were supposed to have done due honour to the illustrious dead if his own
decease were not followed by the death-struggle of champions from the
rival gladiatorial schools, and men who aspired to a decent funeral made
due provision for such combats in their wills. The Roman magistrate
bowed to the prevalent taste, and displays of gladiators became one of
the most familiar features of the aediles' shows. Military sentiment was
in its favour, for it was believed to harden the nerves of the race that
had sprung from the loins of the god of war,[70] and humane sentiment
has never in any age been shocked at the contemporary barbarities which
it tolerates or enjoys. But a certain element of coarseness in the
sport, and perhaps the very fact that it was of native Italian growth,
might have given it a short shrift, had the cultured classes really
possessed the power of regulating the amusements of the public. Leaders
of society would have preferred the Greek _Agon_ with its graceful
wrestling and its contests in the finer arts. But the Roman public would
not be hellenised in this particular, and showed their mood when a
musical exhibition was attempted at the triumph of Lucius Anicius Gallus
in 167. The audience insisted that the performers should drop their
instruments and box with one another.[71] This, although not the best,
was yet a more tolerable type of what a contest of skill should be. It
was natural, therefore, that the professional fighting man should become
a far more inevitable condition of social and political success than the
hunter or the race-horse has ever been with us. Some enterprising
members of the nobility soon came to prefer ownership to the hire system
and started schools of their own in which the _lanista_ was merely the
trainer. A stranger element was soon added to the possessions of a Roman
noble by the growing craze for the combats of wild beasts. The first
recorded "hunt" of the kind was that given in 186 by Marcus Fulvius at
the close of the Aetolian war when lions and panthers were exhibited to
the wondering gaze of the people.[72] Seventeen years later two curule