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Updated: June 22, 2025
With regard to what you consult me about at the present moment, I am not against his superintending the feast of the priests, in the games of Mars, if he will suffer himself to be governed by his kinsman, Silanus's son, that he may do nothing to make the people stare and laugh at him. But I do not approve of his witnessing the Circensian games from the Pulvinar.
You will ask, "How that can possibly be in the midst of Rome?" It was the time of celebrating the Circensian games; an entertainment for which I have not the least taste. They have no novelty, no variety to recommend them, nothing, in short, one would wish to see twice.
All was possest by carelessness and sloth, gluttony, drunkenness, sleep, according to that which the prophet saith: A sleep from the Lord had come over them. It is credible, however shocking, that though Treves was four times taken by the barbarians, it remained just as reckless as ever; and that I quote Salvian still when the population was half destroyed by fire and sword, the poor dying of famine, corpses of men and women lying about the streets breeding pestilence, while the dogs devoured them, the few nobles who were left comforted themselves by sending to the Emperor to beg for Circensian games.
A third cause, which from the first had exercised a most baleful influence upon the arts and upon literature in Rome, had by this time matured its disastrous tendencies towards the extinction of the moral sensibilities. This was the circus, and the whole machinery, form and substance, of the Circensian shows. Why had tragedy no existence as a part of the Roman literature?
He presented the people with a great number and variety of spectacles, as the Juvenal and Circensian games, stage-plays, and an exhibition of gladiators. In the Juvenal, he even admitted senators and aged matrons to perform parts. In the Circensian games, he assigned the equestrian order seats apart from the rest of the people, and had races performed by chariots drawn each by four camels.
Being incensed at the people's applauding a party at the Circensian games in opposition to him, he exclaimed, "I wish the Roman people had but one neck." When Tetrinius, the highwayman, was denounced, he said his persecutors too were all Tetrinius's.
This amulet, at last, he laid aside, from aversion to her memory; but he sought for it again, in vain, in the time of his extremity. VII. When he was yet a mere boy, before he arrived at the age of puberty, during the celebration of the Circensian games , he performed his part in the Trojan play with a degree of firmness which gained him great applause.
XXXIX. The spectacles he exhibited to the people were of various kinds; namely, a combat of gladiators , and stage-plays in the several wards of the city, and in different languages; likewise Circensian games , wrestlers, and the representation of a sea-fight.
It was ordered, that his name should be sung in a solemn procession of the Salii; that crowns of oak, in allusion to his victories, should be placed upon curule chairs in the hall pertaining to the priests of Augustus; and that an effigy of him in ivory should be drawn upon a chariot, preceding the ceremonies of the Circensian games.
He likewise celebrated the Secular games , reckoning not from the year in which they had been exhibited by Claudius, but from the time of Augustus's celebration of them. In these, upon the day of the Circensian sports, in order to have a hundred races performed, he reduced each course from seven rounds to five.
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