is! By-and-by he will fight with his visor
down."...

While thus conversing, the first formalities of the show were over. To
these succeeded a feigned combat with wooden swords between the
various gladiators matched against each other. Among these the skill
of two Roman gladiators, hired for the occasion, was the most admired;
and next to them the most graceful combatant was Lydon. This sham
contest did not last above an hour, nor did it attract any very lively
interest except among those connoisseurs of the arena to whom art was
preferable to more coarse excitement; the body of the spectators were
rejoiced when it was over, and when the sympathy rose to terror. The
combatants were now arranged in pairs, as agreed beforehand; their
weapons examined; and the grave sports of the day commenced amid the
deepest silence--broken only by the exciting and preliminary blast of
warlike music.

It was often customary to begin the sports by the most cruel of all;
and some bestiarius, or gladiator appointed to the beasts, was slain
first as an initiatory sacrifice. But in the present instance the
experienced Pansa thought better that the sanguinary drama should
advance, not decrease, in interest; and accordingly the execution of
Olinthus and Glaucus was reserved for the last. It was arranged that
the two horsemen should first occupy the arena; that the foot
gladiators, paired off, should then be loosed indiscriminately on the
stage; that Glaucus and the lion should next perform their part in the
bloody spectacle; and the tiger and the Nazarene be the grand finale.
And in the spectacles of Pompeii, the reader of Roman history must
limit his imagination, nor expect to find those vast and wholesale
exhibitions of magnificent slaughter with which a Nero or a Caligula
regaled the inhabitants of the Imperial City. The Roman shows, which
absorbed the more celebrated gladiators and the chief proportion of
foreign beasts, were indeed the very reason why in the lesser towns of
the empire the sports of the amphitheater were comparatively humane
and rare; and in this as in other respects, Pompeii was the miniature,
the microcosm of Rome. Still, it was an awful and imposing spectacle,
with which modern times have, happily, nothing to compare; a vast
theater, rising row upon row, and swarming with human beings, from
fifteen to eighteen thousand in number, intent upon no fictitious
representation--no tragedy of the stage--but the actual victory