These great families were rapidly extinguished. Alarmed at the diminishing number of free men, Augustus had made laws to encourage marriage and to punish celibacy. As one might expect, his laws did not remedy the evil. There were so many rich men who had not married that it had become a lucrative trade to flatter them in order to be mentioned in their will; by having no children one could surround himself with a crowd of flatterers. "In the city," says a Roman story-teller, "all men divide themselves into two classes, those who fish, and those who are angled for." "Losing his children augments the influence of a man." =The Shows.=--In the life of this idle people of Rome the spectacles held a place that we are now hardly able to conceive. They were, as in Greece, games, that is to say, religious ceremonies. The games proceeded throughout the day and again on the following day, and this for a week at least. The amphitheatre was, as it were, the rendezvous of the whole free population; it was there that they manifested themselves. Thus in 196, during the civil wars, all the spectators cried with one voice, "Peace!" The spectacle was the passion of the time. Three emperors appeared in public, Caligula as a driver, Nero as an actor, Commodus as a gladiator. =The Theatre.=--There were three sorts of spectacles: the theatre, the circus, and the amphitheatre. The theatre was organized on Greek models. The actors were masked and presented plays imitated from the Greek. The Romans had little taste for this recreation which was too delicate for them. They preferred the mimes, comedies of gross character, and especially the pantomimes in which the actor without speaking expressed by his attitudes the sentiments of the character. =The Circus.=--Between the two hills of the Aventine and the Palatine extended a field filled with race courses surrounded by arcades and tiers of seats rising above them. This was the Circus Maximus. After Nero enlarged it it could accommodate 250,000 spectators; in the fourth century its size was increased to provide sittings for 385,000 people. Here was presented the favorite spectacle of the Roman people, the four-horse chariot race (quadrigæ); in each race the chariot made a triple circuit of the circus and there were twenty-five races in a single day. The drivers belonged to rival companies whose colors they wore; there were at first four of these colors, but they were later reduced to two--the Blue and the Green, notorious in the history of riots. At Rome there was the same passion for chariot-races that there is now for horse-races; women and even children talked of them. Often the emperor participated and the quarrel between the Blues and the Greens became an affair of state. =The Amphitheatre.=--At the gates of Rome the emperor Vespasian had built the Colosseum, an enormous structure of two stories, accommodating 87,000 spectators. It was a circus surrounding an arena where hunts and combats were represented.