Pyramid of Cestius an essential sight for many who undertook the Grand Tour in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was much admired by architects, becoming the primary model for pyramids built in the West during this period. Percy Bysshe Shelley described it as "one keen pyramid with wedge sublime" in "Adonaïs", his 1821 elegy for John Keats. In turn the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy saw the pyramid during a visit to the nearby Protestant Cemetery in 1887 and was inspired to write a poem, "Rome: At the Pyramid of Cestius near the Graves of Shelley and Keats", in which he
Adonias saga king reveals that he knows about the deception practiced on him, he is attacked by the duke and killed. The queen's son, Constancius, ascends the throne. The greater part of the romance relates the attempts of Adonias, the king's son, to gain the throne of Syria. The romance is characterized by extensive battle accounts. In the assessment of Otto J. Zitzelsberger, ‘"Adonias saga", which runs to seventy-one chapters, is unnecessarily prolongued by its unrelenting account of large-scale military preparations and actions as well as duels and other single encounters. It is also overloaded with stock banquets, hunting scenes, and hyperbole