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Updated: May 22, 2025
Their mastery of the arch, their excellent concrete, and their engineering genius, enabled them to produce works in this kind which had had no parallels in the Greek world. Nor had the Greeks felt the same need for such buildings. They had been innocent of gladiatorial shows, and they had been unfortunately too innocent of large conceptions in the way of water-supply.
Unattested as may be the details in these accounts, the statement at least appears to be well founded, that the detestable amusement of gladiatorial combats the gangrene of the later Rome and of the last epoch of antiquity generally first came into vogue among the Etruscans. At any rate on the whole they leave no doubt as to the deep degeneracy of the nation.
It is not to a Titus, a Trajanus, an Antoninus, that we owe the abolition of the bloody gladiatorial games; it is to Jesus Christ. Virtuous unbelievers have not seldom been the apostles of benevolence and humanity, but we rarely see them in the asylums of misery. Reason speaks, but it is religion that makes men act.
By an edict of the Emperor the gladiatorial sports were forbidden for ever; and the Colosseum, thenceforth useless, crumbled slowly away into that vast ruin which remains unto this day, purified, as men well said, from the blood of tens of thousands, by the blood of one true and noble martyr.
Gladiatorial shows and Spanish bull-fights at any rate contributed to the public amusement, which certainly was not the case here. The most confirmed sensation-monger would fight shy of sensation if he knew that it was well on the cards that he would, in his own proper person, be the subject of the next "event." Once we rose and tried to remonstrate, but were sternly repressed by Twala.
While two armies one from the East, one from the North contended fiercely for the possession of Rome, the populace of that city flocked to behold the fight, as if it was a gladiatorial struggle got up for their diversion, and nothing in which they had any personal interest. Tacitus says,
"Next time," it is said in a letter of this period, "we may expect our lackeys to outvote the emancipation-tax." The real powers of the day were the compact and armed bands, the battalions of anarchy raised by adventurers of rank out of gladiatorial slaves and blackguards.
The deep boom of their applause pursued Brinnaria and made her cower. The people would never forget her now. They were in ecstasy. She was their darling. ON the drive homeward from that unforgettable gladiatorial exhibition Manlia and Gargilia shared the second state coach: in the first sat Brinnaria by Causidiena. "My child," Causidiena queried, "what ever made you do it?"
A young gladiator, named Narcissus, was therefore introduced into the room; what passed is not known circumstantially; but, as the emperor was young and athletic, though off his guard at the moment, and under the disadvantage of sickness, and as he had himself been regularly trained in the gladiatorial discipline, there can be little doubt that the vile assassin would meet with a desperate resistance.
Hence the attitude of the Quarter was patronising, as if the Quarter had said: "Yes, he is the greatest violinist in Paris and perhaps in the world; but that's all, and it isn't enough." The young man and the boy made ready for the game as for a gladiatorial display. Their frowning seriousness proved that they had comprehended the true British idea of sport.
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