelled by a strong wind, it swept unchecked by retaining walls through adjoining regions of the city. "Rome is divided into fourteen regions [regiones]," Tacitus writes, in seven of which "nothing survived except a few dilapidated and half-burned [lacera et semusta] relics of houses," those adjectives appearing in the neuter nominative plural to agree with "relics [vestigia]."(84) In London, according to the north dado inscription on the Monument, out of twenty-six wards (REGIONIBVS), the fire destroyed fifteen and left eight others "dilapidated and half-burned" (LACERAS ET SEMIVSTAS). The sequence of Latin adjectives is carried over exactly.

Other elements of the north dado inscription bespeak an intimate connection to Tacitus's writings. The word "destruction [clades]" appears in two significant narratives in the Annals: the accounts of the fire at Rome and Boudicca's revolt, where it is written that "a terrible disaster was experienced in Britain."(85) Furthermore, in three instances, the grammatical form of the ablative absolute performs a similar narrative function, namely to adduce factors that explain a fire's rapid diffusion. As Tacitus writes (Annals 15.38), "the flames . . . kept ahead of all remedial measures, the mischief traveling fast [velocitate mali]." In his rejected draft inscription, Wren uses the phrase "the south wind blowing [austro flante]," but only to provide circumstantial information, so the ominous cast of Tacitus's words is altered. In the actual inscription, readers learn that "a fire broke out in the middle of the night, which, the wind blowing [VENTO SPIRANTE] . . . rushed . . . through every quarter with incredible fury and noise."(86) In London, as in Rome, contemporaries knew that narrow streets had occasioned the rapid spread of flames blown by a strong wind and fed by flammable materials stored throughout a city that had had no rain for some time.

Tacitus writes that "the private houses, tenement-blocks, and temples that were lost would not be easy to enumerate [domuum et insularum et templorum inire numerum haud promptum fuerit]." Consumed as well were venerable altars and shrines, trophies, "the glories of Greek art," and Latin literary texts. In the north dado inscription, one reads that "the fire consumed churches [TEMPLA], gates, the Guildhall, public edifices, hospitals, schools, libraries, a great number of tenement blocks and houses [INSVLARVM MAGNVM NVMERVM DOMVVM], [and] 400 streets." Besides counting the regions or wards that were laid flat, each text mentions either natural features, sites within the city, or particular buildings and building types in order to locate the far-flung boundaries of the conflagration and to evince its enormity. Thus, the fire of Rome touched the Palatine, Caelian, and Esquiline hills, whereas that of London found its eastern limit at the Tower, its western limit at "the head of the Fleet-ditch."

We have seen that the members of the inscription committee, using texts from Roman antiquity as a source for telling the story of London's fire, preserved both the narrative function and the dramatic and emotional charge of their models. If we return briefly to the south dado inscription, however, it becomes clear that in two instances the committee opted only for the letter and not the spirit of the cited texts. One example can be found in the phrase "Parliament decreed . . . that streets be made straight and regular, such as were steep levelled, and those too narrow made wide." The implied absence of similar urban amenities before 1666 had materially contributed to London's destruction. In his 1598 Survey of London, John Stow had already noted the increase of carts and drays in the capital's congested streets, and during the reigns of James I and Charles I, coach traffic to and from Whitehall only aggravated that situation.(87) The inscription committee, representing the interests of the lord mayor and aldermen, must have been loath to cite - especially in such a monumental context - a perennial shortcoming in urban planning.(88) Tacitus, on the other hand, looking toward a more distant past with a dispassionate eye, identifies "the narrow, twisting lanes and formless streets typical of old Rome" to help explain the fire's spread.

Finally, at the end of the south dado inscription, one learns that "Londinum [sic] rises again, whether with greater speed or splendor is uncertain" (RESVRGIT LONDINVM MAIORI CELERITATE AN SPLENDORE INCERTVM). In Tacitus's account, the same construction - the adjective "uncertain [incertum]" preceded by and governing the conjunction "whether [an]," which is set between two nouns in the ablative singular - is used to offer two possible explanations for the outbreak of the fire: "whether by chance or by the malice of the prince is uncertain [forte an dolo principis incertum]." Just as Cibber reversed the traditional role ascribed to Time, so the members of the inscription committee made exact use of Tacitus's syntax and phrasing but stripped both of their negative import by using different words. Thus, a positive image of rebuilding replaces an image of potentially abusive imperial power.(89)

The similarities pointed out thus far prove that members of the inscription committee, intimately familiar with Tacitus's words, phrases, and implications, put all these elements to new uses, here verbatim, there in recast, sometimes in sanitized versions. But something is amiss here, in that the many linguistically exact references to Tacitus, to say nothing of structural and narrative relationships, have, to this day, remained unnoticed. For the viewer who can read Latin, the inscriptions on the Monument are not difficult to decipher. To put it differently, it is easy enough for trained individuals to read and understand what is written there, yet equally easy for them to fail to recognize the original source and context of certain words and phrases. But what went wrong in the seventeenth century? With four printed editions of Tacitus published in England in the first four decades of that period, why did erudite contemporaries (members of the inscription committee excepted) consistently fail to bind ancient Rome to modern London after the Great Fire, when the possibility for such a perfect pairing was present - and, in fact, was virtually spelled out in the Monument's inscriptions?(90) An elite, literate, and learned culture had produced the likes of Robert Cotton, who fashioned a classification for his private library based on the names of Roman emperors, Faustina, and even Cleopatra.(91) And, as all four faces of the Monument's pedestal amply demonstrate, that culture continued to rehearse the links between an ancient past and a proud present. How can it be that such a momentous event of Roman antiquity as the fire of 64 was not more generally mined for all it was worth?

Many striking historical parallels to the Great Fire of London can be identified in Tacitus's accounts of the Roman presence in Britain and, especially, of the Great Fire of Rome. One could, in fact, use many aspects of his narrative to describe the former conflagration - which is exactly what Wren did, first on his own, then in committee. Tacitus loomed large in the intellectual discourse of seventeenth-century Europe. Among the works of seventeen ancient historians, Tacitus's Annals and Histories appeared in the greatest number of new editions between the years 1600 and 1649; two editions published within that period were in Wren's library.(92) The facts that Tacitus sets out are everywhere inflected by a vividly personal viewpoint. An Italian writing in the seventeenth century opined that Tacitus was popular "because he not only narrates events, but, so to speak, writes a commentary on his own narrative," a commentary that also lent itself to distillation in the form of maxims, which were often extracted from their immediate contexts and pithily quoted elsewhere.(93) The often sinister implications of the Roman historian's words spring from his joltingly expressive syntax, elliptical style, and dramatic word choices and reflect his agenda for writing history. A partisan of monarchy, Tacitus nonetheless had an astringent view of its many demonstrated abuses, which led some seventeenth-century readers with different political ends to interpret him as an antimonarchist.

In 1693, John Dryden wrote an introduction to a translation of Polybius in which he claimed that "Tacitus is more useful to those who are born under a monarchy."(94) His statement is evidence that reading the ancient historians was not conceived as a passive, neutral, or academic exercise in the seventeenth century. English playwrights of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, like their counterparts in France, mined Tacitus's Annals for complex narratives whose subject was the changing fortunes of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.(95) In the words of Henry Cuffe already cited, the purpose of history was to "suit the wise observations of ancient times to the transactions of modern times." The pattern of conceptualization was such that current events called images of the past to mind that, when elaborated, not only served as moral exempla but also cast the present in a shockingly, even scandalously different light. In Parliament in 1626, for example, the Puritan Sir John Eliot compared George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham, to Sejanus; remembering his Tacitus, Charles I not only understood the insulting comparison but completed it - "he must intend me for Tiberius" - and then had Eliot arrested.(96) A year later, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who had founded the first history lecturership at the University of Cambridge, nominated the Dutchman Isaac Dorislaus to that post, requiring him to speak on Tacitus's Annals. Matthew Wren, Christopher's uncle and first architectural patron, wrote a letter to William Laud, then bishop of Bath and Wells (later archbishop of Canterbury), to describe Dorislaus's first inaugural lecture of December 7, which began with the astonishingly direct opening words of the Annals - "At first the kings had Rome [Urbem Romam a principio Reges habuere]" - and in which Dorislaus "seemed to acknowledge no right of kingdomes" independent of "the peoples voluntary submission." Wren complained that the second lecture of December 12 "was stored with dangerous passages (as they might be taken) and so appliable to the exasperations of these villanous times, that I could not abstayne before the Heads there present to take much offense, that such a subject should be handled here, and such lessons published, and at these times, and E Cathedra Theologica before all the University."(97) Using Tacitus in seventeenth-century England could be an activity riddled with controversy and fraught with danger. Apart from the direct connections between Tacitus and the inscriptions on the Monument, why did a comparative historical dialogue largely fail to come into play in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, nearly half a century after the heady 1620s, when Tacitus, in Ben Jonson's epigrammatic evocation of a cry of London, was carried in the pockets of "ripe statesmen, ripe," or, as Milton wrote a few decades later, "cut . . . into slivers and steaks?"(98)

In addition to his narrative of the Great Fire of Rome, Tacitus left a rich lode of information on ancient Britain that would have been of particular interest to learned Englishmen of the seventeenth century. One of Tacitus's shorter works is a biography of his father-in-law, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, who served as governor in Britain. Agricola "privately urged [local chieftains] . . . to build temples, fora, and houses"; thus, an ennobling campaign of urban and architectural improvements had been carried out on British soil in Roman antiquity, even if it was not the result of purely local initiative. And those chieftains' sons, "who once refused the Roman language, began to aim at eloquence."(99) From a speech put into the mouth of a certain Calgacus comes one of the most famous aphorisms in Latin literature: "robbery, slaughter, laying waste they call by the false name of 'empire,' and where they have made a wilderness, they call it 'peace.'"(100)

One of the bitterest conflicts beween Rome and its distant, northwesternmost colony occurred in the reign of Nero, four years before the Great Fire of Rome. Tacitus gives an account of the brutal relationship between the emperor's representatives in Britain and certain local chieftains in book 14 of the Annals. Roman officials had nominated Prasutagus as a client king of the Iceni, who resided in East Anglia. His testament revealed that he had named his own daughters and the emperor as co-heirs. However, the dead king's daughters and his wife, Boudicca, were disgracefully and treacherously treated to acts of violence and insolence by the Roman authorities. To seek retribution, Boudicca assembled her East Anglian subjects and others, exhorting them to rise against the foreign oppressors. (In the Agricola, Tacitus points out that the Britons recognized men and women equally as their rulers, for the benefit of Roman readers for whom the idea of a female ruler standing at the head of an army might otherwise have seemed strange.(101)) Camulodunum (near Colchester) and Verulamium (near St. Albans) were sacked and burned by this impromptu, ragtag "British" alliance, as was London, described as "not distinguished by the title of colony, [yet] none the less a busy center, chiefly through its crowd of merchants and stores."(102) This passage, in fact, is the only place in pagan Latin literature where the word for London (Londinium) appears. In the intervening centuries, commercial London had itself become the capital of a nascent world empire, so Tacitus's characterization of the provincial outpost's economic life could apply equally well to the decades of the 1660s and 1670s.

Tacitus's account of the fire of Rome follows hard upon a description of how Nero had used the entire city as a setting for lewd feasts.(103) After hearing of the fire, the emperor "mounted the domestic stage [in his villa at Antium] and, comparing present ills to past disasters, sang of the destruction of Troy." He did not return to Rome until the fires came close to the Domus Transitoria, which connected the palace complex on the Palatine to other imperial buildings on the Esquiline, all of which were burned to the ground. By contrast, Charles II was not one to fiddle while London burned. While the fires raged, the king and the duke of York appeared almost unguarded among the crowds, the latter manning the buckets like any commoner.(104) On the sixth day, the fire of Rome was brought under control, the clear spaces created by the razing of houses having checked its course. In London, the fire was quenched on the fourth day, its ferocity in part tempered by authorities' having followed the advice of Samuel Pepys and the seamen, who recommended that gunpowder be used to destroy buildings and thus create firebreaks.(105)

Tacitus's chronicle of Nero's relationship to the fire is not entirely negative. The emperor implemented a series of projects meant to assist the displaced, rebuild the destroyed city, and correct its former failings. Temple precincts in the Campus Martius, including Agrippa's Pantheon, became asylums, and the imperial gardens were opened to offer shelter to the homeless. Vessels that had carried emergency supplies of grain up the Tiber returned downriver laden with debris, which was dumped in the marshes at Ostia. Fixed deadlines were enacted to ensure speedy reconstruction. Nero offered individuals sites cleared of rubbish and rewards to those who rebuilt quickly. Structures were fashioned of "Gabine or Alban stone [saxo Gabino Albanove], because they are impervious to fire." Tacitus writes of "measured lines of streets, with broad thoroughfares, buildings of restricted height, and open spaces" and mentions "the striking beauty of the rearisen city." Suetonius, writing even later, asserts that Nero "thought out a new form for the buildings of Rome," which were fronted with porticoes whose roofs could serve as a place for fighting fires.(106)

Measures similar to those adopted by Nero were implemented by Parliament and the City of London, with the engaged oversight and approval of Charles II. After the fire, the king, riding outside the north wall of the City to Moorfields (where tents made from canvas stored in naval arsenals had been pitched), addressed his subjects and promised to help them, gaining their profound gratitude in the process. Supplies of biscuit from naval stores were distributed to the population, who declined to eat it, the markets being quickly supplied with the more familiar baked bread.(107) Royal proclamations ordered localities near London to provide assistance to the bereft, while "churches, hospitals, and other public places" - those in the City that had survived the flames, and those in the suburbs and in the country - were used as temporary lodgings.(108) Once plots of land had been cleared of rubbish, City surveyors measured and set property boundaries, subtracting, in equal proportion from each interested landholder, the area needed for raising party walls.(109) Structures rebuilt in masonry and brick replaced flimsy, flammable constructions (although even what was newly built came to be consumed in subsequent conflagrations).(110) Wall thicknesses and the construction of cellars were officially regulated, as were facade heights, lending many areas of the resurrected city a marked visual coherence.(111) The restored street plan of the capital did not include the sweeping changes envisioned by Wren and Evelyn (among others), who proposed orthogonal grids cut by broad slashing diagonals and punctuated by piazzas [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 11, 12 OMITTED]. Nevertheless, many large and small streets were widened and regularized to facilitate pedestrian and vehicular traffic.

Nero was an excellent city planner, and even Tacitus admits as much in his description of building activities after the fire of Rome. However, he winds up casting the changes wrought in an ominous light, writing that "there were those who held that the old form had been the more salubrious, as the narrow streets and high-built houses were not so easily penetrated by the rays of the sun; while now the broad expanses, with no protecting shadows, glowed under a more oppressive heat" (Annals 15.43). To set Nero in a positive light was doubly difficult in seventeenth-century England, for his name, as we have seen, could call to memory the untrammeled excesses of absolute power, not to mention the slaughter of brave Britons who fought against perfidy and for freedom.

The Specter of Papal Rome and Intolerance against

Roman Catholics The Monument was called a pyramid and an obelisk by contemporaries, and a similarly flexible usage was also current on the Continent.(112) Both architectural forms, commonly understood to symbolize "the famous glory of princes," embody the magnificence of Pharaonic Egypt, evincing an image of memory that will withstand the ravages of time.(113) In seventeenth-century Europe, though, the word obelisk summons up other significant spatial and temporal associations. In his Kalendarium, Evelyn mentions an obelisk lying broken and in ruins in what he called the Circus Caracalla (the Circus of Maxentius on the Appian Way), an antiquity that the second earl of Arundel had planned to purchase; unable to arrange a suitable means of transport, that great collector had to give up his plans. After returning from his Grand Tour, during which he visited the Piazza Navona in Rome in 1645, Evelyn continued to make additions to his diary, recounting how that obelisk was "plac'd on [a] stupendous Artificial Rock . . . the work of Cavaliere Bernini, the Popes Architect."(114) He refers, of course, to the Fountain of the Four Rivers (1651), one of the major artistic commissions of Innocent X's papacy.

If the Monument was to be understood as an obelisk, learned observers in seventeenth-century England would certainly have called to mind an image of the architectural and urban interventions of Sixtus V. In 1606, for example, the English humanist Edmund Mary Bolton presented Inigo Jones with a copy of Giovanni Francesco Bordini's De rebus praeclare, in which panegyric poems and etchings describe the pope's various undertakings, likening them to the glorious undertakings of the Roman emperors in their scale and magnificence [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 13 OMITTED]. Bolton inscribed his gift with a Latin dedication to Jones, "through whom the hope is that sculpture, modelling, architecture, [painting], theatrical representation, and all that is praiseworthy in the elegant arts of the ancients, may some day [sneak] across the Alps into our England."(115) Thus, even though the book treats of a recently deceased pontiff's building projects, Bolton believed that the Roman imperial legacy that (often literally) underlay them could be extracted and modified as needed for new, magnificent, and patriotic purposes. Indeed, Bolton meant to include Jones among the founding members of a royal academy, a project that James I supported, but that eventually came to naught.(116) The obelisks of Rome, ancient spolia set up some seven decades before the erection of the Monument, were outfitted with elaborate and extensive Latin inscriptions, a fact that Wren, the designer of London's obelisk, could hardly have ignored. Indeed, several unexecuted projects exist for the Monument in the form of an obelisk. Perhaps he decided to change the overall form from an obelisk to a column as a result of examining Bartoli's opulent Colonna traiana, a plate from which, as we already know, he studied in considerable detail [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED].(117)

The reerected obelisks of Rome stood in a carefully determined relationship to several long straight streets, either laid out under the reign of Sixtus V or already extant and newly included within a network meant to link the far-flung patriarchal basilicas in the capital of the Roman Catholic Church. Domenico Fontana, the architect in charge of this radical restructuring of the Eternal City, wrote that moving through the new city provided the wayfarer, "beyond the religious purposes . . . a pasture for the bodily senses."(118) The obelisks of Rome certainly do define capacious squares, pin down the horizontal trajectory of streets, beckon far-off travelers, and adorn fountains. The Monument, much taller than any Roman obelisk, rose as an unmistakable element in the vast panorama of the north bank of the Thames. It also loomed large within its immediate context of Monument Yard and the important north-south axis of Gracechurch Street and Fish Street Hill, both significantly widened after the Great Fire.(119) Unlike any Roman obelisk, however, the Monument can be entered and climbed, and thus experienced with more than the sense of sight.

On the same tour that led him to Rome in 1645, Evelyn also visited Richelieu, a small town near Poitou built between 1631 and 1639, which had rectilinear streets flanked by uniform facades in stone quoins and brick and commodious squares defined by prominent public buildings.(120) Both Wren's and Evelyn's projects for a rebuilt London, submitted less than a week after the fire had been extinguished, include long, straight streets whose absence had already been acknowledged as a potential problem by Evelyn in his Fumifugium [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 11, 12 OMITTED].

One might argue that there was no need to look abroad for inspiration, since England had produced Thomas More, author of Utopia, inventor of both a literary genre and a concept, and Francis Bacon, author of New Atlantis. Yet Sixtine Rome provided a three-dimensional object lesson on how an extant city might be functionally and symbolically modified, and it was experienced at first-hand by Evelyn, just as Wren had experienced the broad quays of Paris, quays that he (according to a contemporary) thought "exceeded all manner of ways the building of the two greatest pyramids in Egypt."(121) Those quays facilitated the delivery and dispatch of goods from vessels plying the Seine and provided clear passage to vehicles and pedestrians, advantages that were conspicuously absent in London. Within a week of the Great Fire, Charles II, in concert with the Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen, had hoped for the construction of a quay.(122) A provision for suspending construction along the Thames was passed in the House of Commons on February 1, 1667, but it likely had only the limited practical purpose of leaving the bankside free for the removal of debris and the delivery of building materials.(123)

But any reference to contemporary Rome was bound to raise suspicions. A panegyric poem of 1669, "Upon the Rebuilding the City," mocks the papacy and predicts that the Thames will continue to flow long after the Tiber has dried up.(124) In 1666 and afterward, France, too, found many English detractors. A poem of 1672 enjoins the alleged firebrands who had burned the British capital to "Go set a Fire on ROME and PARIS too; / And all your old Built Towns; go Burn them down, / That they may be Rebuilt like LONDON Town."(125) Louis XIV was a nominal ally of Holland, with which England was involved in what is now known as the Second Dutch War (1665-67). Many Londoners believed that England's Roman Catholics, in concert with the French and the Dutch, were the incendiaries responsible for the Great Fire. Although a deranged French (albeit Huguenot) silversmith and watchmaker named Robert Hubert confessed to setting the fire, it was a crime he could not have committed. Knowing that Hubert was innocent, judges at the Old Bailey nonetheless sentenced him to be hanged at Tyburn. Charles II failed to intervene in this obvious miscarriage of justice.

The sacrifice of a scapegoat did nothing to silence rumors in the short run, and anti-Catholic hysteria waxed unabated in the months and years immediately after the Great Fire, including the time in which the Monument rose to its vertiginous heights.(126) A royal proclamation, "published in many public places," commanded "priests and Jesuits" to leave the kingdom before December 20, 1666, or face penal sanctions, with foreign clerics who served or were to serve the queen and the queen mother exempted.(127) A fire in Southwark in the first week of August 1670 raised anew among the populace suspicions "of a plot [attributed] to Frenchmen and Catholics."(128) On March 26, 1672, shortly before declaring war on Holland for the third time, the king issued a Declaration of Indulgence, which suspended penal sanctions against Roman Catholics and Nonconformists alike. Although the king had hoped "to unite interests for the defense and service of the public," some Presbyterians soon sought to downplay and discredit the monarch's recent martial successes and future plans, to awaken jealousy against Catholics, and to foment suspicions that he was sympathetic toward them.(129) In March 1673, strapped for funds to finance the Dutch war, the king was forced to retract. Parliament went on to pass a Test Act, which excluded all non-Anglicans from public office.(130) On Guy Fawkes Day in 1675, Parliament transacted no business, "meet[ing] only to listen to a sermon against the Pope and Catholics."(131) In 1676, in the wake of several fires that had broken out in London and elsewhere in England, Roman Catholics were again suspected of malevolent acts carried out under the sponsorship of Louis XIV.(132)

The atmosphere in London was volatile. Whiling away some years of his exile (1651-60) in Holland, Charles II had admired the neat brick buildings and broad quays of numerous cities whose aqueous arteries were used to signal economic advantage. There, too, he had had ample time to absorb chastening lessons about the limits of British monarchical power. In truth, neither the crown nor the City had the funds necessary to push through far-reaching urban renewal projects, as had occurred at Rome and Paris. Little more than a month after the fire, both king and Parliament realized that any official expropriation would have made it impossible to adjudicate property owners' claims for recompense; as a result, ideal plans had to be abandoned, Charles II gave up his dream of a broad quay along the Thames, and the city was reconstructed "in the old form, as narrow as it was," with owners building anew on their sites.(133)

The complex task of setting London on its feet again was daunting enough, and had to be carried out quickly to ensure that the city not be permanently abandoned.(134) In January 1676, nearly ten years after the Great Fire, the Tuscan resident minister wrote that the city still lacked inhabitants, and that rebuilt houses stood empty.(135) Later that year, the lord mayor and Court of Aldermen presented a petition to the king, asking him to forbid by proclamation further construction in the suburbs and towns surrounding London. In response, Charles II labeled the petition a work of "vanity and temerity [of] some few discontented and factious persons," but also indicated that it was beyond his power to issue any such proclamation, and that he would "recommend [the affair] to the consideration of Parliament."(136) The grandiose, up-to-the-minute schemes of Evelyn, Wren, and others, which promised to recreate and even outshine the splendors of Sixtine Rome or Bourbon Paris on English soil were condemned to remain fantasies on paper [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 11, 12 OMITTED].

Notwithstanding these unrealized projects, the actual rebuilding of London came to serve as a model and a measure for a British colonial city. On the other side of the Atlantic, in the experimental space of North America, William Penn, a survivor of the Great Plague and an eyewitness to the disastrous aftermath of the Great Fire, founded the provincial capital of Philadelphia between 1681 and 1683.(137) Built on a strict grid plan, his "green country town, which will never be burnt, and always be wholesome," included garden plots not only for cultivation's sake, but also to serve as natural firebreaks.(138) A Welsh Quaker settler wrote in 1698 that in the city of brotherly love, there were "above two thousand Houses, all Inhabited; and most of them Stately, and of Brick, generally three Stories high, after the Mode in London."(139) This architectural dialogue between center and periphery took a new turn in 1786, when Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend that "London, tho handsomer than Paris, is not so handsome as Philadelphia."(140)

William Penn had left England to create a haven of religious toleration, or, to phrase it differently, to escape religious persecution. And, as the members of the inscription committee well knew, the distant voice of Tacitus tells a grotesque and atrocious story about a persecution that followed the fire of Rome. Nero's plans for rebuilding "were provided for by human prudence [humanis consilis]"; many individuals considered them "welcome for their utility" and "beneficial to the appearance of the new capital." (In the north dado inscription, we read that "on the third day, the fatal fire had vanquished . . . all human prudence" [HVMANA CONSILIA].) Yet in spite of "public prayers" and two propitiations to Juno, "first in the Capitol, then at the nearest point of the sea-shore," rumors that Nero had had the fire started would not go away. To help abolish them, the emperor "substituted as culprits, and punished with the utmost refinements of cruelty, those individuals, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd called Christians." At certain public entertainments, some members of the sect were covered with flayed animal skins and then mauled by dogs; others were attached to crosses, smeared with pitch, and set on fire at night to serve as human torches to light the way to the Circus of Nero in the Vatican. Writing for a pagan audience, Tacitus inserts a definition of Christians: "Christus, the originator of that moniker, underwent capital punishment during the reign of Tiberius by order of the procurator Pontius Pilate." No apologist, he continues his description: "this pernicious sect, after it had been for some Time represt, sprung up, not only in the place of its first Rise, but in Rome itself, which is the Rendezvous and the Sink of all the Filth in the World."(141) This is one of four places in pagan Latin literature where Christ is mentioned, albeit in terms of his death, which implies that he lived.

In the days, weeks, months, and years that followed the Great Fire of 1666, Roman Catholics in London regularly fell victim to mob violence and state-sanctioned persecution, as we have already seen. In November 1677, "a great quantity of people gathered together about the Monument." Although the lord mayor, Francis Chaplin, "had a guard there to watch them," he remained unperturbed by their activity, for they "only burnt [an effigy of] the Pope and so went home."(142) The Monument, still without writing, nonetheless stood for the Great Fire and served as a lightning rod for acts of intolerance. It was in the heat of Nero's festivities, according to historical tradition, that Peter, the first pope, was believed to have been crucified upside down, and Paul, the Roman citizen who had sought his civil right to trial, beheaded. Thus, in this celebratory popular manifestation, history not only repeated itself but served as a grim foreshadowing of more widespread and systematic actions against England's Roman Catholics, or, in the prejudiced parlance of the time, "papists." Between 1679 and 1681, "[m]agnificent procession[s] and solemn burning[s] of the Pope" took place on November 17, the anniversary of Elizabeth I's coronation.(143)

Structures rebuilt in London after the Great Fire remained largely devoid of writing on their exteriors, the ambitious Monument being the notable exception.(144) And before the cataclysm of 1666, nowhere were the powerful connotations of public inscriptions more evident than at London's St. Paul's Cathedral. Between 1634 and 1642, Inigo Jones rebuilt the west facade, whose frieze was outfitted with a majestic inscription in Roman majuscules identifying Charles I, who "restored the temple . . . consumed by old age and made the portico." The juxtaposition of a columnar porch and Latin inscriptions naming a building's patron and his deed ultimately recalls two venerable antiquities, the Temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum and the Pantheon. At both the Pantheon and St. Paul's, eight monolithic columns support the entablature of the portico, and the inscribed friezes begin with a proper noun as subject and end with the verb "made" (FECIT); moreover, the inscription of the Temple of Saturn provides the phrase "consumed by fire [incendio consumptum]" that was recast as "consumed by old age [vetustate consumptum]" at St. Paul's.(145) The king had earmarked special funds for this project, over and above an annual royal commitment to the extensive restoration of the church.(146) The executed facade was selected over another design by Jones that bore numerous formal connections to Jesuit church facades in Rome and Genoa; thus, on a substantially transformed Anglican cathedral originally built for Roman Catholic rituals, ancient Rome triumphed over the modern papal city.(147)

The building of the west facade engendered the razing of some Londoners' houses and other acts considered unpleasant and unwelcome. Jones's facade likewise took its place with a nationwide ecclesiastical building campaign sponsored by the archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, a lover of High Church ritual that smacked too much of popery for many a dissenter's taste.(148) Indeed, despite the unassailably ancient pedigree of the inscription, it is hard to imagine anything more Roman Catholic in spirit than placing Latin writing on an Anglican church, since a fundamental tenet of Protestantism, especially in the minds of Puritans, was an insistent use of the vernacular. Although Wren gave his New St. Paul's a pedimental front, no grandiloquent inscription graces its frieze. Writing is also eschewed on the exteriors of Wren's imaginative City. churches. Roman ecclesiastical inscriptions of the early modern period, in their studied antiquarian form, magnificently broadcast not only dates and the names of patrons but also those of saints, and the veneration of saints was emphatically not part of the established Church of England.

New St. Paul's School, prominently rebuilt opposite the apse end of the cathedral, did have a Latin inscription in its frieze: "a school for young boys' catechization in the faith of Christ the best and greatest and in the liberal arts" (SCHOLA CATECHIZATIONIS / PVERORV IN CHRISTI OPT MAXIMI / FIDE ET BONIS LITERIS). This inscription reproduces verbatim that of the first school founded in 1512 by John Colet, although the tripartite division of its recomposition after the Great Fire (at least as recorded in a much later illustration) curiously bears a formal consonance with the facade inscription of St. Peter's Basilica at Rome. In addition, the recasting of the ancient formula, "the best and the greatest," to refer to Christ, not Jupiter Capitolinus, is noteworthy, as is the yoking of faith and the liberal arts.(149) A taste for Latin inscriptions on public buildings characterized ancient Rome and its modern, papal counterpart, and scores of properly trained "Grand Tourists" - like Wren's friend Evelyn - took pains to copy down the modern texts, along with the precious epigraphy of Roman antiquity.(150)

The long Latin inscriptions on the Monument soon came to share space with new writing that was not the fruit of a scholarly committee's learned lucubrations. In the frenzied aftermath of Titus Oates's revelation of a so-called popish plot to assassinate Charles II and enthrone his Roman Catholic brother, who would allegedly rule in the Jesuits' thrall, the Court of Common Council mandated that the Monument be outfitted with two additional inscriptions, one in Latin, the other in English (see App. below).(151) Both were the work of City comptroller Joseph Lane, who had conferred with Wren, Gale, and Hooke about the three original inscriptions. Lane was appointed to the rusk in November 1680, and his work was approved in June 1681.(152) On July 2, 1681, the Court of Aldermen even sanctioned the removal, if the need arose, of parts of the earlier inscriptions.(153)

The inscriptions of 1681 blamed Roman Catholics for setting the Great Fire, a patent falsehood that later caused Alexander Pope to write, "Where London's column, pointing to the skies / Like a tall bully, lifts the head, and lyes."(154) Lane's one-sentence Latin text - "But the papal madness that has accomplished so many abominations is not yet snuffed out" (SED FVROR PAPISTICVS, QVI TAM DIRA PATRAVIT NONDVM RESTINGVITVR) - was placed at the bottom of the north dado, such that nothing of the first inscription was removed. This inscription was effaced in 1685 (when the duke of York ascended the British throne as James II), recut more deeply in 1689 (soon after the accession of William III and Mary, the so-called Glorious Revolution), and obliterated once and for all in 1831; the gougings stilt visible in the stone identify its former location.(155)

Lane's English inscription was to be found on blocks set between the torus and the top of the plinth, and its former location, too, is still visible. To read what was once legible there, viewers had to walk counterclockwise around the Monument, starting at the west beneath Cibber's relief; this side faced Fish Street Hill and the approach to London Bridge, and so would have caught the attention of many passersby. Joseph Addison describes precisely that movement in an account of a visit to the Monument, originally published in the Freeholder on June 1, 1716. He and his companion "took a ramble together to see the curiosities of this great town." Quick on his feet, the companion "mounted the ascent with much speed and activity," leaving the breathless Addison behind. At the top, he "counted all the steeples and towers," whereas below, "observing an English inscription upon the basis," he moved around the column several times. The last word he read before he turned the southwest corner was PROTESTANT; the first word he read on the south side was CITY. That brief, angular juxtaposition makes a point no less tendentious than any Latin inscription to be found in a Catholic capital on the Continent. What he read contradicted what he had learned "from an old Attorney . . . in the country," who claimed "it was the Presbyterians who burned down the city."(156)

The Court of Common Council also decreed that an inscribed stone plaque, whose English text was also by Lane, be set up at 25 Pudding Lane [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 14 OMITTED].(157) The choice of language meant that literate Londoners and those who heard the words read aloud could easily understand what was written on the plaque, which made its message infinitely more accessible than the Latin words on the Monument - so, too, the implications of that message. Here, then, along with the English inscription on the Monument, are the "stones [made] vocall by inscriptions," not, to be sure, by the Romans, but by official acts of the City, fathers. The text scathingly condemns "THE MALICIOUS HEARTS OF BARBAROUS PAPISTS," whose "AGENT HUBERT" had admitted to wreaking such destruction "UPON THIS PROTESTANT CITY." The plaque - which so many curious individuals went to inspect that local residents had it removed in the mid-eighteenth century - deliberately directed the gazes of readers and listeners of the period back to "THE NEIGHBOURING PILLAR." It thus encouraged its audience to connect, physically and symbolically, two significant points in London's urban fabric separated by 202 feet, a distance incandescently charged with wrenching political conflict and religious unrest.(158)

Designs for the Summit of the Monument

On July 14, 1675, the City Lands Committee asked Wren "to signify in writing under his hand upon or before this sevn'night, what Sort of finishing upon the top of the new erected Obelisq in memoriall of the fire is most approved of by his Ma.ty, and the materiall dimensions and an Estimate of the charges of each particular thereof."(159) A fortnight later Wren responded, and also provided "the several designes which some monthes since I shewed his Majestie, for his approbacon."(160) He reported that "[a] Phoenix was at first thought of, and is the ornament of the wooden model of the Pillar, which I caused to be made before it was begun." A highly finished and detailed presentation drawing of a column with gilt-bronze tongues of flame in high relief along the shaft and a phoenix set atop a classically inspired urn at the summit bears the pen-and-ink inscription "With His M.ties Approbation Chr. Wren," which makes this drawing comparable to Wren's warrant design for New St. Paul's of 1675 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED].(161) And, just as occurred at London's cathedral, Wren kept changing his mind as building progressed. For instance, since the fluting was added after the column's erection, the motif of the gilt-bronze flames could be abandoned at the last minute, perhaps because of concerns about cost.(162) With the scaffolding in place until the first half of October 1676, it was easy enough for masons to work the flutes, and in this case one had only to pay for their labor, not for expensive bronze and gold. The sketched-in relief (showing the city of London in flames) and escutcheon-bearing dragons that support a laurel wreath at the base of the shaft correspond in general terms to elements that were eventually executed. Gibber's relief was not yet begun (nor perhaps even commissioned) when the drawing was made, not later than February 14, 1671 (the date of its approval by the Court of the Common Council), which explains the discrepancy between what is depicted therein and the actual west dado relief.

The summit design was rejected by the architect himself, "because it will be costly, not easily understood at the highth, and worse understood at a distance and lastly dangerous by reason of the sayle, the spread winges will carry in the winde." In his report, Wren also discussed a project for a twelve-foot statue "in brasse." He had hoped to find artists who would cast one fifteen feet tall, which would have been "the largest at this day extant." Another point in favor of the statue was that it "would be more valluable in the eyes of Forreiners and Strangers." In the architect's mind, therefore, certain signs or figures in an urban landscape had the potential to communicate to a wide audience. The king, however, as Wren recounts, "was pleased to think a large ball of metall guilt would be most agreeable, in regard it would give an Ornament to the towne at a great Distance: not that his Majestie disliked a Statue." The "ball of Copper, nine foot diameter . . . with the Flames and guilt" also recommended itself because of "the good appearance at distance, and because one may goe up into it, and upon occasion use it for fireworks." On July 28, 1675, when Wren's letter was read to the Committee, Hooke "took [a] draught of Piller, Ball, and Statue."(163)

Without a doubt, Wren's pet project was to crown the Monument with a bronze statue of Charles II, "as Founder of the new City, in the Manner of Roman pillars, which terminated with the Statues of their Caesars," and to do so at a historically unprecedented scale - just as the height of the London column itself surpassed all the triumphal columns and obelisks of Roman antiquity.(164) The drawing with the half elevation and half section of the Column of Trajan already mentioned includes both the statue of Saint Peter erected by Sixtus V in 1587 and a hypothetical reconstruction of the statue of the emperor that once stood in its place [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 4 OMITTED]. Both renderings of the summit are better observed in a detail from the drawing's source, an etched plate from Bartoli [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 16 OMITTED]. Thus, both the Italian printmaker and the English draughtsman who copied his work effortlessly replace a bold and visible symbol of urban transformation and papal power in Rome with its ancient prototype. A version of Wren's statue project is preserved in an engraving by Henry Hulsberg after Nicholas Hawksmoor of the west elevation of the Monument [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED]. The print dates to 1723, the year Wren died, so it may have had an explicitly laudatory and commemorative function when first published. Also recorded in the perspectival distance of the engraving, over the fictive wall, is that perennial comparison between the Monument, on the left, and the shorter Column of Trajan on the right; the drapery cartouche to the left provides the title of the print, "The London Column, greater than which the Sun has not seen [Columna Londinensis, qua Sol Majorem non vidit]." In the Bartoli etching, the emperor holds a staff and orb, emblems, respectively, of military power and universal dominion; according to what is shown in the engraving, Wren opted to depict Charles II with a baton of command, just as he is shown in the west dado relief. Indeed, Wren's statue would have added an impressive closing element to the Monument's formal, iconographic, and symbolic structure, to say nothing of a commanding presence in the London skyline. Had the statue been executed and put in place, the figure of the king in Cibber's stone relief on the base would have found its bronze analogue at the summit, just as the figure of the emperor appears repeatedly on Roman triumphal columns, whose narratives unravel in an ever ascending spiral, unfolding in historical time and space. The statue would have also strengthened an overarching reference to the Forum of Trajan, whose magnificence Wren wanted to reconstitute in a new square in London.

Yet for those who knew their Roman history, a colossal statue could easily have called to mind the infamous colossus of Nero that once stood in the vestibule of the Domus Aurea, that eternal icon of imperial megalomania and the unjust expropriation of public land on the heels of destruction. After the Great Fire, according to Tacitus, "the emperor made use of his homeland's ruins," expropriating large tracts of land within the Servian walls to build the famous Golden House, which was distinguished "not so much in gems and gold, materials long familiar and vulgarized by extravagance, as in fields and lakes and in the appearance of wildernesses, here [hinc] woods, after that [inde] open spaces and distant views" (Annals 15.42). As a matter of fact, this is a passage within a story that the members of the inscription committee also knew well, for in the north dado inscription, practically the same two adverbs are used to delimit the geographic extent of the fire of London: "on this side [HINC] from the Tower along the [north] bank of the Thames to the church of the Templars, on that side [ILLINC] from the northeast gate along the walls to the head of the Fleet-ditch." The positioning of these words at the head of successive lines lends visual stress to their syntactic function in the sentence and, for readers who know Tacitus's text well, facilitates such a comparative reading. Early in Charles II's reign, buoyed by the enthusiasm that accompanied the Restoration, an author writing about the queen mother's palace at Greenwich adduced what Suetonius records Nero to have said about the Golden House, "his capacious and glorious Edifice," namely that he was at last beginning to live like a human being.(165) Yet after 1666, pithy statements attributed to that notorious figure were doubtless less convenient to cite. Thus, the phrasal pattern used in the north dado inscription is carefully stripped of its context.

The minutes of the City Lands Committee indicate that "[a]fter several debates," it was decided that the flaming ball "should be placed upon the top of the New Columne," the termination that had received the king's approval.(166) It is plausible that historical memory informed those debates and the king's deliberate choice. For although Charles II may not have "disliked a statue," such a brazen reference to his alleged status as the founder of a new London would not merely have constituted excessive flattery and, in fact, a patent falsehood, it might well have prompted the king's well-educated supporters and detractors to think of the very same Nero who had been suspected of having had Rome set on fire in order to rebuild it in a more stately form and rename it, according to Suetonius, "Neropolis."(167)

The story of the ill-starred Valentine Knight goes some way to confirm the king's desire to maintain a positive public image and to avoid any untoward comparisons after the fire of London. On September 20, 1666, Knight put forward a series of written proposals for rebuilding London, which would have transformed the north bank of the Thames, "from the Temple to Tower-dock," with structures "to be built Uniform with stone or brick . . . at least 80 foot from the high water mark." He meant to include urban amenities, like "peyatsoes," which for him meant either paved and arcaded alleys between buildings along the Thames or paved and arcaded walkways flanking his projected thirty-six long, straight streets. Despite his imaginative spelling, what he had in mind was the local "piazza," Inigo Jones's Covent Garden in Westminster (1631-38), which brought the most modern aspects of Italian and French design right to London's doorstep. Knight also envisioned the cutting of a barge canal through the City, from Billingsgate in the east to Holborn Bridge in the west, whence it would have flowed into the Fleet River. In addition, he proposed to raise funds by levying fines on newly built houses, funds that would have been put "towards the Maintenance of [the king's] Forces by Sea and Land." His project would have turned a rebuilt London into a perennial source of revenue for the royal fisc. No coeval graphic visualization of Knight's scheme exists, and apparently there never was one.(168) Nine days after issuing his broadside, Knight was arrested.(169) The breathtaking inappropriateness of implementing such a highhanded royal policy should perhaps have been obvious to Knight, and it was certainly obvious to Charles II. Although the king had publicly expressed his view that the fire was "a stroke of good fortune," as it had provided a safeguard for attack against his fleet, he made it clear that rebuilding efforts would be such "that no mans Right be sacrificed to the publick convenience."(170) The royal call for the respect of private property, or "old English liberty," would have struck a soothing chord to many a distraught landowner.

The rejection of a bronze colossus manifests a self-conscious diminution of a regal presence on the Monument. In response to the king's wishes, a gilt-bronze flaming sphere was executed at the summit, but it was eventually set atop an urn fashioned from the same materials. An extant drawing of an early project for the urn can be assigned to Wren, since Hooke writes in his diary, "To Sir Chr. Wren's. Received Draught of Urne" on September 11, 1675 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 18 OMITTED].(171) Thus, the drawing was produced about ten weeks after Wren consigned his report on the termination of the Monument to the City Lands Committee. On September 22, 1675, Hooke showed the committee "the figure of an Urne as most proper to be placed upon the top of the new Columne on Fishtreet hill."(172) A variant of this early project is also depicted, in the guise of an unrolled drawing, in the upper right of Hulsberg's engraving of the Monument [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED].(173) The close relationship among Wren, his son and executor Christopher, his assistant and architectural heir Hawksmoor, and the Dutch-born printmaker Hulsberg is documented by the engraved presence of the drawing, since that drawing lay among the elder Wren's personal papers and would thus have been accessible to very few individuals without permission.(174) Cast in two parts by coppersmith Robert Bird, the urn may well have been chosen for its explicitly funerary connotations. Dio Cassius reports that the Column of Trajan was also his mausoleum, while according to widespread belief, the gilt-bronze sphere that stood atop the Vatican obelisk until 1586 had held the ashes of Caesar.(175) In a similar vein, the urn on the Monument served symbolically as a repository for London's ashes, but it was pulled up, as it were, from the burial chamber to take its gleaming place within the panorama of the rearisen city. The exact formal, iconographic, and symbolic appropriateness of the urn should be set against the account of Wren's disappointed disapproval, communicated at letter N under "Annotationes" in the engraving at lower right, where one reads, "a brazen urn, poorly turned on a lathe, set atop the column despite the architect's effort [Urna AErea, Male tornata, Columnae imposita Contra Architecti Intentionem]."(176)

In Wren's drawing, the foot of the urn is enveloped with luxuriant acanthus leaves, while the swelling body is bedecked with escutcheons linked by festoons of fruits and flowers that symbolize a restored abundance [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 18 OMITTED]. Graphic conventions permit only two and a half escutcheons to be depicted, but four were intended. In the presentation drawing approved by the king [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED], the phoenix was set above an urn, so Wren typically returned to an earlier motif and altered it. The fluted neck also corresponds in form to a detail from the presentation drawing. In both instances, however, Wren may have drawn his inspiration, at least in part, from representations of urns in innumerable surviving Roman reliefs - for example, those reproduced in Boissard.(177) The stepped ring from which the flames spring in Wren's drawing can likewise be located in graphic images of urns and altars, where an eternal flame kept alive the memory of the defunct.(178) Thus, the flame in Wren's project wittily keeps alive the memory of London's near demise, since fire was the very medium of destruction.

In the executed urn, two escutcheons represent the arms of the City, as originally proposed, but they are surmounted with crowns replacing the strapwork and grotesque masks in Wren's drawing [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 19, 18 OMITTED]. The other two escutcheons, outfitted with decoratively interlocked Cs, bear witness to another significant revision. The new motif is much like the addorsed or interlocked Ls that symbolize Louis XIV on French royal buildings (the former to be seen at the Invalides and the east facade of the Louvre, the latter at Versailles). Adopting a standard metaphor, the poem "London's Index" likens the rebuilt city to "the Chamber of the KING."(179) So, although impossible to discern from the street, a golden three-dimensional royal presence was, in the end, modestly attached to the summit of the Monument. The escutcheons, which were complete and ready for gilding in August 1676, are in this article newly attributed to the medalist George Bowers.(180)

On the other hand, the sphere, whose form recalls the summit of the Paris column, figuratively holds the flames of destruction in apotropaic check.(181) Hooke writes that on August 3, 1675, he "Walked with Sir. Chr. Wren in Privy Garden and Discoursed of the Ball for the Column."(182) Some of their conversation must have touched on how the sphere embodies a now long-forgotten locus classicus, Ammianus Marcellinus's description of "a bronze globe gleaming with gold-leaf" placed on the obelisk set up in the Circus Maximus by Constantius II in 357. The globe "was immediately struck by a bolt of the divine fire and therefore removed and replaced by a bronze figure of a torch overlaid with gold-foil and glowing like a mass of flame."(183) The vicissitudes of the ancient model would have struck Wren as ironic if not bittersweet, as he remembered that the Great Fire of Rome began in the Circus Maximus, and as he devised (and saw rejected) both his inscription and his various proposals for the summit.

The passage would have commanded his boundless intellectual interest for other reasons. It puts forward the claim that an obelisk's tapering shape "imitates a sunbeam," explains what obelisks looked like, how they were made, and the symbolic uses to which they were put in ancient Egypt. It also describes, in considerable technical detail, how this immense object, during the reign of Constantine, was transported from its original location in Thebes to Alexandria and then loaded onto a specially constructed boat rowed by hundreds of oarsmen. Soon afterward, Constantine died; some years later, his son Constantius II had the obelisk transported from Alexandria to a port near Rome, and thence up the Tiber to the circus. Provided, too, are a general definition of hieroglyphs and an (alleged) translation in Greek of the specific ones on this obelisk.(184) Standing at 106.5 feet (32.5 meters), this obelisk is tallest ever fashioned in ancient Egypt. It was transferred to its present location at the Lateran by Fontana in 1588. Incorporating exact words and closely recast phrases from Ammianus Marcellinus's account, one inscription from the same date rehearses aspects of the history of this obelisk "dedicated to the sun [SOLI DEDICATVM]"; another states that Sixtus V "dedicated . . . this obelisk . . . to the most invincible cross [HVNC OBELISCVM . . . CRVCI INVICTISSIMAE DICAVIT]," thus putting this marvel of antiquity to a renewed but ideologically different use.(185)

Ammianus Marcellinus first mentions the obelisk in an account of the many architectural splendors - among them "the Pantheon like a rounded city-district" - that Rome offered to the gaze of Constantius II as he entered the city in a particularly resplendent triumph, even though (as the historian takes pains to point out) he had won no military victories. Having reached the Forum of Trajan, "he stood fast in amazement" at its size and splendor, "abandoning all hope of attempting anything like it." The emperor, however, "after long deliberation," decided "to add to the adornments of the city, by erecting . . . an obelisk."(186) Neither Wren nor his colleagues knew the splendor and dimensions of the Markets and Forum of Trajan, for that complex lay unexcavated until the nineteenth century.(187) Yet in light of the dialogue Wren wished to establish with ancient Roman models of many types, it was only fitting that the Monument, a marvel of modern construction nearly twice the height of the Lateran obelisk - taller, too, than the Column of Trajan - be surmounted by a flaming gilt-bronze sphere with imperial connotations set above a giant funerary urn. From reading Ammianus Marcellinus, Wren devised a spherical summit that, like the velarium at the Sheldonian, gave three-dimensional form to a passage from Latin literature.

The Politicization of Roman History in Seventeenth-Century England

Nero was always a perplexing character, but there was more than one way to remember him. For example, in the nepotistic world of mid-seventeenth-century Rome, Francesco Borromini used Italian translations of Tacitus and Suetonius to gather information about the Domus Aurea, and those writers' comments about that notorious building served as unambiguously positive inspiration for the architect in an unrealized villa project for Cardinal Camillo Pamphili.(188) English intellectuals of the first decades of the seventeenth century grappled with Nero for other reasons, not least because it was under his reign that a momentous and revolutionary event in the history of Roman Britain occurred. Nero likewise served, for those who chose to interpret him this way, as an object lesson in absolute monarchy gone awry, yet here, too, history had many a lesson to impart.

In the reign of the first Stuart monarch, as we already know, Inigo Jones received an inscribed copy of Bordini's De rebus praeclare from Edmund Mary Bolton, a lifelong Roman Catholic whose neo-Greek pen name was Philanactophil, or "friend of the king's friend."(189) In his own scholarly work, Bolton did not hesitate to yoke ancient Rome to ancient London. His Nero Caesar, or, Monarchie Depraved, an important work in its time, attracted the interest of James I, who, suspicious of such a subject, had characterized Nero as a "Villaine." Bolton carried on with his project to "teach this pretious secret; No Prince is so bad as not to make monarckie seeme the best forme of government." An etched frontispiece serves as the title page to the second edition, published in London in 1627 and dedicated to "the king's friend" George Villiers, first duke of Buckingham and lord high admiral [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 20 OMITTED]. There, on the left, is Rome, a spear in her right hand, a shield inscribed with SPQR in her left, the world symbolically underfoot; on the right is London, her sword at her side, standing proud, offering abundance, mistress of the sea with an anchor at her feet. The accompanying poem mentions the burning of London and Rome, in that correct chronological order; in the etching, the personifications of both capitals wear turreted crowns, the conventional symbol for provinces and cities, here appropriately shown in flames. Poised on a rearing horse and "crown'd with Bayes," the figure of Nero rises at the top center. The poem identifies the "Song, and Visard for the stage" that he holds in his right hand; beneath, to the left and right respectively, are represented an amphitheater and a theater, sites of gruesome public entertainments and private, albeit perverse pleasures. A cartouche-enframed oval vignette in the upper right depicts Boudicca rallying the troops.(190)

Some five decades later, in the reign of the third Stuart monarch, the tide had turned. For example, Buckingham, Bolton's dedicatee, the handsome, all-powerful, and widely reviled favorite of both James I and Charles I, had been stabbed to death at Portsmouth in 1628. Fate was hardly kinder to Thomas Wentworth, first earl of Strafford, also known as Black Tom Tyrant, nor to Archbishop Laud, through whose combined policy of "Thorough" Charles I held sway during his years of personal rule (1629-40). Both men had been tried in the Long Parliament and then subjected to capital punishment, the one hanged in 1641, the other beheaded in 1645. And, on January 30, 1649, on a platform erected outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall, "the poor king of England . . . at last lost both crown and life by the hand of the public executioner, like a common criminal . . . before all the people."(191)

While living in exile at the Hague, Charles II commissioned the Frenchman Claude de Saumaise, whose Latin pen name was Salamasius, to write a vindication of his father and a condemnation of the regicide Commonwealth government. His Royal Defense on behalf of Charles I (Defensio regia pro Carolo I) of 1649 found its blistering response in Milton's Defence of the People of England (Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio) of 1651, which excited shocked outrage on the Continent. Although impressions of Milton's tract were burned in Paris and Toulouse, one survived in Wren's library.(192) In the most trenchant of many unflattering parallels, Milton, an indefatigable enemy of the Stuart crown, claimed that Charles I had "out-Nero'd Nero."(193) ln 1666 and afterward - "while the ruins were still smoking" (FVMANTIBVS IAM TVM RVINIS), as in the south dado inscription - and during the rebuilding campaigns, it must have been thought politic to avoid historical comparisons that would have likened the son to his late father in Neronian terms and cast a decidedly defamatory light on the institution of the British monarchy, a monarchy that was newly contested and fundamentally weakened.(194) On the west dado, Cibber depicted Charles II as a nonspecific Roman emperor, "crown'd with Bayes." Such symbolic yet vague flattery was a conventional morpheme in the language of the visual arts, not unlike the choice of a fluted Tuscan Doric column for the Monument - without, as in the project for the Monument approved by Charles II [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 15 OMITTED], gilt-bronze tongues of flame on the shaft; nor, as in three other unexecuted projects for the summit, a phoenix, nor a personification of London ("a woman crowned with turrets, holding a sword and cap of maintenance, with other ensigns of the city's grandeur and re-erection"), to say nothing of a statue of the king [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 17 OMITTED].(195)

When it came to writing about London's fire in Latin, the members of the inscription committee scoured the germane literary and epigraphic texts of Roman antiquity, for apposite inspiration. Without a doubt, Tacitus's accounts of Boudicca's sack and burning of London; of the Great Fire of Rome and subsequent plans for improved rebuilding; of the stunning, scandalous opulence of Nero's Domus Aurea, designed by Severus and Celer, two of the few ancient Roman "architects and engineers [magistri et machinatores]" whose names have been preserved; of the persecution of the Christian sect; and of the death of Jesus are no scholar's arcanum, but some of the most important paragraphs in the history of Western civilization.(196) Numerous elements of the north and south dado inscriptions of the Monument prove that the members of the inscription committee, superb humanists all, made verbatim, phrasal, syntactic, and narrative use of Tacitus - just as should be expected, because Tacitus provides the most extensive extant description of a fire that survives in Latin, and because writing correct "classical" Latin was predicated on emulative citation.

In a diary entry dated November 17, 1676, Hooke writes that he and Wren had discussed the inscriptions for the Monument - nearly fourteen months after the City Lands Committee had enjoined "Mr Surveyor generall and Mr Hooke . . . to appoint such persons as they think most Fitting to make An Inscripcon for the said Collume." On October 17, 1677, some twenty-seven months after the original mandate, Hooke was "at [the] Lord Mayor's about the Fleet and Dr. Gale's inscription"; following the orders of the lord mayor, he then met "with Dr. Gale, Sir Chr. Wren and Controuler [Joseph Lane] about [the] inscription"; their colloquy did not finish "till 10 at night." Hooke goes on to state that the committee, on October 18, "Attended all day on that affaire," and for some time in the presence of the Court of Aldermen; on October 20, he "Discoursed with Sir Chr. Wren at Mans about [the] Inscription."(197) Two days later, the Court of Aldermen approved the inscriptions, and two days after that, so did the lord mayor. On June 17, 1678, when he called on Gale, Hooke "saw the Monument inscription finisht"; on November 6, he "Viewd Inscription on the Pillar," and on November 30, he was "At the Piller with Sir Chr. Wren and Dr. Gale."(198)

What took the parties involved so long? In Wren's rejected draft inscription, the Suetonian reference to a prudent change in construction materials in London after the Great Fire would have sprung quickly to the trained eye and ear. In comparison with Wren's draft, the committee's executed inscriptions are much more dependent on Tacitus. Both make obvious use of narrative strategies, but on his own Wren took far fewer direct quotations from his source and model. One wonders whether those (too) numerous borrowed words and phrases - a telling sign, perhaps, that Gale, the erudite philologist, was in charge - were a subject of debate. Apart from the indispensable words, lapidary phrases, and vivid images Tacitus's text provided for the task at hand, one wonders as well whether some of the committee's discussions revolved around the astonishing political inconvenience of that same text, or its potentially unsettling (mis)use by enemies of the crown, for Nero could never be separated from those words and phrases - unless, of course, the context was sufficiently masked to escape immediate recognition.(199) Indeed, a quarter of a century earlier, Milton had apostrophized Salamasius as follows: "But you tell us not where Tacitus has these words - aware, of course, that you had glaringly tricked your readers; which I had an inkling of, although I could not immediately find the place."(200) By using Tacitus's account as a model but not identifying it, the members of the committee, committed royalists all, turned their active, creative use of Latin into a dead letter, such that the king (no skilled philologist, and not particularly well read, quite unlike his paternal grandfather) approved the inscriptions.(201)

One wonders, too, whether the members of the committee felt suddenly imprisoned or stifled by the language, culture, and history that determined their intellectual horizons and the very categories of their thought. Recall that surviving documents indicate that Wren and his colleagues had no mandate from either Parliament, the City, Lands Committee, or the Court of Aldermen to compose in Latin, whereas in 1680, the London Court of Common Council commissioned two new inscriptions for the Monument, one in Latin, the other in English. In so doing, the Court provided an opportunity for nearly all Londoners to read (or hear read) words, make their own connections, and draw their own conclusions. In light of the many apt and troubling comparisons the work of the inscription committee so readily admits, it seems remarkable, even audacious, that Wren, Gale, and Hooke chose to write in Latin at all. But was there a choice? In 1770, an Italian observer took it for granted that "Latin is the language of inscriptions," and even as late as 1910, the Admiralty Arch in London was outfitted with a Latin inscription.(202) Perhaps the members of the committee knew that their mother tongue, alive and ever-changing, aged fast, and that monumental writing in it would come to look dated, crude, and even unlettered before long. Since Latin was a dead language, it could not age and was therefore timeless. They certainly knew that few people could read the inscriptions in the first place, even though the very presence of so much impressive writing would lend an air of mystery, magnificence, and authority. to this most spectacular new landmark.(203) They also must have felt confident that even those capable of reading and understanding the inscribed words would not necessarily connect them to anything else. For a long time, they were right.

In comparing Wren's scientific interests with his architectural experiments, one must bear in mind that in seventeenth-century Europe, there was precious little access to natural philosophy without Latin, the language of scholarship, and the language in which an entire university education was conducted. Cardinal Richelieu's founding of "an University where the Sciences should be read in French, for the ease of his countrymen, wherby they might presently fall to the matter, and not spend time to study words only," or, for that matter, London's Gresham College, where, beginning in 1597, lectures on seven subjects were held in Latin in the morning and in English in the afternoon, were far from the European norm.(204) In Wren's youth, Latin was not, as it is today, one of several subjects studied in grammar school: it was the only subject, and the undisputed foundation, filter, lens, and sine qua non for much subsequent advanced knowledge.(205) To answer a question obliquely posed by a great scholar of English architecture: What did anatomy, astronomy, and architecture have in common for Wren?(206) Latin. It is a mistake for modern scholars to treat that linguistic ability as if it were transparent, or a grace note, or something akin to the reading knowledge of Latin once required of graduate students in the humanities. ln seventeenth-century Europe, knowing and using Latin could be complex, controversial, and even dangerous.

Throughout his long life, Wren remained unshakably committed to a classical education, even though English intellectuals of the late seventeenth century began to question that pedagogical and cultural hegemony.(207) A member of the Commission for Building Fifty New Churches (convened in 1711), he set out ideal design criteria for that project in a letter of about 1714. Writing of the placement of the pulpit, he complained that some English preachers did not lay stress on the last word of a sentence (as Frenchmen admirably did) and considered that something "which School-masters might correct in the young, as a vicious Pronunciation, and not as the Roman Orators spoke: For the principal Verb is in Latin usually the last Word; and if that be lost, what becomes of the Sentence?"(208)

Likewise, whatever suggestive inferences scholars may draw from the presence of architectural treatises in Wren's library, the numerous, extremely expensive volumes of Latin literature once found there must not be overlooked, for they constitute a rich source for the history of architecture. Although recent claims that" [Inigo] Jones was not a Classical scholar" may or may not be true, Wren was.(209) Able to speak, read, and write Latin at the highest imaginable level of competence, Wren composed a Latin inscription for the Monument on his own and then worked in committee to perform the same task, demonstrating his mastery of a vast thesaurus of linguistic, stylistic, literary, historical, and technical information about the ancient world that few artists of his own time (or any other) could ever have hoped to possess. Historians of art must not take that skill or that knowledge for granted.

Willed by an act of Parliament, financed by a tax on coal entering the port of London, and fully overseen by the City fathers, the Monument was not a royal commission. Still, references to Charles II exist in the white Portland stone used to build the structure, in royal coats of arms, in Cibber's bas-relief, in the gilt-bronze escutcheons on the urn at the summit, in the inscriptions as a group (for the king approved them), and in the south dado inscription explicitly, where the ruler's titles are provided and his emotional and practical responses to the fire described. In addition, the fluted Tuscan Doric column explicitly recalls, in terms of form and function, the royal astrological column at Paris. Finally, the gilt-bronze sphere at the summit of the Monument embodies a written description of an adornment added to an obelisk whose transport and erection represented a major engineering feat of late Roman antiquity, sponsored by a monarch who wished to beautify his capital.

In Tacitus's dramatic delineation of the fire of Rome, Wren and his colleagues found the textual model they needed to write about London's fire in Latin, an account that sets out a monarch's relationship and reaction to a natural and national disaster. But they who dared identify the context of that account - they who dared remember it at all - risked committing an act of lese-majeste.(210) For all intents and purposes, a contentious political climate erased an exact historical analogue. In the Agricola, Tacitus observes that "along with speech, we should have lost memory itself, had it been in our power to forget as much as to keep silent."(211) In the case of the Monument, Christopher Wren's memory did not fail him, but he lost his Roman accent. And there the Monument stands today, still 202 feet tall, once a dominant element of the London skyline, now dwarfed by a densely built-up urban context, and tacitly silenced.

Appendix

East dado inscription

INCEPTA RICHARDO FORD EQUITE: PRETORE LOND: A.D. MDCLXXI PERDVCTA ALTIVS GEORGIO WATERMAN EQ: PV ROBERTO HANSON EQ: PV GVLIELMO HOOKER EQ: PV ROBERTO VINER EQ: PV IOSEPHO SHELDON EQ: PV PERFECTA THOMA DAVIES EQ: PRAE: VRB: ANNO [D.sup.NI] MDCLXXVII

South dado inscription

CAROLVS II C. MART. F. MAG. BRIT. FRAN. ET HIB. REX FID. D. PRINCEPS CLEMENTISSIMVS MISERATVS LVCTVOSAM RERVM FACIEM PLVRIMA FVMANTIBVS IAM TVM RVINIS IN SOLATIVM CIVIVM ET VRBIS SVAE ORNAMENTVM PROVIDIT TRIBVTVM REMISIT PRECES ORDINIS ET POPVLI LONDINENSIS RETVLIT AD REGNI SENATVM QVI CONTINVO DECREVIT VTI PVBLICA OPERA PECVNIA PVBLICA EX VECTIGALI CARBONIS FOSSILIS ORIVNDA IN MELIOREM FORMAM RESTITVERENTVR VIIQVE(212) AEDES SACRAE ET D PAVLI TEMPLVM A FVNDAMENTIS OMNI MAGNIFICENTIA EXSTRVERENTVR PONTES PORTAE CARCERES NOVI FIERENT EMVNDARENTVR ALVEI VICI AD REGVLAM RESPONDERENT CLIVI COMPLANARENTVR APERIRENTVR ANGIPORTVS FORA ET MACELLA IN AREAS SEPOSITAS ELIMINARENTVR CENSVIT ETIAM VTI SINGVLAE DOMVS MVRIS INTERGERINIS CONCLVDERENTVR VNIVERSAE lN FRONTEM PARI ALTITVDINE CONSVRGERENT OMNESQVE PARIETES SAXO QVADRATO AVT COCTO LATERE SOLIDARENTVR VTIQVE NEMINI LICERET VLTRA SEPTENNIVM AEDIFICANDO IMMORARI AD HAEC LITES DE TERMINIS ORITVRAS EEGE [sic, LEGE] LATA PRAESCIDIT ADIECIT QVOQVE SVPPLICATIONES ANNVAS ET AD AETERNAM POSTERORVM MEMORIAM H.C.P.C. FESTINATVR VNDIQVE RESVRGIT LONDINVM MAIORI CELERITATE AN SPLENDORE INCERTVM VNVM TRIENNIVM ABSOLVIT QVOD SECVLI OPVS CREDEBATVR

North dado inscription

ANNO CHRISTI [M]DCLXVI DIE IV NONAS SEPTEMBRIS HINC IN ORIENTEM PEDVM CCII INTERVALLO QVAE EST HVIVSCE COLVMNAE ALTITVDO ERVPIT DE MEDIA NOCTE INCENDIVM QVOD VENTO SPIRANTE HAVSIT ETIAM LONGINQVA ET PARTES PER OMNES POPVLABVNDVM FEREBATVR CVM IMPETV ET FRAGORE INCREDIBILI XXCIX TEMPLA PORTAS PRAETORIVM AEDES PVBLICAS PTOCHOTROPHIA SCHOLAS BIBLIOTHECAS INSVLARVM MAGNVM NVMERVM DOMVVM [13,200] VICOS CD ABSVMPSIT DE XXVI REGIONIBVS XV FVNDITVS DELEVIT ALIAS VIII LACERAS ET SEMIVSTAS RELIQVIT VRBIS CADAVER AD CDXXXVI IVGERA HINC AB ARCE PER TAMISIS RIPAM AD TEMPLARIORVM FANVM ILLINC AB EVRO AQVILONALI PORTA SECVNDVM MVROS AD FOSSAE FLETANAE CAPVT PORREXIT ADVERSVS OPES CIVIVM ET FORTVNAS INFESTVM ERGA VITAS INNOCVVM VT PER OMNIA REFERRET SVPREMAM ILLAM MVNDI EXVSTIONEM VELOX CLADES FVIT EXIGVVM TEMPVS EANDEM VIDIT CIVITATEM FLORENTISSIMAM ET NVLLAM TERTIO DIE DVM IAM PLANE EVICERAT HVMANA CONSILIA ET SVBSIDIA OMNIA COELITVS VT PAR EST CREDERE IVSSVS STETIT FATALIS IGNIS ET QVAQVAVERSVM ELANGVIT SED FVROR PAPISTICVS, QVI TAM DIRA PATRAVIT NONDVM RESTINGVITVR(213)

Expunged English and Latin inscriptions, and plaque at 25 Pudding Lane(214)

This day M:r Comptroller of ye Chamber (psuant to an order of this Court of ye Twelfth of Novem. last) did present to this Court an Inscripton in Latin and English by him composed to be affixed on ye Monum.t or pillar on ffishstreet hill. The Latin is in these words (Sed Furor Papisticus qui tam dira patravit nondum Restinguitur) - w.ch he conceived might properly be added to the psent Inscripton on the North side thereof, after these words (Stetit Fatalis Ignis et quaquaversum Elanguit.) And ye English Inscripton follows in these words (viz:t) ([west] This Pillar was sett up in Perpetuall Remembrance of that most Dreadfull Burning of this Protestant [south] City, Begun and Carried on by the Treachery and Malice of the Papists [YE POPISH FACTIO.], in the beginning of September, in the year of [east] our Lord 1666: in order to the carrying on their Horrid Plott; For Extirpating [north] the Protestant Religion, and old English Liberty and Introducing Popery and Slavery.) which said Inscriptons being read This Court doth very well like and approve of them and doth order that ye same shall be forthw.th affixed on ye said Monum.t in y.e most convenient parts thereof att ye directon and appointm.t of ye Right Hono.ble ye Lord Major and Court of Aldren.

And it is likewise ordered That another Inscripton in English now psented by M.r Comptroller and read in this Court and agreed on, shall be likewise forthw.th affixed on ye ffront of ye house where ye said ffire began at ye like appointm.t of ye Lord Major and Court of Aldren w.ch said Inscripton is in these words viz.t (Here by the Permission of Heaven, Hell broke loose upon this Protestant City from the malicious hearts of barbarous Papists, by the hand of their Agent Hubert, who confessed, and on the Ruines of this place declared the fact, for which he was hanged, Vizt, That here began that dreadfull fire w:ch is described and perpetuated on and by the Neighbouring Pillar.)

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Notes

In memory of Sheila Valtz Watson, Smith '62.

Shorter versions of this article were read as papers, in April 1996 at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians and in February 1997 at Smith College. I thank Scott Bradbury, Barbara A. Kellum, Pamela Scott, Barbara Shapiro-Comte, and Nancy Shumate for sharing their expertise and Dana Leibsohn for her careful reading. Smith College provided research support, for which I am grateful. Calendar years altered to conform to new-style dating appear within brackets. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

1. Edmund Bolton [Philanactophil, pseud.], Nero Caesar, or, Monarchie Depraved: An Historical Work, 2d ed. (London, 1627), 181. Bolton describes Stonehenge, which he believed to be the burial site of Queen Boudicca. His theory was already rejected in the 17th century; see John Webb, ed., The Most Notable Antiquity of Great Britain vulgarly called Stone-Heng on Salisbury Plain, Restored by Inigo Jones Esq. (London, 1655), 44-55. For Bolton, see Dictionary of National Biography, (hereafter cited as DNB), s.v.

2. Neo-Latin sentence as in [B. and Y.], The Arraignment of Co-Ordinate-Power; Where In All Arbitrary Proceedings Are laid open to all Honest Abhorrers and Addressers ([London], 1683), title page; the emendation and translation are my own. Variations on the Tacitean model (Annals 4.35) typify how a command of written Latin was imparted to grammar-school students, who were asked to state some moral precept in different ways; see M. L. Clarke, Classical Education in Britain 1500-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 16. That training did not guarantee correct results; the recast sentence makes no sense unless se is removed (it does not appear in Tacitus) or unless extingui is made into a present active infinitive (it is passive in Tacitus). Latin text as in Tacitus, The Annals, trans. John Jackson, vol. 4 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962). I generally follow Jackson's translations throughout this article. On Aug. 27, 1612, the Italian humanist Traiano Boccalini quoted the same sentence in a letter to James I; see Kenneth C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Renaissance Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 147.

3. For the monuments and inscriptions of Sixtus V's pontificate, see Giovanni Francesco Bordini, De rebus praeclare gestis a Sixto V Pon. Max . . . carminum liber primus (Rome, 1588); and Armando Petrucci, Public Lettering: Script, Power; and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. 36-40.

4. For 6 of the 388 lines in his poem entitled "The Dreadful Burning of London" (London, 1667), quoted in Aubin, 31-45, Joseph Guillim invokes "Nero, who sang to his Lyre," but only to contrast him negatively with Charles II ("A shower of tears straight from the Kings eyes fell") and Titus ("So Titus wept, as Salems Temple burn'd / To see its beauty thus to ashes burn'd"). Guillim also makes several footnote references to different passages in Tacitus's account. From an acrostic poem allegedly composed on Sept. 8, 1666, comes the following line: "Nero's may laugh at it, so must not we"; "London's Fatal Fall," in Rome Rhym'd to Death. Being a Collection of Choice Poems (London, 1683), quoted in Aubin, 89-92. In the second chapter of An Historical Narrative of the Great and Terrible Fire of London, Sept. 2nd 1666: With Some parallel Cases, and Occasional Notes (London, 1769), Tacitus's account appears with no mention of its relationship to the inscriptions on the Monument.

5. For religious clairvoyants' predictions, see Ellis, 9; for Alexandria, ibid., 76.

6. "The Latines made use only of seven of their Capital Letters: viz. MDCLXVI . . . and all made use of in the same order, in the fatal year 1666 . . . therefore in memory thereof for the future it might be expedient, especially for the Londoners to count this, X VI. 1672. X VII. 1673, &c. [both Xs encircled in the printed text] "; Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia, or, The Present State of England, 10th ed., pt. 2 (London, 1677). For MDCLXVI as a harbinger of the length of the Roman empire, see [Ezerel Tonge], The Northern Star: The British Monarchy, or, The Northern the Fourth Universal Monarchy. . . . (London, 1680), 4,1-46, 53; for Tonge, see DNB, s.v. Wren's father, Christopher, having written MDCLXVI in that order, predicted a fateful event in 1666 some forty years before the fact; Parentalia, 146. Comparing the two most disastrous fires at Rome - that accompanying the Gallic invasion ("Vae victis!") of 390 B.C.E. and the Great Fire of 64 - Tacitus reports that "others have even gone so far as to reckon an equal number of years, months, and days between both fires"; Annals 15.41.

7. Brooks, "The First Part of the Application," 27; for Brooks, see DNB, s.v.

8. See Bradford; Peter Burke, "A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians, 1456-1700," History and Theory 5 (1966): 132-52; Burke; J.H.M. Salmon, "Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England," in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 169-88; Kevin Sharpe, "The Foundation of the Chairs of History at Oxford and Cambridge: An Episode in Jacobean Politics," in Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England: Essays and Studies (London: Pinter, 1989), 207-30; Smuts; Zwicker and Bywaters.

9. See A Description of the Monument (London, [1834]), 6; and Theatrum illustrata, 126-27. For a clear delineation of this axis in Ogilby and Morgan's map of 1676, see Ralph Hyde, ed., The A to Z of Restoration London (Lympne Castle, Eng.: H. Margary, 1992), 74-75.

10. CSPV, 1666-68 (letter from Paris dated Oct. 5, 1666).

11. AS, MP, 4206 (letter from London dated Oct. 1, 1666).

12. CLRO, RCA, 76, fol. 72v (minutes of Feb. 14, [1671]): "This Court approving the Draught or Modell now presented of the Pillar to bee erected in memory of the late dismall ffire doth recomend it to the Comittee for publiq buildings to promote the building of the said Pillar will all convenient expedicon according to the said Draught."

13. Dates of payment to executing mason Joshua Marshall, with dates of mandate in parentheses, follow: Apr. 8, 1671 (Mar. 20, [1671]); July 7, 1671 ("by Order dated this day"); Aug. 10, 1671 (Aug. 2); Aug. 18, 1671 (Aug. 17); Sept. 28, 1671 (Sept. 26); Oct. 24, 1671 (Oct. 18); GL, 184/4, fol. 41v. An account entitled "The Pillar on New fish Street hill in Memoriall of the fire: Out of the Cole money" may establish a terminus ante quem for the start of construction: "Novem. 11 1671 Paid Nicholas Duncomb by Order dated 3.d Novem. for carrying away rubbish from the ffoundton of the said Pillar [[pounds]] 73 08[s.] 00[d.]"; GL, 184/4, fol. 41 (fills out and emends the incomplete transcription in BH.v, 50). On Nov. 18, payment is recorded for ragstone: "Measured to Mr Marshall for his use at ye great Pillar on Fish Street Hill, a loan of rag stone in St Faith's Church. 60 yds at 5d p yd [[pounds]] 15 0[s.] 0[d.] "; BH.xiii, 60.

14. From Hooke's diary we learn that on June 1, 1674, "the Piller, Fish Street Hill . . . was above ground 210 steps"; on Sept. 21, 1675, Hooke was "At Fish Street Hill on top of the Column"; BH.xviii, 190. The upper third of the 311 steps, then, were built in the fifteen months between June 1674 and Sept. 1675; if one extrapolates at the same rate backward from the former date, the start of construction would fall in Dec. 1671, which corresponds to the completion of foundation work. For Hooke, see DNB, s.v.; and Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714, facsimile ed. (Nendeln, Liech.: Kraus, 1968), s.v. For delays in procuring stone, see Parentalia, 321-22.

15. The verso of "London's Index," printed as a single-sheet folio, bears an inscription in a 17th-century hand: "These Verses were written by a Youth of but thirteen years old a scholar in merchantaylors school in London." For the urn, see n. 176 below.

16. CLRO, JCLC, fol. 50r (minutes of June 7, 1676): "The Inhabitants neer the Cullumne on new fishstreet hill makeing complaint to this Comittee of the danger of the falling of the Scaffolds about the same by the Continuall concourse of people that come to see the same It is Ordered that Mr Daniell Man doe forthwith goe & demand the key and lock up the door thereof and keep the said key and door shut till further order of this Comittee." The City Lands Committee subsequently wished "that Mr Hooke and the s[ai]d Mr Oliver doe take care that so much of the scaffolding about the Cullumne as can be taken down be forthwith taken down"; CLRO, JCLC, fol. 65 (minutes of July 26, 1676). Hooke records that from Oct. 8 to 14, 1676, the "Scaffolds at Fish Street Piller almost all struck"; on Nov. 17, "At Piller the laying it open reported with Sir Chr. Wren"; BH.xviii, 190.

17. CLRO, RCA, 81, fol. 268 (minutes of Aug. 8, 1676): "Whereas the Workmen at the monument on Fishstreet hill do spend great part of their Time in letting up People and Weighting upon them whereby that Work is much Retarded It is Ordered by this Court that Edward Feake do for the present keep the door of the said monument and of the Ground adjoyning and suffer none brit the Workmen to go in untill that Work be wholly finished." On Aug. 6, 1676, one John Oliver was enjoined by the City Lands Committee "to see about 2 good substantiall doors for the said Columne"; BH. v, 49. The doors cost thirty-five pounds; BH.v, 50.

18. CLRO, RCA, 82, fols. 136v-137 (minutes of Mar. 29, [1677]): "This Court now entering into Consideration of raising some yearly revenue to the Chamber towards defraying the necessary and growing Charge of repairing the new Pillar on ffishstreet hill, and also the Payment of an Annual Sume charged on the Chamber for a void peice of ground near the place whereon the said Pillar stands, And Nicholas Olney who was formerly admitted by this Co:rt to the Custody of the said Pillar and now required by this Co:rt to pay an Annual acknowledgment for the same and wholly submitting and referring himselfe therein to the Pleasure and determination of this Co:rt and also waiveing all his claime thereunto by any former Order of this Co:rt It was thereupon now agreed by this Co:rt that the said Nicholas Olney should have the sole charge and custody of the said Pillar for the terme of one and twenty, years commencing from Lady day last if he shall well and duely use and behave himselfe therein Paying therefore into the Chamber of London for the uses and purposes aforesaid fifty pounds p Ann by qterly paiments, the first payment to be made at Midsummer next, And if the s.d Nicholas Olney shall misbehave himselfe therein then this Grant to him to be void; Whereunto the said Nicholas Olney declared his full consent and agreement, and promised due performance thereof accordingly." The Court had several months earlier noticed and debated "some profitts arising by the keeping of the new Pillar on ffishstreet = hill"; CLRO, RCA, 82, fol. 1 (minutes of Nov. 7, 1676).

19. CLRO, RCA, 82, fol. 139 (minutes of Apr. 3, 1677): "It is thought fitte and ordered by this Court That M:r Marshall doe forthwith proceed to the levelling and paveing of the ground before the new Pillar on ffishstreet hill performing the same well and ornamentally and finishing it assoone as may be, according to his Agreement."

20. For St. Margaret's, see Paul Jeffery, The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 22. For quarterly rent payments to the rector of the still-ruined church in the amount of [pounds]5 5s., see CSPD, Nov. 1673-75 (accounts dated Nov. 27, 1673, and Nov. 27, 1674); see also CLRO, JCLC, fol. 50r (minutes of June 7, 1676), and n. 18 above.

21. For the training provided to students at Westminster School under Richard Busby, headmaster from 1638 until 1695, during which period Wren, Gale, Hooke, Dryden, and John Locke were students, see Clarke (as in n. 2), 35-37.

22. See M. S. Briggs, Wren the Incomparable (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), 33-34; and Catherine Whistler, "The Sheldonian Theatre," Apollo 145 (May 1997): 21.

23. The reference to Ausonius is particularly apt, since he was a native of Gaul and resided there most of his life; he thus stood as an emblem of the presence of a cultivated, literate Latin culture north of the Alps. His Parentalia is a series of poems dedicated to deceased relatives. For Ausonius, see Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), s.v. For the octavo "Ausonii Opera," see Watkin, 31. The literary connection is not mentioned in J. A. Bennett, "A Study of Parentalia, with Two Unpublished Letters of Sir Christopher Wren," Annals of Science 30 (1973): 129-47.

24. BH.xviii, 190.

25. For English translations of the Monument's inscriptions, 1 generally follow Welch, 29-33.

26. "SPQR . . . AD DECLARANDVM QVANTAE ALTITVDINIS MONS ET LOCVS TANT[IS OPER] IBVS SIT EGESTVS"; Latin text and English translation in Donald R. Dudley, Urbs Roma: A Source Book of Classical Texts on the City and Its Monuments (London: Phaidon, 1967), 134.

27. Boissard, pt. 6, pl. 118, text reproduced tinder the title "In basi Columnae Traiani." For the folios "Boissardi Antiquitat. Roman. 8 Part. 2 vol., Franc. 1627" and "[Columna] Trajana, per P. Bellori ib. [Rome]," see Watkin, 36. John Evelyn copied the inscription in his diary; Evelyn, vol. 2, 379.

28. A royal decree, "Given at our court, at Whitehall, the 4th day of May, in the 21st year of our reigne, 1669," required Wren's "leave and warrant" be obtained for all stone quarried on Portland; BH.xviii, 13.

29. Edward Pierce Jr. carved the coats of arms and the four dragons; BH.v, 50.

30. See Mark K. Deming, La Halle au Ble de Paris 1762-1813: "Cheval de Troie" de l'abondance dans la capitale des Lumieres (Brussels: Archives d'Architecture Moderne, 1984), 101-7; Louis Hautecoeur, Histoire de l'architecture classique en France, vol. 1, pt. 1 (Paris: Picard, 1943), 234, 324, 343; Anatole de Barthelemy, "La colonne de Catherine de Medicis a la Halle au Ble," Memoires de la Societe de l'Histoire de Paris et de l'Ile-de-France 6 (1879): 180-99; and Henri Sauval, Histoire et recherches des antiquites de la ville de Paris, vol. 2 (Paris, 1733), 21 3-14, 217-20. Sauval, 220, discusses the proportions and decoration of the colonne astrologique, compares it with the three triumphal columns cited in Parentalia, and writes of the "iron sphere" at the summit, which is there "in place of the statue of the queen."

31. BH.v, 45: "columnae colossae speculatoriae." In his rejected draft inscription for the Monument, lexicographer Adam Littleton wrote "Obeliscum hunc, sire Turrim Speculatoriam"; transcription in Elmes, 295. For Wren's Parisian contacts, see Bennett, 90-91; for Auzout, see Dictionnaire de biographie francaise, s.v. While in Paris, Wren examined a device for making "all kinds of arithmetical rules"; see a letter from London of Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, dated Aug. 24, 1675, transcribed in Margaret Whinney, "Sir Christopher Wren's Visit to Paris," Gazette des Beaux-Arts 51 (1958): 232. The exiled Charles li and his mathematics tutor, Thomas Hobbes, probably knew the Paris column, too. In his bell tower for the church of S. Lorenzo in Turin (begun 1668), the mathematician, astronomer, and architect Guarino Guarini (in Paris from 1662 to 1666) also drew formal inspiration from the Paris column; see Augusta Lange, "Disegni et documenti di Guarino Guarini," in Guarino Guarini e l'internazionalita del Barocco, ed. Vittorio Viale, vol. 1 (Turin: Accademia delle Scienze, 1970), 115-20.

32. For the invitation of Perrault, see Elmes, xxix.

33. "In this bright Star Astrologers may find, / Being at the top, / Without a Telescope, / How all the City is inclin'd"; "London's Index." For the air pump, see n. 180 below. For experiments, see Welch, 13, 44; Theatrum illustrata, 121, 124; and Bennett, 42.

34. Brit. Lib. ms Sloane 5238, fol. 75, is a precise tracing of another plate representing the "interior and exterior plan of the pedestal" and the "plan of the entrance with the spiral staircase of the column." Not transcribed are measurements and Italian words and phrases of the etched original, among which is the "spindle of the spiral staircase, three feet in diameter." The drawings of the entire volume have been attributed without evidence to Hooke; Jeffery (as in n. 20), 35.

35. For the folios "Il [sic] Quattro Libri dell'Architettura di Andrea Palladio Ven. 1601," and "Architettura di S. Serlio Ven. 1663," see Watkin, 36. The relevant section of Palladio (1st ed., Venice, 1570) is found in bk. 1, 60-65; of Serlio (London, 1611), in bk. 3, ch. 4, 26, 69.

36. "This column is certainly very graceful and seems not so thick as it is because of its height. The staircase is not very wide, but pretty as a snail floating free from a tree"; Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach, Herrn Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach Merkwurdige Reisen durch Niedersachsen Holland und Engelland, vol. 2 (Ulm, 1753), 530.

37. In Inigo Jones's St. Paul Covent Garden (1631-33), there existed "a communion table set on a black and white marble pavement against the east wall"; John Newman, "Laudian Literature and the Interpretation of Caroline Churches in London," in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed. David Howarth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 183. Likewise, there was a contrast of black and white stone in Jones's west facade at Old St. Paul's; see Jane Lang, Rebuilding St. Paul's after the Great Fire of London (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 3. A roundel - or, better, an imago clipeata - depicting the Head of Christ commissioned to Pietro Torrigiani by Abbot Islip for the Jesus Chapel, Westminster Abbey (now London, Wallace Collection) dates from 1516 or earlier; the white stone head emerges in full relief from a flat plane of polished black stone. In the 17th century, one can point to the Monument to the Duke of Buckingham in Portsmouth Cathedral and the tomb of the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham in the Henry VII Chapel at Westminster Abbey, both by Hubert Le Sueur; see David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485-1649 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 177-83. Cf. also the beginning of Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst" (1616): "Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show, / Of touch or marble"; in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, rev. ed., ed. M. H. Abrams (New York: Norton, 1968), 921.

38. Alonso Chacon, Historia vtrivsqve belli dacici, reprinted in Bartoli, sec. 12: "Traiani Augusti forum, in cuius medio haec Hetrusco opere columna eminebat."

39. CSPD, Jan.-Dec. 1678 (undated [July?] letter of Samuel Packer, clerk of the Poultry Compter, to his wife, Anne): "let him [Edmund] meet me at 7 this evening at the Monument, a new tavern over against the Monument on Fish Street Hill."

40. The Column, Called the Monument, Described (London, 1805), 6: "BY ORDER OF THE COURT OF COMMON COUNCIL. The Hours of Admission are from Nine o'clock in the Morning 'till Three o'clock in the AFternoon from Michaelmas Day to Lady Day, and the remainder of the year from Eight o'clock in the Morning 'till Six o'clock in the Evening. Admission Sixpence each Person." In 1726, the cost for admission was two pence; Kuchelbeckern, 64.

41. [Francois Lacombe], Observations sur Londres et ses environs (London, 1777), 98. "Now Gentlemen, before we represent to you the estate of our misery, and ground of our jealousies and fears, 'tis our humble request, that those who have most Power amongst you, would so far trouble themselves, as to go to the top of your new rais'd Pyramid, and from thence take a Survey of that magnificent Pile of building, whereof you are yet Masters: In which posture, to animate you with true English spirits, be pleas'd to fancy to your selves the following objects, which you will infallibly see come to pass, when ever Popery prevails. First, Imagine you see the whole Town in a flame, occasioned this second time, by the same Popish malice which set it on fire before"; Junius Brutus [Charles Blount], An Appeal from the Country to the City, for the Preservation of His Majesties Person, Liberty, Property, and the Protestant Religion ([London], 1679), 1; attributed authorship in DNB, s.v. "Blount, Charles (1654-1693)." This passage found a response: "In the next clause, the Scribler gives to understand that he has read Hodge upon the Monument; and writing after that Copy, he follows the phansie of the Citizens looking about them from the top of the Pyramid"; R. L'Estrange, An Answer to the Appeal from the Country' to the City (London, 1681), 3.

42. For uses of the Monument, see Welch, 44-54.

43. Payments to Cibber "for carving the Hieroglifick figures" began on June 28, 1673, and ended on Sept. 9, 1675; BH.v, 50. On June 14, 1676, Wren "desired with the Surveyors of new buildings to view the worke done by Mr Gabriell Cibber at and about the Cullume and certifye their opinions concerning the value thereof"'; BH.v, 48.

44. For the "emblematical" nature of the relief, see English Architecture, or, The Publick Buildings of London and Westminster (London, 1756), 27, where "Imagination" is identified as "Genius" and "Architecture" as "Science." In another guidebook, "Imagination" becomes "Science," whereas "Architecture" is understood as the figure holding a square and compasses; An historical description of St. Paul's Cathedral, to which are added, a Description of the Monument, with an explanation of its sculpture, and a Translation of the Latin inscription round it (London, 1784), 44. Some twenty years later, "Imagination" is identified as such, "Architecture" as "Ichnografia"; The Column, called the Monument, Described (as in n. 40). 16. This latter source links the figure of Liberty, to the freedom accorded workmen from outside London who helped rebuild the city, for the space of three years. Indeed, for the space of seven years they could ply their trades as London freemen did, which would otherwise have been impossible in that closed-shop town. If they worked there a full seven years, they could enjoy that privilege for life; Reddaway, 115-21.

45. Industry takes on the third of four guises provided in Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 3d ed. (Rome, 1603), 227. Bees also figured in a triumphal arch raised for Charles II's passage through London. Above a sculpture of Neptune was a depiction of the Royal Exchange, outfitted with a citation from Virgil's Georgics 4.248-49, whose grammatical subject is bees - "How much by Fortune they exhausted are / So much they strive the Ruins to repair / Of their fal'n Nation"; trans. in John Ogilby, The Relation of His Majesties Entertainment Passing through the City of London to His Coronation (London, 1661), 12.

46. "The Market of Honey-Lane, or Milk-Street" was one and the same, and those locales are contiguous; An Act for the Settlement and well Ordering of several Publick Markets within the City of London (London, 1672). The figure of Artemis would have recalled Acrs 19:23-41 to at least one contemporary: Charles Blount, in Great is the Diana of the Ephesians, or, The Original of Idolatry (Cosmopoli [London, n.d.]), attributed authorship in DNB, s.v. Biblical citations from King James version (New York: New American Library), 1974.

47. A similar sentiment can be discerned in John Dryden: "Already labouring with a mighty fate, / She shakes the Rubbish from her mourning Brow, / And seems to have renew'd her Charters date, / Which Heav'n will to the death of time allow"; Dryden, Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, M.DC.LXVI. An Historical Poem, in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. John Sargeaunt (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 45.

48. For quoted words relating to Justice and Fortitude, see CL. 46, [fol. 5v]; for Envy, see LED, vol. 5, 7.

49. For example, Elmes, 289; and Welch, 26.

50. AS, MP, 4211 (newsletter from London dated June 26, 1676). The injunction is also obliquely mentioned in Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-Society of London for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667), 78. Some eleven years earlier, Charles II had written to his sister "about the delayed arrival of fashionable silk waistcoats from France"; Christopher Falkus, The Life and Times of Charles II (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), 101. After the Great Fire, it was his desire that "this Court and the nobles not imitate (as they were accustomed to do) French fashions; His Majesty has taken to dressing in a mixture of the Spanish and Polish styles"; AS, MP, 4206 (newsletter from London dated Oct. 22, 1666). Provisions against the importation and adoption of French products were promulgated in May 1673; see AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated May 26, 1673). For the burning of 150 pairs of gloves at Woolchurch, see AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated Mar. 23, [1674]). In 1675, the king revoked the privilege of his mistress, Louise de Keroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, to wear French lace that she had recently procured "at the cost of 28,000 scudi"; AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated Aug. 9, 1675).

51. See Maurice Ashley, England in the Seventeenth Century, 3d ed., rev. (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1975), esp. 130-40.

52. Cuffe's words are quoted in Clarke (as in n. 2), 30; see also Salmon (as in n. 8), 172-75. For Essex's words, see Bradford, 129.

53. Parliament, 19 Charles II, cap. iii, sec. 29, from BH.v, 45.

54. CLRO, JCLC, fol. 19r (minutes of July 28, 1675); transcription from a related archival source in BH.v, 47.

55. BH.xviii, 190.

56. Brit. Lib. ms Sloane 5238, fol. 72.

57. For Cibber's relief, see n. 43 above. The drawing and the draft inscription likely date to some point after July 28, 1675 (see n. 54 above); neither, however, should be dated after Oct. 4, 1677 (see n. 59 below).

58. Wren writes, "Carolus secundus, Dei gratia, rex Magnae Britanniae, Franciae et Hiberniae, anno regni XVIII et plerique Angliae proceres . . . Monumentum posuere" (Charles II, by God's grace king of England, France, and Scotland, in the 18th year of his reign, and the greater part of England's nobles . . . set up this monument). For the Latin text of the draft, see Welch, 34-36; Parentalia, 323-24; and BH.v, 51; the translation is my own. Adam Littleton goes boldly further, writing, "Anno Salutis Humanae MDCLXVI., Reditus CAROLINI VI., Regni autem XVIII" (in the year of human salvation, 1666, the 6th of the Caroline restoration, the 18th, however, of his reign); transcription in Elmes, 295; the translation is my own. Parliament records its deliberations with reference to the regnal year: "Die Jovis. 31o Jan. 19o Car. IIdi [On Thursday, the 31st of Jan., in the 19th (year) of Charles II]. The House resumed the Debate upon the Bill for Rebuilding of the City of London. A Proviso for excepting the Churches of Saint Paul's, Saint Faith's and Saint Gregory's, from being vested in the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Commons, of the said City, was twice read; and, upon the Question, agreed to"; Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 8 (London, 1803), 687; see also n. 28 above.

59. CLRO, RCA, 82, fol. 268v (minutes of Oct. 4, 1677): "This Court doth desire D:r Gale Master of the Schoole of S:t Paul to consider of and devise a fitting inscription to be set on the new Pillar at ffishstreet Hill, and to consult therein with S:r Christopher Wren Kn:t his Ma:tie's Surveyor Generall and M:r Hooke And then to present the same unto this court." On Oct. 5, 1677, Hooke writes, "then Sir Chr. Wren, Dr. Gale, and Mr. Lane about Monument inscription"; The Diary of Robert Hooke, ed. Henry W. Robinson and Walter Adams (London: Taylor and Francis, 1935), 318. For additional meetings of the committee, see n. 198 below.

60. CLRO, RCA, 82, fol. 283v (minutes of Oct. 22, 1677): "Upon intimation now given by the right Hono:ble the Lord Major That the Inscriptions for the New Pillar on ffishstreet Hill prepared and lately presented to this Court by D:r Gale had been tendered to and very well approved off by his Ma:tie, This Court doth Order that the said Inscriptions be forthwith made upon the said Pillar accordingly."

61. CLRO, RCA, 82, fol. 291 (minutes of Oct. 25, 1677): "This Court now taking into their consideration the ingenious inscriptions prepared and presented unto this Court by D:r Gale for the new Pillar on ffishstreet hill, doth order that M:r Chamberlain doe deliver unto Mr Lane Comptroller of the Chamber ten Guineys (to be placed on Accompt of the Cole Duty.). And hee to lay out the same in a handsome peice of plate to be presented to the said D:r Gale as a loveing remembrance from this Court."

62. For Pierre-Daniel Huet's characterization of Gale, see DNB, s.v., where it is erroneously stated, with regard to the inscriptions added in 1681, that Gale, "by the king's command, composed the obnoxious inscription for the monument of London."

63. For the Royal Society, see W.P.D. Wightman, Science in a Renaissance Society (London: Hutchison, 1972), 161-52. For Wren's scientific collaborations, see Bennett, esp. 22-24, 28-29.

64. The sentence of the east inscription is in the perfect passive indicative, with the copula "was [est]" suppressed. That is one pattern that Wren and his colleagues followed; the other occurs in the use of the ablative absolute, which provides circumstantial information related to the main sentence. Characteristic of the Latin language, the ablative absolute allows for great economy of expression. For an exactly analogous use of this form in inscriptions from the papacy of Sixtus IV, see Francesca Niutta, "Temi e personaggi nell'epigrafia sistina," in Un pontificato ed una citta: Sisto IV (1471-1484), ed. Massimo Miglio et al. (Vatican City: Scuola Vaticana di Paleografia, Diplomatica, e Archivistica, 1986), 383. A reproduction of a lengthy inscription naming Lucius Aurelius Avianus Symmachus as praefecto urbi is in Boissard, pt. 5, pl. 53. The inscription is now in the Vatican Museums.

65. The Arundel collection, famous throughout learned Europe for its collection of Greek inscriptions from Asia Minor, also included Latin epigraphy; John Selden, Marmora Arvndelliana (London, 1628).

66. AS, MP, 4206 (newsletter from London dated Oct. 22, 1666). The practice continued in later years; see Kuchelbeckern, 148. After the fire of Rome in 64, "public prayers were offered to Vulcan, Ceres, and Proserpine, while Juno was propitiated by the matrons"; Tacitus, Annals 15.44.

67. For example, in All Hallows London Wall: "Item Memoriae Nobilis Matronae Gulielmae van Heila . . . Petrus ab Heila . . . H.M. Maest. P." (Likewise to the memory of the noble matron Wilhelmina, Petrus van Heila full of sadness placed this monument); Seymour, 372. My translation of the abbreviation differs from that in Welch, 32. He takes the final c as curavit (" [Parliament] caused this column to be erected"), and curare with the gerundive is common in Roman inscriptions. Yet censere can also appear with the gerundive, which would yield censuit, or "[Parliament] decreed," which more precisely corresponds to the other activities described in the south dado inscription as resulting from acts of Parliament.

68. In the translation of the south inscription provided in Welch, 31, Charles II is brought back as the grammatical subject of lines 20-21, but this is incorrect, especially since the inscription goes on to mention the erection of the Monument, which resulted from an act of Parliament. Three 18th-century sources properly maintain "Parliament" as the implied agent of all purpose clauses dependent on VTI; see GL, 46, [fol. 5], LED, vol. 5, 57, and Seymour, 451.

69. Quotations from Fumifugium are from John Evelyn, London Revived: Consideration for Its Rebuilding in 1666, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 8; see also Mark Jenner, "The Politics of London Air: John Evelyn's Fumifugium and the Restoration," Historical Journal 38 (1995): 535-51. The ancient source is Suetonius, Augustus 28; Latin text in Suetonius, trans, and ed. J. C. Rolfe, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960). In a proclamation, James I cited the same passage; see J. Newman, "Inigo Jones and the Politics of Architecture," in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (London: Macmillan, 1994), 243. The legend on the obverse of a Parisian commemorative medal of 1606 has MARMOREAM RELINQVET ("[Henry IV] shall leave [Paris a city] of marble"); see Hilary Ballon, The Paris of Henri IV: Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Architectural History Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 232, fig. 160; the translation is my own.

70. ". . . ut e suis ruinis pulcrior [sic] multo prodiisse videatur"; Latin text and English translation from Welch, 34-35. For the folios Caii Suetonii Tranquilli duodecim Caesares, cum Philippi Beroaldi Bononiensis, Marcique item Antonii Sabellici commentariis, & Bapt. Aegnatti, aliorumque doctorum vivorum annotationibus (Lyons, 1548) and Caii Suetonii Tranquilli opera quae extant. Carolus Patinus Doctor Medicus Parisiensis, Notis & Numismatibus illustravit (Basel, 1675), see Watkin, 15, 19.

71. Quoted translation in GL, 46, [fol. 5]. In his rejected draft inscription, Wren also cited a "triennio spatio"; Latin text from Welch, 34.

72. Lorenzo Magalotti, Relazione d'Inghilterra nell'anno 1668, ed. Walter Moretti (Bari: Laterza, 1968), 105.

73. AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated July 18, 1670); ibid. (newsletter from London dated Sept. 12, 1670).

74. CSPV, 1669-70 (letter from London dated Dec. 5, 1670).

75. CSPV, 1671-72. Another writer implies that by the end of William Turner's lord mayorship in Oct. 1670, the City had been considerably rebuilt: "Though the Assyrians have laid our Jerusalem waste, yet even to a wonder, how have the Buildings been carried on this last year"; Brooks, "The Epistle Dedicatory," n.p.

76. CSPV, 1671-72 (letter from London dated Nov. 13, 1671).

77. AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated Nov. 13, 1671).

78. For Evelyn's comments about the Monument, see Parentalia, 322; see also a broadside poem dedicated to Lord Mayor Turner, "Litterae Consolatoriae; From the Author to the dejected place of his Nativity, the Honourable City of London" (London, 1669).

79. "First God sends his Red Horse amongst us, viz. a cruel bloody War; and then he sends his Pale Horse amongst us, viz. a noisome sweeping Pestilence"; Brooks, "The First Part of the Application," 40. In that same year, Brooks preached a commemorative sermon on the Great Fire based on Isaiah 42:24-25; Welch, 109.

80. William Penn was ejected in the same year from Christ Church, Oxford. For the effects of the act, see Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658-1667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 176-77.

81. Brooks, "The First Part of the Application," 182-84.

82. Latin text in Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, ed. Richard M. Gummere, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962); the translations are my own.

83. Parentalia, 324. The sentence concerns a certain Timagenes, whose only regret with regard to fires at Rome was that the rebuilt structures would surpass the ones destroyed.

84. In his rejected draft inscription, Wren uses the same verb for "survived" as Tacitus, the former writing superesset (Welch, 34), the latter supererant (Annals 15.39, 42).

85. Annals 14.29: "gravis clades in Britannia accepta." In his rejected draft inscription, Wren uses clades twice; Welch, 34. In the first instance the architect, recasting the phrase "of such [a] . . .," recalls a famous line from Aeneid 1.33, so that the Virgilian "tantae molis erat romanam condere gentem imperiumque" (of such effort it was to found the Roman people and empire), becomes "hic ubi tantae Cladis prima emicuit Flamma" (here where the first flame of such a disaster flashed forth); the translations are my own. Wren used this motif even earlier, in a letter of ca. 1651-54 in which he describes a double-writing machine: ". . . for to produce this slender thing, Tantae Molis erat"; Bennett (as in n. 23): 144. In Annals 15.39, moreover, "[Nero] compar[ed] present ills to past disasters [cladibus]."

86. The word for "fury" (impetu) is also borrowed from Annals 15.38, where Tacitus writes, "the fire, having spread all over with fury [impetu pervagatum incendium]." I have translated CVM IMPETV ET FRAGORE INCREDIBILI differently from Welch, 30. From the same paragraph in Tacitus comes the phrase ETIAM LONGINQVA, also found on the Monument, which Welch translates as "even distant buildings," but which in Tacitus refers implicitly to "distant [districts]," and can be so construed on the Monument. In additon, the word for "devoured" (hausit) recasts the haurirentur of Annals 15.39.

87. Reddaway, 35.

88. "Upon the desires of the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen, He [Charles II] is pleased to prohibit the hasty building of any Edifice, till such speedy care be taken for the Re-edification of the City, as may best secure it from like Accidents, and raise it to a greater beauty and comeliness than formerly it had"; London Gazette (hereafter referred to as LG), no. 87 (Sept. 13-17, 1666).

89. A similar pattern obtains with the words "hasten" and "delay." Of those fleeing the flames, Tacitus writes, "one group delaying, another hastening about, impeded everything [pars mora, pars festinans, cuncta impediebant]." In the south dado inscription, in the positive context of the rebuilding of London, it is written that "no one was allowed to delay rebuilding beyond a period of seven years" (NEMINI LICERET VLTRA SEPTENNIVM AEDIFICANDO IMMORARI); further along, one reads that "haste is made everywhere" (FESTINATVR VNDIQVE). The translations are my own.

90. Henry Savile, Elizabeth I's Greek tutor and founder of the Oxford professorship in astronomy held by Wren, was the first to translate Tacitus's Histories and Agricola into English, to which he added a short work of his own; see Foster (as in n. 14), s.v. Savile, and Smuts, 25. Richard Greneway's translations of the Annals and the Germania appeared in 1598; see Smuts, 30, and Bradford, 133. Complete editions of Tacitus date from 1604, 1612, 1622, and 1640; see Smuts, 34.

91. See Kevin Sharpe, Sir Robert Cotton, 1586-1631: History and Politics in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

92. For the publishing history, see Burke (as in n. 8), 137; for Tacitus's status, see Burke, 164. For the octavo C. Cornelius Tacitus ex I. Lipsii accuratissima editione (Leiden, 1634) and the folio Opera quae exstant, a Justo Lipsio postremum recensita; item C. Velleius Paterculus cure ejusdem Justi Lipsii auctioribus notis (Antwerp, 1648), see Watkin, 16, 28.

93. Maiolino Bisaccioni, "Della historia della guerra ciuile d'Inghilterra de'nostri tempi," in Historia delle gverre civili di qvesti vltimi tempi, 2d ed. (Bologna, 1653), bk. 1, 1, trans, in Burke (as in n. 8), 151.

94. Dryden, quoted in Zwicker and Bywaters, 332.

95. See Bradford, 134; for Tacitean themes in Jonson, Racine, Corneille, and Monteverdi and the European interest in Tacitus, see Burke, 158-60.

96. See Schellhase (as in n. 2), 163-64; Bradford, 148; and Burke, 161-62. For Villiers, see DNB, s.v.

97. London, Public Record Office, SP 16/86 (letter of Wren to Laud from Peterhouse dated Dec. 16, 1627). For Dorislaus, see Bradford, 148-51; Burke (as in n. 8), 150; and Sharpe (as in n. 8), 220-23.

98. Jonson, quoted in Bradford, 137; Milton, quoted in Burke, 162. In Francis Delaram's 1626 etched frontispiece to Henry Peacham's The Compleat Gentleman, attributes of scientia include a volume inscribed TACIT, which accompanies Thucydides and Plutarch; illus, in John Morrill, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Tudor and Stuart Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 242. Magalotti, in his Relazione del regno di Svezia dell'anno 1674, writes of Senator Andrea Lilliuche, "a great orator, he is considered a learned man and always has maxims from Tacitus and Seneca in his mouth"; Magalotti (as in n. 72), 325.

99. Tacitus, Agricola 21; Latin text in P Cornelii Taciti libri qvi svpersvnt, ed. Erich Kosterman, vol. 2, fasc. 2 (Lepizig: Teubner, 1962); the translation is my own.

100. Tacitus, Agricola 29.4, 30.4.

101. Tacitus, Agricola 16.1. In Annals 12.37, Tacitus explains how odd it was that Agrippina received homage from Caratacus, the Celtic royal prisoner who had fought twice and unsuccessfully against the Romans.

102. Annals 14.31, 33, 35, 37.

103. Annals 15.37. The sexual behavior of Charles II became a subject of opprobrious commentary in literary works of the mid-1660s; see Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 105, 119.

104. "And we cannot but observe to the confutation of all his Majesties enemies, who endeavour to perswade the world abroad of great parties and disaffection . . . in all this time it hath been so far from any appearance of designs or attempts against his Majesties Government, that his Majesty and Royal Brother, out of their care to stop and prevent the fire, frequently exposing their persons with very small attendants in all parts of the Town, sometimes even to be intermixed with those who labored in the business. Yet nevertheless there hath not been observed so much as a murmuring word to fall from any"; LG, no. 85 (Sept. 3-10, 1666). John Rushworth, an eyewitness, wrote in a letter that the duke "hand[ed] Bucketts of water with as much diligence as the poorest man that did assist, if the Lord Major had done as much, his Example might have gone Far towards saveing the Citty"; Welch, 67. For suspicions, however, that the duke had had the fire set, and that he was "a little too gay and negligent for such an occasion," see An Historical Narrative (as in n. 4), 53-54.

105. Under the personal supervision of Charles II and the duke of York, gunpowder was used to help extinguish fires at Whitehall on Nov. 19, 1666, in the Strand on June 19, 1670, and at the Theater Royal, along with forty houses in the same square, on Feb. 4, 1672; see, respectively, AS, MP, 4206 (newsletter from London dated Nov. 26, 1666), and AS, MP, 4210 (newsletters from London dated June 20, 1670, and Feb. 5, [1672]). In 1673, "the lower House read . . . a bill to sanction the razing of houses and buildings to prevent the spread of fires in this City"; AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated Mar. 17, [1673]).

106. Suetonius, Nero 16.

107. ". . . that when his Majesty, fearing lest other Orders might not yet have been sufficient, had commanded the Victualler of his Navy to send bread into Moore-fields for the relief of the poor, which for the more speedy supply he sent in Bisket out of the Sea Stores; it was found that the Markets had been already so well supplied, that the people, being unaccustomed to that kind of Bread, declined it, and so it was returned in great part to his Majesties Stores again without any use made of it"; LG, no. 85 (Sept. 3-10, 1666). For the provisioning of food and canvas, see CSPV, 1666-68 (letter from Paris dated Oct. 5, 1666).

108. AS, MP, 4206 (newsletter from London dated Oct. 1, 1666).

109. In this regard, rebuilding practice in London differed from that in ancient Rome, where "there were to be no joint partitions between buildings, but each was to be surrounded by its own walls"; Annals 15.43.

110. For the burning of a newly built sugar factory, see AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated Sept. 25, 1671). Some wooden structures survived the Great Fire, only to burn later; see AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated Feb. 10, [1673]).

111. "Go view each street, and stand amaz'd to see, / With what fair Fabricks they adorned bee; / Each House a Palace, and may entertain / A KING in State, with all his Noble Train"; George Eliott, "Great Brittans Beauty, or, Londons Delight. Being a Poem, in the Commendation of the Famous Incomparable City of London, and the Royal Exchange, as they now stand Rebuilt" (London, 1671), quoted in Aubin, 186.

112. A Frenchman wrote to Athanasius Kircher in 1676 to ask whether "a column of blue porphyry . . . should . . . be described as a pyramid or an obelisk"; John Fletcher, "Athanasius Kircher and His Correspondence," in Athanasius Kircher und seine Beziehungen zum gelehrten Europa seiner Zeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), 140, 148, nos. 17, 18; see also the first folio of Claude Perrault's "Dessein d'un obelisque," reproduced in Michael Petzet, "Der Obelisk des Sonnenkonigs: Ein Projekt Claude Perraults von 1666," Zeitschrift fur Kunstgeschichte 47 (1984): 440, fig. 1. Elizabeth I disapproved of a City proposal to replace the dilapidated cross at Cheapside with an obelisk, or "a piramis"; John Stow, The Survey of London, ed. H. B. Wheatley (1956; London: Dent, 1987), 239; and Martin Holmes, Elizabethan London (London: Cassell, 1969), 33. On July 14, 1675, the City Lands Committee spoke of "the new erected Obelisq in Memoriall of the Fire," on July 28, of "the new Cullumne," on Nov. 10, of "the piramides"; BH.v, 46, 48; see also nn. 31 and 41 above and n. 115 below.

113. Ripa (as in n. 45), [189]. For the obelisk as symbolic of "eternal fame," see Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 153. For the motif of an obelisk intersected by rays emanating from "the mind's eye [Oculus Imaginationis]" with numerous figural reliefs on its sloping surface, see the illustration of "the art of memory" in Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi . . . Metaphysica, Physica atque Technica Historia, vol. 2 (Oppenheim, 1619), reproduced in Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pl. 15.

114. Evelyn, vol. 2, 362.

115. The dedication dates to Jan. 30, 1606; see Christy Anderson, "Learning to Read Architecture in the English Renaissance," in Albion's Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550-1660, ed. Lucy Gent (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 273, and 285 n. 93 for the Latin original, on which I base the bracketed emendations above. For the problem of separating ancient from papal Rome, see Nigel Llewellyn, "'Plinie is a weyghtye witnesse': The Classical Reference in Post-Reformation Funeral Monuments," in Gent, 158-59; and John Peacock, "Inigo Jones's Catafalque for James I," Architectural History 25 (1982): 1-5. For the "Obelisk, or Aguglia" in Cheapside (apparently under construction in 1728, but abandoned by 1735), meant to stand 160 feet in height, "and made in imitation of those ancient ones which formerly adorned Old Rome; and in this, and the last, century, have been taken out of the old ruins, and again erected for the beautifying of New Rome," see Theatrum illustrata, 120 n.*.

116. For details of this project, see the entry on Bolton in DNB.

117. Brit. Lib. ms Sloane 5238, fol. 69, shows an elevation of an obelisk surmounted by a phoenix perched atop a capital (illus. in BH.v, pl. xxxiv, left); fol. 74, another obelisk project in elevation, with an abacus supported by four volutes and, above, a phoenix consumed in its own flames; fol. 73, an elevation of a still different pedestal and shaft design for an obelisk, with no summit represented (illus. in BH.v, pl. xxxiv, right).

118. Fontana, quoted in Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 498. Evelyn, vol. 2, 241, wrote enthusiastically about the view along the Via Pia, as did an 18th-century writer, Edward Wright: "[F] or, certainly, the Glories of his Reign will never pass away, or be forgot, as long as History continues. . . . The streets of Rome are many of them exactly strait, especially those which were regulated by Sixtus V"; Wright, Some Observations Made in Travelling through France, Italy, &c. In the Years 1720, 1721, and 1722 (London, 1730), 191, 196.

119. See Reddaway, 291.

120. Evelyn, vol. 2, 150-51. For Richelieu, see Hanno-Walter Kruft, Stadte in Utopia: Die Idealstadt vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert zwischen Staatsutopie und Wirklichkeit (Munich: Beck, 1989), 82-98.

121. BH.xviii, 180 (letter of Edward Browne from Paris dated Sept. 30, 1665); also in Whinney (as in n. 31), 232.

122. "No houses are to be erected within some feet of the river, and those built are to be fair structures for ornament"; CSPD, 1666-67 (draft of "His majesties declaration to his city of London upon occasion of the late calamity by the lamentable fire" dated Sept. 13, 1666); "That a fair Key and Wharfe be left on all the River side, no House to be erected, but at a distance declared by the Rules"; LG, no. 87 (Sept. 13-17, 1666).

123. See Journals of the House of Commons (as in n. 58), 687. A "new key" stretching westward from London Bridge to All Hallows Lane is twice indicated on Ogilby and Morgan's map; Hyde (as in n. 9), 72-75.

124. "Let them not boast their Charls la Grand, la Boon, / Great Brittain can outshine them both in One, / A Prince of far more gracious intents / Than all thy Urbans, Clements, Innocents, / Upon whose head shall stand a Tripple Crown, / When thy grand Tyrants shall be tumbled down / Still on our Thames shall noble barges ride, / When Tyber to a Ditch shall shrink her p[ri]d[e]"; "Upon the Rebuilding the City The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor, and the Noble Company of Batchelors Dining with Him, May 5th. 1669" (London, 1669), quoted in Aubin, 154.

125. "Upon Sight of Londons Stately New Buildings" (London, 1672), quoted in Aubin, 169.

126. AS, MP, 4206 (letter from London dated Nov. 12, 1666).

127. AS, MP, 4206 (newsletter from London dated Nov. 26, 1666).

128. In the same week there were fires near the new Stock Exchange and in Bishopsgate; AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated Aug. 8, 1670).

129. AS, MP, 4210 (letter from London dated Apr. 1, 1672).

130. AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated Mar. 24, [1673]).

131. AS, MP, 4210 (newsletter from London dated Nov. 15, 1675).

132. AS, MP, 4211 (newsletter from London dated July 3, 1676). For fires in Bishopsgate, Drury Lane, and Southwark, see ibid. (newsletters from London dated, respectively, May 15, May 29, June 5, and June 12, 1676); for committees set up by Charles II to examine the causes, see ibid. (newsletters from London dated July 10 and 17, 1676).

133. AS, MP, 4206 (letter from London dated Oct. 15, 1666). Cf. the optimistic tone in these extracts from broadside poems: "When, like the Churches you her Streets shall see / Founded, and fronted uniformallie: / Houses so firmly built, so fairly furnisht, / As if had been burnt, but to be burnisht"; "London Undone, or, A reflection upon the Late Disasterous Fire" (London, 1666), also quoted in Aubin, 53-55; "But now our Phoenix doth from Ashes rise, / The Wonder, and the Joy of all our Eyes. / A' LA MODERNA, Peace doth all restore / No Town was e'er so Edifi'd before"; R. Crouch, "New-Englands Lamentation for the Late Firing of the City of London" (London: "Cambridge in New England", [n.d.]).

134. "I hear, this very day [Oct. 2, 1666] there is a meeting of some of his majesties councill, and others of the nobility, with the leading men of the citty, to conferre about this great work, and to try, whether they can bring it to some issue, before the people, that inhabited London, doe scatter into other parts"; Briggs (as in n. 22), 55 (letter from Henry Oldenburg to Robert Boyle); see also AS, MP, 4206 (letter from London dated Nov. 19, 1666).

135. AS, MP, 4211 (newsletter from London dated Jan. 17, [1676]).

136. AS, MP, 4211 (newsletter from London dated Dec. 11, 1676).

137. For Pennsylvania, see Stephen Saunders Webb," 'The Peaceable Kingdom': Quaker Pennsylvania in the Stuart Empire," in The World of William Penn, ed. Richard S. Dunn and Mary Maples Dunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 173-94.

138. William Penn, quoted in John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 160. Penn, who was at Lincoln's Inn in the plague year of 1665, returned to London from his father's estate in Ireland no later than Feb. 15, 1667, for his sister Peg's wedding.

139. Gabriel Thomas, quoted in Reps (as in n. 138), 167.

140. Jefferson, quoted in George Green Shackleford, Thomas Jefferson's Travels in Europe, 1784-1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 62 (letter to John Page dated May 4, 1786).

141. Trans. from The Annals and History of C. Cornelius Tacitus (London, 1698), vol. 2, 403; see also Zwicker and Bywaters. The Latin for "sprung up" (erumpebat [Annals 15.44]) has a parallel in the ERVPIT of the north dado inscription. In the same paragraph, Tacitus writes "toward the guilty and those deserving the most unusual punishments [adversus sontis et novissima exempla meritos]"; in the north dado, the phrase pattern is maintained, thus "[the fire was] hostile toward the citizens' wealth and fortunes" (ADVERSVS OPES CIVIVM ET FORTVNAS INFESTVM). My translation differs from that in Welch, 30.

142. CSPD, 1677-78 (letter of Francis Chaplin to secretary of state Joseph Williamson), and AS, MP, 4211 (newsletter from London dated Nov. 20, 1677). An effigy of the pope had been burned in an unspecified place in London in 1673, on "the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, attributed to the Catholics"; CSPV, 1673-75 (letter from London dated Nov. 17, 1673). "This evening, according to custom, the pope will be burned in effigy, and there is much reason to fear that the people will rise against the Catholics, who live in the greatest fear. . . ."; Vienna, Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv, Abteilung Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, England, Berichte, Kart. 20 (letter of Charles, count Waldstein, from London dated Nov. 15, 1678); trans, from Latin original is my own.

143. "London, Novemb. 20. . . . In our last we gave an account of what we then knew concerning the Magnificent Procession, and solemn burning of the Pope at Temple-bar, upon Monday last the seventeenth of November, in memory of that excellent Princess Queen Elizabeth"; Domestick Intelligence, or, News both from CITY and COUNTRY, Nov. 21, 1679, [n.p.]; see also Sheila Williams, "The Pope-Burning Processions of 1679, 1680 and 1681," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21, nos. 1-2 (1958): 104-18.

144. In the courtyard of the rebuilt Royal Exchange (1667-69), Latin inscriptions once graced the white marble pedestal of a statue of Charles II of 1684, and a "royal image . . . of Charles I, twice a martyr (in body and image), pulled down from this place and broken by rebels' impious hands . . . in 1647, restored and emplaced here . . . in 1683" ([in Greek] EIKON BASILIKE . . . CAROLI PRIMI . . . Bis Martyris, [in corpore & effigie] Impiis rebellum manibus ex hoc loco deturbata & confracta . . . Restituta & hic collocata). For transcriptions, see Kuchelbeckern, 61-62; the translations are my own. In the environs of London, Latin inscriptions are to be found on royal buildings - the Queen's House and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and Chelsea Hospital, to name three - and numerous other structures (e.g., Dulwich College).

145. "CAROLUS D:G: MAG: BRIT: FRAN: ET HIBER: REX F D: TEMPLUM SANCTI PAULI VETUSTATE CONSUMPTUM RESTITUIT ET PORTICUM FECIT"; William Kent, The Designs of Inigo Jones, Consisting of Plans and Elevations for Publick and Private Buildings, vol. 2 (London, 1727), pl. 56, engraved by Henry Hulsberg after a drawing by Henry Flitcroft; see also Harris and Higgott, 240, fig. 78, who locate sources in "Palladio's reconstruction of the Temple of Venus and Rome with details from that of Antoninus and Faustina." However, at both the Pantheon and Old St. Paul's, the porticoes are octastyle (the portico of the Temple of Venus and Rome is tetrastyle in antis, that of Antoninus and Faustina hexastyle). It should also not be ignored that inscriptions meaningfully link the two. For the piers faced with pilasters that Jones utilized to frame the columns, he had only to recall those placed against the portico wall of the Pantheon. Pilasters also articulate the portico wall at Old St. Paul's, as is the case at the Pantheon. These pilasters are clearly visible in Wenceslaus Hollar's engraving from William Dugdale's The History of St. Paul's Cathedral (London, 1658), illus, in Harris and Higgott, 238, fig. 75, and would suggest that the statement that the "portico is seen against a huge expanse of plain wall" is imprecise; Harris and Higgott, 240. For the inscription of the Temple of Saturn, see Dudley (as in n. 26), 79.

146. See Harris and Higgott, 238.

147. For Jones's rejected design, see Harris and Higgott, 241-43.

148. For conflicts related to the facade, see John Summerson, Inigo Jones (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1966), 97-98. Elaborate dedication ceremonies held in 1631 at the rebuilt church of St. Katharine Cree were used as evidence in Laud's capital trial; see Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds., The London Encyclopaedia (London: Macmillan, 1983), s.v. St. Katharine Cree.

149. For the rebuilding, see Reddaway, 143; for an elevation of the facade, see Theatrum illustrata, etching after B. Howlet facing 74. For "[t]he ancient catholic custom of dedicating churches," see ibid., 79 n. d; and John Harris, Stephen Orgel, and Roy Strong, The King's Arcadia: Inigo Jones and the Stuart Court, exh. cat., Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1973, 82. CHRISTI OPT MAXIMI is a recasting of the ubiquitous D.O.M. (deo optimo maximo) of Christian epitaphs; for example, in All Hallows London Wall: "Deo Opt. Max. Sacrum & Memoriae Nobilis viri Dominici ab Heila" (sacred to God, the best and the greatest, and to the memory of the nobleman Dominic van Heila); Seymour, 372. D.O.M., in turn, is a recasting of I.O.M., as seen in the reproduction of a medal showing the "temple or arch consecrated to Jupiter and decorated with spoils" in Bartoli, pl. 116, medal 36, where a block over the pediment is inscribed IOM.

150. In contrast, a female Grand Tourist writes of her visit to the Villa Albani in 1786: "Here is an antique list of Euripedes's plays in marble, as those tell me who can read the Greek inscriptions; I lose infinite pleasure every day, for want of deeper learning"; Hester Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, vol. 2 (London, 1789), 125.

151. A defaced portrait also signaled discontent with the Roman Catholic duke of York: "This day was published the following order of the Lord Mayor and the Court of Aldermen. . . . Whereas an indignity hath lately been offered to the Picture of his Royal Highness the Duke of York, in the Guild-hall of the said City, which cannot be understood otherwise then an effect of Malice against his Person"; LG, no. 1690 (Jan. 26-30, [1682]).

152. "It is Ordered by this Court that Mr Comptroller taking to his assistance such psons as he shall thincke fitt doe compose & draw up An Inscripton in Latin and English to be affixed on the Monum.t on fisshste Hill signifying that the Citty of London was burnt & consumed with ffire by the treachery & malice of the papists in September in the yeare of our Lord 1666;" CLRO, JCCC, fol. 156v (minutes of Nov. 12, 1680). For the false attribution to Gale, see n. 62 above.

153. "Itt is now agreed by this Court that the Right Hono.ble the Lord Maior (who was desired by this Court to cause the additionall inscription lately agreed to in Comon Councill to be set upon the pillar at ffishstreet hill) doe in order thereunto cause the inscription allready made on the said Pillar or such as his Lopp shall thinke convenient to be taken out and anew ingraved, the better to make way for the said additional Inscription"; CLRO, RCA, 86, fol. 162 (minutes of July 12, 1681).

154. For Pope's couplet (Epistle to Bathurst, lines 339-40), see Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope: A Life (New York: Norton, 1985), 41-42, 513-21.

155. For the 1685 removal, see Kuchelbeckern, 70; and Treatrum illustrata, 123. For the 1689 recutting, see the decree of the Court of Aldermen dated Sept. 16, 1689, transcribed in Theatrum illustrata, 123. For the final obliteration, see Welch, 40-41; and Theatrum illustrata, 124. For speculations regarding "the delicate nature of [Lane's] task," see Welch, 37.

156. The Works of the Late Right Honourable Joseph Addison, 3d ed. (London, 1741), vol. 4, 495-97.

157. As Lord Mayor Patience Ward's name appears in the guise of a signature, the mistaken inference that he was the author was made as early as 1710, and is still today.

158. For a German tourist's visit to the plaque, see Uffenbach (as in n. 36), vol. 2, 530. "PUDDING lane, Thames street. In this lane the fire of London broke out, at a house situated exactly at the same distance from the Monument as that is high. Upon this house, which is rebuilt in a very handsome manner, was set up by authority the following inscription. . . . But the inhabitants being incommoded by the many people who came to look at the house, and read this board, it was taken down a few years ago"; LED, vol. 5, 232-33. The decision to include or omit references to the inscriptions of 1681 changes over time, and so requires historical explanation. In Edward Chamberlayne's The Present State of England, two causes are adduced for the outbreak of the fire, whereas earlier only the first explanation was offered: "First, either the Drunkenness, or the Supine Negligence of the Baker and his Servants, in whose House it began: Or else (as many believe) a Hellish Combination of some Roman Catholicks to begin and promote that Fire"; Chamberlayne (as in n. 6), 12th ed. (London, 1679), pt. 2, 181. The additional text appeared in the 14th ed. (London, 1682), pt. 2, 186, and the 15th ed. (London, 1684), pt. 2, 188. It was first omitted in the 16th ed. (London, 1687), pt. 2, 192, and was still absent in 1720, as noted in another source: "The Inscription is in Latin, engraven in Capital Letters, setting forth at large an account of the said firing of London, and of the rebuilding and restoration of it. Which, since it is already printed in the Present State of England, shall be here omitted. I shall only insert a few English Lines engraven round the bottom of the Pedestal, which in the aforesaid Book is left out"; John Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (London, 1720), vol. 1, bk. 2, 181.

159. CLRO, JCLC, fol. 18 (minutes of July 14, 1675); transcription from a related archival source in BH.v, 46-47.

160. "This day S.r Christopher Wren K.t his Ma.tyes Surveyer Generall delivered in a Report in writing the Tenor whereof is as followeth, viz. . . . wch Report being Read . . . and consideracon being hade thereof and of Severall figures presented also by Mr Surveyor generall Representing the Severall particulars in the said Report After several debates It was at length Resolved and is accordingly Ordered That a Ball having been approved of by his Maty should be placed upon the top of the New Columne"; CLRO, JCLC, fol. 19r (minutes of July 28, 1675). For Wren's letter, see BH.v, 46-47. On July 27, Hooke was "With Sir Chr. Wren about Report of Monument," a further indication of the close working relationship between the two; BH.xviii, 190.

161. Oxford, All Souls College Library, vol. 2, 71. This drawing differs considerably from several of the sketchy early obelisk studies mentioned in n. 117 above. Wren's account would permit these studies and the presentation drawing to be dated to a period between 1667 (when Parliament decreed that the Monument be built [see n. 53 above]) and Feb. 14, 1671, with the latter coming last in the series, close to the time when an actual site for the column had been established and the foundation cleared of rubbish (see n. 13 above).

162. For the fluting, see Parentalia, 323.

163. BH.xviii, 190. On the same day, the committee asked Wren and Hooke to begin thinking about the inscription; see n. 54 above. An extant elevation showing pedestal, dragons, laurel crown, fluting, booth at the summit (all much as executed), and a sphere with flames emerging from the sides and the top may correspond to the drawing Hooke took with him; Brit. Lib. ms Sloane 5238, fol. 78 (illus. in BH.v, pl. xxxv, top). Another study for the sphere, with flames emerging from the top only and set on a four-faced support composed of huge triglyphs and guttae, is in Brit. Lib. ms Sloane 5238, fol. 77 (illus. in BH.v, pl. xxxvii, top).

164. Parentalia, 322.

165. "Somewhile before this their Majesties coming to Whitehall, arrived that most incomparable Lady for Piety, Prudence and conjugal affection, the Queen Mother. . . . The Place of this most Excellent Princesses Residence, her Palace and Mannor of Greenwich, importunely directs me to an observation well becoming this discourse; and that is a consideration and Survey of its present glory (common to it with other its Sisters, as Somerset-House, Nonsuch-House, and some few else) from the level of its designed neer ruin and Demolition. . . . They have now together with his Majesties fortune resumed their Grandeurs, and have reared up their exalted heads, - and as Nero once said of his capacious and glorious Edifice, nunc incipiunt habitare; they do but now begin to dwell"; James Heath, The Glories and Magnificent Triumphs of The Blessed Restitution of His Sacred Majesty K. Charles II. From His Arrival in Holland 1659/60 till this Present. Comprizing all the Honours and Grandeurs Done to, and Conferred by, HIM (London, 1662), 268-70. Heath has skillfully altered and sanitized the Suetonian original, "ut se diceret quasi hominem tandem habitare coepisse," Nero 31; Latin text in Suetonius, trans, and ed. J. C. Rolfe, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969). For Heath, see DNB, s.v. "Heath, James (1629-1664)."

166. Full transcription in n. 160 above.

167. Suetonius, Nero 55: "destinaverat et Romam Neropolim nuncupare." The emperor supposedly wanted to rebuild because the "old buildings and narrow, crooked streets" offended him; ibid., 38. Tacitus, too, suggests that Nero "was seeking the glory of founding a new city and calling it by his own name," Annals 15.40.

168. GL, Broadsides 23.104, single-sheet folio. Ellis, 88, fails to point out that the letterpress sheet and etched plan he illustrates both date to the 18th century. The typeface, as well as orthographical and typographical conventions of the sheet reproduced (GL, Maps and Plans, 1666) mark the later period, which fact also emerges clearly in comparison with the original broadside, which bears the publication date "20 Sept. [16]66." According to what is written on the top of the etching, Knight did not submit "any Draught or Delineation" with his project. The reformatted written proposals and new etched plan likely date to ca. 1748-49, when the London Society of Antiquaries commissioned prints of Wren's and Evelyn's plans.

169. "Whitehall, Sept. 29. This day by a Warrant from His Majesties Principal Secretary of State, the Person of Valentine Knight was committed to the Custody of one of His Majesties Messengers in Ordinary, for having presumed to publish in Print certain Propositions for the rebuilding of the City of London, with considerable advantages to His Majestys Revenue by it, as if His Majesty would draw a benefit to himself from so publick a Calamity of His People, of which His Majesty is known to have so deep a sence, that he is pleased to seek rather by all means to give them ease under it"; LG, no. 91 (Sep. 24-Oct. 1, 1666).

170. For the sense of the king's words, see CSPV, 1666-68 (letter from Paris dated Oct. 5, 1666); for the limits of the rebuilding, see LG, no. 87 (Sept. 13-17, 1666).

171. BH.xviii, 190.

172. CLRO, JCLC, fol. 22r (minutes of Sept. 22, 1675); transcription from a related archival source in BH.v, 47.

173. The preparatory drawing is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; illus, in Kerry Downes, Sir Christopher Wren, exh. cat., Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1982, 64, fig. IV.5. The engraved image lacks the fluting at the neck of the urn, which is also not as high and thus differently proportioned from the one represented in the drawing; missing, too, are the flames seeping from the foot of the urn.

174. For the younger Christopher Wren's "great Collections of his Fathers" and the inference of a failed project to publish them, see "The Note-Books of George Vertue Relating to Artists and Collectors in England," Walpole Society 22 (1933-34): 136; and Bennett (as in n. 23): 136-39.

175. Dio Cassius, Roman History 68.16, quoted in Dudley (as in n. 26), 134. Chacon (as in n. 38) wrote about the Column of Trajan that "the statue . . . held a globe or ball in the right hand, within which people affirm Trajan's ashes are concealed"; Bartoli, sec. 14. Evelyn, too, mentions the tradition of the bronze statue and the burial; Evelyn, vol. 2, 379. Cf. this extract from a poem on the bronze statue of Saint Peter set atop the Column of Trajan: "Trajan Ulpius had erected this pile to the skies: / He had ordered that his ashes be buried here"; Bordini (as in n. 3), 27. Before the Vatican obelisk was readied for transport in 1586, "the ball that had stood as an ornament at the summit was removed, and because many thought that since the obelisk was dedicated to Caesar, his ashes would be within it, it was examined by me with great diligence"; Domenico Fontana, Della trasportazione dell'obelisco vaticano et delle fabriche di nostro signore Papa Sisto V fatte (Rome, 1590), 13.

176. For Wren's opinion, see Parentalia, 322. An 18th-century guidebook speaks of "a curious and spacious gilded Flame, very suitable to the Intent of the whole Column"; Seymour, 450. From the end of Aug. to the end of Sept. 1675, Hooke was involved in negotiating the per-pound price of casting. He paid for a model in lignum vitae, materials, and labor on Oct. 11, 1675. The first attempt to cast half the object was "bungled" on Nov. 20; on Dec. 16, Hooke "saw half the Urne made"; on Jan. 25, 1676, it was finished; on Jan. 27, the 1,452-pound urn was transported to the building site; on July 14, there was an "Order to raise the Urne tomorrow"; BH.xviii, 190. "1676 Aprill 13 Paid Robert Bird Coppersmith by order dated 12th of Aprill 1676. on Accom.tt for the Copper Urne on the Pillar [[pounds]]128 06[s.] 00[d.]"; GL, 184/4, fol. 41v (emends the incorrect date of "23 April" transcribed in BH.v, 50).

177. In Boissard, pt. 6, pl. 81, two grotesques composed of stacked urns act as framing devices in a representation of an antiquity "at Cardinal Cesi's"; in each instance, flames shoot upward from the topmost urn.

178. See Boissard, pt. 6, pl. 59, for a funerary monument "in the palace of Cardinal Cesi," in which flames emerge from a stepped ring set in the midst of an altar, or pt. 4, pl. 116, for a relief "at the oratory of Nero on the Quirinal," where flames also shoot upward from an altar. In the latter instance, the graphic conventions adopted do not allow for a view of the altar's upper surface.

179. "London's Index": "And what can be too great / For such a room of State? / Since we may justly sing; / London, built so nigh Heaven, is Chamber of the KING."

180. "Mr Hook having this day given an acct to this Comittee that he had treated with Severall persons concerning the Ball to be placed upon . . . the new Columne on Fish = street = hill, but had not made a final agreemt with them, not having a full authority from this Comittee for that purpose It is Ordered that he forthwith proceed to agree for the said workes upon the most Reasonable termes, and he see to the well and speedy performance thereof, that so the whole work may be Compleated and the Scaffolds taken downe as soon as is possible"; CLRO, JCLC, fol. 22 (minutes of Sept. 15, 1675). "Mr Oliver acquainting this Corn that one Mr Bowers who had begun ye Ornamentall worke about the Urne to be placed at ye top of the publiq Cullumne on new fishstreet hill was unwilling to proceed thereupon till he had some assurance what & when he should be paid for ye same"; CLRO, JCLC, fol. 58r (minutes of July 5, 1676); transcription from a related archival source in BH.v, 49. On July 14, Bowers was "enjoyne[d] . . . to proceed noe farther therein and to attend upon this Comittee at their next meeting to receive satisfaccon for w.t he hath allready done"; CLRO, JCLC, fol. 59 (minutes of July 14, 1676). On July 19, "It [was] Ordered that Mr Bowers forthwith bring into Mr Daniell Man all such Ornamentall worke as he hath done to be placed about the Urne appointed to be sett upon the publiq Cullumne on new ffishstreethill and that Mr Dep: Hall together with the Surveyors of new buildings doe view the same and consider of the vallue and make Report thereof to this Comittee"; CLRO, JCLC, fol. 60r (minutes of July 19, 1676). On July 26, 1676, Hooke wrote "Bird here about air pump & urn ornaments"; BH.xviii, 190. "This day this Com after a full debate & Consideracon had did unanimously Agree resolve & Order that the Ornamentall Copperwork lately made by Mr Bowers to be placed Round the Urne upon the publiq Cullumne should forthwith be finished guilded & sett up thereupon by him and the said Mr Bowers being here present . . . undertooke and promised to finish & fitt & make the same ready for the Guilder in four days time from hence & to referr himselfe to any Judicious person as this Com shall appoint as to what he shall receive in satisfaccon when he shall have finished the same, whereupon he was Ordered forthwith to proceed thereupon"; CLRO, JCLC, ff. 66r-67 (minutes of Aug. 6, 1676); transcription from a related archival source in BH.v, 49. For Bowers, see Gunter Meissner, ed., Allgemeines Kunstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Kunstler aller Zeiten und Volker, vol. 13 (Munich: Saur, 1996), s.v. "Bowers, George." The cartouche between the volutes of the pediment over the dedicatory inscripton at the Greenwich Royal Observatory has a similar decorative pattern, as does a border decoration in Ogilby and Morgan's map; for the latter, see Hyde (as in n. 9), 88.

181. "London's Index": "See it surveys the City as its charge, / And seems to scorn / Flames, which lye buried in this flaming Urn."

182. BH.xviii, 190. According to the City Lands Committee's minutes, the flames, the work of John Oliver, were made sometime soon after July 25, 1676, while "Mr Edmond Pickering, painter" was asked on Aug. 6, 1676 "to guild a sample piece in the presence of Mr John Oliver"; BH.v, 49.

183. Latin text and English translation in Ammianus Marcellinus, trans. John C. Rolfe, vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 17.4.1-23. Sauval (as in n. 30), 220, writes of a "sphere of gold and brass that was raised in the middle of the Circus Maximus in Rome under the emperor Constantius and, when struck by the sun, seemed to expel fire and flame."

184. The translation is abbreviated and imprecise (to say the least), yet numerous proper names and epithets are correct - a point worth making, although Wren and his contemporaries (including the delightful polymath Athanasius Kircher, who devoted many weighty tomes to the study of hieroglyphs) did not have the ability to tell what was correct or incorrect. For a transcription and Italian translation of the hieroglpyhs, see Orazio Marucchi, Gli obelischi egiziani di Roma (Rome: Loescher, 1898), 8-50. Ammianus was following the work of the otherwise unknown Hermapion, for whom see Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, suppl. 3 (Stuttgart, 1918), s.v., where the obelisk in question is incorrectly identified.

185. For the Sixtine inscriptions, see Giovanni Cipriani, Gli obelischi egizi: Politica e cultura nella Roma barocca (Florence: Olschki, 1993), 46-50; and Petrucci (as in n. 3).

186. Ammianus Marcellinus (as in n. 183), 16.10.1-17.

187. The base of the Column of Trajan was fully excavated and surrounded by a square ambulatory bordered by retaining walls some twenty feet high. For a useful description of the site as it existed in 1722, see Wright (as in n. 118), 347. For a mid-18th-century drawing and a related etching of the site, see Michael McCarthy, "Philothee-Francois Duflos (c. 1710-1746): Three Unpublished Drawings," Burlington Magazine 127 (1985): 223, figs. 49, 50.

188. The passage from Suetonius is the same as that cited and transformed by James Heath; see n. 165 above. Borromini also read Pliny the Younger, Andrea Fulvio, Vincenzo Scamozzi, and Giacomo Lauro; see Paolo Portoghesi, "Un progetto per la villa Pamphilij," in Borromini nella cultura europea (Rome: Laterza, 1982), 291-95.

189. According to the biographical entry on Bolton in DNB, he signed the dedication of his Roman Histories of Lucius Iulius Florus (London, 1618) with the name Philanactophil, a "word . . . invented by himself." In 1617, however, Johann Seyffert published an octavo under the neo-Greek pseudonym Philander Philanax entitled De natura, fine, mediis Iesuitarum; an impression is in the Vatican Library. The unrelentingly negative tone of this work may not have appealed to Bolton, but it would have found many sympathetic readers among his English compatriots - if they or he knew it.

190. Impressions in the first edition (London, 1624; frontispiece, 1623) lack both the explanatory poem and the numbers keyed to it in the print. In the second edition, the etching becomes the title page, the plate having been scraped, reworked, and rebitten. Arabic numerals set near figures or scenes in the print are keyed to Roman numerals in the explanatory poem. In addition, the lettering tablet was altered and its text greatly expanded. Similar compositional schemes exist in Francis Delaram's etched frontispieces to the Compleat Gentleman (see n. 98 above) and to Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished by G.[eorge] S.[andys] (London, 1626); see also DNB, s.v. "Sandys, George." For the relationship of Bolton's work to Jacobean politics, see Smuts, 39-40; and Bradford, 139-48.

191. CSPV, 1647-1652 (letter of Alvise Contarini from Munster dated Feb. 26, 1649).

192. Watkin, 15.

193. ". . . men . . . who kept preaching to their congregations that they were fighting not against a king, but against a greater tyrant than any Saul or Ahab, nay, one that out-Nero'd Nero [immo Nerone ipso Neroniorem susceptum esse]"; Joannis Miltoni Angli Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (London, 1651), chap. 1, from The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson, vol. 7, ed. Clinton W. Keyes and trans. Samuel Lee Wolff (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 60-61. According to Burke, 164, "Milton . . . called Tacitus 'the greatest possible enemy to tyrants.'" In a broadside published soon after the Restoration, the poet, allegedly having received his just deserts, takes his place among "some Eminent Engagers against Kingly Government": "Milton that writ two Books against the Kings and Salmasius his Defence of Kings, struck totally blind, he being not much above 40. years old"; The Picture of the Good Old Cause drawn to the Life (London, 1660).

194. "The king's palace is not touched, but is possibly reserved to be the theatre of some dire spectacle, as cries are now heard on every hand, that since the House of Stuart came to the throne England has never enjoyed felicity but has suffered from incessant miseries"; CSPV, 1666-68 (letter from Paris dated Sept. 28, 1666); cf. the account in n. 104 above.

195. For the quoted description of the rejected termination, see LED, vol. 5, 2. The summit elevation with a personification of London is in Brit. Lib. ms Sloane 5238, fol. 70 (illus. in BH.v, pl. xxxvii, center). For other unexecuted projects, see nn. 117 and 161 above.

196. Subsequent paragraphs tell of the conspiracy of Piso (15.48-59); the execution of Plautus Lateranus (15.60), whose expropriated property remained in imperial possession until it was donated to the papacy by Constantine, who had a church built on the site, namely the cathedral of Rome, St. John Lateran; and the death of Seneca the Younger (15.60-65). Hydraulic engineer Samuel Morland received "a fair medal of Gold fastened to a Green Ribbon, on the one side of which Medal was his Majesties Effigies, set round with Diamonds . . . and on the other the following inscription . . . Samuel Morlandus . . . MAGISTER MECHANICORUM"; LG, no. 1643 (Aug. 15-18, 1681).

197. Alexander Man established a coffeehouse near Charing Cross in late Sept. or early Oct. 1666. After he was named "Coffee man to Charles II" in 1675, the shop was also called the Royal Coffee House, so the locale of the inscription committee's discussion was not neutral; see Bryant Lillywhite, London's Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), 351-57. It was also within walking distance from Whitehall, where Wren, as surveyor-general of the King's Works, lived.

198. For citations from Hooke's diary provided in this paragraph, see BH.xviii, 190-91.

199. "Nero . . . whose wickednesses are too many to be related in this place: Amongst other things, he Crucified St. Peter, and caused St. Paul to be Beheaded, Burnt the City of Rome, Killed his Wife, Ripped up his Mother, and Persecuted the Christians with new invented Torments; he did great Injuries to the Britains, by his Lieutenants, for which Queen Boduo slew Eighty Thousand of his Romans"; James Heath, Englands Chronicle, or, The Lives and Reigns of the Kings and Queens from the Time of Julius Caesar To the present Reign of K. William and Q. Mary (London, 1689), 14. "New invented torments" neatly renders the novissima exempla of Annals 15.44. For Heath's positive use of words ascribed to Nero that could equally lend themselves to a negative reading, see n. 165 above. Robert Southwell records in his diary and commonplace book (compiled 1674-85) that upon the expulsion from France to Brussels of Marie de Medicis and Gaston, duke of Orleans, "The Kings Enemy made thereon [a] distick" in Latin that compared Louis XIII's actions to Nero's matricide; Brit. Lib. ms Egerton 1633, fol. 96.

200. Milton (as in n. 193), 316-17 (chap. v); the translation is my own.

201. "He had but little Reading, and that tending to his Pleasures more than to his Instruction"; George Savile, A character of King Charles II, quoted in John Cannon and Ralph Griffiths, eds., The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Monarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 412. For Charles II's apparently nonexistent Latin, see Leopold von Orlich, ed., Briefe aus England uber die Zeit von 1674 bis 1678; in Gesandtschafts-Berichten des Ministers Otto von Schwerin des Jungeren an den Grossen Kurfursten Friedrich Wilhelm (Berlin, 1837), 313-14 (letter from Windsor dated Sept. 10, 1678).

202. "The proposed inscription for the base of the statue of Voltaire would be sublime, if all the literati [gens de lettres] of Europe were allowed to subscribe. It would be good to name as his compatriots the English, the Germans, the Italians, and even the emperor of China . . . but if there are only the French, the inscription is only insipid [mais s'il n'y a que les Francais, l'inscription n'est que plate], and it would be better like this: 'To Voltaire [A Voltaire], as if carried away with admiration; but Latin would be worth more. . . . Latin is the language of inscriptions, and the French will never effect this other miracle with their language"; Correspondance inedite de l'abbe Ferdinand Galiani, conseiller du roi, pendant les annees 1765 a 1783, ed. M. C. de St.-M. (Antoine Serieys), vol. 1 (Paris, 1818), 85-86 (letter from Naples to Mme d'Epinay, dated May 12, 1770). For Admiralty Arch, see Weinreb and Hibbert (as in n. 148), s.v.

203. Francois Charpentier, quoted in Burke (as in n. 113), 158, argued that inscriptions on French triumphal arches be written in French, so that by reading them (or hearing them read aloud), ordinary people might obtain "the pleasure of participating for once in the magnificence of the state and the glory of their prince."

204. James Howell, "The Epistle Dedicatory," in A French-English Dictionary, by Randle Cotgrave (London, 1650). For Gresham College, see Weinreb and Hibbert (as in n. 148), s.v.; and Wightman (as in n. 63), 170-71. The obligation to lecture in both languages was not stipulated in Gresham's will but imposed by the trustee executors; see An Account of the Rise, Foundation, Progress, and Present State of Gresham College in London (London, 1707), 13.

205. "As early as 1600, Greek had become a recognised part of the grammar school curriculum, and it remained the second language, to be learned after Latin. Other languages and other subjects were scarcely taught at all"; M. L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England 1700-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), 10.

206. John Summerson, Sir Christopher Wren (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 22.

207. Gilbert Burnet, quoted in G. N. Clark, The Later Stuarts, 1660-1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949), 397, "thought it a great error to waste young gentlemen's years so long in learning Latin by so tedious a grammar." John Locke discusses at length who should learn Latin and how in Some Thoughts concerning Education (London, 1693), sec. 154-67. However vigorously he cast doubt on the usefulness of teaching Latin grammar and prose composition indifferently to all schoolboys, his own thorough grounding in the classics propelled him to begin his revolutionary treatise with Juvenal's dictum, "A Sound Mind in a sound body"; sec. 1.

208. Parentalia, 321.

209. Harris et al. (as in n. 149), 63. For Bolton's Latin dedication to Jones, see n. 115 above. If Jones knew no Latin, why did Bolton write in a language the dedicatee could not read? One must distinguish between an ability to read Latin (and assuming Jones could not says nothing about what he could read) and an ability to intelligently cull useful information from translations. For the latter point with reference to Borromini, see n. 188 above.

210. For Elizabeth I's suspicion of treason in John Hayward's The first parte of the life and raigne of King Henrie IIII (London, 1599) and Francis Bacon's assurance that there was no treason but "very much felony . . . because he had stolen many of his sentences and conceits out of Cornelius Tacitus," see Burke, 155. Two acts of lese-majeste compounded by citations from Tacitus occurred in the reign of Charles I. For the infamous reference to Sejanus, see n. 96 above. In his Histriomastix (The Actor's Scourge) (London, 1633), a diatribe against actors and acting, the Puritan pamphleteer William Prynne invoked the excesses of Nero's reign "as a precedent justifying the violent overthrow of tyrants" and, by extension, Charles I; Smuts, 42. For Prynne, see DNB; and Howarth, 1997 (as in n. 37), 269-80. The title of Prynne's book recalls the nickname of the 4th-century B.C.E. Greek rhetorician Zoilus, "Homeromastix."

211. Tacitus, Agricola 2.2: "memoriam quoque ipsam cum voce perdidissemus, si tam in nostra potestate esset oblivisci quam tacere."

212. This word is incorrectly transcribed as VTI in Welch, 31.

213. For the addition, first removal, recarving, and definitive expunging of the last sentence, see n. 155 above.

214. CLRO, JCCC, fol. 224 (minutes of June 17, 1681); see also n. 155 above. Additions within brackets locate the inscription's erstwhile course and signal one change in what came to be carved; see Theatrum illustrata, etching facing 118. Latin inscription also in Welch, 29. For different versions of the English, see ibid., 37; Addison (as in n. 156), 496; and Ellis, 98, 100.

A happy (albeit transient) newcomer to Wren and his architecture, John E. Moore finds his usual scholarly home in studies of eighteenth-century Roman festivals, on which he has published in Memory and Oblivion: Acts of the XXIXth International Congress of the History of Art (forthcoming), and the Art Bulletin 77 (1995) [Department of Art, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. 01063, jmoore@sophia.smith.edu].

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