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The love of theatrical representations, which has proved so potent and unceasing with other nations, had but a brief period of prevalence in Rome, its milder enjoyment vanishing before the wild excitement of the gladiatorial struggle and the spectacle of rending beasts and slaughtered martyrs.
Most of the men who talked of him did it in about the manner of spectators of the gladiatorial combats in ancient Rome: they admired the endurance and courage of the man, but seldom did it occur to them to stretch out a hand to help him. There were exceptions to this rule, however.
Another essential but demoralizing feature of Roman society, were the games and festivals and gladiatorial shows, which accustomed the people to unnatural excitements, and familiarity with cruelty and suffering. They made all ordinary pleasures insipid. They ended in making homicide an institution.
"They have got it into their heads," said he, "that the gladiatorial element is the curse of most modern sport. They tremble especially for the professional gladiator. And they want to know whether my experience tallies with their theory." "So they say!" "They quote the case of a league player, sus per coll., and any number of suicides. It really is rather in my public line."
What might have come of it, had the national kings from the mountains of Auvergne or of the Balkan, and not runaway gladiatorial slaves, been at the head of the victorious bands, it is impossible to say; as it was, the movement remained notwithstanding its brilliant victories a rising of robbers, and succumbed less to the superior force of its opponents than to internal discord and the want of definite plan.
'I will get my Sherlock Holmes system to work. What was the other team in the modern gladiatorial contest at which you saw Comrade Rossiter? 'Manchester United. 'And Comrade Rossiter, I should say, was a Manchester man. 'I believe he is. 'Then I am prepared to bet a small sum that he is nuts on Manchester United. My dear Holmes, how ! Elementary, my dear fellow, quite elementary.
What comes next, comrades?" Arvina, it is true, was for a moment both shocked and disgusted at the heartless and unfeeling tone; but few if any of the others evinced the like tenderness; for it must be remembered, in the first place, that the Romans, inured to sights of blood and torture daily in the gladiatorial fights of the arena, were callous to human suffering, and careless of human life at all times; and, in the second, that Stoicism was the predominant affectation of the day, not only among the rude and coarse, but among the best and most virtuous citizens of the republic.
I considered, besides, that I was not engaging myself to exhibit public games or gladiatorial combats, but to establish an annual fund for the support and education of young men of good families but scanty means.
Familiarity with such sights must have hardened the heart and rendered the mind insensible to refined pleasures. What theatres are to the French, what bull-fights are to the Spaniards, what horse-races are to the English, these gladiatorial shows were to the ancient Romans. The ruins of hundreds of amphitheatres attest the universality of the custom, not in Rome alone, but in the provinces.
It kept the unruly poorer classes quiet in the towns by furnishing them with bread, and sometimes with wine, meat, and clothes. It provided amusement for them by expensive entertainments, such as races and gladiatorial combats.
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