The Romans also instituted public games in imitation of the Greeks, on the degrading ‘panis et circenses’ principle. In Greece, Apollo with his nine muses presided over the public games. The Romans had specially-trained gladiators, wrestlers, dancers, and prize-fighters. The competitors at the Greek games were free and independent citizens; with the Romans they were either criminals, runaway slaves, or men condemned to death. Bears, lions, tigers, and elephants were starved, and set against one another, to delight the spectators with their savage brutality. Soon an improvement was effected, and men were arrayed against men with deadly weapons, to amuse men and women, boys and girls, with their skill in murdering; and at last, as a further progressive development in taste, men were pitted against wild beasts. In the Greek tragedy, the ideal sufferings of humanity, struggling in an unequal combat with omnipotent and inexorable fate, were prominently set forth to purify men from their passions by showing the consequences of even unconscious guilt. The Greek tragedy was the national moral conscience brought into the most perfect poetical form. The Romans instituted a cruel reality of _bodily_ suffering; _real_ blood streaming from _real_ limbs; the _real_ rattle in the throat, which signals death; and the _real_ last gasp of an expiring man, afforded them amusement. Like their religion and public games, their literature, with the exception of their satires and law-codes, was matter of fact and imitative. The generation of the Roman products of poetry and prose was the following: Homer engendered Virgil, Hesiod--Lucretius; Pindar--Horace; Æsop--Phædrus; Euripides--Terence; Aristophanes--Plautus; Xenophon--Sallust; Thukydides--Titus Livy; Demosthenes--Cicero. Ovid and Tacitus were the only really original writers; the first faithfully depicted the hollowness of Roman ethics; and the other, in unsurpassed language, drew a historical sketch of the Teutons, mercilessly exposing the contrast between noble simplicity, grandeur and honesty, and the demoralised state of his own country.