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Updated: June 24, 2025
In the beginning of October on a very fine afternoon I drove with these two friends to the Colosaeum, a monument which, for the hundredth time even, I had viewed with a new admiration; my friends partook of my sentiments. I shall give the conversation which occurred there in their own words.
Onu. This last fact recalls to my recollection an idea which Philalethes started in the remarkable dream which he would have us believe occurred to him in the Colosaeum, namely that no important facts which can be useful to society are ever lost; and that, like these stones, which though covered with ashes or hidden amongst ruins, they are sure to be brought forward again and made use of in some new form.
But prepare your mind, and you shall at least catch a glimpse of those states which the highest intellectual beings that have belonged to the earth enjoy after death in their transition to now and more exalted natures." The voice ceased, and I appeared in a dark, deep, and cold cave, of which the walls of the Colosaeum formed the boundary.
When I had cast my eyes on the varied features of this melancholy scene, which was now lighted by a rising sun, I heard again the same voice which had astonished me in the Colosaeum, and which said, "See the birth of Time! Look at man in his newly created state, full of youth and vigour. Do you see aught in this state to admire or envy?"
The mechanical agency of electricity is very limited; the effects of lightning have, however, been witnessed, even in some of the great monuments of antiquity, the Colosaeum at Rome, for instance; and only last year, in a violent thunderstorm, some of the marble, I have been informed, was struck from the top of one of the arches in this building, and a perpendicular rent made, of some feet in diameter.
I was on the top of an arcade under a silken canopy, looking down upon the tens of thousands of people who were crowded in the seats of the Colosaeum, ornamented with all the spoils that the wealth of a world can give; I saw in the arena below animals of the most extraordinary kind, and which have rarely been seen living in modern Europe the giraffe, the zebra, the rhinoceros, and the ostrich from the deserts of Africa beyond the Niger, the hippopotamus from the Upper Nile, and the royal tiger and the gnu from the banks of the Ganges.
I saw Ambrosio's countenance kindle at Onuphrio's explanation of his opinions, and he appeared to be meditating an angry reply. I endeavoured to change the conversation to the state of the Colosaeum, with which it had begun.
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