Exhibited in 1839 with the following lines:

-The clear stream,

Aye, - the yellow Tiber glimmers to her beam,

Even while the sun is setting.

Germanicus Julius Caesar was the nephew and adopted son of the Emperor Tiberius and, by his wife Agrippina, the father of the future Emperor Caligula and Nero's mother, the younger Agrippina. He died in Antioch, the cause being rumoured to be poison or the magical arts. In his verses Turner is presumably alluding to this incident as a stage in the decline of Rome. The picture is a pair to 'Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino' (No.517). The subject had been treated before by such neoclassical artists as Benjamin West, but Turner treats it as an architectural fantasy in the style of Joseph Gandy and Harvey Lonsdale Elmes. The massive building on the summit of the hill is very close in spirit to the latter's designs for St. George's Hall, Liverpool, which won the competition for that building in the same year as this picture was exhibited. The bridge recalls that in 'Caligula's Palace' of eight years before (No.485).