up to it, the sound of an advancing chorus
was heard at last, chanting the words of a sacred song, or hymn to
Diana; for the spectacle of the amphitheatre was, after all, a [237]
religious occasion. To its grim acts of blood-shedding a kind of
sacrificial character still belonged in the view of certain religious
casuists, tending conveniently to soothe the humane sensibilities of so
pious an emperor as Aurelius, who, in his fraternal complacency, had
consented to preside over the shows.

Artemis or Diana, as she may be understood in the actual development of
her worship, was, indeed, the symbolical expression of two allied yet
contrasted elements of human temper and experience--man's amity, and
also his enmity, towards the wild creatures, when they were still, in a
certain sense, his brothers. She is the complete, and therefore highly
complex, representative of a state, in which man was still much
occupied with animals, not as his flock, or as his servants after the
pastoral relationship of our later, orderly world, but rather as his
equals, on friendly terms or the reverse,--a state full of primeval
sympathies and antipathies, of rivalries and common wants--while he
watched, and could enter into, the humours of those "younger brothers,"
with an intimacy, the "survivals" of which in a later age seem often to
have had a kind of madness about them. Diana represents alike the
bright and the dark side of such relationship. But the humanities of
that relationship were all forgotten to-day in the excitement of a
show, in which mere cruelty to animals, their useless suffering and
death, formed [238] the main point of interest. People watched their
destruction, batch after batch, in a not particularly inventive
fashion; though it was expected that the animals themselves, as living
creatures are apt to do when hard put to it, would become inventive,
and make up, by the fantastic accidents of their agony, for the
deficiencies of an age fallen behind in this matter of manly amusement.
It was as a Deity of Slaughter--the Taurian goddess who demands the
sacrifice of the shipwrecked sailors thrown on her coasts--the cruel,
moonstruck huntress, who brings not only sudden death, but rabies,
among the wild creatures that Diana was to be presented, in the person
of a famous courtesan. The aim at an actual theatrical illusion, after
the first introductory scene, was frankly surrendered to the display of
the animals, artificially stim