with amused contempt, that Seneca and other writers of the first century were unanimous in their condemnation of Greek athletics, and that the Olympic competitor became the butt of the epigrammatist. That Olympia survived even this degradation is perhaps the strongest proof of its vitality. While the emperors were introducing Greek festivals into Italy, the influence of Rome was degrading and brutalizing the public taste of Greece. Gladiatorial shows had been introduced into the East nearly two centuries before Christ. They had long been popular with the cosmopolitan crowds of Antioch and Alexandria. In Greece they found a congenial home in the equally cosmopolitan crowd of Corinth, which, refounded as a Roman colony by Julius Caesar, quickly regained her commercial supremacy, and eclipsed even the records of her past in wealth and luxury and vice. Athens followed and even improved upon the example set by her rival. For while at Corinth the gladiatorial shows had been held in a ravine outside the city, at Athens they were exhibited in the theatre of Dionysus.[248] The growing love of excitement and bloodshed is evident in boxing. The caestus had, as we have seen, become gradually more ponderous and more murderous, and boxing consequently less scientific. Every one is familiar with the description of the boxing match in the _Aeneid_. The brutal, unscientific fight is in perfect keeping with the ponderous character of the weapons, and even the gentle and refined Vergil can only represent a heroic fight by heaping horror upon horror, and by ascribing the heavy caestus to heroic times, he actually reverses the whole history of boxing. We should not perhaps take Vergil’s description as typical of Greek boxing even in his day, but only of the feeling at Rome, where scientific boxing was of so little account that even Augustus preferred to watch a fight between two street roughs to a match between trained boxers. But the brutality of boxing even in Greece is strikingly illustrated in a collection of epigrams written by or collected by one Lucilius in the reign of Nero. Their tone of persiflage, so different from that of the early Greek epigrammatist, is just what we should expect from such an age. Some of them are skits upon the athletes or would-be athletes of the age; a whole series are devoted to describing the disfigurement and mutilation of the boxer. Here is an old translation of one of them which may be taken as typical of them all:— This victor, glorious in his olive wreath, Had once eyes, eyebrows, nose, and ears and teeth. But turning cestus champion, to his cost, These, and still worse! his heritage he lost, For by his brother su’d, disowned, at last Confronted with his picture he was cast.[249]