a Roman holiday
Enjoyment taken from watching somebody else suffer.
“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.”
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.
Emperors, spectacle, and the machinery of keeping a city entertained.
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bread and circuses (idiom)
Food and entertainment handed out by those in power to keep the public quiet.
Juvenal's complaint.
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circus (word)
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.
The Circus Maximus.
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fiddle while Rome burns (idiom)
To busy yourself with trivia while a disaster you could be addressing unfolds.
Nero and the fire of AD 64.
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triumph (word)
a great success or victory after a lot of hard work; as a verb, it means to win or succeed against something difficult.
The victory parade.
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laurel (word)
a type of evergreen tree with shiny leaves, often used as a symbol of success or victory.
The victor's wreath.
- 06
rest on one's laurels (idiom)
To rely on past success and stop making the effort to keep improving.
What the wreath came to mean.
Last updated August 3, 2026