Despite these attempts--feeble they seem and few--at amelioration and at instilling a higher view of human nature, the amphitheatre still remained “the great slaughter-house.” When we look at Marcus’ statue high in the Pantheon of the Positivists, we must remember another figure, cold and abstracted indeed, but thus all the more convicted of feebleness, under the awning and the perfume sprays and flowers of the Roman amphitheatre looking on with impassive tolerance at the spectacle of human and animal suffering, the daily bread of the most brutal of all populaces. True, he could soothe his soul by a Stoic aphorism on the nothingness of pain, or some other such mockery of human misery--the necessary refuge of those who had no certainty of a larger hope. For mockery truly must any solution of the problem of evil be, and vain comfort, which was not written on Calvary. That Marcus could look on such suffering unmoved; that he could order it for his fellow-man when the turn of the Christians came; this removes him from what Christians look for in their leaders to the land of Promise. It mattered little that he did not take the delight and interest which Faustina, seated by strange irony among the Vestal Virgins, robed in all the magnificence which the Via Nova could produce, took in her favourite gladiators; or which Commodus, the centre of the fastest group of young Roman nobles, manifested at every thrust, eager for the day when he himself could enter the arena as Emperor and fight with the beasts. The mere fact that he could countenance such brutality condemns him to the level of conventional mediocrity. As Pater says: “Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of blindness, of deadness and stupidity.... Yes! what was needed was the heart that would make it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be with the forces that could beget a heart like that.... Surely evil was a real thing, and the wise man wanting in the sense of it, where not to have been, by instinctive election, on the right side was to have failed in life.” The humanity of the age, though unable to effect any appreciable reform of the amphitheatre, did much for the relief of the sick. The great plague brought back from the East by Lucius Verus and his troops was ravaging the Empire. It has been compared to the great plague of Athens, which will live for ever in Thucydides’ vivid phrases, and to the Black Death of the 14th century. Niebuhr says that it was a disaster from which the old world never recovered. Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, and Gaul were darkened by its passing; and in Rome itself, so Dio, a Roman senator, tells us, two thousand men were buried every day. A Golden Age! An age of peace and happiness indeed! Rather an age whose glory is that it was an age of hospitals, of funeral clubs and orphanages; of relief of suffering rather than freedom therefrom.