["How often have we seen the stage of the theatre descend and part asunder, and from a chasm in the earth wild beasts emerge, and then presently give birth to a grove of gilded trees, that put forth blossoms of enamelled flowers.  Nor yet of sylvan marvels alone had we sight:  I saw sea-calves fight with bears, and a deformed sort of cattle, we might call sea-horses.”—­Calpurnius, Eclog., vii. 64.]

Sometimes they made a high mountain advance itself, covered with fruit-trees and other leafy trees, sending down rivulets of water from the top, as from the mouth of a fountain:  otherwhiles, a great ship was seen to come rolling in, which opened and divided of itself, and after having disgorged from the hold four or five hundred beasts for fight, closed again, and vanished without help.  At other times, from the floor of this place, they made spouts of perfumed water dart their streams upward, and so high as to sprinkle all that infinite multitude.  To defend themselves from the injuries of the weather, they had that vast place one while covered over with purple curtains of needlework, and by-and-by with silk of one or another colour, which they drew off or on in a moment, as they had a mind: 

              “Quamvis non modico caleant spectacula sole,
               Vela reducuntur, cum venit Hermogenes.”

["The curtains, though the sun should scorch the spectators, are drawn in, when Hermogenes appears."-Martial, xii. 29, 15.  M. Tigellius Hermogenes, whom Horace and others have satirised.  One editor calls him “a noted thief,” another:  “He was a literary amateur of no ability, who expressed his critical opinions with too great a freedom to please the poets of his day.”  D.W.]

The network also that was set before the people to defend them from the violence of these turned-out beasts was woven of gold: 

                   “Auro quoque torts refulgent
                    Retia.”

["The woven nets are refulgent with gold.” 
—­Calpurnius, ubi supra.]

If there be anything excusable in such excesses as these, it is where the novelty and invention create more wonder than the expense; even in these vanities we discover how fertile those ages were in other kind of wits than these of ours.  It is with this sort of fertility, as with all other products of nature:  not that she there and then employed her utmost force:  we do not go; we rather run up and down, and whirl this way and that; we turn back the way we came.  I am afraid our knowledge is weak in all senses; we neither see far forward nor far backward; our understanding comprehends little, and lives but a little while; ’tis short both in extent of time and extent of matter: 

“Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
Mufti, sed omnes illacrymabiles
Urgentur, ignotique longs
Nocte.”

[ Many brave men lived before Agamemnon, but all are pressed by the
long night unmourned and unknown.”—­Horace, Od., iv. 9, 25.]