The Amphitheater, judging from what is left of it, must have been a structure of enormous size—it measured a fifth of a mile in circumference—and of extreme magnificence, for it was built when Rome was intoxicated by her wealth and power. Here, during those blood-drenched years when pagan Rome sought vainly to stamp out the steadily spreading cult founded by the Man of Nazareth, that “white-robed multitude” of martyrs died horribly—some on the cross, some at the stake, others by the claws and fangs of snarling beasts. How little could their executioners have dreamed that, in the fullness of time, one of the dungeons in which the martyrs awaited death would be transformed into a Christian chapel dedicated to two of the most illustrious of them, the twenty-two-year-old Perpetua, who, accompanied by her friend Felicitas, left her parents and her baby-in-arms behind, and walked unafraid into the arena to meet the lions! No wonder that Tertullian of Carthage wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” For the simple, loving faith preached by the humble peasant of Judea has spread around the world and is to-day a living force, while the men who sought to stamp it out are remembered only by virtue of that fact. Doubtless because of its tragic associations with the early days of Christianity, more excavating work has been done in the Amphitheater than anywhere else in Carthage; the dens for the wild beasts, the dungeons in which were confined the Christians who were sentenced to fight them, and a portion of the vast arena in which these dreadful ordeals took place have been laid bare. They were terribly unequal, those combats between naked men and savage animals, but, despite the fearful odds, a Christian occasionally emerged from them alive, as is testified by the inscription found upon a marble column in one of the subterranean chambers, probably a dungeon. It was scratched with some sharp instrument—perhaps the point of a sword—and consists of the single pregnant word, “_Evasi_”—“I have escaped.” The Circus, of which only the outline remains, was an enormous structure, twenty-three hundred feet in length and accommodating nearly a quarter of a million spectators. The Yale Bowl, the Harvard Stadium, the stands at the Polo Grounds, are insignificant in comparison. In the Circus were held the chariot-races to which the Carthaginians were as whole-heartedly devoted as Americans are to baseball; for if a passion for racing was ingrained in the character of the European Romans, even more was such the case with the peoples of their African possessions, where the love of horses was indigenous.