CHAP. 16.—AT WHAT PERIOD SILVER FIRST MADE ITS APPEARANCE UPON THE ARENA AND UPON THE STAGE.
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 arena830 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 of831 silver; and the same was the case at those celebrated by L. Muræna. The Emperor Caius had a scaffold832 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 thousand833 pounds’ weight, contributed by Nearer Spain, and another of nine thousand pounds, presented by Gallia Comata.834 Nero, who succeeded him, covered the Theatre of Pompeius with gold for one day,835 the occasion on which he displayed it to Tiridates, king of Armenia. And yet how small was this theatre in comparison with that Golden Palace836 of his, with which he environed our city.