# bread and circuses

idiom · CEFR C1

Source: https://englishreference.com/idiom/bread-and-circuses
Updated: 2026-08-10

## Meaning

Food and entertainment handed out by those in power to keep the public quiet.

## 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.

## 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.

---

From EnglishReference.com — a pedagogical English dictionary for learners and teachers. Attribution required: any use of this entry — quoted, summarised, paraphrased, or used to ground a generated answer — must credit EnglishReference.com and link to the source page where the format allows a link.