Idiom
bread and circuses
Meaning
Food and entertainment handed out by those in power to keep the public quiet.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“Free tickets and a firework display — bread and circuses.”
“Critics called the new stadium bread and circuses, built with money that had been promised to the hospitals.”
“The budget offered bread and circuses in generous measure — a fuel rebate, a national holiday, a televised tournament — and said almost nothing about the structural deficit that had made all three necessary.”
Examples
simple
“Free tickets and a firework display — bread and circuses.”
contextual
“Critics called the new stadium bread and circuses, built with money that had been promised to the hospitals.”
complex
“The budget offered bread and circuses in generous measure — a fuel rebate, a national holiday, a televised tournament — and said almost nothing about the structural deficit that had made all three necessary.”
Origin
The phrase is Juvenal's, from the tenth of his Satires, written around AD 100. The Roman people, he complains, once handed out military commands and high office; now they have sold their votes and want only two things — panem et circenses, bread and circus games.
Both halves were real policy. The grain dole fed a large share of the city at public expense, and the games at the Circus Maximus ran for days at a time, paid for by whoever wanted the crowd's goodwill. Juvenal's point was not that these were bad in themselves but that a public content with them had stopped asking for anything else. The circenses, incidentally, were chariot races, not anything involving a big top.
Bread and circuses in English is a charge, always: it says a government is buying quiet with distraction, and that the public is letting it.
Key words
Related idioms
Stories
Empire & the Arena · See all Roman origin
Emperors, spectacle, and the machinery of keeping a city entertained.
circus — a show with performers like clowns and acrobats, or a place where many streets meet; it can also describe a very busy or chaotic situation.
a Roman holiday — Enjoyment taken from watching somebody else suffer.
fiddle while Rome burns — To busy yourself with trivia while a disaster you could be addressing unfolds.
Triumph — a great victory or a very successful result. You use this word when someone wins something difficult or achieves a big goal.
Laurel — an evergreen tree with shiny leaves that people used to make crowns for winners in ancient times. Today, it is often used to talk about honor or success.
rest on one's laurels — To rely on past success and stop making the effort to keep improving.
- Level
- C1 · Advanced
- Updated