Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 April 1885 — The Last Gladitorial Fight. [ARTICLE]

The Last Gladitorial Fight.

In 404 Honorius was emperor. At that time, in the remote deserts pi Libya, there dwelt an obscure monk named Telemachus. He had hemrd of these awful scenes in the far-on Coliseum at Rome. Depend upon it, they lost nothing by their transit across the Mediterranean in the hamjs of Greek and Roman sailors. In the bath and market places of Alexandria, in the Jewries of Cyrene, in the month of every . eastern storyteller, the festive massacres of the Coliseum ' would doubtless be clothed in colors truly very appalling, yet scarcely more appalling than the truth. Telemachus brooded over these horrors until his mission dawned upon him. He was ordained by heaven to put an end to the slaughter of human beings in the Coliseum. He made his way To Rome, He entered the Coliseum with the throng, at the time the gladiators were parading in front of the emperor with uplifted swords and the wild mockery of homage —“ As oritur i te Habitant.” Elbowing his way to the barrier, he leaped over at the moment when the combatants rushed at each other, threw himself between them, bidding them, in the name of Christ, to desist. To blank astonishment succeeded imperial contempt and popular fury. Telemachus fell, slain by the swords of the g’adiators. Legend may adorn the tale and fancy fiil out the picture, but the solid tact remains—there never was another gladitorial fight in the Coliseum. One heroic soul had caught the flow of popular feeling that had already begun to set in the. direction of humanity, and turned it. He had embodied by his act and consecrated by his death the sentiments that already lay timidly in the hearts of thousands in that great city of Rome.— Leslie's Magazine.