Chapter 11

The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of
the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest,
remaining in Britain.

Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and
precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome,
concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more
than a foot or two deep about the town fields and gardens
without coming upon some tall soldier or other of the
Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest
for a space of fifteen hundred years. He was mostly found
lying on his side, in an oval scoop in the chalk, like a
chicken in its shell; his knees drawn up to his chest;
sometimes with the remains of his spear against his arm, a
fibula or brooch of bronze on his breast or forehead, an urn
at his knees, a jar at his throat, a bottle at his mouth;
and mystified conjecture pouring down upon him from the eyes
of Casterbridge street boys and men, who had turned a moment
to gaze at the familiar spectacle as they passed by.

Imaginative inhabitants, who would have felt an
unpleasantness at the discovery of a comparatively modern
skeleton in their gardens, were quite unmoved by these hoary
shapes. They had lived so long ago, their time was so
unlike the present, their hopes and motives were so widely
removed from ours, that between them and the living there
seemed to stretch a gulf too wide for even a spirit to pass.

The Amphitheatre was a huge circular enclosure, with a notch
at opposite extremities of its diameter north and south.
From its sloping internal form it might have been called the
spittoon of the Jotuns. It was to Casterbridge what the
ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the
same magnitude. The dusk of evening was the proper hour at
which a true impression of this suggestive place could be
received. Standing in the middle of the arena at that time
there by degrees became apparent its real vastness, which a
cursory view from the summit at noon-day was apt to obscure.
Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every
part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot
for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged
there; tentative meetings were there experimented after
divisions and feuds. But one kind of appointment--in itself
the most common of any--seldom had place in the
Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers.

Why, seeing that it was pre-eminently an airy, accessible,
and sequestered spot for interviews, the cheerfullest form
of those occurrences never took kindly to the soil of the
ruin, would be a curious inquiry. Perhaps it was because
its associations had about them something sinister. Its
history proved that. Apart from the