The theatre was organized on Greek models.  The actors were masked and presented plays imitated from the Greek.  The Romans had little taste for this recreation which was too delicate for them.  They preferred the mimes, comedies of gross character, and especially the pantomimes in which the actor without speaking expressed by his attitudes the sentiments of the character.

=The Circus.=—­Between the two hills of the Aventine and the Palatine extended a field filled with race courses surrounded by arcades and tiers of seats rising above them.  This was the Circus Maximus.  After Nero enlarged it it could accommodate 250,000 spectators; in the fourth century its size was increased to provide sittings for 385,000 people.

Here was presented the favorite spectacle of the Roman people, the four-horse chariot race (quadrigae); in each race the chariot made a triple circuit of the circus and there were twenty-five races in a single day.  The drivers belonged to rival companies whose colors they wore; there were at first four of these colors, but they were later reduced to two—­the Blue and the Green, notorious in the history of riots.  At Rome there was the same passion for chariot-races that there is now for horse-races; women and even children talked of them.  Often the emperor participated and the quarrel between the Blues and the Greens became an affair of state.

=The Amphitheatre.=—­At the gates of Rome the emperor Vespasian had built the Colosseum, an enormous structure of two stories, accommodating 87,000 spectators.  It was a circus surrounding an arena where hunts and combats were represented.

For the hunts the arena was transformed into a forest where wild beasts were released and men armed with spears came into combat with them.  Variety was sought in this spectacle by employing the rarest animals—­lions, panthers, elephants, bears, buffaloes, rhinoceroses, giraffes, tigers, and crocodiles.  In the games presented by Pompey had already appeared seventeen elephants and five hundred lions; some of the emperors maintained a large menagerie.

Sometimes instead of placing armed men before the beasts, it was found more dramatic to let loose the animals on men who were naked and bound.  The custom spread into all cities of the empire of compelling those condemned to death to furnish this form of entertainment for the people.  Thousands of persons of both sexes and of every age, and among them Christian martyrs, were thus devoured by beasts under the eyes of the multitude.

=The Gladiators.=—­But the national spectacle of the Romans was the fight of gladiators (men armed with swords).  Armed men descended into the arena and fought a duel to the death.  From the time of Caesar[152] as many as 320 pairs of gladiators were fought at once; Augustus in his whole life fought 10,000 of them, Trajan the same number in four months.  The vanquished was slain on the field unless the people wished to show him grace.