lower series divided by simple square Doric pillars, the upper by Corinthian columns, only a few of which still possess their capitals. They are weather-worn and greatly damaged, and it is only by picking out more or less perfect bits, here and there, that evidence of its original beauty can be obtained. Internally, great galleries run round the inside walls, and lead out by flights of steps and passages on to three great ranges of seats. The original seating arrangements have undergone much change, but the traces of the disposition of the Cavea can easily be made out with a little trouble.
The high wall of the Podium is cased with smooth marble, upon the face of which there is a cornice that in former times supported an extra gallery, when the performance was not of a character too dangerous to the spectators. The upper galleries, reserved for the common people and slaves, have been roughly used, for during the eighth century, when the city was threatened by an invasion of the Saracens, a large number of the inhabitants took up their abode within the great ellipse; the arches were built up, and four towers erected at the north and south, east and west, turning the place into a vast fortress. Streets were formed in all directions by the two hundred buildings that grew up, and a marketplace and church were erected. Right on, until about a hundred years ago, when it was cleared by the Mayor and municipality, this town remained a squalid blot upon the city. Two of the four towers still remain.
After the removal of the “town” from the heart of the arena, it was utilised again for the amusements of the people. The first step towards re-establishing spectacles was the annual ceremony of branding the bulls, which was half in the nature of a “bullfight”; and later in the last century bullfights, very much after the fashion of those of Portugal, were staged both here and at Nîmes—the bull being played with in a harmless way without being killed or tortured as in Spain. But this has not proved sufficiently exciting for the Southern blood, and to-day tauromachy in its most aggravated forms obtains in the arenas of Provence: horses and bulls pour out the red heart-blood upon the sanded arena, as did the gladiators, martyrs, and savage beasts of old; and if the Greeks have transmitted their beauty to the womenfolk of Arles, the Romans have been no less successful in implanting in their ancient colony some of their characteristic love of what, to put it mildly, might be called exciting pastimes.
The world of to-day looks back with horror on the Roman holidays, which strangely enough grew out of a religious celebration in honour of the dead. The despised barbarians of the old world burnt victims on the funeral pyre; the proud Romans, exulting in their superiority over the untutored savages, outdid them in barbarity.
The rapid development of the show of dying agony went on from the earliest times, when slaves were first immolated upon the tombs of the illustrious dead, until the time when the Gothic King Theodoric took Arles—one long record of the wanton pouring out of human blood. From an offering to appease the gods, it grew to be a slaughter for the gratification of an insatiable lust for bloodshed in the body politic.
The first gladiatorial fighters appear upon the scene about two hundred years before the Christian era, and the strange funeral custom became so fashionable that it was a common thing for a son to celebrate his father’s funeral with a fight in which hundreds of forced combatants took part and fought to the death. Julius Cæsar gave such encouragement to the “sport” that peaceful citizens and political opponents grew alarmed at the rapid growth of the gladiatorial fraternity, who were a standing menace to their city. But, in spite of the endeavours of the more enlightened emperors, the passion for the arena increased, as hundreds of records show. Slaves, prisoners of war, fair-haired Saxons and tattooed Britons, swarthy Moors and Oriental Turks, criminals and Christians, were exhibited and put to death by one another in front of thousands of spectators, who never tired of these holocausts of blood.
To-day in Spain, and in her now lost colonies, similar appetite exists for the blood of bulls and horses, and all attempts to put down these gory spectacles meet with violent opposition. The great bullrings in Spain and Mexico still preserve something of the atmosphere, attentuated perhaps, that pervaded the arenas of old, and, mild as the exhibitions are by comparison with the
