This Court, as we know, will allow, for a handsome consideration, an uncle to marry his niece, whereas formally it forbids an union within the seven degrees.
High aloft, towering above Monaco, 1,270 feet from the sea-level, accessible by a cog-railway, is La Turbie, the point where the old Roman Via Aurelia and the modern Corniche Road cross a neck that is the natural division between France and Italy; the point where, in Roman times before the Empire, Gaul ended, and Italy began.
La Turbie is a corruption of Tropaïa—the Trophy, for here stood the monument erected by Augustus about the year B.C. 13, commemorative of his victories over the Ligurian natives of the coast. For some seventeen years the empire had existed. All exterior marks of flattery and submission had been accorded to him. To him had already been given an official worship, as if he were a god. Even that “white soul” Virgil thus speaks of the living emperor:—“A god has vouchsafed us this tranquillity; for to me he (Augustus) shall always be a god. A tender lamb from our folds shall often dye his altar with its blood.”
Ancient writers have left us no description of the monument. Pliny records the inscription it bore in seventy-eight words, of which thirty-three were devoted to the official dedication to the divine Augustus and to record his dignities, and forty-five to the enumeration of the conquered peoples.
The monument has gone through a period of sad wreckage. The Genoese pillaged it of marbles wherewith to decorate the palaces of the citizen nobles; and in the period of the furious struggles between Guelfs and Ghibellines it was converted into a fortress. It now presents a substructure of the period of Augustus, above which rises the shattered fragment of a mediæval tower.
Before the year 1869 only fourteen letters of the inscription had been recovered. Since then five more have been found, which had been built into a wall surrounding the village. From a description of the monument as it existed in the sixteenth century, before it was such a complete wreck as it is at present, written by a Franciscan, Antonio Boyer, of Nice, it had a square basement about twenty-four feet high, above which rose a circular structure sixty feet high, divided into two stages, with marble columns ranging one above another. Between these columns were niches once adorned with statues, and the whole was capped by a cupola surmounted, probably by a statue of Victory, or of Augustus. In the basement were two doors, and above the north door was the tablet inscribed with the dedication to Augustus. The upper portion, converted into a tower in the Middle Ages, was destroyed in 1705 by order of Louis XIV. Mines of gunpowder were exploded under it.