ents, a feeling of compassion toward them began to rise, as
men felt that they were being immolated not for any advantage to the
Commonwealth, but to glut the savagery of a single man."

Imagine that awful scene, once witnessed by the silent obelisk in the
square before St. Peter's at Rome! Imagine it, that we may realize how
vast is the change which Christianity has wrought in the feelings of
mankind! There, where the vast dome now rises, were once the gardens of
Nero. They were thronged with gay crowds, among whom the Emperor moved
in his frivolous degradation--and on every side were men dying slowly on
their cross of shame. Along the paths of those gardens on the autumn
nights were ghastly torches, blackening the ground beneath them with
streams of sulphurous pitch, and each of those living torches was a
martyr in his shirt of fire. And in the amphitheatre hard by, in sight
of twenty thousand spectators, famished dogs were tearing to pieces some
of the best and purest of men and women, hideously disguised in the
skins of bears or wolves. Thus did Nero baptize in the blood of martyrs
the city which was to be for ages the capital of the world!

The specific atrocity of such spectacles--unknown to the earlier ages
which they called barbarous--was due to the cold-blooded selfishness,
the hideous realism of a refined, delicate, aesthetic age. To please
these "lisping hawthorn buds," these debauched and sanguinary dandies,
art, forsooth, must know nothing of morality; must accept and rejoice in
a "healthy animalism"; must estimate life by the number of its few
wildest pulsations; must reckon that life is worthless without the most
thrilling experiences of horror or delight! Comedy must be actual shame,
and tragedy genuine bloodshed. When the play of Afranius, called _The
Conflagration_, was put on the stage, a house must be really burned and
its furniture really plundered. In the mime called _Laureolus_ an actor
must really be crucified and mangled by a bear, and really fling himself
down and deluge the stage with blood. When the heroism of Mucius Scaevola
was represented, a real criminal must thrust his hand without a groan
into the flame and stand motionless while it is being burned. Prometheus
must be really chained to his rock, and Dirce in very fact be tossed and
gored by the wild bull; and Orpheus be torn to pieces by a real bear;
and Icarus must really fly, even though he fall and be dashed to death;
and Hercules mu