deep stillness prevailed. Two persons only, the one a Romish priest, were wandering there in silent contemplation. The day was like the loveliest summer-day. The soft wind chased light, white clouds, across the heavens, which arched themselves, clear and full of light, above the immense arena, surrounded with dark walls, where so much blood had flowed, of gladiators, slaves, and martyrs! These latter had now conquered.[1] The Christian sign of a cross is now erected on the spot where the blood had been shed by the teeth and claws of wild beasts; peaceful altars stand around it, indicating stations in the history of our Lord's sufferings. The proud theatre, in which thousands of blood-thirsty spectators had clapped their hands in frantic joy over the combats and agonies of their victims, was now in ruins, and over the broken galleries, shrubs waved in the wind, with their yellow and red flowers, and the grass grew upon the field of blood,
“As the scar grows upon the healed wound.”
The deliciousness of the air, the sunlit sky above the grand monument, with its gloomy memories, the doves which circled around in flocks, the wind which made a murmuring in the young trees and bushes,—this present life which spoke of the ultimate
- ↑ It is related that during the reign of one of the latest Roman emperors, Honorius, in the year 404, a Christian monk flung himself, one day, in pious zeal, into the arena, in the endeavor to prevent the murderous conflict of the gladiators. He was killed by the people, but the Emperor issued, from that time, a severe interdict against these spectacles.—Author's Note.
