Idiom
a Roman holiday
Literary Roman origin
Meaning
Enjoyment taken from watching somebody else suffer.
Examples
“The tabloids made a Roman holiday of his divorce.”
“The hearing was broadcast live, and the studio panels afterwards turned it into a Roman holiday.”
“What was billed as an accountability process became a Roman holiday: the questions stopped mattering somewhere in the second hour, and the audience stayed for the same reason audiences have always stayed.”
Examples
simple
“The tabloids made a Roman holiday of his divorce.”
contextual
“The hearing was broadcast live, and the studio panels afterwards turned it into a Roman holiday.”
complex
“What was billed as an accountability process became a Roman holiday: the questions stopped mattering somewhere in the second hour, and the audience stayed for the same reason audiences have always stayed.”
Origin
The phrase comes from Byron. In the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818) he describes the statue known as the Dying Gaul — a wounded fighter propped on one arm — and imagines the man's last thoughts turning to his family far away while the crowd around him cheers. He was, Byron writes, "butcher'd to make a Roman holiday".
The holiday is the crowd's, not the victim's. Games were public festivals, days off work, and the entertainment on offer included men killing each other. Byron's line puts the arithmetic of that plainly: one person's death is the price of everybody else's afternoon.
So a Roman holiday in English is not a trip to Rome. It is any spectacle that is enjoyable in direct proportion to the damage being done to someone — a public humiliation, a pile-on, a scandal that everyone is having a wonderful time with.
Stories
Empire & the Arena · See all Roman origin
Emperors, spectacle, and the machinery of keeping a city entertained.
bread and circuses — Food and entertainment handed out by those in power to keep the public quiet.
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.
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
- C2 · Proficiency
- Updated