the combat between the lions, and these again were the forerunners of
a more bloody bout between the hyenas and the crocodiles.

At last blood had begun to flow. The audience sniffed its sickening
odour with a thrill of nostril and brain, and tongues and lips became
parched with the fever of desire for more.

The other items--the play, the naval pageant, the scenes of hunting and
combat of beasts amongst themselves--these were only the prologue. The
real spectacle was at last to commence. For this the Romans
thirsted--patricians and plebs alike, rich and poor, man, woman and
child. These shows were their very life; they constituted the essence of
their entire being; for these they rose at midnight and stood waiting,
hour upon hour, that they might be near enough to smell the blood when
it reddened the sand of the arena, and to see the last throe of agony on
the face of those who fell in combat.

"Habet! Habet! Habet!"

The cry became more insistent and more hoarse. See the men and women
leaning over the edge of the tribunes, their eyes wide open, their hands
outstretched with thumb pointing relentlessly the way of death.

"Habet! Habet!" shrieked the women when a prostrate figure lay writhing
on the ground, and the victor with head erect demanded the final
verdict.

And up in the imperial tribune the Caesar jested and laughed, the
standards waved above his head, the striped awning threw a cool blue
shadow over his gorgeous robes and the jewel-crowned heads of the
Augustas.

The rest of the gigantic arena was a blaze of riotous colour now, with
the mid-morning's sun darting its rays almost perpendicularly on the
south side of the huge oval place. A sea of heads gold and brown, ruddy
and black oscillating in unison to right or left like waters driven by
the tide, as the combatants down below shifted their ground across the
floor of the arena--fans of coloured feathers swinging, mantles caught
by a passing breeze, every grain of sand on the floor of the arena a
minute mirror radiating the light, everything glowed with an intensity
of colour rendered all the more vivid by contrast with the dense shadows
thrown against the marble walls.

On the south side every shade of russet and brown and green showed in
the mantles and the tunics of the plebs, and seemed flecked with vivid
gold under the light of the sun, whilst in the tribunes of the rich on
the opposite side cool tones of amethyst and chrysoprase were veiled in