slaughtered five
thousand animals at a time; twenty elephants contended, according to
Pliny, against a band of six hundred captives. Probus reserved six
hundred gladiators for one of his festivals, and slaughtered on another
two hundred lions, twenty leopards, and three hundred bears; Gordian let
loose three hundred African hyenas and ten Indian tigers in the arena.
Every corner of the earth was ransacked for these wild animals, which
were so highly valued that in the time of Theodosius it was forbidden by
law to destroy a Getulian lion. No one can contemplate the statue of the
Dying Gladiator which now ornaments the capitol at Rome, without
emotions of pity and admiration. If a marble statue can thus move us,
what was it to see the Christian gladiators contending with the fierce
lions of Africa! "The Christians to the lions!" was the cry of the
brutal populace. What a sight was the old amphitheatre of Titus, five
hundred and sixty feet long and four hundred and seventy feet wide,
built on eighty arches and rising one hundred and forty feet into the
air, with its four successive orders of architecture, and enclosing its
eighty thousand seated spectators, arranged according to rank, from the
Emperor to the lowest of the populace, all seated on marble benches
covered with cushions, and protected from the sun and rain by ample
canopies! What an excitement, when men strove not with wild beasts
alone, but with one another; and when all that human skill and strength,
increased by elaborate treatment, and taxed to the uttermost, were put
forth in needless slaughter, until the thirsty soil was wet and
saturated with human gore! Familiarity with such sights must have
hardened the heart and rendered the mind insensible to refined
pleasures. What theatres are to the French, what bull-fights are to the
Spaniards, what horse-races are to the English, these gladiatorial shows
were to the ancient Romans. The ruins of hundreds of amphitheatres
attest the universality of the custom, not in Rome alone, but in the
provinces.

Probably no people abandoned themselves to pleasures more universally
than the Romans, after war had ceased to be their master passion. All
classes alike pursued them with restless eagerness. Amusements were the
fashion and the business of life. At the theatre, at the great
gladiatorial shows, at the chariot races, emperors and senators and
generals were always present in conspicuous and reserved seats of honor;
be