look, others are stoical, but all will have to roll at last upon the sand of the arena, condemned by the inexorable caprice of a people greedy for blood.  “The modest virgin,” says Juvenal, “turning down her thumb, orders that the breast of yonder man, grovelling in the dust, shall be torn open.”  And all—­the heavily armed Samnite, the Gaul, the Thracian, the secutor; the dimachoerus, with his two swords; the swordsman who wears a helmet surmounted with a fish—­the one whom the retiarius pursues with his net, meanwhile singing this refrain, “It is not you that I am after, but your fish, and why do you flee from me?”—­all, all must succumb, at last, sooner or later, were it to be after the hundredth victory, in this same arena, where once an attendant employed in the theatre used to come, in the costume of Mercury, to touch them with a red-hot iron to make sure that they were dead.  If they moved, they were at once dispatched; if they remained icy-cold and motionless, a slave harpooned them with a hook, and dragged them through the mire of sand and blood to the narrow corridor, the porta libitinensis,—­the portal of death,—­whence they were flung into the spoliarium, so that their arms and clothing, at least, might be saved.  Such were the games of the amphitheatre.

[Footnote K:  M. Campfleury has reproduced this design in his very curious book on Antique Caricature.]

IX.

THE ERUPTION.

     THE DELUGE OF ASHES.—­THE DELUGE OF FIRE.—­THE FLIGHT OF THE
     POMPEIANS.—­THE PREOCCUPATIONS OF THE POMPEIAN WOMEN.—­THE VICTIMS: 
     THE FAMILY OF DIOMED; THE SENTINEL; THE WOMAN WALLED UP IN A TOMB;
     THE PRIEST OF ISIS; THE LOVERS CLINGING TOGETHER, ETC.—­THE
     SKELETONS.—­THE DEAD BODIES MOULDED BY VESUVIUS.

It was during one of these festivals, on the 23d of November, 79, that the terrible eruption which overwhelmed the city burst forth.  The testimony of the ancients, the ruins of Pompeii, the layers upon layers of ashes and scoriae that covered it, the skeletons surprised in attitudes of agony or death, all concur to tell us of the catastrophe.  The imagination can add nothing to it:  the picture is there before our eyes; we are present at the scene; we behold it.  Seated in the amphitheatre, we take to flight at the first convulsions, at the first lurid flashes which announce the conflagration and the crumbling of the mountain.  The ground is shaken repeatedly; and something like a whirlwind of dust, that grows thicker and thicker, has gone rushing and spinning across the heavens.  For some days past there has been talk of gigantic forms, which, sometimes on the mountain and sometimes in the plain, swept through the air; they are up again now, and rear themselves to their whole height in the eddies of smoke, from amid which is heard a strange sound, a fearful moaning followed by claps of thunder that crash down, peal on peal.  Night, too, has come on—­a night of horror; enormous flames kindle the darkness like the blaze of a furnace.  People scream, out in the streets, “Vesuvius is on fire!”