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In the last tragedy, it is said that a young sentinel, posted at the entrance of the stage, seeing him in a prison dress and bound with fetters, as the fable of the play required, ran to his assistance. XXII. He had from his childhood an extravagant passion for horses; and his constant talk was of the Circensian races, notwithstanding it was prohibited him.
Thereto not far from this he had set Rome and the lawless rape of the Sabines in the concourse of the theatre when the great Circensian games were celebrated, and a fresh war suddenly arising between the people of Romulus and aged Tatius and austere Cures. Next these same kings laid down their mutual strife and stood armed before Jove's altar with cup in hand, and joined treaty over a slain sow.
Those Circensian games, and indeed all the public spectacles, are fresh proofs of what I said just now; that if a bad people earn bad government, still a bad government makes a bad people. They were the most extraordinary instance which the world ever saw, of a government setting to work at a vast expense to debauch its subjects.
It was considered almost as sacred as the Via Sacra itself, being the route taken by the great procession of the Circensian games, in which the statues of the gods were carried in cars from the Capitol through the Forum to the circus.
Seventeen years later two curule aediles furnished sixty-three African lions and forty bears and elephants for the Circensian games.
He told us then how one afternoon at Triers, when the Emperor was taken up with the Circensian games, he and three others, his companions, went out to walk in gardens near the city walls, and there as they happened to walk in pairs, one went apart with him, and the other two wandered by themselves; and these, in their wanderings, lighted upon a certain cottage, inhabited by certain of Thy servants, poor in spirit, of whom is the kingdom of heaven, and there they found a little book containing the life of Antony.
XLV. He generally viewed the Circensian games himself, from the upper rooms of the houses of his friends or freedmen; sometimes from the place appointed for the statues of the gods, and sitting in company with his wife and children.
He likewise presided at the games celebrated on account of that victory; and in the Trojan games intermixed with the Circensian, he commanded a troop of the biggest boys.
In another curious respect Pliny was ahead of his times. He had no taste for the Circensian games and the brutalities of the gladiatorial shows. He cannot understand why so many thousands of grown-up people take such a childish pleasure in watching horses running races.
I had by chance a passage in hand, which while I was explaining, a likeness from the Circensian races occurred to me, as likely to make what I would convey pleasanter and plainer, seasoned with biting mockery of those whom that madness had enthralled; God, Thou knowest that I then thought not of curing Alypius of that infection.
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