te
for brutal pleasure which the emperors encouraged debauched the spirit
of the Romans, and deprived them of that traditional virtue of which
they had been so proud. _Panem et circenses_, the giving of bread
unworked for, and the making of grand gladiatorial shows for the plebs.

Standing-room for twenty thousand plebians was actually given free, and
the other eighty thousand people who could be accommodated paid little
enough. The shows which gave pleasure also gave glory, and emperors
and magistrates sunned themselves in the people's favour by the
entertainment they could procure for the masses. Wild beasts were let
out upon little crowds of kneeling Christian victims and tore them to
pieces amid the guffaws and delighted yells of that vast concourse of
people. Or men fought with infuriated beasts--the foundation of the
bull-fight. Bears and lions and rhinoceroses and elephants and many
other animals were opposed to men for the popular delight. Or men
fought men with swords, and champions arose and championships in
plenty. We read of one gladiator worsting hundreds of other gladiators
in the arena of the Colosseum to the joy of the people, who got
extremely excited as to whether the fight had been a sporting one, and
whether they should have the defeated gladiator killed or let him go:
thumbs up or thumbs down!

Rome fell: its era was supplanted by another greater era. The
barbarian whom the Romans had enslaved and tormented at last threw down
the mighty empire.

I see before me the gladiator lie
Butchered to make a Roman holiday
. . . Shall he expire
And unavenged? Arise! Ye Goths
and glut your ire

as Byron wrote.

Now little children are playing where wild beasts were held, and
tourists peep into the empty dens where the Christian prisoners were
kept.

A great war has lately been raging when all manner of anachronistic
tendencies of mankind were displayed, but the popular lust for cruelty
and blood, which once raged from all those burning Roman eyes about the
great arena, has not returned. Few people now can bear to look on at
cruelty. Even executions are hidden from men's eyes, and if, upon
occasion, we will cruelty, we demand that it shall be accomplished away
from our eyes, and that we shall not be confronted with the details.
Here, where such gory things were done, if one of us saw an
organ-grinder threatening a monkey with a knife we should leap to save
the monkey--and ourse