No scene visited in our prolonged “day” in Rome can be more repellent to non-Roman tastes than that of the amphitheater, but to complete the picture it must not be omitted, although horrid deeds will be dismissed with few words and still less of moralizing. Publius Calvus’s friend, Decimus Cluentius, this year is Prætor. He is a wealthy senator and has been saving money carefully for “his games.” He has already made a good public impression by his program of races in the Circus; now he will “add to the luster of his fame” by a day of contests in the Flavian. Already the notice writers have distributed the list of the gladiators that he has engaged, in every eating-house and wine-room in the city. The impression thus made has been excellent: “Cluentius is living up to his riches. Many of his gladiators are freemen--the finest blades, no running away, the kind of fellows that will stand right up and be butchered in mid-arena. Besides, he’s been lucky enough to get from the præfect a farm steward who was caught insulting his master’s wife--a good dinner for the lions. These fights won’t be as when that miserly Norbanus exhibited--his gladiators were such a cowardly, feeble lot they’d have fallen flat if you breathed on ’em.”[213] =335. The Flavian Amphitheater (Later “Colosseum”).=--Such an exhibition can only be held in the Flavian Amphitheater, the vast structure known to later ages as the “Colosseum.” In Republican days gladiator fights were held in the open Forum or in the Circus, but these were ill-adapted for the purpose. To see the fine points of the combats the audience must be concentrated around the contestants as closely as possible; hence the “amphitheater”--an immense oval of seats looking down upon a central arena. The building of such a quantity of seats out of permanent materials is very expensive and wooden structures were largely used until about 70 A.D., when Vespasian and Titus began their vast “Flavian” (dedicated in 80 A.D. by an enormous beast hunt), now among the chief wonders of Rome. Common report has it that thousands of Titus’s Jewish captives had to toil first on the masonry and then for the most part to lose their lives fighting one another in the opening games.