After the subjection of the Carthaginians and of the kings of Asia to the power of the republic, and after the civil contests of Cæsar and Pompey were at an end, elephants of battle appear to have almost entirely fallen into disuse in the Roman armies. The emperors, however, occasionally encountered them in their African and Eastern wars; and Africa continued to be personified as a female wearing the head-skin of an elephant. The following medal was struck in the reign of Antoninus Pius, to celebrate a victory.

But although elephants were scarcely used in battle by the Romans, after the establishment of the imperial government, they doubtless continued abundant within the city; and on one occasion it appeared probable that the animal would again be actively employed in war. When Didius Julianus was about to take the field against Septimius Severus, Rome was filled with horses and elephants for service (A. D. 193). In the great battle between Alexander Severus and Artaxerxes (A. D. 230), three hundred

elephants were captured from the Persians, of which the emperor conveyed a number to Rome; and it was on this occasion that the chariot of Severus was drawn by elephants. During, however, a period of more than five centuries, the brutal sports of the Circus occasioned a greater destruction of the animal than the most profuse waste of the Roman wars. But this practice gradually fell into disuse; and at length, in the time of Justinian (A. D. 527), an elephant was esteemed a wonder both at Rome and Constantinople*. In Africa, also, the animal was once more left to wander amidst his native forests unmolested, except by the negro who required ivory for his armlets; till in process of time the modes by which the Carthaginians had trained their elephants of war became utterly unknown, and the African species was believed incapable of the discipline which still subjects the Indian to the use of man. A wandering population of Arabs spread over the fairest parts of Africa, to whose rapid movements in a pastoral life the elephant would have been worse than useless; while the camel conducted the commercial intercourse of the Moors with the Mussulman nations of Asia. Thus it is that the destinies of man so essentially modify those of the inferior animals; and that the revolutions of civilization produce physical changes, sometimes even more striking, because more rapid, than the ordinary processes of decay and renovation which Nature exhibits.

In the next chapter we shall endeavour to present a general view of the Roman amphitheatre, in which elephants were largely employed for the gratification of the patricians as well as the plebeians of Rome. The subject altogether forms a curious chapter in the *See chapter i. p. 6.

history of man; and as we may probably have occasion often to refer to it in the course of " The Menageries," we shall notice it here more fully than may be considered strictly to belong to the history of the elephant.

THE history of the Amphitheatre is intimately connected with the history of the moral habits and the political condition of the Roman people. When the elephants of Metellus were driven by slaves around the Circus, the exhibition appears to have been devised, not to gratify the cruel passions of the populace, but to destroy those terrors which were unworthy of the Roman name. But when five thousand wild beasts of all kinds were slaughtered at the dedication of the Colosseum of Vespasian, and eighty thousand spectators, looking down securely from their marble seats, shouted with a ferocious joy at the dying agonies of the mangled victims, the Roman courage was gone; the Roman liberty was trampled upon; public magnificence and private

wretchedness went hand-in-hand; the purpled senator and the ragged citizen were equally corrupted and degraded by a brutal despotism. Milton, who better, perhaps, than any man, had seen the indis→ soluble connexion between manners and government, has thus described the Romans under Tiberius:

"That people, victor once, now vile and base,
Deservedly made vassal; who, once just,
Frugal, and mild, and temp'rate, conquer'd well;
But governed ill the nations under yoke,
Peeling their provinces, exhausted all
By lust and rapine; first ambitious grown
Of triumph, that insulting vanity;

Then cruel, by their sports to blood inured
Of fighting beasts, and men to beasts exposed;
Luxurious by their wealth, and greedier still,
And from the daily scene effeminate*."

For four centuries this 66
daily scene" of des-
picable cruelty went forward, with a prodigality of
expense that might have bestowed knowledge and
comfort and independence upon the starving and
ignorant populace, who crowded to these frightful
sports. But it was the policy of their rulers to keep
them poor and profligate, ignorant and ferocious,
ragged and tumultuous; captivated by shows, and
reckless of the solid enjoyment of which those very
shows deprived them. At length "the tremendous
sound of the Gothic trumpet" was heard at the gates
of the imperial city. The golden porches and the
ivory pillars of the Amphitheatre of Vespasian were
given up to the rapine of the barbarians; the very
clamps of iron and brass that held together the pon-
derous stones of that wonderful edifice were re-
moved by the plunderers; and succeeding genera-
tions went thither as to a quarry to find the mate-
rials of their temples and their palaces. Yet the

* Paradise Regained, book iv.