Displays of' Wild Beasts in the Amphitheatre. 55 



of adding too much to their force. Sixty-six years after the 

 triumph of Metellus, in the year before Christ 186, Marcus 

 Fulvius, to absolve himself from a vow he had made in the 

 -^tolian war, exhibited panthers and lions. These animals 

 might have come from Africa ; but perhaps he had obtained 

 them from Asia Minor, where, at this time, some were still to 

 be found. The people getting a taste for these shows, Scipio 

 Nasica and Publius Lentulus gave them a sight of several ele- 

 phants, forty bears, and fifty- three panthers. Quintus Scaevola 

 had several lions fighting against men. Sylla had more than 

 a hundred male lions. In the year 58 before Christ, ^milius 

 Scaurus, during his sedileship, distinguished himself not only by 

 the number of animals he brought out, but also by presenting 

 several that had never before been seen in Rome. In these 

 spectacles the first hippopotamus appeared. There were also 

 five live crocodiles, five hundred panthers, and, more strange 

 still, the bones of the animal to which, it was said, Andro- 

 meda had been exposed. These bones had been brought 

 from the town of Joppa (Jaffa), on the coast of Palestine. 

 There were among them vertebrae a foot and a half long, and 

 a bone not under six-and- thirty feet in length, probably the un- 

 der jaw of a whale. In the year 55 before Christ, Pompey, 

 at the inauguration of his theatre, displayed a lynx, a cephus, 

 from ^Ethiopia (a species of ape), a one-horned rhinoceros, 

 twenty elephants fightinoj with men, four hundred and ten pan- 

 thers, and six hundred lions, whereof three hundred and fifteen 

 had manes. All the sovereigns of Europe together could not 

 now produce such a number. Cicero, who was present at these 

 games, speaks of them with great disdain, and says the people 

 at last took pity on the elephants. In the 48th year before 

 Christ, Anthony exhibited lions harnessed to a chariot ; it was 

 the first time these animals had been seen so employed, but 

 they were not the first that had been tamed. A Carthaginian, 

 named Hanno, had a lion that followed him through that city 

 like a dog. His trouble was ill rewarded, for his countrymen 

 banished him, judging that a man who had been able to subdue 

 a ferocious beast, must have been gifted with some secret power 

 by which he might perhaps have overcome themselves. 



In the year 46 before Christ, Ca?sar put forth, in an amphi- 



