As we sat in the theater, looking at the two lone columns that
survive--part of the decoration of the back of the stage--and at the
fragments of ruin around them, we might have been in the Roman forum.
The arena at Arles, with its great magnitude, is less complete than that
at Nimes; it has suffered even more the assaults of time and of the
children of time, and it has been less repaired. The seats are almost
wholly wanting; but the external walls, minus the topmost tier of arches,
are massively, ruggedly complete; and the vaulted corridors seem as solid
as the day they were built. The whole thing is superbly vast, and as
monumental, for a place of light amusement--what is called in America a
"variety-show"--as it entered only into the Roman mind to make such
establishments. The podium is much higher than at Nimes, and many of the
great white slabs that faced it have been recovered and put into their
places. The proconsular box has been more or less reconstructed, and the
great converging passages of approach to it are still majestically
distinct; so that, as I sat there in the moon-charm stillness, leaning my
elbows on the battered parapet of the ring, it was not impossible to
listen to the murmurs and shudders, the thick voice of the circus, that
died away fifteen hundred years ago.
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