has admitted them to festive tables; she has sought their love, and not their fear. She has lived, as we should all live, like a member of one great brotherhood, of which all are bound to mutual assistance. She has done good in secret. In the midst of wealth she has been as one who is poor. She has stretched her hand to the shipwrecked; shown his path to the wanderer; divided her bread with the hungry; and has been, as so few are, a friend to the distressed. ‘But she does not go to the theatre! Is that to be accounted a crime? Rather let us erect a statue to a virtue which can still blush for infamies at which so many women dare to be spectators. Is the licence of the Fescennines, and the grossness of the Atellan plays, acted by slaves whom the ancient laws branded with shame, a fit amusement for pure matrons? If these be deemed tolerable, what shall be said of the softer luxury, the subtler indecency, the more fascinating corruption of the modern mimes? Instead of blaming Pomponia for not patronising such spectacles, let us commend her example! ‘Or is it a sign of moroseness and alienation from the customs of her country, that she is never to be seen among the multitudes of every rank and age who gaze with frenzied delight at the gladiatorial shows? Nay, she is to be applauded for shunning scenes so fatal to true morality! It is shocking enough to see noble beasts ruthlessly mangled, and once, at least, a cry of compassion has risen from the dense throngs when they saw that frightful combat between five hundred Gætulians and twenty elephants. But their compassion was for the elephants![66] How much deeper is the compassion due to the unhappy human beings whose carcases encrimson the white sands of the amphitheatre! Augustus tried to check and limit this savagery. To see men torn by wild beasts in the morning, and hacking each other to pieces in the afternoon--and that as a mere amusement, to kill the time--is simply degrading, however much custom may sanction it. It is true that Cicero invented an excuse for his brutality of pleasure, this delirium of homicide, by the absurd plea that it stimulated courage. The courage of the tiger, which leaps with bare breast on the hunter’s steel, exists in the lowest of the human race, without the need for this bloody stimulus. Man should be to man a sacred thing; the only result of gazing at such scenes is to destroy this generous sense of a common humanity. It may be said that the gladiators, or those who fight the wild beasts, are often criminals. Be it so; but are _we_ criminals also? If not, why should we condemn ourselves to the shame of gloating over the supreme agony and mystery of death? ‘But Pomponia is charged with speaking as though there were but one God. Well, do we not read even in the sacred poems of Orpheus-- ‘“One God, one Hades, one Sun, and one Dionysus?”