Gladiatorial shows were first exhibited (B.C. 246) in the Forum Boarium by Marcus and D. Brutus at their father’s funeral, during the Saturnalia (our Christmas) and the Minerva feasts.[887] They were abolished by Constantine ‘the Great’ (A.D. 306–33), but the edict seemed to give them fresh life; Frank prisoners were slaughtered by the hundred in the arena of Trèves. They were finally suppressed (A.D. 404) by Honorius, who made a martyr of the monk Telemachus. I need hardly relate how this meddling ecclesiastic rushed into the amphitheatre to separate the combatants, and was incontinently stoned by ‘the house.’ But the time had come for abolishing these glorious _spectacula_; as mostly happens, long custom and familiarity had merged the use into the abuse, and caused Lactantius to exclaim ‘tollenda est nobis!’ The misuse had begun under Divus Cæsar, who collected so many gladiators for the fights that his enemies became alarmed, and restricted the number. Caligula, the ‘Bootling,’ was devoted to the sport, and made some gladiators captains of his German guards. He deprived the ‘Mirmillones’[888] of certain weapons. One Columbus coming off victorious in a fight, but slightly hurt, he caused the wound to be infused with poison, which got the name of Columbinum. The nervous Claudius (‘Caldius’) assisted at the _spectacula_ ‘muffled up in a pallium, a new fashion!’ Having spared, at the intercession of his four sons, a conquered prize-fighter, he sent a billet round the house reminding the spectators how much it behoved them to get children, since these could procure favour and security for a gladiator. In later years he became savage. If a combatant chanced to fall, especially one of the Retiarii, he ordered him to be butchered that he might enjoy the look of the face in the agonies of death. Two combatants happening to kill each other, he ordered some little knives to be made of their Swords. He also delighted in seeing Bestiarii, and he made the sport most brutal and sanguinary. Nero, during his ‘golden quinquennium,’ ordered that no gladiators, even condemned criminals, should be slain; and he persuaded four hundred senators and six hundred knights, some of unbroken fortunes and unblemished fame, to fight in the arena. He espoused the cause of the Thraces or Parmularians, and often joined in the popular demonstrations in favour of the Prasine or ‘green faction,’ without, however, compromising his dignity or doing injustice. In his later and crueller days,[889] hearing the master of a family of gladiators say that a Thrax was a match for a Mirmillo, but not so for the exhibitor of the games, he had him dragged from the benches into the arena and exposed to the dogs, with this label, ‘A Parmularian guilty of speaking blasphemy.’ And, as ‘Mero’ scandalised the world by his passion for singing and harping, so Commodus degraded himself by amateur gladiatorship. He was cunning of fence, but in the most cowardly way.