We, too, have done things that posterity may probably look upon as fabulous. Cæsar, who was afterwards dictator, but at that time ædile, was the first person, on the occasion of the funeral games in honour of his father, to employ all the apparatus of the arena[1] in silver; and it was on the same occasion that for the first time criminals encountered wild beasts with implements of silver, a practice imitated at the present day in our municipal towns even.
At the games celebrated by C. Antonius the stage was made
of[2] silver; and the same was the case at those celebrated
by L. Muræna. The Emperor Caius had a scaffold[3] introduced
into the Circus, upon which there were one hundred and
twenty-four thousand pounds' weight of silver. His successor
Claudius, on the occasion of his triumph over Britain, announced
by the inscriptions that among the coronets of gold,
there was one weighing seven thousand[4] pounds' weight, contributed
by Nearer Spain, and another of nine thousand pounds,
1.
2.
3.
4. thousand, and nine
thousand, as given by the Bamberg MS. It is just possible, however, that
the latter may have been the united weights of all the coronets contributed
by Spain and Gaul respectively, the word "inter" being an interpolation.
5.
6.
7.