mxjllidjE or mullets. 137 



cannot help thinking that the language in which Seneca 

 animadverts on these entertainments, might have been 

 transferred with more telling propriety to the bloody 

 butcheries of the Coliseum, where red men, and not red 

 mullet, were the victims of the entertainment. Nei- 

 ther does it. strike us as at all surprising, that those who 

 could not only endure but enjoy the thrilling sights and 

 sounds there presented, of fellow-creatures and wUd 

 beasts gashed and gored and struggbng in every stage of 

 suffering, should watch with something like philosophic 

 complacency the flagging pulses and quiet deportment 

 of a moribund mullet, even by way of relief to so much 

 strong and fierce excitement. The Latin moralist in- 

 deed states, as an aggravating circumstance attending 

 these ichthyophagian banquets, that 'funerals' were not 

 properly 'furnished' in consequence, and that friends 

 and relatives were continually left and forsaken on the 

 bed of death, when their parting hours interfered with 

 an invitation to one of these feasts; nay, he would have 

 us believe that such orgies tended to extinguish the 

 last sparks of patriotism in the breast, and to drown 



mentitur, ant vincit! . . . Ad laimc fastum pervenere ventres de- 

 Kcatorum, ut guatare non possent pisoem, nisi quern in ipso con- 

 vivio natantem palpitantemque viderint. Audiebamus niViil esse 

 meKus saxatili Mnllo : at nunc audimus nihil est moriente for- 

 mosius. Da mihi in manus vas vitreum, in quo exultet, in quo 

 trepidet ; ubi multum diuque laudatus iu illo perlucido vivario 

 extraliitnr, tunc ut quisque peritior est, monstrat. Vide quomodo 

 exarserit rabor omni acrior minio. Vide quas per -latera venas 

 agat. Eoce sanguinem putes ventrem, quam lucidum quiddam 

 CEeruleumque sub ipso tempore efiulsit. Jam porrigitux et pallet, 

 et in unum colorem componitur. Ex his nemo morienti amico 

 assidet : nemo videre mortem patris sui sustiuet, quam optavit. 

 Quotusquisgue funus domesticum ad rogum prosequitur? Fratrum 

 propinquorumque extrema hora deseritur ; ad mortem Mulli con- 

 curritur,' etc. — Quest. Nat. c. 17. 



