ovel request of a
favourite officer, and the grateful creature, in token of his fidelity,
humbly kissed the hand of Ligurius, and followed him from the arena. The
cruel mob, however, angered at being deprived of their anticipated
spectacle of blood, howled with rage, and demanded the crowning scene of
the day's sports--the conflict between the wild beasts and the Christian
martyrs.

These hateful scenes had become the impassioned delight of all classes,
from the Emperors to the "vile plebs" of Rome. Even woman's pitiful
nature forgot its tenderness, and maids and matrons gloated on the cruel
spectacle, and the honour was reserved for the Vestal Virgin to give the
signal for the mortal stroke. Such scenes created a ferocious thirst
for blood throughout society. They overthrew the altar of pity, and
impelled to every excess and refinement of barbarity. Even children
imitated the cruel sport in their games, schools of gladiators were
trained for the work of slaughter, women fought in the arena or lay dead
and trampled in the sand.

It is to the eternal praise of Christianity that it suppressed these
odious contests, and forever averted the sword of the gladiator from the
throat of his victim. The Christian city of Constantinople was never
polluted by the atrocious exhibition. A Christian poet eloquently
denounced the bloody spectacle. A Christian monk, roused to indignation
by the hateful scene, leaped over the barrier to separate the gladiators
in the very frenzy of the conflict. The maddened mob, enraged at this
interruption of their sport, stoned him to death. But his heroic
martydom produced a moral revulsion against the practice, and the laws
of Honorius, to use the language of Gibbon, "abolished forever the human
sacrifices of the amphitheatre."

It remains to notice in another chapter the last scene in the stern
drama of this "Roman holiday."

[Illustration]

FOOTNOTES:

[49] On this very arena perished the venerable Ignatius, linked by
tradition with the Saviour Himself as one of the children whom He took
in His arms and blessed. "Suffer me to be the food of wild beasts," he
exclaimed, "by whom I shall attain unto God. For I am the wheat of God,
and I shall be ground by the teeth of wild beasts, that I may become the
pure bread of Christ."

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE MARTYRS CROWNED.

At a flourish of trumpets the iron-studded doors of the cells in which
the Christians were confined were thrown open, a