Roman society could not live without games. They were as necessary to its existence as bread – for they were holy games and the people’s right to them was a holy right. Their basic function lay not merely in celebrating such prosperity as the community had already won for itself, but in fortifying it and ensuring future prosperity by means of ritual. The great and bloody Roman games were a survival of the archaic play-factor in depotentialized form. Few of the brutalized mob of spectators felt anything of the religious quality inherent in these performances, and the Emperor’s liberality on such occasions had sunk to mere alms-giving on a gigantic scale to a miserable proletariat.