enjoying the
pleasures of hunting and fishing, banqueting and revelling, surrounded
by the most amusing people he could find. Many of these were writers,
artists, and actors. Actors were looked down upon in Rome, but Roscius
the tragedian was a great friend of Sulla's, for he scorned all such
notions as unreal. Always Sulla had provoked the Romans by his power of
casting off serious cares when he sat down at table and by what they
thought his ill-timed jests. They did not understand his view of life.
To him it was all a play, not a very good play: out of which, if one
were lucky, one might get some entertainment. He had been lucky: chance
was his goddess and he believed in nothing higher. Before he died, at
the age of sixty, he wrote his own epitaph, which was inscribed on the
great monument set up to him in the Campus Martius: 'No friend ever did
me so much good or enemy so much harm but I repaid him with interest.'

[Illustration: SCENE FROM A TRAGEDY
Terra-cotta relief]

[Illustration: CUTLER'S FORGE]

VIII

The New Rome

With the death of Sulla a new period of Roman history begins, a brief
and in many ways brilliant half-century, about which we know far more
than we do of any earlier time, since we possess the works, in writing,
architecture, sculpture, of the men, or of some of them, who helped to
make it. Roman life in these fifty years is, in many respects,
startlingly like that of our own day. True, the great discoveries of
science had not been achieved; there were no motors, telephones or
lifts, no railways, no electric light or power, no illustrated
papers--indeed the first newspaper of any kind was a small sheet issued
by Caesar. But in the things they did and said and thought about, and in
the way they acted and spoke and thought about them, the Romans who
lived in the sixty odd years before the birth of Christ were very much
like the Englishmen of our own day. The comfort of the lives of the
well-to-do, with their elegant town houses and charming country villas,
furnished with beautiful things brought from all parts of the world,
depended on the labour of innumerable slaves. In many ways, however,
these slaves were not worse off than the poor factory workers of our
great towns; in some they were more fortunate. The lot of those who were
being trained to fight in the games was certainly dreadful; but those
owned by private persons were for the most part kindly treated and could
and often