Some of the most famous of the mimic actors were themselves Romans; but the ancient prejudice against the exercise of histrionic art by citizens was never perhaps wholly overcome. Accordingly Greek names figure more conspicuously than Roman in the roll of actors on the Roman stage; and two of these, Bathyllus and Pylades, divided between them, under the mild autocracy of Augustus, the dearest sympathies and favours of the masters of the world. The rivalry of these two competitors for public applause, or rather of their admirers and adherents, broke out in tumultuous disorders, which engaged at last the interference of the emperor himself. “It is better for your government,” said one of them to him, when required to desist from a professional emulation which imperilled the tranquillity of the city—“it is better that the citizens should quarrel about a Pylades and a Bathyllus than about a Pompey and a Cæsar.”
But whatever claims pantomime might have as a legitimate child of the drama, the Roman stage was invaded by another class of exhibitions, for which no such pretensions could be advanced. The vast proportions of the theatre invited a grander display of scenic effects than could be supplied by the chaste simplicity of the Greek chorus, in which the priests or virgins, whatever their number might be, could only present so many repetitions of a single type. The finer sentiment of the upper classes was overpowered by the vulgar multitude, who demanded with noisy violence the gratification of their coarse and rude tastes. Processions swept before their eyes of horses and chariots, of wild and unfamiliar animals; the long show of a triumph wound its way across the stage; the spoils of captured cities, and the figures of the cities themselves were represented in painting or sculpture; the boards were occupied in every interval of more serious entertainment by crowds of rope-dancers, conjurers, boxers, clowns, and posture-makers, men who walked on their hands, or stood on their heads, or let themselves be whirled aloft by machinery, or suspended upon wires, or who danced on stilts, or exhibited feats of skill with cups and balls. But these degenerate spectacles were not the lowest degradation to which the theatres were subjected. They were polluted with the grossest indecencies; and the luxury of the stage, as the Romans delicately phrased it, drew down the loudest indignation of the reformers of a later age. Hitherto at least legislators and moralists had been content with branding with civil infamy the instruments of the people’s licentious pleasures; but the pretext even for this was rather the supposed baseness of exhibiting one’s person for money than the iniquity of the performances themselves. The legitimate drama, which was still an exercise of skill among the Romans, was relegated, perhaps, to the smaller theatres of wood, which were erected year by year for temporary use. There were also certain private theatres, in which knights and senators could exercise their genius for singing and acting without incurring the stigma of public representation.
The appetite for grandeur and magnificence, developed so rapidly among the Romans by the pride of opulence and power, was stimulated by the furious rivalry of the great nobles. The bold and ingenious tribune, Curio, whose talents found a more fatal arena in the contests of the civil wars, was perhaps the first to imagine the form of the double hemicycle, which he executed with an immense wooden structure and a vast mechanical apparatus, by which two theatres, after doing their legitimate duty to the drama, could be wheeled front to front, and combined into a single amphitheatre for gladiatorial spectacles. There can be no doubt that this extraordinary edifice was adapted to contain many thousands of spectators; and there are few perhaps, even of our own engineers, who build tubular bridges and suspend acres of iron network over our heads, who would not shrink from the problem of moving the population of a great city upon a single pair of pivots.
The amphitheatre of Julius Cæsar in the Campus was of wood also, and this, as well as its predecessors, seems to have been taken down after serving the purpose of the day. It remained for Statilius Taurus, the legate of Augustus, to construct the first edifice of this character in stone, and to bequeath to future ages the original model of the magnificent structures which bear that name, some of which still attest the grandeur of the empire in her provinces; but the most amazing specimen of which, and indeed the noblest existing monument of all ancient architecture, is the glorious Colosseum at Rome.
Like most of the splendid buildings of this period, the amphitheatre of Taurus was erected in the Campus Martius, the interior of the city not admitting of the dedication of so large a space to the purpose; though it was rumoured indeed that Augustus had purposed to crown the series of his public works by an edifice of this nature, in the centre of his capital, to be attached perhaps to his forum. While the amphitheatre, however, was a novel invention, the circus, to which it was in a manner supplementary, was one of the most ancient institutions of the city. The founder himself had convened his subjects in the Murcian valley, beneath his cabin on the Palatine, to celebrate games of riding, hunting, and charioteering.
The enclosure in which these shows were annually exhibited was an oblong, curved at the farther end, above six hundred yards in length, but comparatively narrow. The seats which ranged round the two larger sides and extremity of this area (which derived its name of arena from the sand with which it was strewed) were originally cut for the most part out of the rising ground and turfed; less rude accommodation was afterwards supplied by wooden scaffoldings, but the whole space was eventually surrounded by masonry and decorated with all the forms and members of Roman architecture.
The arena was adapted for chariot racing by a partition, a dwarf wall, surmounted with various emblematic devices, which ran along the middle and terminated at either end in goals or ornamented pillars, round which the contending cars were driven a stated number of times. The eye of the spectator, from his position aloft, was carried over this spinal ridge, and he obtained a complete view of the contest, which thus passed and repassed, amidst clouds of dust and roars of sympathising excitement, before his feet. The Romans had from the first an intense delight in these races; and many of the most graphic passages of their poets describe the ardour of the horses, the emulation of their drivers, and the tumultuous enthusiasm of the spectators.
These contests maintained their interest from the cradle to the very grave of the Roman people. The circus of Constantinople, under the Greek designation of Hippodrome, was copied from the pattern of the Roman; and the factions, which divided the favour of the tribes almost from the beginning of the empire, continued to agitate the city of Theodosius and Justinian. The citizens were never satiated with this spectacle, and could sit without flagging through a hundred heats, which the liberality of the exhibiter sometimes provided for them. But the races were more commonly varied with contests of other kinds. All the varieties of the Greek pancratium, such as boxing, wrestling, and running, were exhibited in the circus; gladiators fought one another with naked swords, sometimes in single combat, sometimes in opposing bands.
The immense size of the arena, unfavourable for the exhibition of the duel, was turned to advantage for the display of vast multitudes of wild animals, which were let loose in it to be transfixed with spears and arrows. This practice seems to date from the sixth century, when victorious generals first returned to Rome from the far regions of the teeming East, to ingratiate themselves with the populace by showing them the strange monsters of unknown continents, lions and elephants, giraffes and hippopotami. As in other things, the rivalry of the nobles soon displayed itself in the number of these creatures they produced for massacre; and the favour of the citizens appears to have followed with constancy the champion who treated it with the largest effusion of blood. The circus was too spacious for the eye to gloat upon the expression of conflicting passions, and watch the last ebbings of life; but the amphitheatre brought the greatest possible number of spectators within easy distance of the dead and dying, and fostered the passion for the sight of blood, which continued for centuries to vie in interest with the harmless excitement of the race.
The idea of the theatre is representation and illusion, and the stage is, as it were, magic ground, over which the imagination may glance without restraint and wander at will from Thebes to Athens, from the present to the past or future. But in the amphitheatre all is reality. The citizen, seated face to face with his fellow-citizens, could not for a moment forget either his country or his times. The spectacles here presented to him made no appeal to the discursive faculties; they brought before his senses, in all the hardness of actuality, the consummation of those efforts of strength, skill, and dexterity in the use of arms to which much of his own time and thoughts were necessarily directed.