the top, with three or four score rows of seats, all of marble also, and
covered with cushions:

"Exeat, inquit,
Si pudor est, et de pulvino surgat equestri,
Cujus res legi non sufficit;"

["Let him go out, he said, if he has any sense of shame, and rise
from the equestrian cushion, whose estate does not satisfy the law."
--Juvenal, iii. 153. The Equites were required to possess a fortune
of 400 sestertia, and they sat on the first fourteen rows behind the
orchestra.]

where a hundred thousand men might sit at their ease: and, the place
below, where the games were played, to make it, by art, first open and
cleave in chasms, representing caves that vomited out the beasts designed
for the spectacle; and then, secondly, to be overflowed by a deep sea,
full of sea monsters, and laden with ships of war, to represent a naval
battle; and, thirdly, to make it dry and even again for the combat of the
gladiators; and, for the fourth scene, to have it strown with vermilion
grain and storax,--[A resinous gum.]--instead of sand, there to make a
solemn feast for all that infinite number of people: the last act of one
only day:

"Quoties nos descendentis arenae
Vidimus in partes, ruptaque voragine terrae
Emersisse feras, et eisdem saepe latebris
Aurea cum croceo creverunt arbuta libro!....
Nec solum nobis silvestria cernere monstra
Contigit; aequoreos ego cum certantibus ursis