SCENES IN THE COLOSSEUM.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2531, 29 September 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

SCENES IN THE COLOSSEUM.

One evening, more than a quarter of a einlury ajro, I was seated on one of tin topmost of the ruined seats of the Colosseum. It was a Friday, and the winter sun w.is beginning to set. It happened that I was absolutely alone in the mighty building, enjoying the stillness of unbroken thoughts. In such a scene, at such an hour, it was easy to understand how the ruins if the Colosseum had suggested to Gibbon the great subject of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Still inort! immediately might the spectacle suggest a history of the Rise, a»d ulas ! also of the Corruption of the.Christian Faith. It scarcely required an effort of the imagination to call up that" noble wreck in ruinous perfection," the vanished scenes with which it has been connected. All day long streams the terrible libation of human blood ; the very air seems full of the crimson dew and heavy fume of slaughter. The air is rent with shouts, and as the yell of hnhct (he has it!) marks the infliction of some terrible wound the poor wretch drops his shield and raises his arm to implore the pity of the people. But already the brutal populace is drunk with blood, and maddened with the hideous fascination of the spectacle in which human beings like themselves are stabbed or hewn to pieces before their eye*. The attendants go round and touch the fallen with a hot iron to see if they are dead or not. Then there is a pause. For a moment the spectators whose fierce partisanship has been excited to the uttermost are allowed to rest. Odours of wine and saffron are sprinkled among them, while troops of attendants in gay dresses are striking their iron hooks iuto the bodies of the dead gladiators, and dragging them along to the spoliarium, which is already choked with corpses ; and young boys rake the ground, and Ethiopian slaves sprinkle white sawdust or sand over those crimson patches and ghastly stains which make the soil so slippery. Then the gates of the wildbeast cages are suddenly drawn up and out leap a multitude of lions, bears, tigers, panthers, and wild boars, goaded to mad excitement by fear and famine and torture, to tear each other to pieces before the throng. And after that some miserable wretch, dressed up as Mucins Screvola, burns his hand in the flame without a cry ; or in the guise of Hercules mounts the mimic funeral pyre and is consumed to ashes ; or in the character of Laureolus is hung to a cross and de voured by beasts. Uγ another wretch is burnt in the tunica molesta, a robe smeared with pitcli ; or another is tied to a stake and mangled by a hungry bear ; and others are covered with the skins of wild beasts and are hunted down by packs of dogs ; or amid wild screams of " The Christians to the lions" some old man or gentle maiden stands immovable before tuo Libyan lion's spring, amid the derison of the savage multitude. At last the sun sets upon the ghastly Roman holiday, in which the myriads of citizens have been full fed with the restheticism, anguish and butchery, and go home to their banquets intoxicated with the fumes of slaughter, the poison of sensuous cruelty throbbing in their blood, without one sigh for the waste of all that splendid human life, that strength aud beauty and courage and heroic skill and human passioD. Were they all fiends ? No ; but " damned custom" had so brazin;d fieir hearts that", swept by a common and contagious passion, they were callous to the guilt involved in this horrible hecatomb of cruelty and crime. They were not fiends but they were Pagans.—" Christians in the Colosseum." by Archdeacon Farrar, in Sunday Magazine.