did. A magistrate who went out with only five servants, was pointed at

in the streets. The people had even begun to measure their esteem for a man according to the number of servants who accompanied him. An advocate was not considered eloquent if he did not have at least eight servitors behind his litter. When he was not rich enough to buy them he hired them, this being the only way by which he could get causes to plead and be listened to when he spoke. Women also made use of them to attract public attention. Juvenal says that Ogulnia took good care not to go to the theatre alone; who would have turned round to look at her? She hired female attendants and a fair-haired damsel, to whom she pretended to give frequent orders. She carried display to such an extent that she was always accompanied by a respectable nurse and some female friends of good appearance. In this way Ogulnia was sure to create a sensation wherever she went.

Thus the slaves were very useful out of doors; they accompanied their masters, created a good opinion of him, and contributed to his importance; but what was to be done with them in the house? There were too many for occupation to be found for all in an ordinary household, and in order to give them something to do each had his particular office. “I use my slaves,” said a Greek, “like my limbs, one for each thing.” From this arose the extreme division of labour in ancient houses; it was never carried farther than at Rome. There were slaves to open the door to a visitor, others to bring him in, others to lift up before him the heavy draperies, and others to announce him. There were some to carry the dishes to the table, others to carve, some to taste them before the guests, and others to offer them. “These unhappy creatures,” says Seneca, “live only to carve the poultry well.” Each portion of a woman’s toilet was given to a different slave.

The slave who had charge of the clothes was not the same as the one who looked after the jewels or the purple. There were special artists for hairdressing and for perfuming. The tomb has even been discovered of an unhappy man whose sole function in life was to paint the aged Livia. Thus the master as soon as he returns home finds a crowd of servitors who are on the lookout for his wants and anticipate his orders. “I sit down,” says a character in a comedy, “my slaves run up to me and take off my shoes, others hasten to arrange the couches and to prepare the repasts. They all take as much trouble as possible.” What is the result? That by force of being surrounded and waited upon the master contracts the habit of doing absolutely nothing. All these people who gather around him, and to whom he is so grateful, render him the worst service possible; they take from him the necessity of doing anything for himself. The Roman of the early days of the republic, who had hardly more than one personal servant and who waited upon himself, was active and energetic; he conquered the world. The Roman of the empire, continually surrounded by a troop of slaves, became cowardly, effeminate, and a dreamer. Of all the furniture in his house, his couch is the one he is most ready to use. He lies down to sleep, to eat, to read, and to think. His servants divide amongst themselves all the functions of life, and all is minutely calculated to give him nothing to do. But this regularity which he admires so much is full of danger. Physical activity cannot be relaxed without moral activity suffering as well, and he who ceases to act ends by ceasing to have any will. This race of men who had given up exercising their bodies and keeping themselves in condition, also allowed their souls to become enervated. It is therefore a true saying that the large number of slaves which the Romans kept up contributed in no small measure to render themselves the slaves of the cæsars.

Let us suppose the newly purchased slave thrown amidst the multitude of servants that fills the Roman house; his first thought is naturally for his new master. He tries anxiously to know him, that he will see what he may expect from him, and how he will be treated. Let us do like him, and let us ask first of all to what treatment he will be subjected, and what will be the relations between master and slave. The answer to this question is not easy; the lot of the slave may be conceived of in different ways, and, for instance, it entirely changes its aspect according to whether we study it from the laws or from the facts. Until the days of the Antonines, the law in relation to him is terribly hard. It abandons him wholly to his master, whose property he is as much as a field or a flock of sheep. He has the right to use him or abuse him according to his fancy. He is free to inflict upon him all kinds of insults and dishonour; he can beat and kill him. We are therefore forced to admit that according to the laws there has never been a worse condition than that of a Roman slave; but it must be remembered that human institutions never do all the good or harm of which they are capable. In public morals and in the general feeling there exist obstacles which cannot be surmounted. Laws may be excellent or detestable; man, who is little capable of perfection and who is instinctively averse to barbarism, corrects their exaggeration in practice; as a rule he only carries them out in so far as they are not opposed to the mediocrity of his nature. We are therefore liable to mistake, if we judge the social condition of a nation according to its legislation. The first thing to discover is in what manner it was actually applied. There is reason to think that in Rome, even at the time when manners were most barbaric, the terrible rights that the law gave to the masters were rarely taken advantage of. Cato might say that it is wise to sell a slave when he is old and can be of no further use; custom might allow him to be abandoned without mercy when he was ill and left in the island of the Tiber near the temple of Æsculapius, in order that he might recover or die without any expense; but it is probable that, in generous souls, nature has always revolted against such cowardly desertion. There are several reasons for thinking that even in Cato’s time the slave was as a rule humanely treated, that he lived on familiar terms with his master, and that he nearly always grew old in his master’s house. After the battle of Cannæ, Rome having no more soldiers did not hesitate to arm eight thousand slaves. They fought bravely side by side with the legions, and deserved their liberty. Would they have exposed themselves to die for masters whom they detested?

All slaves, however, were not treated alike, and distinctions must be made between them. They were as a rule less well treated in the country than in the town. The agriculturists, in describing the stock of a farm and the instruments of cultivation, have no hesitation in classing the slave in the same category with the oxen. In reality the master does not make much difference between him and the cattle. At night he is shut up in a species of stables or underground prisons (ergastula), with narrow windows, at such a distance above ground that he cannot reach them with his hand. During the day, if he is to work alone, irons are put on his feet in case the fresh air and open field should suggest to him the idea of escape. This is certainly rigorous treatment, and nevertheless the slave seems to support it with no great difficulty. A comic author makes him say, “When one’s work is in a distant field, where the master rarely comes, one is not a servitor but master.”

When a day of festival comes round and work is suspended, he celebrates it with such noisy joy that “those in the neighbourhood can hardly support his outbursts of delight.” It would have been difficult to imagine--seeing him after the harvest or the vintage, amusing himself with such good will, laughing and singing at the games of the cross-ways (compitalia) or jumping gaily over the straw fires at the Palilia--that he was so harshly treated the rest of the year. What proves that on the whole this lot was not thought so wretched is that the town slave sometimes envied his country brother. Horace had at Rome a slave of an unstable disposition who asked his master as a favour to send him to his Sabine farm. It is true he soon repented this.

As a rule the slave was sent to the fields only as a punishment when he had given dissatisfaction. It is certain that he was better treated and happier in town. Placed near his master he might have to suffer more from his caprice, but he also reaped advantage from it. He had the best chance of obtaining his liberty and making his fortune. There were some whose situations were even brilliant and envied, namely the imperial slaves. To belong to Cæsar’s household was to be somebody, and the great lords who esteemed themselves happy to be known by the porter of Sejanus bought the good graces of the stewards of Tiberius by presents and degrading acts. Even before being liberated these slaves often filled real public offices; they were officers of the mint, the finances, and the commissariat of Rome. They had also a sense of their own importance. They were proud and insolent and thought they were under an obligation to see that the dignity of the emperor was respected in their own persons. After these we should naturally place the slaves belonging to the towns, the temples, and the different civil and religious bodies. When authority is thus divided and when nobody takes the entire burden, not only is the servitor not under control but in reality it is he who dominates. Thus the slaves of this class appear as a rule to be rich and contented with their lot. Some there are who make large donations to the societies which have bought them, giving themselves the piquant pleasure of being the benefactors of their masters.

Nor are those belonging to some great houses much to be pitied. If they attain high functions in the establishment they make good profit. Sometimes the steward of a rich man found the position so lucrative that he preferred to remain a slave, rather than give it up. The most fortunate were those who happened to fall to a master who prided himself upon being humane and enlightened, who cultivated literature and practised the lessons of the philosophers. Pliny the Younger treated his dependents with the greatest kindness. Not only did he forbid irons to be put on them when they were tilling his fields, but he did not allow them to be crowded together in narrow cells or dark prisons. In his house at Laurentum the accommodation was so good that he could put guests there. He looked after them whenever they were ill, he allowed them to make wills and leave their small possessions to their friends; his humanity went so far that he wept at losing them. In the service of a rich and wise man like Pliny the slave is not really very unhappy. It is when he is with humbler people that his lot is harder. As he shares the fortune of the house, with the poor he is of course poor, and he may chance to fall into the hands of a master in very wretched circumstances. Everybody, even the workmen and soldiers, had slaves in those days. Even the peasant of the _Moretum_ whose worldly wealth consists of a little garden, and who gets up so early to prepare his dish of garlic, cheese, and salt, is not alone in his hut; he has for maidservant a negress, whom the poet describes to us with such striking realism: “Her hair is woolly, her lips thick, her skin black; her body badly made, her legs lank, and nature has given her a foot which spreads at ease” (spatiosa prodiga planta). In the poor houses little money was made and life was hard.

The only compensation the slave had in his miserable life was that he lived near his master, that he was more familiarly treated; that, being obliged to help him in his sufferings and share his hard lot, he was looked upon less as a slave than a kinsman. Moreover, it must be noted that, in Rome as in the East to-day, he always formed part of the family. In modern times master and servants, being both free and united by a temporary contract on conditions already agreed upon between them, live apart from one another, although under the same roof. They are two jealous individualities who keep a watch on each other and are very determined to maintain their respective rights. At Rome the slave had no rights; he was not a citizen and hardly a man. His dignity did not prevent him from wholly abandoning himself to the man to whom he belonged and becoming one with him.

There was thus more intimacy and less reserve in their bearing towards each other. There remain many tombs erected by masters in memory of their servitors. They often bear the expression of the most tender feelings; not only is homage paid to their good service, they are also thanked for their affection. In return it must be remembered that they were treated with kindness,“like sons of the house,” and some significant words are even ascribed to them: “Servitude, thou hast never been too heavy for me.” On the tomb of a centurion of the fourth legion, which was erected by his freedmen, are these words: “I never married, and I possessed children,” and the slaves’ answer, “Thanks and farewell.”

What strikes us most of all in studying Roman society is that most of the vices which devoured it and caused its ruin were due to slavery. We have seen that it favoured the corruption of the higher classes, that in accustoming a man to rely continually on the activity of others it paralysed his strength and enfeebled his will. It is also responsible for having nourished a contempt of human life. Cruelty may be learned. Perhaps it is naturally repugnant to mankind, but it feeds on example. It may be said that the houses of many of the rich were public schools of inhumanity. The slave long suffered from it and the master also ended by being its victim. If under the cæsars the crowd saw the deaths of so many illustrious people with great indifference, was it not because tortures and death were no new things to them, and because, when they had become used to seeing manhood no longer respected in the slave, they were less moved to anger at seeing it outraged in the noble? Another graver reproach which can be made against slavery is that it created that miserable populace of the time of the empire which disgusts us so much in the narratives of Tacitus. Its baseness and cowardice are no longer astonishing when we remember its origin. It was the outcome of slavery; slavery formed it, and naturally it was formed for slavery. Not only did its moral degradation and political indifference render the tyranny of the cæsars possible, but the recollection of the injustice it had suffered must have nourished in it those feelings of bitterness and hostility which exposed society to perils little dreamed of.

If there was no servile war in Italy after Spartacus, it is none the less true that slavery kept up a kind of perpetual conspiracy against the public safety. Above all it was the most determined enemy of that spirit of conservatism and tradition which had been the strength of the Roman race. The slaves did not spring from the soil of Rome, their recollections and affections were elsewhere, and when they became citizens they did not hesitate to welcome foreign customs and to introduce them into the city. Whilst the statesmen and leading men wore themselves out in trying to preserve what remained of the ancient spirit and the old customs, down below, amongst those classes of the populace which were constantly being recruited from slavery, there was a continual working to destroy it. It was thus that, thanks to this secret and powerful influence, new religions easily spread throughout the empire.

At the time nobody seems to have perceived the amount of the evil, and as its extent was not realised only partial remedies were proposed. Efforts, often successful, were made to render the slaves’ lot less hard. They were given some security against their masters; the philosophers proclaimed, and all recognised with them, that these were men; lawyers even inscribed in the codes that slavery was contrary to nature. It seems as if this principle, had it been followed out in all its consequences, must have eventually led to the abolition of slavery; but when would the day for it have come, or would it have come at all, if the ancient world had continued? It may well be doubted, in view of the slowness with which progress is accomplished and the frequent recurrence of causeless reactions. Even in the most enlightened times, when opinion seems to give the strongest impulse towards liberal measures, it may chance on a sudden that power, obeying other instincts, again becomes cruel or severe, or that it hovers between severity and indulgence, unable to decide which course to pursue.

It is under Augustus, just when manners are becoming milder and humanity seems to triumph, that a _senatus-consultum_ ordains that when a master has been assassinated by a servant, all those who slept under his roof that night, innocent or guilty, shall be put to death. It is no less a matter of surprise that under Constantine, in Christian times, the laws, which since the Antonines had become much more humane, all at once revert to the ancient severities against slaves. These sudden relapses made them lose in a moment all the ground that they had gained during centuries, and all had to be begun again. Let us add that the measures taken to protect slaves were not always so efficacious as might be expected. Humane laws were hardly ever carried out except by well-disposed men, who were themselves inclined to humanity. Others found ways to evade the laws. Authority, always averse to interfering with the family and restraining the sacred power of the master, generally shut its eyes, and thus abuses, practically beyond the reach of the law, became general.

What is most remarkable of all is that no ancient writer ever expressed, either as a far-away hope, or as a fugitive wish, or as an improbable hypothesis, the idea that slavery might one day be abolished. Whether favourable to slavery or not, no one so much as imagined that it could cease to be. Those even who complain of it with bitterness, who count up the dangers that it occasions and the annoyances to which it gives rise, those who say with Seneca: “How many starving animals, whose voracity we have to gratify! What expense to clothe them! What anxiety to watch all those rapacious hands! What pleasure is there in being waited upon by people who murmur against us and detest us?”--even they did not seem to think that some day these people might be dispensed with. The institution was so ancient, and had so entered into the habits of the nation, that life could not be imagined without it. Men who thought slavery indispensable were not inclined, even when they knew it to be unjust, to take much trouble to abolish it. It was one of those radical reforms that one is scarcely justified in expecting in the ordinary course of events, and we may say that such a complete change, which no one either desired or foresaw, could only be accomplished by one of those revolutions which renovate the world.[h]

Let us turn from this depressing picture of the one labouring class in Rome to the complementary theme of games and recreations.

GAMES AND RECREATIONS

Nothing is more enlightening to the understanding both of the peculiarities of the individual and of the character of a nation, than to observe the free motion which begins where work leaves off. Professional activity is illustrated more or less in the same fashion all the world over, and it is forced into a more or less perfect uniformity, for it always follows the same aim. Recreation, on the other hand, opens the door to play, in which spontaneous inclination embodies its expression. As the traveller will note with particular attention the games and entertainments in which a nation spends its leisure, so the student of antiquity is prompted to direct his gaze to this side of life. But on no question are the sources of information so reticent, so far as the Romans are concerned, as on the question before us.

If we take as our basis the description which the ancients themselves give us of the activity peculiar to the Romans and their rooted disinclination for the Greek _far niente_ (otium Græcum), the dignified motion and bearing (gravitas) that was so little fitted for gaiety that even Cicero says that only a man drunk or mad can dance; if we bear in mind the foreign nature of the apparatus which, at all events in the time of the emperors, was engaged for the carrying on of games and festivals--the actors, mimes, pantomimes, athletes, gladiators who were employed for amusement, paid and despised,--we shall be inclined to infer that the Romans had altogether little talent for a spirited enjoyment of life and for national rejoicing.

But one piece of general information at least has been unequivocally handed down to us, and this is the fact that they took an early and religious pleasure in dancing, in studying, and in games. At the _pompa circensis_ in the _ludi magni_, which were celebrated between the 4th and the 19th of September, two detachments of dancers were employed; first those bearing arms in three choruses of men, youths, and boys, all in red tunics with bronze girdles, equipped with swords, lances, and crested helmets, then the comic dancers in sheepskins. Similarly dancing was a part of the ritual of the salii and of the arvales long before it became fashionable with the youths of distinction. Music, too, is acceptable to the gods, and not only in foreign rites, but it is a necessary ingredient in Roman ritual for which the old college of the _tubicines_ and the _tibinices_ provided. Music was indispensable in all festal celebrations, triumphs, funeral processions; and at the feast of Pales (on the 21st of April) the whole town was a blare of wind instruments, cymbals, and kettledrums. Songs and mimic representations were not missing either in the ceremonial of worship, or at home, or on the occasion of popular rejoicing, as we may see from the songs of the salii and of the arvales, from the songs of praise during meals, from the _fescennini_, _saturæ_, and _atellanæ_, as well as from the comic interludes at the Saturnalia, at the Floralia, at the Megalesia, at triumphs, and at funeral processions.

True, these beginnings of an original Roman national poetry never reached their perfect development, because they submitted to the influence of Greek literature, so much admired by the educated classes; but, on the other hand, they resisted this influence so strenuously that Augustus still continued to make _fescennini_, and the four masked types are still unchanged to-day in the Italian _commedia dell’ arte_. We may assume the same to have been generally the case with the games of amusement. What was specially Greek in them was absorbed by the higher orders chiefly; what was really national is still to be traced more or less in the Italy of to-day. So the well-known game _mora_, in which two players hold out a number of fingers at the same moment and let their adversary guess how many they were, is found certainly with the Greeks, but is of extreme antiquity in Italy, where it is described by the expression _micare digitis_, and was used on grave occasions, and particularly on the occasion of business transactions, as a kind of lottery (_sors_). On the whole, the information on Roman games is uncommonly scanty, and it is vain to attempt to imagine a definite picture of the entertainments at the Matronalia, the Vinalia, and the Saturnalia.

Ovid once describes the festival of Anna Perenna that was celebrated on a heath on the Via Flaminia, but there is nothing characteristic in the whole description; people eat, drink, dance, and sing, but what they sing are not national songs. “_Cantant_,” says Ovid, “_cantant quidquid didicere theatris_.” What we hear of games in Rome is all Greek or is reckoned as such at least; even the old game of jumping upon full leather bottles that were oiled, and trying, it would appear, to stand on one’s head upon them, is mentioned by Virgil as Attic, and in fact identical with the Greek ἀσκωλιάξειν. Under these circumstances we must not attempt to prove the existence of any form of national rejoicing peculiar to the Romans, and must confine ourselves to gathering together those games which, although customary in Greece also, are frequently mentioned in Rome. On the one hand, we have children’s and young men’s games; on the other, games of hazard and board games.

The game of ball, which is known to all antiquity, is certainly a game for young men, but owing to the healthy movement which it affords, and which Galen quite particularly recommends in a singular pamphlet on the little ball, it was also a recreation for elder persons as useful as it was agreeable. In Rome and Italy generally ball was played, both on the Campus Martius, where the younger Cato himself might have been seen taking part in the game, and in the _sphæristeria_ especially laid out for the purpose in the baths and villas. Among the players of ball were Mucius Scævola, Cæsar, the emperor Augustus, Mæcenas, the old Spurinna the friend of Pliny, the emperor Alexander Severus; and there were people who spent their whole time in this amusement.

During the empire five kinds of balls were employed, one small, one middle-sized, one large, one very large, one full of air. Perhaps these five kinds correspond to the Latin expressions _pila_, _trigon_ or _pila trigonalis_, _pila paganica_, _harpastum_, perhaps identical with _pila arenaria_, and _follis_. The ordinary ball was stuffed with hair and sewn with bright or at all events coloured patches; the _paganica_, the name of which indicates a game between people _en masse_, in which the whole village (pagus) in the country took part, was a large ball stuffed with feathers; the _follis_, which was first discovered in the time of Pompey, was the largest and was full of air (κενή); of the _harpastum_ we know nothing further than that it was a small hard ball.

The different kinds of games may be determined first by the nature of the throw and secondly by the number of people engaged in the games. First the ball may be thrown up and caught by the thrower himself or by another--this is the Greek οὐρανία; secondly the ball may pass between two or more players (datatim ludere), the object being skill in throwing (διδόναι), _dare, ittere_, _jactare_, in catching (λαμβάνειν, δέχεσθαι, facere, excipere), and in throwing back (remittere, repercutere). Finally the ball may be bounced violently on the ground or against the wall, so that it rebounds and may be repeatedly slapped with the hand. In this game, which is the Greek ἀποῤῥαξις and the Latin _expulsim ludere_, the number of bounces are counted, and if several play, the winner is he who can keep it up longest without letting the ball fall. The true significance of the word _pilicrepus_ is certainly to be found from this game, as elsewhere the ball makes no especial kind of noise. According to this, apart from the height of the throw, we may indicate all the methods of playing ball by the formulæ of _datatim_, _reptim_, _expulsim ludere_.

So far as the number of players is concerned, first of all there was the single game in which one played alone with one, or also with two and three balls, keeping them in perpetual motion as he sat or walked. From this juggler’s game was derived the art of Ursus Togatus, who, proud of his steadiness, first used glass balls. Then there was the double game in which two played and threw the ball to each other, and then one of the most popular games, which was played before the bath and very frequently in the Campus Martius, was the _trigon_, in which three players took part. It is often mentioned but never described. The stations of the three players were at the three corners of an equilateral triangle; but the ball did not travel simply from one player to another; it was thrown at one of them arbitrarily, so that he had to rid himself of two balls at the same time, a process which involved the use of both hands, and not only the catching of the two balls but their discharge at one of the other players. Besides the players themselves, three persons were necessary for the _trigon_ to pick up the balls, and three others to keep the score.

The games for players _en masse_ (sphæromachiæ) were particularly interesting to the Romans. There were three kinds, ἡ ἐπίσκυρος or ἐπίκοινος τὸ φενίνδα, and τὸ ἁρπαστόν. We are only partially informed of the difference between them; according to the latest investigation however the following may be assumed to be probably correct particulars. In the ἐπίσκυρος, the players divide into sides of equal numbers which are separated by a line marked in stones (σκῦρος): they also had a limit at the back of them beyond which they were not allowed to go. The ball is placed on the σκῦρος. One of the sides, whichever is the first to capture the placed ball, throws off as far as possible; the other side remains where it is caught and in turn throws it back. The object is to throw the ball with such force that the opposite side are driven back, and to drive them right back to the boundaries of the court, in which case they have lost the game.

In the second game, the φενίνδα, two sides are also engaged. The man who throws off challenges a definite person on the opposing side to catch the ball, but then throws it in quite another direction, in which case it has to be caught by someone else. If it falls to the ground, the side which failed to catch it has lost. We know least of all about the _harpastum_, but the ball seems to have been thrown up in the air so that the thrower himself is in a position to catch it again. In order to stop this all the players scrum up, and while they are struggling for the ball upset one another to the accompaniment of a tremendous noise. Finally, the game described by Cinnamus the Byzantine, which Meineke and after him Grasberger have identified with the _harpastum_, has nothing whatever to do with it. It was quite a particular game for the imperial family, was played on horseback, and the ball was hit with a racket, none of these features being characteristic of the _harpastum_.[f]

_The Roman Theatre and Amphitheatre_

If the Roman people was ill accommodated in its streets, it might derive compensation in the vast constructions which were erected for its amusement, the ample walks and gardens devoted to its recreation, and the area which was sedulously preserved for its exercise in the Campus Martius, and the circuses of Romulus and Flaminius. The theatre of Pompey, the first fabricated of stone for permanent use, was rivalled by that of Balbus, and Augustus dedicated a third to the pleasures of the citizens under the title of the theatre of Marcellus. From the enormous size of these celebrated edifices, it is clear that the idea of reserving them for dramatic performances entered but little into the views of their builders. The Roman theatre was an institution very different from ours, where a select audience pay their price of admission to a private spectacle on a large scale. They were the houses of the Roman people, to which every citizen claimed the right of entrance; for they were given to him for his own by their munificent founders, and the performances which took place in them were provided gratuitously by the magistrates. The first object, therefore, was to seat the greatest number of people possible; and when that was accomplished, the question followed of how they should be safely and conveniently entertained.

An assemblage of thirty thousand spectators, gathering excitement from the consciousness of their own multitude, could not sit tamely under the blaze of an Italian sun, tempered only by an awning, in the steam and dust of their own creating, which streams of perfumed waters were required to allay, to hear the formal dialogue of the ancient tragedy declaimed by human puppets from brass-lipped masques, staggering on the stilted cothurnus. Whatever might be the case with the Greeks, it was impossible, at least for the plainer Romans, so to abstract their imaginations from the ungraceful realities thus placed before them as to behold in them a symbolic adumbration of the heroic and the divine. For the charms, however, both of music and dancing, which are also considered pleasures of the imagination, they appear to have had a genuine though perhaps a rude taste. Their dramatic representations, accordingly, were mostly conducted in pantomime; this form at least of the drama was that which most flourished among them, and produced men of genius, inventors, and creators in their own line.

Some of the most famous of the mimic actors were themselves Romans; but the ancient prejudice against the exercise of histrionic art by citizens was never perhaps wholly overcome. Accordingly Greek names figure more conspicuously than Roman in the roll of actors on the Roman stage; and two of these, Bathyllus and Pylades, divided between them, under the mild autocracy of Augustus, the dearest sympathies and favours of the masters of the world. The rivalry of these two competitors for public applause, or rather of their admirers and adherents, broke out in tumultuous disorders, which engaged at last the interference of the emperor himself. “It is better for your government,” said one of them to him, when required to desist from a professional emulation which imperilled the tranquillity of the city--“it is better that the citizens should quarrel about a Pylades and a Bathyllus than about a Pompey and a Cæsar.”

But whatever claims pantomime might have as a legitimate child of the drama, the Roman stage was invaded by another class of exhibitions, for which no such pretensions could be advanced. The vast proportions of the theatre invited a grander display of scenic effects than could be supplied by the chaste simplicity of the Greek chorus, in which the priests or virgins, whatever their number might be, could only present so many repetitions of a single type. The finer sentiment of the upper classes was overpowered by the vulgar multitude, who demanded with noisy violence the gratification of their coarse and rude tastes. Processions swept before their eyes of horses and chariots, of wild and unfamiliar animals; the long show of a triumph wound its way across the stage; the spoils of captured cities, and the figures of the cities themselves were represented in painting or sculpture; the boards were occupied in every interval of more serious entertainment by crowds of rope-dancers, conjurers, boxers, clowns, and posture-makers, men who walked on their hands, or stood on their heads, or let themselves be whirled aloft by machinery, or suspended upon wires, or who danced on stilts, or exhibited feats of skill with cups and balls. But these degenerate spectacles were not the lowest degradation to which the theatres were subjected. They were polluted with the grossest indecencies; and the luxury of the stage, as the Romans delicately phrased it, drew down the loudest indignation of the reformers of a later age. Hitherto at least legislators and moralists had been content with branding with civil infamy the instruments of the people’s licentious pleasures; but the pretext even for this was rather the supposed baseness of exhibiting one’s person for money than the iniquity of the performances themselves. The legitimate drama, which was still an exercise of skill among the Romans, was relegated, perhaps, to the smaller theatres of wood, which were erected year by year for temporary use. There were also certain private theatres, in which knights and senators could exercise their genius for singing and acting without incurring the stigma of public representation.

The appetite for grandeur and magnificence, developed so rapidly among the Romans by the pride of opulence and power, was stimulated by the furious rivalry of the great nobles. The bold and ingenious tribune, Curio, whose talents found a more fatal arena in the contests of the civil wars, was perhaps the first to imagine the form of the double hemicycle, which he executed with an immense wooden structure and a vast mechanical apparatus, by which two theatres, after doing their legitimate duty to the drama, could be wheeled front to front, and combined into a single amphitheatre for gladiatorial spectacles. There can be no doubt that this extraordinary edifice was adapted to contain many thousands of spectators; and there are few perhaps, even of our own engineers, who build tubular bridges and suspend acres of iron network over our heads, who would not shrink from the problem of moving the population of a great city upon a single pair of pivots.

The amphitheatre of Julius Cæsar in the Campus was of wood also, and this, as well as its predecessors, seems to have been taken down after serving the purpose of the day. It remained for Statilius Taurus, the legate of Augustus, to construct the first edifice of this character in stone, and to bequeath to future ages the original model of the magnificent structures which bear that name, some of which still attest the grandeur of the empire in her provinces; but the most amazing specimen of which, and indeed the noblest existing monument of all ancient architecture, is the glorious Colosseum at Rome.

Like most of the splendid buildings of this period, the amphitheatre of Taurus was erected in the Campus Martius, the interior of the city not admitting of the dedication of so large a space to the purpose; though it was rumoured indeed that Augustus had purposed to crown the series of his public works by an edifice of this nature, in the centre of his capital, to be attached perhaps to his forum. While the amphitheatre, however, was a novel invention, the circus, to which it was in a manner supplementary, was one of the most ancient institutions of the city. The founder himself had convened his subjects in the Murcian valley, beneath his cabin on the Palatine, to celebrate games of riding, hunting, and charioteering.

The enclosure in which these shows were annually exhibited was an oblong, curved at the farther end, above six hundred yards in length, but comparatively narrow. The seats which ranged round the two larger sides and extremity of this area (which derived its name of arena from the sand with which it was strewed) were originally cut for the most part out of the rising ground and turfed; less rude accommodation was afterwards supplied by wooden scaffoldings, but the whole space was eventually surrounded by masonry and decorated with all the forms and members of Roman architecture.

The arena was adapted for chariot racing by a partition, a dwarf wall, surmounted with various emblematic devices, which ran along the middle and terminated at either end in goals or ornamented pillars, round which the contending cars were driven a stated number of times. The eye of the spectator, from his position aloft, was carried over this spinal ridge, and he obtained a complete view of the contest, which thus passed and repassed, amidst clouds of dust and roars of sympathising excitement, before his feet. The Romans had from the first an intense delight in these races; and many of the most graphic passages of their poets describe the ardour of the horses, the emulation of their drivers, and the tumultuous enthusiasm of the spectators.

These contests maintained their interest from the cradle to the very grave of the Roman people. The circus of Constantinople, under the Greek designation of Hippodrome, was copied from the pattern of the Roman; and the factions, which divided the favour of the tribes almost from the beginning of the empire, continued to agitate the city of Theodosius and Justinian. The citizens were never satiated with this spectacle, and could sit without flagging through a hundred heats, which the liberality of the exhibiter sometimes provided for them. But the races were more commonly varied with contests of other kinds. All the varieties of the Greek pancratium, such as boxing, wrestling, and running, were exhibited in the circus; gladiators fought one another with naked swords, sometimes in single combat, sometimes in opposing bands.

The immense size of the arena, unfavourable for the exhibition of the duel, was turned to advantage for the display of vast multitudes of wild animals, which were let loose in it to be transfixed with spears and arrows. This practice seems to date from the sixth century, when victorious generals first returned to Rome from the far regions of the teeming East, to ingratiate themselves with the populace by showing them the strange monsters of unknown continents, lions and elephants, giraffes and hippopotami. As in other things, the rivalry of the nobles soon displayed itself in the number of these creatures they produced for massacre; and the favour of the citizens appears to have followed with constancy the champion who treated it with the largest effusion of blood. The circus was too spacious for the eye to gloat upon the expression of conflicting passions, and watch the last ebbings of life; but the amphitheatre brought the greatest possible number of spectators within easy distance of the dead and dying, and fostered the passion for the sight of blood, which continued for centuries to vie in interest with the harmless excitement of the race.

The idea of the theatre is representation and illusion, and the stage is, as it were, magic ground, over which the imagination may glance without restraint and wander at will from Thebes to Athens, from the present to the past or future. But in the amphitheatre all is reality. The citizen, seated face to face with his fellow-citizens, could not for a moment forget either his country or his times. The spectacles here presented to him made no appeal to the discursive faculties; they brought before his senses, in all the hardness of actuality, the consummation of those efforts of strength, skill, and dexterity in the use of arms to which much of his own time and thoughts were necessarily directed.

The exhibition of gladiatorial combats, which generally preceded the departure of a general upon a foreign campaign, was part of the soldier’s training (and every citizen was regarded as a soldier), from which he received the last finish of his education, and was taught to regard wounds and death as the natural incidents of his calling. These were probably the most ancient of the military spectacles. The combats of wild beasts, and of men with beasts, were a corruption of the noble science of war which the gladiatorial contests were supposed to teach; they were a concession to the prurient appetite for excitement, engendered by an indulgence which, however natural in a rude and barbarous age, was actually hardening and degrading. The interest these exercises at first naturally excited degenerated into a mere passion for the sight of death; and as the imagination can never be wholly inactive in the face of the barest realities, the Romans learned to feast their thoughts on the deepest mystery of humanity, and to pry with insatiate curiosity into the secrets of the last moments of existence. In proportion as they lost their faith in a future life, they became more restlessly inquisitive into the conditions of the present.

The eagerness with which the great mass of the citizens crowded to witness these bloody shows, on every occasion of their exhibition, became one of the most striking features of Roman society, and none of their customs has, accordingly, attracted more of the notice of the ancient writers who profess to describe the manners of their times. By them they are often represented as an idle and frivolous recreation, unworthy of the great nation of kings; nor do we find the excuse officially offered for the combats of gladiators, as a means of cherishing courage and fostering the ruder virtues of antiquity, generally put forward as their apology by private moralists. Men of reflection, who were far themselves from sharing the vulgar delight in these horrid spectacles (and it should be noticed that no Roman author speaks of them with favour, or gloats with interest on their abominations), acquiesced without an effort in the belief that it was necessary to amuse the multitude, and was better to gratify them with any indulgence they craved for than to risk the more fearful consequences of thwarting and controlling them. The blood thus shed on the arena was the price they calculated on paying for the safety and tranquillity of the realm.

In theory, at least, the men who were thus thrust forth to engage the wild beasts were condemned criminals; but it was often necessary to resort to the expedient of hiring volunteers to furnish the numbers required, and this seems to prove that the advantage was generally on the side of the human combatant. The gladiators, although their profession might be traced by antiquarians to the combats of armed slaves around the pyre of their master, ending in their mutual destruction in his honour, were devoted to no certain death. They were generally slaves purchased for the purpose, but not unfrequently free men hired with liberal wages; and they were in either case too costly articles to be thrown away with indifference. They were entitled to their discharge after a few years’ service, and their profession was regarded in many respects as a public service, conducted under fixed regulations. Under the emperors, indeed, express laws were required to moderate the ardour even of knights and senators to descend into the arena, where they delighted to exhibit their courage and address in the face of danger. Such was the ferocity engendered by the habitual use of arms, so soothing to the swordsman’s vanity the consciousness of skill and valour, so stimulating to his pride the thunders of applause from a hundred thousand admirers, that the practice of mortal combat, however unsophisticated nature may blench at its horrors, was actually the source perhaps of more pleasure than pain to the Roman prize-fighters. If the companions of Spartacus revolted and slew their trainers and masters, we may set against this instance of despair and hostility the signal devotion of the gladiators of Antonius, who cut their way through so many obstacles in a fruitless effort to succour him. But the effect of such exhibitions upon the spectators themselves was wholly evil; for while they utterly failed in supplying the bastard courage for which they were said to be designed, they destroyed the nerve of sympathy for suffering which distinguishes the human from the brute creation.[c]

SHEPPARD’S ESTIMATE OF THE GLADIATORIAL CONTEST

The gladiatorial combats were, above all things else, the distinctive characteristics of Rome. Rome, in her fallen days, without virtue, without faith, without trust in her gods or in herself, loved, believed in, deified one idol still--Homicide. The butcheries of the amphitheatre exerted a charm upon the minds of men, for which literature, art, philosophy, religion, and the simple enjoyments of domestic life were flung aside. Existence became a frightful phantasmagoria--an alternation of debauch and blood.

The practice itself can be traced back to one of the darkest superstitions of the human mind. It originated in the barbarous instinct of the savage to sacrifice his victim upon the tomb of the dead as a satisfaction, and perhaps as an attendant upon the departed spirit. The example, from whatever source derived, was first set to the Roman people by Marcus and Decimus Brutus, who matched together gladiators in the Forum Boarium, for the purpose of casting unprecedented éclat upon the obsequies of their father, 264 B.C. The seed fell upon fruitful ground, for it soon grew and ripened into a harvest more destructive than the dragon’s teeth of Grecian fable. The wealth and ingenuity of the Roman aristocracy were taxed to the uttermost to content the populace and provide food for the indiscriminate slaughter of the circus, where brute fought with brute and man with man, or where the skill and weapons of the latter were matched against the strength and ferocity of the first. In one day Pompey poured six hundred lions into the arena. Augustus delighted the multitude with the sight of four hundred and twenty panthers. Twenty elephants, Pliny tells us, contended against a band of six hundred Gætulian captives. The games given by Trajan lasted for more than one hundred and twenty days. Ten thousand gladiators descended to combat, and more than ten thousand beasts were slain. Titus, that “delight of the human race,” had upwards of five thousand animals slaughtered in a single day. Every corner of the earth was ransacked for some strange creature whose appearance was hailed with frantic applause by the spectators. We hear of camelopards, white elephants, and the rhinoceros. Scaurus produced upon the stage a hippopotamus and five crocodiles. Game of the nobler sorts became scarce. The Roman populace was as indignant with those who in any way damaged its supplies, as the country sportsman is with a poacher or with the unlucky culprit who has made away with a fox. In the time of Theodosius it was forbidden by law to destroy a Gætulian lion, even in self-defence.

But the death-agonies of the wild animals of the desert were too tame a spectacle to satisfy the Roman thirst for blood. It was when man strove with man, and when all that human strength and skill, increased by elaborate training and taxed to the uttermost, could do, was put forth before their unrelenting eyes, that the transport of their sanguinary enthusiasm was at its height. It is impossible to describe the aspect of the amphitheatre at such a time. The audience became frantic with excitement; they rose from their seats; they yelled; they shouted their applause, as one blow more ghastly than another was dealt by lance, or sword, or dagger, and the life-blood spouted forth. “Hoc habet”--“he has it, he has it!”--was the cry which burst from ten thousand throats, and was re-echoed, not only by a debased and brutalised populace, but by the lips of royalty, by purple-clad senators and knights, by noble matrons, and even by those consecrated maids whose presence elsewhere saved the criminal from his fate, but whose function here it was to consign the suppliant to his doom by reversing the thumb upon his appeal for mercy. His blood was soon licked up by the thirsty sand, or concealed beneath the sawdust sprinkled over it by the ready attendant; his body dragged hastily from the stage by an iron hook, and flung into a gory pit; his existence forgotten, and his place supplied by another and yet another victim, as the untiring work of death went on.

And we must remember that these things were not done casually, or under the influence of some strange fit of popular frenzy. They were done purposely, systematically, and calmly; they formed the staple amusement, I had almost said the normal employment, of a whole people, whose one audible cry was for “panem et circenses”--“bread and blood.” Neither were they fostered by the brutalised habits and associations which surround the cockpit or the prize-ring. When men were “butchered to make a Roman holiday,” it was among all the delicate appliances of the most refined sensualism. An awning, gorgeous with purple and gold, excluded the rays of the midday sun; sweet strains of music floated in the air, drowning the cries of death; the odour of Syrian perfumes overpowered the scent of blood; the eye was feasted by the most brilliant scenic decoration, and amused by elaborate machinery; and, as a crowning degradation to the whole, the Paphian chamber of the courtesan arose beside the bloody den into which were flung the mangled bodies of men and brutes.

Such things seem impossible to those who live beneath a civilisation which Christianity has influenced, however imperfectly, by its presence. And indeed it needs much--the concurrent testimony of poet, historian, and philosopher; the ruins of a hundred amphitheatres before our eyes; the frescoes of the Museo Borbonico; the very programmes of the performance, which something higher than accident has preserved; the incidental witness of an inspired apostle--it needs all this to convince us of the truth. But they are true, undisputed facts of history, and facts which carry with them no obscure intimation of the reasons which worked the fall of the imperial city. They prove that she deserved to fall, and by the hands of those in whose persons she had outraged humanity. It was not a poet remarkable for overstraining the religious sentiment of divine retribution, who wrote:

“Shall he expire, And unavenged! Arise, ye Goths! and glut your ire.”

The gladiator, whether directly a captive or a refractory slave, was generally the child of those races who wreaked, in after times, a bloody vengeance upon the city of blood. And if her own degenerate sons, freedman, knight, or senator, nay, even her degraded daughters, descended into the arena and combated by his side, this could only bespeak her more entire debasement and unfitness to direct the destinies of the world.[i]

FOOTNOTES

[36] [It is well to bear in mind that a more optimistic view of the early empire has its supporters. As has already been pointed out, there are different estimates of such emperors as Tiberius. It is urged, also, that the cruelties and vices of the emperors affected but a limited circle; and that meantime the provinces might be well governed, healthful, and prosperous. It has been alleged, _e.g._, that Tiberius and Domitian ruled the provinces better than the Antonines.]

[37] The Appian way was the fashionable drive of the Roman nobility.

[38] The Romans rode in carriages on a journey, but rarely for amusement, and never within the city. Even beyond the wall it was considered disreputable to hold the reins one’s self, such being the occupation of the slave or hired driver. Juvenal ranks the consul, who creeps out at night to drive his own chariot, with the most degraded of characters: that he should venture to drive by daylight, while still in office, is an excess of turpitude transcending the imagination of the most sarcastic painter of manners as they were. And this was a hundred years later than the age of Augustus. See Juvenal, VIII, 145.

[39] The _leges Juliæ_ allowed two hundred sesterces for a repast on ordinary days, three hundred on holidays, one thousand for special occasions, such as a wedding, etc. Gellius[d] II, 24.

[40] The structor or carver was an important officer at the sideboard. Carving was even taught as an art, which, as the ancients had no forks (χειρονομᾶν, to manipulate, was the Greek term for it), must have required grace as well as dexterity. Moreau de Jonnès observes, with some reason, that the invention of the fork, apparently so simple, deserves to be considered difficult and recondite. The Chinese, with their ancient and elaborate civilisation, have failed to attain to it.