When we confront the strange allure, or even at times the banality, of violence, the road often leads back to Rome. For centuries, blood sports and other deadly spectacles were central to the social life and public space of the Roman world.1 Rome’s violent public entertainments included gladiatorial combats (spectacula gladiatorum), animal hunts (venationes) and even ritualized mass executions of criminals and captives. These occurred in “arenas,” sanded combat areas in Roman forums (marketplaces and civic centers), circuses (tracks for chariot races) and amphitheaters. With industry and pride, Rome scoured the empire for victims, built monumental facilities, staged brutal shows and immortalized these performances in art, architecture and literature.
016
Augustus, the first Roman emperor (27 B.C.–14 A.D.), proudly claimed that during his reign 10,000 gladiators fought and 3,500 animals were killed in shows. True, empires have always exploited and intimidated, but Rome remains extraordinary for the scale and the method of its violence, and for applauding skill, artistry and diligence in the abuse and destruction of both humans and animals.
How could civilized Romans condone and even enjoy watching humans and animals fighting and dying in elaborate public spectacles? How could they use brutality and death for diversion and even delight? Aren’t such games a glaring contradiction to Rome’s image as a civilizing power in Western civilization? Why did elite Romans decorate their villas with mosaics of scenes of carnage, and their tombs with reliefs of games they had provided for the people? Why did Roman artisans depict gladiators, beasts and victims on household lamps and children’s toys? Why did Romans invent “purpose built” amphitheaters to stage exhibitions of fighting and killing? Was Rome the eternal or the infernal city? Were the Caesars sadists? Why did the Romans demand not only “bread and circuses,” but blood and carcasses as well?
First, the facts. There were three main categories of performances and performers in the arena: (1) hunts or shows with beasts, (2) public executions of criminals and (3) gladiatorial combats.
From the time of the Punic Wars (third century B.C.) through the late republic and into the early empire (first century A.D.), political opportunism greatly expanded these spectacles of violence and death as public entertainments. They also became more elaborate and complex. Danger and death were not stylized or reduced as in modern spectator sports such as boxing or football, but intensified and actualized.
By Augustus’s time, arena games offered three shows in a set sequence during the day: beast fights in the morning, executions in midday shows (meridiani) and gladiators in the afternoon.
From our modern perspective, all arena performers were victims, but not all faced the same dangers or deaths. Just as the seating at the Flavian amphitheater, the Colosseum—with tiered levels of spectators rising from the seats of officials and senators up to women and slaves—functioned as a metaphor for Rome’s hierarchically ordered society, Rome’s status consciousness also extended to the arena. From rhinoceroses to rabbits, and from gladiators to criminals to Christians, the victims were equal only in that Rome regarded all of them as surplus commodities, by-products of expanding imperial power.
Professional gladiators, fierce and excellent fighters, should not be confused with doomed humans killed en masse. Roman art and advertisements clearly distinguish different human performers—from elite gladiators to abject, hopeless victims—by their appearance, equipment, and body language. In the famous Zliten mosaic from Tripolitania (Libya), for example, pairs of gladiators appear in flattering poses, while condemned criminals appear helpless, terrified and bloody. Gladiators are often depicted as glamorously armored and armed, while lowly victims are nude or nearly nude, with their hands tied or 017their bodies bound to posts, being pushed towards or mauled by leopards, lions and bears.2 Mass killings were prominent arena spectacles, but most studies focus on the gladiators, the stars of the arena.
Traditional studies assumed that Rome adopted gladiatorial combat from the Etruscans as a form of human sacrifice, but most scholars now feel the combats originated in fourth-century southern Italy as a feature of funeral games. The earliest recorded gladiatorial combat at Rome was not until 264 B.C., when the sons of Junius Brutus had three pairs of slaves fight one another to honor their dead father. During the time of the Republic such performances were staged by elite individuals to honor their dead, but ambitious politicians soon expanded these rites into larger and ever more popular entertainments. As the Christian writer Tertullian said, Rome turned a funerary obligation into a “pleasure” and a “more cultured form of cruelty.”3
Demonstrations of physical prowess and violent assertions of masculinity struck a chord with the patriarchal, militaristic Romans. The arena was a surrogate battlefield. The gladiators evoked warrior traditions and inspired discipline and bravery among the citizens. Expert gladiators fought and, if necessary, died by the standards of Roman military virtue. Recognizing the potential of such shows, Augustus and later emperors largely monopolized them as displays of power and generosity, and as instruments of cultural assimilation, of romanization, throughout the provinces.
Most became gladiators against their will—as prisoners of war, slaves or condemned criminals. All had to take the same oath of self-debasement—to be “burned by fire, bound in chains, to be beaten, to die by the sword”—but then they were sorted by aptitude and trained as specialists with different equipment and fighting styles, from the retiarius, with trident and net, to the secutor, with helmet and sword. Inscriptions classify gladiators by experience, records of combats, legal status and style of fighting. One typical inscription, from the second century A.D., lists prices of combatants, ranging from 3,000 to 15,000 sesterces (around 100 A.D., a Roman soldier earned about 12,000 sesterces a year). With training, gladiators became specialized weapons fighters—with fans who applauded and rewarded them, giving them increased privileges and prizes.
Although elite gladiators risked injury and death, they had a decent chance of survival and even freedom if they put on 018a good show. Well tended by doctors and mostly well protected by armor, gladiators fought not in mass combats but in duels. Recent studies have shown that gladiatorial combats were not always—perhaps not even often—to the death. Valuable fighters were seldom squandered. Most combats went on only until one gladiator was wounded or gave up out of exhaustion. Losers might receive the coup de grace, an expertly administered death blow, but despite Hollywood, a draw or a benevolent decision by the emperor or the crowd often resulted. One scholar recently suggested that only between five and ten percent of those engaged in gladiatorial combat died in the arena.4
Epitaphs on gladiators’ tombstones show that they formed associations to arrange each others’ burials, that they had spouses, children and friends, and that many lived long enough to be excused from combats (after three years) and to earn their freedom (after five years). Like aging boxing champions in modern times, veteran gladiators, once freed, often contracted to fight again as auctorati (paid contractees) earning more money and applause. Driven by debt or drawn by delusion or depravity, even some highborn dilettantes volunteered to debase themselves in the arena. The most notorious was the emperor Commodus, who shocked Rome by fighting hundreds of decidedly unsporting combats in the arena.
Roman attitudes toward gladiators were paradoxical and ambivalent. Gladiators were branded—sometimes literally—with legal and social infamy (infamia) because of their lowly origins and despicable profession. Romans often associated gladiators with murderers and prostitutes, excluding them from certain offices and even from some cemeteries. Yet star gladiators became popular heroes and heartthrobs. The inherent psychosexual allure of violence and of the forbidden added eroticism to the gladiator’s appeal. With their public displays of virility, gladiators sometimes became sex symbols. Graffiti at Pompeii proclaim that gladiators were 019the delight of girls, and Juvenal indignantly protests that gladiators were attractive even to noble women.5 For good Roman women, fraternizing with gladiators was scandalous.
An unsympathetic Tertullian insightfully saw Romans as inconsistent, fickle and confused in their attitude toward gladiators:
Look at their attitude to … gladiators (arenarios), most loving of men, to whom men surrender their souls and women their bodies as well … on one and the same account they glorify them and they degrade and diminish them … The perversity of it! They love whom they lower; they despise whom they approve; the art they glorify, the artist they disgrace (artem magnificant, artificem notant).6
No matter what fame and rewards gladiators earned in the arena, the stigma of their origins and performances could not be erased. Contrary to popular opinion, most of the humans killed in the arena were not true gladiators, but rather war captives and convicted criminals (damnati, noxii) 020that had been sentenced to execution.
Roman blood sports thus legitimized, dramatically communicated and legally reinforced the social and moral order of the community. The common people of Rome wanted to be assured that their leaders had the power to confront and punish offenders and enforce social order. Rome did not execute everyone in the same way. Quick and unaggravated decapitation at the edge of town was the most desirable form of execution, a privilege for citizens of status. In early Rome, rebellious slaves and serious criminals might be thrown off a cliff or beaten to death as a ritualized display in public areas in or near the forum. By the time of Augustus, various forms of executions were performed as spectacles in the arena. Criminals of low status were given aggravated or ultimate punishments (summa supplicia)—they were crucified, killed by beasts or fire, or forced to kill each other. There was no hope, no contest, no ambivalence. Like public hangings in other cultures, arena executions, however cruel and bizarre, were accepted as legitimate retributive punishments. The victims’ humiliating and agonizing deaths provided a terrifying warning to potential criminals and deviants.
In Christian martyrologies, exposure to beasts (damnatio ad bestias) was a common form of execution. Victims are often depicted as proud and unapologetic in mosaics and sculptures. Despite modern assumptions, however, they were not routinely eaten. Consumption was an ancient literary metaphor used by Romans for the complete removal of a social pariah and by Christians for the complete attainment of salvation. The legal objective was that the beasts maul and mutilate the victims, many of which had to be finished off by arena attendants.
A famous passage from Seneca, often misinterpreted as an indictment of gladiatorial combat, in fact describes meridiani, ritualized mass executions in which condemned criminals were simply forced to kill each other.
By chance I attended a mid-day exhibition (meridianum spectaculum) … Now all the trifling is put aside and it is pure murder. The men have no defensive armor. They are exposed to blows at all points, and no one ever strikes in vain … In the morning they throw men to the lions and the bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators … The outcome of every fight is death, and the means are fire and sword … [Spectators shout] “Kill him! Lash him! Burn him! Why does he meet the sword in so cowardly a way? … Let them receive blow for blow, with chests bare and exposed to the stroke!”7
As a Stoic, Seneca condemned the brutalizing passions of crowds, who were pleased to see criminals suffer but displeased by their poor performances. Protesting that Romans saw the turning of a man into a corpse as a “satisfying spectacle,” he felt that humans should not be killed “for jest and sport (per lusum ad iocum),” but he accepted the violent 021public execution of criminals as “unquestionably just” (iustissimorum suppliciorum).8
In another form of performance, criminals and captives were forced to fight and kill each other in staged, military combats on land and on water. The battles were artificially arranged, but the deaths were real. The supposed gladiator-salute, “Emperor, we who are about to die salute you,” was in fact uttered not by true gladiators, but by the doomed victims in a naval battle (naumachia) arranged in 52 A.D. by the emperor Claudius on the Fucine Lake with 100 ships and 19,000 combatants.9 (Tacitus says that large crowds of spectators came from nearby towns and from Rome to see the spectacle or show respect for Claudius.)
By the late first century B.C., executions became even more sensational and creative in what scholars now call “fatal charades”—brutal punishments of criminals cast in roles in dramatic or mythical contexts. Promoters used theatrics, costumes and props to turn violent motifs from myths and legends into real capital punishments in the arena—or even on the stages of theaters. As Prometheus, a victim might be crucified and mauled by beasts. As Orpheus, one might be dropped down into a cage of wild beasts. As Pasiphae, a woman might suffer bestiality. As Martial wrote, “What had been a fable (fabula) was now a punishment (poena).”
Perhaps wanting more realism in their drama, perhaps enjoying the demonstration of absolute power, and certainly feeling morally superior and distant, Roman spectators were amused rather than disgusted.10
Contrary to popular perception, Christians did not outnumber pagan arena victims. In Roman eyes Christians in the arena were not persecuted heroes but prosecuted heretics. Pious pagans, the Romans believed that their own success depended on the observance of proper rituals and respect for the gods. In Roman minds the Christians’ denial of the existence of other gods constituted a serious threat to public order.
Tacitus records that during the first major Christian persecution, by Nero in 64 A.D., Christians were covered in animal skins and torn to death by dogs or attached to crosses and set on fire.11 Accounts of martyrdom indicate that Christians defied authority, showed no terror and even pulled lions toward themselves. St. Ignatius, killed in the Colosseum early in the second century, wrote: “Let there come on me fire and cross and struggles with wild beasts, cutting and tearing asunder, rackings of bones, mangling of limbs, crushing of my whole body … May I but attain to Jesus Christ!”12 Christian defiance and fervent faith in resurrection apparently enraged spectators and led to especially harsh abuse. Rome’s failure to humiliate 022powerless martyrs was very humiliating!
For economic more than moral reasons, the greatest quantities of bloodshed and death probably took place in beast hunts, and the greatest numbers of victims probably were animals. As Rome expanded its empire, foreign animals were paraded and put on display in shows at festivals and military triumphs. Beasts fought against each other and against humans. In the morning shows of the arena, beasts were “hunted” by skilled and well-equipped hunters (venatores) or managed by professional handlers (bestiarii). Under the emperors, staggering numbers of animals were slaughtered: for example, 9,000 in Titus’ games to dedicate the Flavian amphitheater in 80 A.D. and 11,000 in Trajan’s games of 108–109 A.D. Since the beasts were captured in the wild and were soon killed, the demands of the arena were ecologically disastrous. Hunting to supply the games led to the extirpation of species and changes in patterns of fauna, especially in northern Africa.13
Beasts (like humans) were subdivided into a hierarchy according to fierceness and rarity. Large cats (lions, tigers and leopards), elephants, bears, bulls and boars were expensive but popular 023performers. Camels, giraffes, rhinoceroses and crocodiles appeared often, with elaborate props and in artificial pools or artificial forests. Driven from cages in the basement of the amphitheater, beasts were lifted up to the arena and thrust before loud and excited crowds. Some were trained but most fought, fled or attacked out of instinct or terror.
In these days of animal rights, these spectacles are regarded as inhumane, but ancient Romans, like most cultures until very recently, viewed cruelty to animals as an acceptable form of entertainment. Wild animals were simply predators, nuisances or trophies—that is, symbols of human bravery, skill or prowess. The controlling and killing of beasts in the arena was not only thrilling, but a comforting demonstration of the power and territorial dominion of Rome.
To our amazement, the arena faced no widespread opposition in Roman society. There were some ineffectual protests from elitists and Stoics, who felt the games pandered to and overly excited the masses,14 and later from Christians, who saw arena games as pagan sacrifices to the spirits of the dead. More typically, philosophers like Seneca and Cicero praised the gladiators’ virtue and discipline and applauded the games as educational demonstrations of military valor or stoic fortitude. Even Christians had few problems with the killing of beasts or the execution of criminals in the arena. According to Tertullian, “It is a good thing when the guilty are punished.”15
Older books claim that Constantine and enlightened Christian love abolished gladiatorial combats in the fourth century A.D., but archaeology shows that the combats persisted in the Western Empire into the early fifth century. And it was not humanitarianism or Christian charity but the collapse of the empire itself, administrative chaos and lost resources that ended the combats. It was more a problem of supply than demand. Economics, not ethics, eliminated gladiators from European history; sadly, the abuse of animals and inventive forms of public execution did not end with the fall of Rome.
As sophisticated, “civilized” people, we are tempted to agree with traditional judgments of the arena as a barbaric slaughterhouse, a horror that must not, or could not, happen again. Romans have been condemned as “cruel by nature,” Rome as a “morbid” and “sadistic” nation, saved only by the triumph of Christianity. Condemnation, however, is not synonymous with comprehension. Moralistic charges of some unique, unfathomable Roman pathology will not suffice, as explanations of Rome’s blood sports and aggravated executions have too many analogues in other cultures and 024times, including our own.
The arena was not the product of lower-class sadism, the “mob” thirsting for blood. Even the emperors, who sponsored the arena games, took pride in their productions. The spectators included the high and the low, male and female. They flocked—50,000 at a time—to the Colosseum in Rome. Nor was it just the Italians; amphitheaters and their games spread throughout the empire, from Rome to London to Arles to El Djem (in north Africa), not only to the “barbaric” north but to the Greek east as well, coexisting with the Olympic and other traditional athletic festivals.
New theories interpret arena combats as ideologically charged cultural performances—as ritual and symbolic communications of power, leadership and empire. Obviously the arena was a social and political institution central to the Roman Empire, but no singular explanation, however erudite, adequately covers a complex phenomena involving diverse victims and spectators over several centuries.
Clearly spectacles were political devices used by leaders to gain support and to appease the masses under autocratic regimes. Shows were poor replacements for sovereign assemblies, but this was not simply one-dimensional manipulation. Emperors were expected to provide games generously, to orchestrate and enjoy such shows with appropriate decorum, and to attend to expressions of the popular will from sometimes vocal and assertive crowds of spectators. Games were prime occasions for the emperor to show that he was effective and attentive, that he was a good patron or father, that he not only provided for his people but could guarantee order and protect them from human and animal threats.
For the state, the spectacular combats, the killing of humans and beasts, and the imposing amphitheaters themselves dramatically demonstrated the power and resources of the empire. With the variety and multitude of species and peoples involved, the games were a microcosm of Rome’s territorial extent and power. As Martial claimed, the games showed the majesty of Rome and its control over subjects, provinces and even nature.16 Amphitheaters and their games were also unifying symbols of cultural romanization and Roman authority in the provinces. The height of the games (from the first century B.C. to the third century A.D.)—the greatest period of theater construction—corresponds to the height of Rome’s imperial power. Cruelty and civilization, certainly brutality and empire, are not such strange bedfellows after all.
Rome’s blood sports were also entertainment, leisure and recreation. These were not trivial matters for the common people of Rome. Rome was a city with over a million underemployed, urban dwellers, many living out their limited mortality in squalid, unsafe multistory apartments (insulae). With little in common—and sometimes less to live on or live for—they needed some diversion, some release of tensions or frustrations, some consolation, some “popular” culture. After slave revolts, civil wars and frontier threats, anxious Romans wanted to be reassured that they were strong, safe and, yes, superior. They were pleased, excited, even delighted, to be a part, however infinitesimal and indirect, of something larger and grander than themselves. Everyone loves a winner, and the arena 025showed that Rome was the Mediterranean and European champion.
Just as we have myriad motives for endorsing and attending concerts and football games, so different spectators found different performances and punishments in the arena attractive and meaningful for a variety of reasons. Some were drawn by the allure of violence and power, some by the thrilling sights of foreign peoples and exotic animals, some by the opportunity to interact with the emperor. And some went for the crowds as well as the action: Ovid recommends the gladiatorial shows, like chariot races, as places for courting and gambling. Spectacles were social occasions, as Tertullian said, for “seeing and being seen.”
When we confront the strange allure, or even at times the banality, of violence, the road often leads back to Rome. For centuries, blood sports and other deadly spectacles were central to the social life and public space of the Roman world.1 Rome’s violent public entertainments included gladiatorial combats (spectacula gladiatorum), animal hunts (venationes) and even ritualized mass executions of criminals and captives. These occurred in “arenas,” sanded combat areas in Roman forums (marketplaces and civic centers), circuses (tracks for chariot races) and amphitheaters. With industry and pride, Rome scoured the empire for victims, built monumental facilities, staged […]
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This essay is based on my Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). Other recent books include T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London and New York: Routledge, 1992); C. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); M. Hornum, Nemesis, the Roman State, and the Games (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993); Paul Plass, The Game of Death in Ancient Rome: Arena Sport and Political Suicide (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); J.P. Toner, Leisure and Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997). Valuable essays include Keith Hopkins, “Murderous Games,” in Death and Renewal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1–30; J.C. Edmondson, “Dynamic Arenas: Gladiatorial Presentations in the City of Rome and the Construction of Roman Society During the Early Empire,” pp. 69–112, and D. Potter, “Performance, Power, and Justice in the High Empire,” pp. 129–160, in W.J. Slater, ed., Roman Theater and Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); E. Gunderson, “The Ideology of the Arena,” Classical Antiquity 15 (1996) pp. 113–151; D. Potter, “Martyrdom and Spectacle,” in R. Scodel, ed., Theater and Society in the Classical World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); pp. 53–58, and “Entertainers in the Roman Empire,” sin Potter and D.J. Mattingly, eds., Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999) pp. 256–325.
Recent videos include The Roman Arena. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities, 1994. 50 minutes; Gladiators: Sports and Entertainment in the Roman World. Cincinnati: Institute for Mediterranean Studies, 1998. 22 min.
2.
See S. Brown, “Death as Decoration: Scenes from the Arena on Roman Domestic Mosaics,” in A. Richlin, ed., Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 180–211.
3.
Tertullian, De Spectaculis, trans. by G.H. Rendall, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).
4.
Potter, video, op. cit.
5.
Graffiti: Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum 4.4289, 4342, 4345; Juvenal Satire 6.82–113.
Seneca, De Ira 2.2.4, trans. J.W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928).
9.
Tacitus, Annals 12–56; Suetonius, “Claudius,” in The Twelve Caesars 12.6; and Dio Cassius, 61(60).33.3–4.
10.
See K.M. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments,” Journal of Roman Studies 130 (1990), pp. 44–73.
11.
Tacitus, Annals 15.44.3–8.
12.
Ignatius, Epistle to the Romans 5.3, translated by K. Lake, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912); Apostolic Fathers 2.233.
13.
Elephants, rhinoceroses and zebras were wiped out in northern Africa, and hippopotamuses and crocodiles were pushed south from Egypt into Nubia. (See J.J. Hughes, Pan’s Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994], pp. 105–108.)
14.
Cicero might ask: “But what pleasure can it possibly be for a man of culture, when either a puny human being is mangled by a most powerful beast, or a splendid beast is transfixed with a hunting spear?” (in Letters to his Friends 7.1.3 Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929); but Cicero clearly went to the shows.
