Slavery has been reproached with being responsible for the horrors of the arena, and a general indifference to the sanctity of human life; but this love of spectacular bloodshed, this indifference to the sufferings and death of human beings and animals, is by no means an exclusive feature of societies in which slavery is an accepted institution. Bull fights are being extended at the present day from Spain to France; bull baiting, bear baiting, badger baiting, prize fighting, cock fighting, were accepted amusements in England till the beginning of the present century, some of them are not unknown to our contemporaries; nor is it easy to distinguish that delight in the sufferings of condemned criminals, or in the encounters between trained combatants, which filled the Roman amphitheatres, from the excitement which drew crowds to look on at the merciless tortures and executions of the period of the Reformation, and led the fashionable friends of Madame de Sevignê to watch a woman being burned alive. So far were gladiatorial combats from being one of the hardships imposed by slavery, that we have repeated references in the early Imperial period to the misconduct of Roman knights, and even Senators, who exhibited themselves in the arena. A skilled gladiator risked his life, as does a skilled toreador, and he enjoyed the same measure of popular favour; there were statues of gladiators as well as of schoolmasters. The tendency of the Empire was to break down the barriers between the free man and the slave; as political power ceased to be the privilege of a caste, and became the reward of recognized merit bestowed by the head of the administration, the importance of free descent was diminished; the spiteful remarks about freedmen and servile origin, which we occasionally find in the Latin authors, were suggested by the improved position of slaves and freedmen; they represent the impotent malice of a caste, which saw that the sceptre was departing from between its knees; the distinction was long preserved by literature, for the boys of the Roman Empire, like the boys of England, were brought up on the works of the great Athenians, who spoke of the slave as the slave was spoken of when the free citizens in the most liberal of Greek States were really an aristocracy of birth entrusted with the conduct of affairs among a population by which they were far outnumbered, and which included many men as wealthy as the freeborn citizens, and no less enlightened. It was largely through slavery that men of letters, men of science, architects, engineers, sailors, and even soldiers, found their way from all parts of the world into the executive services of the Empire. Rome had become cosmopolitan without being aware of the fact, long before the genius of Cæsar finally started her on an admittedly cosmopolitan career.