CHAPTER XIV - AMAZEMENT
AURELIUS returned from Syria with his victorious army in the nine hundred and twenty-ninth year of Rome, 176 of our era, ten years after the great pestilence. He had merely crushed a local rebellion, but a vast coalition of nomadic Arab tribes of the desert had been allied with the rebels, and to the Romans it seemed that their Emperor had won a great victory in a mighty campaign. Aurelius humored their mood, and with good judgment, for they needed all the encouragement possible. He arranged to have his return celebrated by shows of all kinds, theatrical performances, fights of gladiators, beast fights, horse-races uncountable and above all, by that thrilling procession of a victor and his armed soldiers through the city along the Sacred Street, up to the great temple on the Capitol, which was the highest honor an army and a commander could receive at the hands of the Roman government, which signalized a notable victory over notable odds, which was called a triumph. Of triumphs Rome had seen fewer than three hundred in more than nine hundred years. Not one of the three hundred had been as magnificent as the triumph of Aurelius.
Its auxiliary spectacles were similarly magnificent. In particular the gladiatorial shows surpassed anything within the memory of the oldest living spectator.
Causidiena, whose eyes troubled her greatly, found that watching the triumphal procession caused her so much pain that she absented herself from the remaining shows. To all of these, races, beast-fights and combats of gladiators, she insisted that the other five Vestals should go together. The arrangement was unusual, but no one could object, for no one would hint or even think that the sacred fire would be in any danger of going out with such a Chief Vestal as Causidiena caring for it or that she needed any other Vestal to assist her. Likewise her five colleagues were genuinely pleased that not one of them would miss any part of the shows.
As the number was odd, Causidiena decreed that they should be conveyed to the spectacles each in her own state coach, attended by her maid of honor. The maids, of course, did not sit with the Vestals, but had seats far back with the populace.
In their luxurious private box in the Colosseum the five Vestals sat in the ample front row arm-chairs. They were seated not according to seniority, but Numisia in the middle, Meffia and Brinnaria, as the youngest, on either side of her, Gargilia next Meffia, and Manlia next Brinnaria.
In the Imperial loge near them Aurelius, now for more than a year a widower, presided over the games, clad in his gorgeous silk robes and attended by his fifteen-year-old son Antoninus, afterward known by his nickname of “Commodus.” The four tiers of the Colosseum were packed with spectators, pontiffs, senators, nobles, ambassadors magistrates and other notables in the front seats along the coping of the arena wall, lesser notables in the first tier, well-to-do persons in the second tier, traders and manufacturers and such like in the third tier and the commonalty in the fourth.
Besides the ninety thousand seated spectators* many thousand more stood in the galleries, in the openings of the stairways, in any place where a foothold could be found and from which a view could be obtained. The outlook from the Vestals’ box was across the level sand to the gigantic curve of seats, all hidden under their occupants, so that the interior of the Amphitheatre was a vast expanse of flower-crowned heads, eager faces and waving fans.
*The author forgets himself. Earlier in the book he
describes an audience of 100,000 as Brinnaria tells the
emperor how she felt down on the sand in her shift, with
“two hundred thousand eyes” (implying one hundred thousand
people) staring at her. In fact, the Colosseum could handle
an audience of about 45 to 50 thousand.—GB ed.
During that second day of gladiatorial fighting Manlia had several times said to Brinnaria: