Sometimes with traps deceive, with line and string
To catch wild birds and beasts, encompassing
The grove with dogs, and out of bushes firing.
———et nidos aviumscrutari, &c.
[3270]Tantalus a labris sitiens fugientia captat
Flumina;
Every palace, every city almost hath its peculiar walks, cloisters, terraces, groves, theatres, pageants, games, and several recreations; every country, some professed gymnics to exhilarate their minds, and exercise their bodies. The [3272]Greeks had their Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian, Nemean games, in honour of Neptune, Jupiter, Apollo; Athens hers: some for honour, garlands, crowns; for [3273]beauty, dancing, running, leaping, like our silver games. The [3274]Romans had their feasts, as the Athenians, and Lacedaemonians held their public banquets, in Pritanaeo, Panathenaeis, Thesperiis, Phiditiis, plays, naumachies, places for sea-fights, [3275]theatres, amphitheatres able to contain 70,000 men, wherein they had several delightsome shows to exhilarate the people; [3276] gladiators, combats of men with themselves, with wild beasts, and wild beasts one with another, like our bull-baitings, or bear-baitings (in which many countrymen and citizens amongst us so much delight and so frequently use), dancers on ropes. Jugglers, wrestlers, comedies, tragedies, publicly exhibited at the emperor's and city's charge, and that with incredible cost and magnificence. In the Low-Countries (as [3277]Meteran relates) before these wars, they had many solemn feasts, plays, challenges, artillery gardens, colleges of rhymers, rhetoricians, poets: and to this day, such places are curiously maintained in Amsterdam, as appears by that description of Isaacus Pontanus, rerum Amstelrod. lib. 2. cap. 25. So likewise not long since at Friburg in Germany, as is evident by that relation of [3278]Neander, they had Ludos septennales, solemn plays every seven years, which Bocerus, one of their own poets, hath elegantly described:
[3279]At nunc magnifico spectacula structa paratu
Quid memorem, veteri non concessura Quirino,
Ludorum pompa, &c.