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The eye was never weary in detecting the natural architecture of the mountain acclivities, which, in the constantly varying scenery, formed amphitheatres like old Roman circuses, and now square battlemented crags, like crumbling castles on the Rhine, and again a deep, shady ravine of unknown depth, where lonely mist-wreaths rested like snowdrifts.
One may see, too so tradition holds upon those very amphitheatres the stains of the fires with which Charles Martel smoked them out; and one may see, too, or fancy that one sees, in the aquiline features, the bright black eyes, the lithe and graceful gestures, which are so common in Languedoc, some touch of the old Mahommedan race, which passed like a flood over that Christian land.
Rome, the proud metropolis, had a diameter of eleven miles, and was forty-five miles in circuit, with a population, according to Lipsius, larger than modern London. It had seventeen thousand palaces, thirty theatres, nine thousand baths, and eleven amphitheatres, one of which could seat eighty-seven thousand spectators. The gilding of the roof of the capitol cost fifteen millions of our money.
The Bureau of Science manufactured the sera and prophylactics required by the Bureau of Health in its work. The two large operating amphitheatres in the Philippine General Hospital were planned with especial reference to the accommodation of students, who could pass along a gallery from one to the other.
Seeing that this chain of the Carpathians was here and there circular in form and with high peaks, they concluded that it anciently formed important amphitheatres. These mountainous circles must have been broken up by the vast cataclysm to which the Sea of Rains was due.
The conversation flagged as the lovers walked in the twilight. The sun was sinking behind the low hedge of yonder level meadow. Far away in mountainous regions the same orb was setting in rocky amphitheatres, distant, unapproachable. Here in this level land he seemed to be going down into a grave behind that furthest hedge.
Julius Cæsar, whose clemency has been so greatly extolled, 'executed the whole senate of the Veneti; permitted a massacre of the Usipetes and Tencteri; sold as slaves 40,000 natives of Genabum; and cut off the right hands of all the brave men whose only crime was that they held to the last against him their town of Uxellodunum. No slaughter in history is more terrible than that which took place at Jerusalem under the general who was called 'the delight of the human race, and when the last spasm of resistance had ceased, Titus sent Jewish captives, both male and female, by thousands to the provincial amphitheatres to be devoured by wild beasts or slaughtered as gladiators.
There was another form of spectacle which gave great pleasure to our ancestors; and often in the market-places of old towns, or in open fields, at the bottom of natural amphitheatres near some of the ancient monasteries, were Scriptural plays performed, which were called Miracles, or Mysteries, because they treated of scenes taken from the Old or New Testament, or from the lives of saints and martyrs.
To the primitive ages, to the reign of the Pelasgi, correspond the subterraneous excavations of Macri, and the Phrygian monuments of Seïdï Gazi; to the Babylonian power, the ruins of Bagdad, and the artificial mountains of Van; to the Hellenic period, the baths, the amphitheatres, and the ruins which strew the coast of the Archipelago; to the Roman empire, the military roads which traverse in every direction the whole Peninsula; to the Greeks of the middle ages, the church of Iznik.
The hills in the south became gradually lower and finally dwindled away into the plain. Alongside the plateau, arranged in amphitheatres, large square fields stripped of their harvest lay here and there in the primitive forest; in other places, innumerable oaks and elms had been dethroned to give place to plantations of cherry-trees, whose symmetrical rows promised an abundant harvest.
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