sagacity, that, regardless of the presence of Pompey, and forgetful of his munificence, they rose from their seats and demanded, with imprecations against the consul, that the combat should be at an end. But habit appears soon to have reconciled the people to the torturing cruelties of the amphitheatre, "Where murder breathed her bloody steam."

We have no other recorded instance of their clemency towards beasts; and too often, when the exhausted gladiator tottered towards the edge of the arena to supplicate his life from the spectators, the remorseless rabble turned down their thumbs as the signal for the final butchery, and the "genial laws" of the Circus were upheld at no less cost than the universal debasement of a mighty nation.

In the games of Pompey a rhinoceros was exhibited for the first time; and this quadruped subsequently became a favourite excitement to the passions of the Circus.

The games given by Cæsar, during his dictatorship, were rendered attractive to the people, as those of Pompey had been, by the combats of elephants. "When Cæsar, the conqueror of the world," says Velleius Paterculus, "returned to the city, he forgave all who had borne arms against him (which passes all human belief), and exhibited shipfights, and contests of horse and foot, together with elephants." In these sports of the Great Dictator, twenty elephants were opposed to five hundred men on foot. Among the other spoils which the conquered deserts of Africa had afforded him, Cæsar exhibited the camelopard.

The immense supplies of untamed animals which the confirmed love of the sports of the Circus de

*

manded, could not be obtained without a prodigal expenditure and constant anxiety on the part of the government of Rome. The people, never satiated with such exhibitions, demanded them as the price of their obedience to the respective factions who courted or compelled their homage. Cœlius. the ædile, writing to Cicero, then proconsul of Cilicia, expressly charges him to procure, at any risk or cost, a number of panthers for the next games; to which mandate Cicero replies, that all possible exertions had been made by the hunters, but that these animals were unusually scarce, and that he had been obliged to send into Caria to procure some. We thus see that it was a part, and a very considerable one, of the Roman machinery of state, to keep the popular appetite for slaughter incessantly supplied. Brutus, after the assassination of Cæsar, during his absence from Rome, ordered the games to be conducted with the splendour to which the people had been accustomed; and he was compelled to abstract a considerable sum from his slender means of carrying on the war of liberty, to purchase "a great number of strange beasts, of the which he would not give one of them to any friend he had, but that they should all be employed in his games."+ Augustus, having the riches of the world at his command, crowded the Circus at the solemnization of the games with wild beasts from every country. The conquest of Egypt offered new stimulants to the popular curiosity. Snakes of enormous magnitude were exhibited in the Comitium, and at one time thirty-six crocodiles were

* Cicero, Fam. Epis., lib. ii., ep. 11.

† Plutarch; "Brutus." North's translation.

killed in the Flaminian Circus. Claudian, who, four centuries after, described the waste of animal life during the long period when the Roman power tore every beast from its native desert, has painted the terrors which the seamen of Rome felt as they passed over the waters with their strange cargo:

"The fainting slave let fall his trembling oar,

And the pale master fear'd the freight he bore."

When the imperial power was firmly established, and the Cæsars were at liberty to indulge their private lusts with a profuseness of expenditure which surpasses the calculations of all modern luxury, and to display their public magnificence with a prodigality which leaves the feeble despots of later days immeasurably behind them in the splendour of their wickedness, the sports of the amphitheatre were conducted upon a scale to which the consuls of the republic had scarcely dared to aspire. Caligula, on his birthday, gave four hundred bears, and as many other wild beasts, to be slain; and on the birthday of Drusilla he exhibited these brutal spectacles, continued to the succeeding day on a similar scale. Claudius instituted combats between Thessalian horsemen and wild bulls; and he also caused camels to fight for the first time with horses. Invention was racked to devise new combinations of cruelty. Many of the emperors abandoned themselves to these sports with as passionate an ardour as the uncultivated multitude. Sensuality debases as much as ignorance, because it is ignorance under another name Claudius rose at daylight to rapair to the Circus, and frequently remained, that he might not lose a single pang of the victims, while the people went

to their afternoon meal. Sometimes, during the reigns of Claudius and Nero, an elephant was opposed to a single fencer; and the spectators were delighted by the display of individual skill. Sometimes, hundreds and even thousands of the more ferocious beasts were slaughtered by guards on horseback; and the pleasure of the multitude was in proportion to the lavishness with which the blood of man and beast was made to flow. The passion for these sports required a more convenient theatre for its gratification than the old Circus. The Colosseum was commenced by Vespasian, and completed by Titus (A.D. 79). This enormous building occupied only three years in its erection. Cassiodorus affirms that this magnificent monument of folly cost as much as would have been required for the building of a capital city. We have the means of distinctly ascertaining its dimensions and its accommodations from the great mass of wall that still remains entire; and we may not improperly bestow a few pages upon its description. Such a building can never again appear in the world, because mankind have learned that the expenditure of princes upon useless monuments to pride and power, can only be wrung from the hard labour of the people themselves; and that the wealth thus diverted from the channels of usefulness perpetuates the abuses of misgovernment, and, at the same time, impedes the progress of the many in knowledge and comfort. Public happiness and the ostentation of despotism cannot exist together.

The Colosseum, which is of an oval form, occupies the space of nearly six acres. "It may justly be said to have been the most imposing building, from its apparent magnitude, in the world; the