Roman+Holiday

The definition of a Roman Holiday is similar to the german expression Schadenfreude--to take pleasure in the pain of others. The Roman Holiday comes from Byron's //Childe's Harold Pilgrimage,//where the barbaric occasion of a gladiator's death is an act of entertainment for the viewer.

//She had lived such a quiet life, attended so to her own affairs, that she bequeathed to the town in which she had been born and lived and died a foreigner, an outlander, a kind of heritage of astonishment and outrage, for which, even though she had supplied at last with an emotional barbecue, a roman holiday almost, they would never forgive her and let her be dead in peace and quiet// (LIA 289).