Along the subterranean ways that led up to it, the sound of an advancing chorus was heard at last, chanting the words of a sacred song, or hymn to Diana; for the spectacle of the amphitheatre was, after all, a [237] religious occasion.

To its grim acts of blood-shedding a kind of sacrificial character still belonged in the view of certain religious casuists, tending conveniently to soothe the humane sensibilities of so pious an emperor as Aurelius, who, in his fraternal complacency, had consented to preside over the shows.
Artemis or Diana, as she may be understood in the actual development of her worship, was, indeed, the symbolical expression of two allied yet contrasted elements of human temper and experience--man's amity, and also his enmity, towards the wild creatures, when they were still, in a certain sense, his brothers.

She is the complete, and therefore highly complex, representative of a state, in which man was still much occupied with animals, not as his flock, or as his servants after the pastoral relationship of our later, orderly world, but rather as his equals, on friendly terms or the reverse,--a state full of primeval sympathies and antipathies, of rivalries and common wants--while he watched, and could enter into, the humours of those "younger brothers," with an intimacy, the "survivals" of which in a later age seem often to have had a kind of madness about them.

Diana represents alike the bright and the dark side of such relationship.

But the humanities of that relationship were all forgotten to-day in the excitement of a show, in which mere cruelty to animals, their useless suffering and death, formed [238] the main point of interest.