Page:Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy, Stockton, 1872.djvu/236

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you are all familiar with pictures of the Colosseum at Rome, but unless you have carefully studied detailed descriptions of this edifice it is impossible for you to properly comprehend the grand style in which the ancients amused themselves.

This great theatre, the ruins of which are now standing in Rome, and which will probably stand for hundreds of years longer, was built nearly eighteen hundred years ago. It is a vast oval building, four stories high, and capable of containing ninety thousand spectators!

Seats, one row above the other like steps, were placed around the walls, from top to bottom. There was no roof to the building, and if the sun was hot, or it rained, the people were obliged to shelter