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He knew, too, that Tarautas was the name of a hateful and bloodthirsty gladiator which had been given as a nickname to Caesar in Rome; and when he heard the insolent fellow's cry taken up by the mob, who shouted after him, "Tarautas's brother-in-law!" wherever he went, he felt as though he were being pelted with mire and stones.
"I say, Monsieur the Gladiator, why didn't you kill when you were about it? I say, why didn't you kill?" and Monsey held his thumbs down, as he looked in Ralph's face. "Kill whom?" said Ralph. He could not help laughing at the schoolmaster's ludicrous figure and gesture. "Why, that Garth a bad garth a kirk-garth a kirk-warner's garth-a devil's garth Joe Garth?"
Byron has made himself so master of the glories and the wrecks of Rome, that almost everything else that has been said of them seems superfluous. Hawthorne, in his Marble Fawn, comes nearest to him; but Byron's Gladiator and Apollo, if not his Laocoon, are unequalled.
And indeed the smallest bits of marble, the maimed statues, the bas-reliefs in fragments, even the isolated limbs whether the divine arm of a nymph or the sinewy, shaggy thigh of a satyr evoke the splendour of a civilisation full of light, grandeur, and strength. * Best known in England, through Byron's lines, as the Dying Gladiator, though that appellation is certainly erroneous. Trans.
Thus if my theory is correct, the yearly flight of the Roman king was a relic of a time when the kingship was an annual office awarded, along with the hand of a princess, to the victorious athlete or gladiator, who thereafter figured along with his bride as a god and goddess at a sacred marriage designed to ensure the fertility of the earth by homoeopathic magic.
A general cry of joy greeted her, and they were in an instant around her, telling of the wonders of the lawn, how the dying gladiator was lying on the blue damask bed, and the case of stuffed humming-birds on the top of the kitchen dresser, and the poor peacock so frightened that he hid himself in the laurels, and would not come near them.
He could leave the decision to Tarautas with perfect confidence; he was the strongest gladiator in the empire, and he was fighting with a sharp sword against the blunt one in his antagonist's hand, who probably had forgotten in the stable how to wield the sword as he had done of yore. But the German was the son of a chief, and had followed arms from his earliest youth.
The dying gladiator listened with intent interest but keen, professional criticism to the combats of the novel. The reader had got to the point where the young amateur fights the brutal Berks. Berks is winded, but holds his adversary off with a stiff left arm. The amateur's second in the story, an old prize-fighter, shouts some advice to him as to how to deal with the situation. "That's right.
The women, with their yellow complexions, and the bright red blankets they wear folded around the head and shoulders, resemble Indian Squaws. I lately spent three hours in the Museum of the Capitol, on the summit of the sacred hill. In the hall of the Gladiator I noticed an exquisite statue of Diana.
Moreover I had seen him as a gladiator not a few times before that, since Falco, soon after we came to Rome from Africa, because of his affection for me and his tendency to indulge me in every imaginable way and to arrange for me every conceivable pleasure, had contrived to use the influence of some new-found friends to make possible my presence at shows in the Colosseum, and that in as good a seat as was accessible to any free-born Roman not a noble or senator.
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