About a furlong to the west of the town, there is a curious piece of antiquity; it is a building about forty feet square without and thirty within. The walls are built of brick after the Roman manner, which are about an inch thick, and the mortar between them is of the same thickness. The casing of the building is very extraordinary, consisting of rows of stone four inches square, set diagonally, one row being white stone and another black alternately. There are two stories of architecture, consisting of five pilasters on each side, which are built of small white hewn stone; the lower story is Doric, and the upper is Ionic, each story being about nine feet four inches high. Above these the top is built like a pyramid, but within it is of the figure of a cone; in the ceiling of the lower arched room there are some remains of fine reliefs in stucco. Some of the people call it the sepulchre of Caius, and Bellona says he saw the sepulchre of Caius Caesar here, but this cannot be, for that prince, being wounded in Armenia, died at Lamyra in Lycia, and his ashes were carried from that place to Rome and deposited in the Mausoleum of Augustus, and his epitaph is among Gruter’s inscriptions, though indeed some ancient historians say erroneously that he died in Syria, so that probably this was a monument erected to the honor of Caius by the people of Emesa in order to gain the emperor’s favor, for on the east and north sides at the top of the second story, there is a Greek inscription, but I had no conveniency of getting up to read it; I could not so much as distinguish one letter of that on the north side, but on the eastern one the first word is ΓAIOC, and I copied some other letters. It is said there was another building of this kind at some distance to the north of it, and that a chain went from one to the other, and that they were the monuments of two sisters, daughters of an emperor; if there really was another, it is not improbable that it might have been erected to the memory of Lucius.
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