ABSTRACT
‘ A S the word “theatre” in Greek signifies a building which is hemispherical, it is clear that the Roman amphitheatre, suggesting two viewing-spaces joined into one, is aptly named. Its arena forms an egg-shape, which gives the necessary room for combatants and enables the spectators to watch all the events with greater ease, since everything has been collected together within an elongated circle. Here people flock to the kind of performances from which human feeling should recoil. The first contender, putting his trust in a fragile wooden pole, runs towards the wild beasts’ jaws and appears to rush at high speed in the direction of the thing he really desires to escape. Prey and predator shoot forward to meet each other with the same velocity, nor can the man be safe unless he races to encounter what he longs to avoid. Then he launches himself high into the air, throwing up his backward-bent limbs as if they were flimsy garments, and while his body, vaulting in an arc, is poised above the animal and hovers for an instant before falling, his wild adversary plunges rapidly onward. Consequently the one that is in fact fooled can appear to be the less dangerous creature.
