58 On the Luxury of the Romans. 



their heads with crescent- shaped blades, fixed on the points of 

 arrows. Herodian, who relates the fact, says, that the birds, 

 after being decapitated, ran about for some time. The experi- 

 ment has been successfully repeated on ducks. Septimius Se- 

 verus, in the tenth year of his reign, at the rejoicings on the 

 marriage of Caracalla, made four hundred animals come out of 

 a machine, and among them some wild asses and bisons. At the 

 marriage of Heliogabalus, there were chariots drawn by all kinds 

 of wild beasts. 



The most expensive and most curious assemblages of animals 

 were those of the Gordians. The first emperor of this name in 

 one day exposed to view a thousand panthers. Probus, one of 

 their successors, had trees planted in the circus. More than a 

 thousand ostriches, and a countless throng of various creatures, 

 were seen running about in this artificial forest. 



So long as the Roman empire existed in the west, similar dis- 

 plays were continued. In spite of the prohibitions of Constan- 

 tine, there were some even under Christian emperors. Theo- 

 dosius gave fights of animals in the circus ; and Justinian himself 

 exhibited in the amphitheatre twenty lions and thirty panthers. 



Such sights, repeated without interruption for more than 

 four hundred years, must have afforded the Roman naturalists 

 opportunities of making numerous observations on the forms, 

 habits, and interior organization of foreign animals ; yet science 

 was little improved by their labours. It seems, that the animals 

 being once killed, nobody derived any further benefit from their 

 slaughter. The proof is, that all the writers of the first, second, 

 and third centuries of the Christian era, who have treated of 

 such animals, have borrowed every thing they have said about 

 them from Greek authors who lived before the Roman conquest. 

 Pliny himself is but a compiler. — From a Lecture delivered by 

 Baron Cuvier. 



