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Updated: June 22, 2025
Others imputed to him both a saying and an action which were indefensible; for, upon the loss of his fleets by storm, he is reported to have said: "I will conquer in spite of Neptune;" and at the next Circensian games, he would not suffer the statue of that God to be carried in procession as usual. Indeed he scarcely ever ran more or greater risks in any of his wars than in this.
"Would it not please Ruas the king to be the friend of the emperor, a general of the empire, and the acceptor, on each recurring season of the Circensian games, of full two hundred pounds of gold as recompense for service and friendship?" "Say, rather, three hundred pounds," said Eslaw, the chief of the envoys, "and our master may, perchance, esteem it wise and fair."
"During the Circensian games, O Cæsar," he explained, "they hope to raise a tumult amongst the people ... and whilst the attention of thy faithful guard is drawn away from thy sacred person, one of the miscreants is to plunge a dagger in thy throat " Here he was forced to silence by a cry like that of a slaughtered ox, which shook the marble pillars of the hall.
He informed me, that at the last Circensian Games, he sat next a stranger, who, after much discourse on various topics of learning, asked him whether he was an Italian or a Provincial.
Let him be silent in Thy praises, who considers not Thy mercies, which confess unto Thee out of my inmost soul. For he upon that speech burst out of that pit so deep, wherein he was wilfully plunged, and was blinded with its wretched pastimes; and he shook his mind with a strong self-command; whereupon all the filths of the Circensian pastimes flew off from him, nor came he again thither.
From the throne, whence the emperor viewed the Circensian games, a winding staircase descended to the palace; a magnificent edifice, which scarcely yielded to the residence of Rome itself, and which, together with the dependent courts, gardens, and porticos, covered a considerable extent of ground upon the banks of the Propontis between the Hippodrome and the Church of St. Sophia.
Nero offered his own gardens for that spectacle, and exhibited a Circensian game, indiscriminately mingling with the common people in the habit of a charioteer, or else standing in his chariot.
Good reader, they cannot find anybody who will hazard so much as a denarius with them against Messala. There are no colors in the saloon but his. No one thinks of his defeat. Why, they say, is he not perfect in his training? Did he not graduate from an imperial lanista? Were not his horses winners at the Circensian in the Circus Maximus? And then ah, yes! he is a Roman!
Laws of economy, of polity, of health, of all which makes human life endurable, may be ignored and trampled under foot, and are too often, every day, for the sake of present greed, of present passion; self-interest may become, and will become, more and more blinded, just in proportion as it is not enlightened by virtue; till a nation may arrive, though, thank God, but seldom, at that state of frantic recklessness which Salvian describes among his Roman countrymen in Gaul, when, while the Franks were thundering at their gates, and starved and half-burnt corpses lay about the unguarded streets, the remnant, like that in doomed Jerusalem of old, were drinking, dicing, ravishing, robbing the orphan and the widow, swindling the poor man out of his plot of ground, and sending meanwhile to the tottering Caesar at Rome, to ask, not for armies, but for Circensian games.
Nero offered his own gardens for that spectacle, and exhibited a Circensian game, indiscriminately mingling with the common people in the habit of a charioteer, or else standing in his chariot.
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