42. King Theodoric to Maximus, Vir Illustris, Consul.

[Flavius Anicius Maximus was Consul a.d. 523.]

Rewards to performers in the Amphitheatre.

'If singers and dancers are to be rewarded by the generosity of the Consul, à fortiori should the Venator, the fighter with wild beasts in the amphitheatre, be rewarded for his endeavours to please the people, who after all are secretly hoping to see him killed. And what a horrible death he dies—denied even the rites of burial, disappearing before he has yet become a corpse into the maw of the hungry animal which he has failed to kill. These spectacles were first introduced as part of the worship of the Scythian Diana, who was feigned to gloat on human gore. The ancients called her the triple deity, Proserpina-Luna-Diana. They were right in one point; the goddess who invented these games certainly reigned in hell.'

The Colosseum (the Amphitheatre of Titus) is described.

The combats with wild beasts are pourtrayed in a style of pompous obscurity. We may dimly discern the form of the bestiarius, who is armed with a wooden spear; of another who leaps into the air to escape the beast's onset; of one who protects himself with a portable wall of reeds, 'like a sea-urchin;' of others who are fastened to a revolving wheel, and alternately brought within the range of the animal's claws and borne aloft beyond his grasp. 'There are as many perilous forms of encounter as Virgil described varieties of crime and punishment in Tartarus. Alas for the pitiable error of mankind! If they had any true intuition of Justice, they would sacrifice as much wealth for the preservation of human life as they now lavish on its destruction.' ['A noble regret,' says Gregorovius ('Geschichte der Stadt Rom.' i. 286), 'in which in our own day every well-disposed Minister of a military state will feel bound to concur with Cassiodorus.']