The first gladiatorial fighters appear upon the scene about two hundred years before the Christian era, and the strange funeral custom became so fashionable that it was a common thing for a son to celebrate his father’s funeral with a fight in which hundreds of forced combatants took part and fought to the death. Julius Cæsar gave such encouragement to the “sport” that peaceful citizens and political opponents grew alarmed at the rapid growth of the gladiatorial fraternity, who were a standing menace to their city. But, in spite of the endeavours of the more enlightened emperors, the passion for the arena increased, as hundreds of records show. Slaves, prisoners of war, fair-haired Saxons and tattooed Britons, swarthy Moors and Oriental Turks, criminals and Christians, were exhibited and put to death by one another in front of thousands of spectators, who never tired of these holocausts of blood. To-day in Spain, and in her now lost colonies, similar appetite exists for the blood of bulls and horses, and all attempts to put down these gory spectacles meet with violent opposition. The great bullrings in Spain and Mexico still preserve something of the atmosphere, attentuated perhaps, that pervaded the arenas of old, and, mild as the exhibitions are by comparison with the [Illustration: ARCADE OF ARENA AT NIMES.] ancient pastimes, they have enough horror to sicken the strong nerves of Northern people. One cannot wander about the great corridors, or up and down the giant stairways of seats of the Arenas at Arles and Nîmes, without being haunted by the ghosts of the distant past. Here, on the front seats once reserved for magistrates, senators, and patricians, one can picture the richly-robed crowds who patronised the ring. There sat the guilds and corporations whose names were inscribed upon the places reserved for them, as can still be seen upon the Arena at Nîmes. Higher up were the plebeians, the common people, the hundred and one unclassed folk who followed lowly occupations; highest of all, standing outlined against the sky, the dense crowd of slaves, with straining eyes, stretched necks, and bated breath, gazed down upon the combatants, who looked like specks in the distant oval.