The World of the Gladiator E-Book

Susanna Shadrake

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 474

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

The figure of the gladiator is as compelling to us as it was to the Romans. Why are we drawn to this ancient blood sport? The usual explanation of the savagery lurking beneath our veneer of civilisation is too simplistic. Gladiatorial combat has always been far more than just an excuse for the enjoyment of violence. From its origins in the funerary religious practices of Republican Rome to the extreme form of entertainment we recognise today, the bloody business of the arena evolved into a microcosm of the Roman Empire: a self-contained world reflecting the culture, attitudes and history of Rome itself. The World of the Gladiator brings the games and the gladiators into focus, placing them in their historical and cultural context. Using evidence from all over the Roman world, including fresh archaeological discoveries, the minutiae of the arena are set out and discussed. A picture of the gladiator's life is built up, from training and diet, to social status and mortality rates. The history of the amphitheatre, that iconic symbol of bloodletting, is also traced alongside the evolution of the gladiator. Films like Gladiator and Spartacus demonstrate that the idea of two men fighting each other for their lives has lost none of its power in over 2000 years. The particular persistence of this public taste for spectacle is explored, with unavoidable comparisons to the modern world.

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susanna Shadrake is a writer, researcher and consultant to TV and film companies, advising on all aspects of gladiatorial life. She is co-founder and secretary of Britannia, a re-enactment society providing shows for English Heritage, the BBC, Museum of London and the National Trust. She is the author of Barbarian Warriors.

FOR MY FATHER, GEORGE ALBERT MOOREINVICTUS

Front cover image: Murmillo gladiator. Photograph: Pharos Pictures

All illustrations are the work of Dan Shadrake unless otherwise indicated

First published 2005

This edition published 2024

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Susanna Shadrake, 2005, 2011, 2024

The right of Susanna Shadrake to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 80399 950 0

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall

CONTENTS

1     Ritual combat: the evolution of the gladiator

2     Caesar’s games

3     From ludus to arena: the making of a gladiator

4     Behind the game of death: organising the spectacle

5     The virtue of worthless blood: to please the crowd

6     Novelty and variety: gladiatorial categories

7     Timor mortis, amor mortis: attitudes to gladiators and the games

8     Gladiators in the twenty-first century: reconstructing the spectacle

Bibliography

Acknowledgements and credits

1

RITUAL COMBAT:THE EVOLUTION OF THE GLADIATOR

And human blood would be an enjoyable sight.

(Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi)

To us, the gladiator has become a metaphor for Rome, a kind of shorthand way of saying what is generally perceived as the Roman attitude to life and death. The image of the gladiator conveys the whole sweep of casual cruelty; the cheapness of life, the sheer incomprehensibility of a civilisation apparently built on blood and suffering (1). In looking at all of this, we must be careful of imposing our own values on Rome; they do not necessarily reflect what actually goes on in our own society, and certainly have no place in one born nine centuries before Christ.

Nowadays, the idea of two armed men fighting each other to the death as an entertainment and a spectacle for a cheering crowd is held up as an affront to the civilised mind. For a couple of seconds we can sign up to that belief, before the modern equivalents to gladiatorial combat start to occur to us. Hypocrisy is an ancient vice still practised today. Living as we do in a society where the most popular forms of mass entertainment use increasingly graphic images of bloody violence and pointless cruelty, we are in no position to assert our moral superiority. So perhaps the history of gladiators, and especially their origins, can provide relevant and useful insights towards that most modern of preoccupations – the quest to ‘know ourselves’. Many writers through the centuries, even to the present day, have felt drawn to speculate on the meaning of the brutality played out on the sand of the arena, and especially what it reveals of human nature.

The pathology and practice of ritualised and institutionalised violence within an organised society deserve closer scrutiny, not least because of what they tell us about the extraordinary human ability to transform something ‘bad’ like violent death into something ‘good’ such as public reassurance in time of crisis. The truth is that we are just as fascinated by the prospect of two men locked in a life and death struggle as our ancient Roman counterparts in the Colosseum were; the insatiable public appetite for celluloid gore, celebrity mayhem and graphic newsreel footage bears witness to that. The modern excuse that we are too civilised to make people fight to the death makes it sound as if there would be no spectators if such a match were actually staged, when in fact common sense tells us that tickets would fly out of the touts’ hands. In fact, the very word ‘fascinate’, coming as it does from the Latin verb fascino, meaning ‘to bewitch, enchant’, and additionally, with fascinum being a phallus-shaped amulet to ward off the evil eye, as well as slang for the male member itself, gives ample indication of the kind of influence such a spectacle, whether real or simulated, has on the spectators, whatever century they happen to find themselves in. It must be better to look steadily into the face of the monster than to turn away and deny its existence.

1 Third-century AD tombstone depicting retiarius type of gladiator, showing several of his victories. Museo Nuovo Capitolino

After all, the Romans, in several hundred years and body counts running into many hundreds of thousands, had the business of bloodshed as performance down to a fine art. That cannot be airbrushed out of the picture if there is to be any sincere attempt to grasp the total reality of Rome. Political correctness has no place in the ancient world; indeed, the phrase would have made no sense to a Roman, to whom politics were not chopped up and kept in a separate box from the rest of life. To understand the gladiatorial phenomenon, we must put aside our modern perspective and sensitivities, or we will miss the whole point of all that spilt blood.

Despite our tendency to interpret the past by using the present as a template, the gladiators and their world seem to exert as strong a pull now as they did then. For a start, the audience’s appetite for endless reruns of Spartacus and, more recently, Gladiator, has not abated. They supply us, however historically flawed they may be, with our own sanitised version of the heroes of the arena. However, it would be a mistake to think, just because we share a predilection for bloody spectacle, that our cultures are the same and that the parallels are obvious, although it is tempting to think that the Romans would enjoy the celluloid cruelty regularly served up to us. Over several centuries, the Western European mindset has developed into a highly analytical, demarcating tradition, where every aspect of life is identified, labelled, categorised. It is important to remember that the Romans would not understand or recognise our insistence on separating the private and public aspects of life, such as religion, politics, social interaction, emotions. For them, daily life was a complex interweaving of all of those influences and more besides, in a way that seems utterly alien to us now. The interaction of social, political and religious spheres made public life in Rome a subtle balancing act.

Gladiators were just one of many cultural expressions that Romans had at their disposal, quite a few of which we would find hard to stomach, such as sacrificing puppies to avert mould growth on garden plants. This should be kept in mind whenever we feel the urge to make any moral judgments on the bloody business of the arena.

It would be satisfying to be able to follow the trail right back through the centuries to its source, to point at one thing and say with confidence, ‘yes, this is definitely how gladiators began’, in order to understand what gave rise to the phenomenon of the munus gladiatorum, the gladiatorial combat, in the first place. However, the sum total of all the evidence, when drawn from the literary, iconographic and archaeological fields, unfortunately fails to point in any one particular direction. No matter how much we may long to solve the mystery with a convenient and tidy explanation, we may have to accept that the gladiator’s origins can never be pinpointed with absolute certainty, unless or until some fresh discovery is made.

In addition, we may be guilty of a failure of imagination in assuming that the development of the gladiatorial games, the munera, can be attributed to a single cause or easily explained by one set of circumstances in the first place. Very few forms of entertainment or sport owe their birth to a specific and singular event. Why should gladiators be any different? They arose out of a very specific set of conditions, a combination of history and circumstance. The background for gladiatorial combat is Rome itself.

ROME’S FIRST GLADIATORS

Down by the Tiber, where the river bends round the Tiberine Island, the Palatine hill overlooks the Forum Boarium, the old cattle market of Rome (2). It is a public space now, smaller than the Forum Romanum, but big enough for the modest combats about to take place. Today human livestock may be slaughtered here, as three pairs of gladiators prepare to fight in honour of one of Rome’s important public figures, the recently deceased ex-consul Junius Brutus Pera. His sons, Decimus and Marcus have put on these combats as part of the funeral games, as a duty and an obligation they owe to the manes, the shade or spirit of their dead father. The men who are to fight aren’t even called gladiatores in the earliest sources; instead, they are known as bustuarii, from the Latin for a tomb or a funeral pyre, bustum. Not that they are necessarily going to fight by the side of the tomb or the pyre, though they often did; their name derives from their association with the funeral rites, whenever and wherever they were conducted.

It is 264 BC. This is the accepted date for the earliest record of gladiatorial combat, the munus gladiatorum, at Rome itself. Whether there were crowds of onlookers, in the manner of a public event, or just mourning family and friends, is not recorded. Whether they sat on hastily erected bleachers, or just stood in the ancient windswept forum to witness the performance of a rite that would spill blood to purify the pollution of death and propitiate the dead man’s spirit, it is impossible to say.

In fact, even the identity of the deceased is a mystery. Some writers have called him Junius Brutus Pera, but it is possible that he was another illustrious Roman by the name of Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva, who, as consul in 292 BC, had defeated the northern Faliscan tribes; alternatively, he was father to the Decimus Junius Pera who, as consul in 266 BC, had military success against Italic tribes. All three possibilities have their supporters, but the confusion serves as a reminder that certainty on this subject as with so much else in the world of the gladiator is elusive. It is interesting that in all three cases the potential honoree had connections to the consulship, and recent military success.

2 Map of early central Rome BC, showing the location of the first gladiator contests at the Forum Boarium

What is beyond doubt is that this duty to the dead, usually performed at the end of full mourning, at least nine days later, was an expensive business. It would not have formed part of the average funeral, as the cost of using several captives or slaves to fight in the munus would have been unaffordable for all but the very rich. From its inception, the munus was the prerogative of the elite, the wealthy, the bluebloods, and as such, it was always about much more than an obligation to the dead.

It has been suggested that Rome developed these violent contests spontaneously from within its own culture. There has been a tendency, both in modern times and by the Romans themselves, to attribute gladiatorial combats to outside influence, typically Etruscan or Campanian, but the truth could be even simpler than that; perhaps the munus did in fact emerge from within Roman society, firstly, as an expression of its piety and religiosity, but then becoming an end in itself, satisfying the crowd’s naked love of spectacle. It is yet another theory to add to the list of potential explanations.

What we do know is that in 264 BC, which just happens to be the year that Rome first picked a fight with mighty Carthage, the occurrence of gladiators at the funeral games for one of Rome’s illustrious dead is considered worthy of inclusion in the historical record (3).

To put it into the historical context, the record shows that, at a time of great uncertainty for Rome in the very year that saw the start of the First Punic War, gladiators had fought at the ludi funebres, the funeral games of a high status Roman, who had either been consul himself, or whose son had held that office; is it possible that those gladiators were prisoners of war from an earlier conflict, who were then put on show for a demonstrably morale-boosting performance of Rome versus the rest of the world?

There is strong evidence, however, for rites of execution and even human sacrifice being performed in Rome long before gladiators appear in the historical record; the common theme is all of these activities involve the shedding of blood, and therefore they were all in some sense propitiary offerings, intended to ward off the gods’ displeasure at the commission of a capital offence, avert disaster in time of crisis, or pay tribute to the shade of a dead relative. The Romans were familiar with bloodshed of all kinds. As Bauman put it, there were no bleeding hearts in ancient Rome; misericordia, the emotion of pity, was thought unmanly compared to its rational cousin, clementia, clemency, which was essentially prompted by reason rather than emotion.

3 Western Mediterranean, showing Rome in relation to Carthage

The Christian author, Tertullian, certainly seemed to have believed that there was an element of human sacrifice in the munera, replacing a more barbaric, archaic form:

The ancients thought that by this sort of spectacle they rendered a service to the dead, after they had tempered it with a more cultured form of cruelty. For of old, in the belief that the souls of the dead are propitiated with human blood, they used at funerals to sacrifice captives or slaves of poor quality whom they bought. Afterwards it seemed good to obscure their impiety by making it a pleasure. So after the persons procured had been trained in such arms as they had and as best they might – their training was to learn to be killed! – they did them to death on the appointed day at the tombs. So they found comfort for death in murder.

(Tertullian, De Spectaculis 12.2–3)

The danger here, of course, is in taking Tertullian at face value. As a Christian apologist of the second century AD and a vociferous critic of pagan Roman mores, his explanation of how the ancient custom of human sacrifice was superseded by the slightly less impious one of death by gladiator combat could be regarded as a partisan construction. However, he was from North Africa; Carthage had a centuries-old tradition of human sacrifice to Baal-Hammon and Tanit, of which he was intensely aware. It is at least worth considering that he might be writing from local knowledge rather than outright bias.

The combats at the Forum Boarium, modest though they were in comparison to the lavish shows that evolved from them, had to have had some special significance to be deemed worthy of inclusion in the public records. Why mention them otherwise? Nevertheless, they were a world away from the organised spectacles so beloved of the Roman mobs in later centuries.

AB URBE CONDITA

There are two ways of looking at Roman history. One is how the Romans saw it; the other, what we have pieced together from the archaeology, the written sources, together with the pictorial, iconographic and historiographical evidence. The history of the gladiatorial games is buried within that larger history of Rome. With few exceptions, of which Livy was the most notable, Roman historians tended to be senators or men of high rank. The aim of the Roman historian was primarily to chronicle Roman matters, to preserve the memory of Rome itself and to record and pass on to future generations of Roman citizens the words, deeds and characters of her famous men. The history of Rome was not purely secular, either; it was concerned with how the gods interacted with Rome, and so a good historian of public affairs would ideally have participated in the conduct of religious and ceremonial practices that were felt to be so important to the safety and prosperity of Rome, practices that included gladiatorial games. Rome’s historians tried to record not only what happened in their lifetimes, but also to reconstruct Rome’s past with whatever material they could find.

Their conclusions tended not to be challenged, and in due course became accepted history. By appreciating their methods, we can see why the origins of gladiators, as with so much else of Rome’s history, were gradually obscured as the annals and chronicles of public life assimilated errors, conjecture and personal interpretation as if they were facts.

For our purposes, an understanding of the history of Rome is vital as it provides the impetus, as well as the backdrop, for the cultural phenomenon of gladiator combats. That history falls neatly into three periods, identifiable by the type of government in each: the monarchy, or ‘the rule of seven kings’, the republic, and the empire.

Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome in 753 BC, was the first of these kings. Their rule covers two and a half centuries from 753 to 510 BC, which stretches them rather thinly over that timespan.

We should remember also that these were not kings in the modern sense; rather, they were like clan-chieftains, overlords who headed their family groups, and were recognised as leaders of their communities. Kingship was not necessarily hereditary; each new king had to get himself elected by the assembly of 30 clans, the comitia curia. Once he was acclaimed as king, he could exercise his power in political, military and religious matters. The Romans called this concept imperium; anyone invested with this divine authority had the right to give orders to those of lower status, and to expect obedience to those orders. It was a vague, all-encompassing power that gave its holder the right to impose their authority by force of arms, not just within the community, but also on any neighbouring peoples who were deemed to have challenged it. It incorporated conquest into the Roman psyche. Imperium was the word they came to use to describe their domination of the world.

The symbol of imperium was the fasces, a bundle of rods bound round an axe, which was carried by officials known as lictores in front of the ruler (4). The fasces may well have been an Etruscan symbol, representing the sacred right of the king to punish and execute anyone opposing his authority. The Greek historian Strabo records that Rome had inherited other symbols of political status whilst under the Etruscan hegemony:

It is said that the triumphal garb and that of the consuls and basically that of any magistrate was brought there from Tarquinia, as were the fasces, trumpets, sacrificial rituals, divination and music, as they are used publicly by the Romans.

(Strabo, Geographica)

If some Romans believed that their symbols of state were Etruscan in origin, this says as much about their ambivalent attitude to the power of the state as it does about the historical truth of Strabo’s suggestion. By the same argument, their attribution of elements of gladiatorial combat to an Etruscan source is possibly indicative of a Roman desire to keep the events of the munera from polluting their native traditions.

4 Fasces, the symbol of imperium, a bundle of rods tied around an axe used in state ceremony

Nothing certain is known about the first four legendary kings, but the historicity of the last three is not in doubt. Etruscan expansion in 616 BC brought Tarquinius Priscus, the first of Rome’s Etruscan kings, and it is during his reign that the major civic building works began. When he was murdered in 578 BC, his successor, Servius Tullius, who was a Latin, not an Etruscan, seized power by force in a popular uprising. His main contribution to Rome was to create the first citizen army, the first legion, with a reported 4000 infantry and 600 cavalry.

The last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, was again an Etruscan, but he behaved so tyrannically that the outraged aristocracy expelled him, after a sexual scandal involving his son, who had raped a Latin woman called Lucretia. There followed a power struggle; it was not that the aristocracy were anti-Etruscan, but they declared themselves to be against all forms of tyranny, and set themselves up as Rome’s protectors.

A new form of government was devised; they created the Senate, a body that could bestow the imperium by election on two magistrates, later known as the consuls, whose rule would last only for a year. Each had the right to check the other’s actions. The republic (509–31 BC) was established.

Although Etruscan rule had ended with the ejection of Tarquin the Proud, the Etruscans had overseen the creation of a programme of civic works and urban development that would be carried on by the Romans for the next thousand years. They had bequeathed to Rome the idea of the city-state. They left behind other helpful items, such as their alphabet, (though not their mysterious language, being neither Greek nor Latin, and which is unlike the other Indo-European based languages of the peoples of the Italic peninsula), their Greek-influenced art and culture, religious rituals and ceremonies, mythology, methods of civil administration, their calendar, sophisticated agricultural methods, a love of chariot-racing, and a number of feats of construction, notably the main sewer draining into the Tiber, the Cloaca Maxima, the Circus Maximus, for the aforementioned races, a number of impressive temples and the Forum Romanum. Because of this legacy, Rome went from being an insignificant trading settlement to a burgeoning city, inhabited by Latins, but underwritten by Etruscan culture.

Despite the headstart this inheritance had given them, the Romans always remained ambivalent about the Etruscans. The historian Herodotus (490–420 BC) thought that the Etruscans were not an indigenous people of Italy, and that they were in some way ‘oriental’, coming from Lydia (now Turkey) in Asia Minor. The Lydian link proved fictitious. Instead, it is believed that the eastern influences so marked in the Etruscan culture came to them by way of the Syrian and Asian products traded by the Greeks in the Campanian markets and colonies.

Modern archaeology has established beyond doubt that the Etruscans were an indigenous people of the Bronze Age Villanovan culture: their civilisation originated within Italy itself, not some mysterious part of Asia Minor: they just happened to speak a language unlike the other tongues of the Italic tribes, and to have developed a culture heavy with eastern ornament (5). This always marked them out as exotic and alien.

After breaking free of the Etruscan yoke in around 510 BC, Rome spent the next 250 years in an almost constant state of warfare as it struggled to dominate its many rival city-states and the assorted tribes of the Italian peninsula (6). Finally, in 290 BC, Rome subjugated its most formidable enemies, the Samnites, an organised and powerful people from the mountainous interior of Italy. By 272 BC, the entire peninsula was under Roman control, and prisoners of war were so plentiful that the terms ‘Samnite’ and ‘gladiator’ were practically synonymous.

5 Etruscan warriors and a woman of rank, possibly a priestess. Bronze statuettes from around 590 BC. Photograph: courtesy of Misha Nedeljkovich, College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Oklahoma USA

6 Tribes of the Italian peninsular 1000–500 BC

MYTH AS HISTORY

Roman historians did not have, and would probably not have welcomed, the modern benefit of archaeology to help them piece together their past. Alongside their prosaic, if incomplete, history of dates and places, they used a variety of legends from both Greek and Roman sources to fill in the gaps, rather as we do with King Arthur, and to create their own interpretations of the foundation of Rome; over time, just two versions began to dominate these accounts.

The first of these told of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who escaped from the city of Troy after the Trojan War. To put that event on some sort of historical footing, there is evidence that Bronze Age Troy was indeed destroyed towards the end of the thirteenth century BC, some 500 years before the Iliad was composed. Aeneas was a favourite hero of the Etruscans, whose cultural seedcorn was sown deep in the Roman psyche.

In this story, Aeneas and his companions landed on the shores of Italy, settled in Latium and founded the city of Lavinium, while his son, Iulus, founded the first Latin city of Alba Longa. So Aeneas became the father of the Roman people, by establishing a line of kings who conveniently bridged the gap until the birth of Romulus and Remus, and following that, the foundation of Rome.

The Aeneas story was already circulating in Etruria in the sixth century BC; his flight from Troy is depicted on a number of Athenian black-figure vases found there, and the same theme crops up on Etruscan gems and votive statuettes found at the Etruscan town of Veii. It found its ultimate expression in the Augustan epic poem by Virgil, the Aeneid.

The second version is the story of Romulus and Remus. At first, some early Roman historians said they were the sons, or grandsons, of Aeneas. Then they started doing the calculations, using 1184 BC, the date of the fall of Troy as fixed by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (275–194 BC) in his Chronographia; they realised that from Aeneas to Romulus and Remus was far more than two generations, hence the creative use of a line of Alban kings descended from Aeneas. Some even managed to join the two legends by making Romulus and Remus the product of the rape of the king’s daughter, Rhea Silvia, who was a Vestal Virgin, by Mars, god of war. Her offspring were thrown into the river Tiber on the orders of her father, the ruthless king, but ended up on the bank of the river where a she-wolf found them and suckled them. Then a shepherd found them and took them home; when they grew up, they overthrew the tyrant who had tried to do away with them. Because the city of Alba was getting overpopulated, they decided to found a new city. As they quarrelled over who should be the one to give his name to the fledgling city, a fight broke out in which Romulus slew his brother. Another, more common, story has Remus mocking his brother by jumping over the partially-built walls; angered, Romulus kills him, with the prophetic words, ‘So perish anyone else who shall jump over my walls.’

The new city would be called Rome, after Romulus. The date the Romans eventually settled on for the foundation is traditionally recorded as 21 April, 753 BC.

Buried deep in these stories, and in their multifarious and inventive offshoots, are grains of truth about Rome’s ancient beginnings. The city of Rome is always the focus of the story. The Aeneas legend joins it to the Greek civilization and culture so admired by Rome, and thus to the Etruscans, who had always been susceptible to the charms of Greek culture, and who regarded Aeneas as their hero. The foundation story of the birth of Rome pivots on a rape and a murder, and a fratricide at that. It hints at human sacrifice (the shedding of Remus’ blood as a foundation offering, vital for the city’s protection and future prosperity), traditions of duelling champions in the heroic manner of the Iliad, and roots in migrations of peoples long since grown over (colour plate 1). The Greek and Etruscan elements within them are important because they demonstrate the effect of other cultures on the Romans, and that is no less true in the case of the evolution of gladiators.

HISTORY AS MYTH

A clue to the way the Roman mind runs is found in the tradition of voluntary self-sacrifice noted even at this early point in Rome’s history. Romans had a taste for the grand sacrificial gesture, the difference that one man could make if he dedicated his life to the gods in return for the good of the nation, and this was reflected in their foundation myths as much as in their actual recorded history. A famous example occurred during the Samnite Wars, when the beleaguered Roman general Publius Decius Mus gave himself as a voluntary sacrifice at the hands of Rome’s enemies in an act of devotio, to secure a Roman victory. By dedicating his life to the gods of the underworld (dii inferi), he was making a deal to trade his own life together with the lives of the slain Samnites, in return for success in battle. As Livy said, he gave himself and the legions of the enemy to the Earth and the infernal gods to be slaughtered.

Once having made this bargain with the gods, he became an unstoppably fierce fighter; his death was already a foregone conclusion, so he plunged into the enemy ranks without fear, knowing that his demise would be the completion of the contract. As a result, he utterly terrified the Samnites. Cicero said that he looked for death more ardently than Epicurus thought pleasure should be pursued. His was the amor mortis of the gladiator. He went down under a rain of spears and lances, and his self-sacrifice inspired the Roman soldiers to renew their attack on the Samnites.

The devotio and the oath of the gladiator, the sacramentum, share the common element of voluntary dedication of a life honourably discharged by death in battle or in the arena. It might be argued that gladiators were not always volunteers; this is true, as the gladiator, once having been acquired for the arena, by whatever means, had no choice but to make his oath; thereafter he was bound by something more important than mere compulsion. This had the effect of freeing him, within the confines of the combat. Provided that he held nothing back, and fought with the same contempt for his life that Decius Mus had done, he would have the glory, whether or not he survived. He had the chance to regain lost dignity, to redeem his place in society, but to gain it he had to be prepared to let go of hope and fear, and fight with the rage of the truly desperate.

FERIAE, LUDI

The enactment of bloody games, by the first century AD, had become one of the defining characteristics of what it meant to be Roman, and the gladiator show is still one of the first images to come to our minds when we think of Rome. Because of this stereotyping, there is great potential for confusion over the different types of event loosely described as ‘games’, and in order to draw any useful conclusions about the origin of gladiator combats, it is important to make distinctions between them. All too easily, the modern mind is lured into thinking that the term, ‘gladiators’ is synonymous with ‘games’. The main difference to keep in mind is that the ludi were state-funded public celebrations involving processions, theatrical shows and circus-games, such as chariot-races, whereas the gladiator fights were munera, privately-funded ceremonial obligations owed to deceased men of standing in the community, the purpose of which was to create publicity for them, enhancing their status, and, by association, their family.

Gladiators were part of Rome’s repertoire of entertainment, a separate strand that joined the mainstream just as the Republic was giving way to the Caesars and empire. It is important to examine the other elements, as they were all designed for the same purpose, gladiators included – to hold the attention of the public.

From Rome’s earliest days, it celebrated religious festivals and holidays known as feriae. Rome was at heart a society based on agriculture; its foundation stories were full of farmers and shepherds. The feriae originated in the need to honour, placate and enlist the support of the gods associated with fertility of crops, livestock, weather, good health, and the myriad concerns of the rustic life. Some of Rome’s most ancient festivals were related to the yearly cycle of the land, and the effect of the seasons. These festivals, dedicated to particular divinities, were spread over the months of the year; despite the plural noun, feriae could be single-day festivals. The ceremonies invariably included sacrifice, a word we tend to associate with ritual killing, but which encompasses the performance of any sacred action, which is the literal meaning of sacrificium.

Various offerings were common, such as wine, oil, cakes, grain, honey, milk, and incense, as well as blood offerings in the form of the slaughter of domestic animals, reflecting the ancient human appreciation of the mechanism of giving up something valuable in order to obtain an even greater benefit (7). In this respect, death and blood were the ultimate gifts available to secure life and prosperity, regeneration and fertility from the gods. The most acceptable sacrifice was one in which the beast, by appearing to offer its neck to the priest’s knife, indicated its willingness. This is strongly reminiscent of the position of the defeated gladiator who, according to Cicero, unflinchingly faces death:

7 Relief on column base in the Forum Romanum, showing ritual sacrifice. Photograph: author

Just look at the gladiators, either debased men or foreigners, and consider the blows they endure! Consider how they who have been well disciplined prefer to accept a blow than ignominiously avoid it! How often it is made clear that they consider nothing other than the satisfaction of their master or the people! Even when they are covered with wounds they send a messenger to their master to enquire his will. If they have given satisfaction to their masters, they are pleased to fall. What even mediocre gladiator ever groans, ever alters the expression on his face? Which one of them acts shamefully either standing or falling? And which of them, even when he does succumb, ever contracts his neck when ordered to receive the blow? (Cicero, Tusculanae Disputationes 2.17.41)

In the same way that the animal going compliantly to slaughter was seen as a good sign, so too was it considered admirable when a vanquished gladiator offered his neck for the coup de grâce (8 and 9). The Romans expected the same quality of willingness in the gladiator as in the sacrificial beast, in that the latter was led to slaughter by a slack rope, without a struggle; if the animal resisted, the offering might not be pleasing to the gods. Another example of this parallel is from Seneca, from his De Tranquillitate (11.5), when he casts the goddess Fortuna (equated to Nemesis, and like her, a goddess associated with the amphitheatre) as the editor of the games: ‘Why should I save you,’ she said, ‘weak and quivering beast? All the more will you be mangled and stabbed because you do not know how to offer your throat.’ What Fortuna, and by implication, the Roman audience, is angry about, is the gladiator who doesn’t go bravely to his death, who doesn’t co-operate in his own slaughter. They are filled with disgust; they feel insulted.

8 Re-enactment of a vanquished gladiator offering his neck for the killing blow. Photograph courtesy of Graham Ashford, Ludus Gladiatorius

9 Oil lamp from the first or second century AD, depicting a gladiator kneeling in defeat and awaiting the deathblow. From the Guttman Collection, reproduced with kind permission of Christies Images Ltd

Similar audience reactions can be seen today at any stadium, football pitch, tennis court, sports hall or even bullring, in fact anywhere that sporting prowess is called for, anywhere that the contestant fails to demonstrate the required amount of ‘grit’; it is as if he, as the representative of all their aspirations, stands in for them; he becomes the offering to whatever deity is running the luck that day, and then, by falling short, whether of expected courage or skill, embarrasses and humiliates both himself and them. At that point, the crowd gets derisive, and angry, cheated out of the exemplary behaviour they came to witness.

The gladiator must be seen against that cultural backdrop, in the context of a society to whom sacrifice and substitution were fully functioning parts of the Roman psyche. The Roman year was heavy with holidays, festivals and games, all with special significance and responsibilities for the people. This was a complicated business; some days were lucky; others best avoided. Romans thought odd numbered days were good, and that even dates were therefore unlucky, so the feriae took place on the odd days spread over the year.

In fact, Trimalchio, in Petronius’ Satyricon, had two boards put up on either side of his door to keep track of his dinner engagements and the special days of the year, which was a good idea, because on public holidays, all legal and political work halted, to avoid polluting the sacred day. For Romans, it was important to be aware of the dates of the festivals and holidays because of the effect they had on everyday life. Not that all work ceased; some was permitted by the priests. Certainly, the city did not grind to a halt; the shops were probably open, and people had the choice of treating the holiday piously, perhaps by visiting temples, or just enjoying the opportunity for relaxation and festivities, or as Pliny called it, harmless relaxation, innoxia remissio.

Although the feriae were essentially religious occasions, Roman citizens were not compelled to treat them as such, by performing acts of worship, provided they observed the rules about working. In any case, by the end of the Republic, it is doubtful whether the average Roman citizen attached any real religious significance to any of the festivals. Centuries of ritual had eroded the meaning of the acts performed; the origin of the beliefs had slowly bled away, leaving a hollow body of tradition.

However, some celebrations did hold a powerful significance for the Romans; chief amongst these were the feriae Latinae (festival of all the Latin peoples) at the end of April and the ludi Romani (also known as the ludi magni) in September, which marked the start and finish of Rome’s traditional summer war months, when farmers would have been free to join military campaigns, in order to enrich the state by raids on neighbours, and to defend it, a peculiar admixture of good husbandry and martial vigour, two things of which the Romans were very proud.

So ancient were some of the festivals that time had clouded their beginnings, and yet it is clear that they were all in some way related to the rustic life of Rome’s forefathers. The Equirria, a horseracing festival held on 27 February was supposedly set up by Romulus in honour of Rome’s first god, Mars. The Parilia was also associated with Romulus, being concerned with the purification of sheep and shepherds; it fell on the supposed date of the anniversary of Rome’s foundation, in April. Another, the equus October, sacrifice of the October horse, was a chariot race held on the Ides of October, in which the near-side horse of the winning team was sacrificed to Mars; its severed head was garlanded with loaves of bread and nailed to one of Rome’s most sacred buildings, the regia. Lupercalia was held on 15 February, and involved rites of purification and fertility, drunkenness and animal sacrifice, when two teams of youths dressed in the bloody skins of slaughtered goats ran through the streets striking people with strips of goatskin called februa, thereby bestowing fecundity. Consualia honoured Consus, god of the granary, whose festivals in August and December celebrated harvest and autumn crop sowing with burnt sacrifices, chariot- and horse races in the Circus Maximus. The religious year ended with possibly the most popular holiday of all, Saturnalia, the feast of the winter solstice on 17 December, which honoured ancient Saturn from the Golden Age (the good old days), as a god of seed-sowing and prosperity. It was a time when shops and businesses were shut, school was out, and a public feast, open to all, was held; everyone wore their comfortable holiday clothes, master and slave changed places, friends exchanged candles, children got presents of little dolls, and the streets were full of happy, noisy crowds.

The Roman calendar had many such festivals; most were state events, administered by priests and officials of the magistracy, usually the aediles and praetores. Attached to the religious festivals were the public games, ludi publici, which, as time went by, became more important for their entertainment value than for any sacred aspect. The oldest and greatest of these were the ludi Romani; these originated as votive games in honour of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, dating from at least 366 BC, and supposedly instituted even earlier by the kings of Rome. They were the first and only annual games until around 220 BC, when the ludi plebeii, also in honour of Jupiter, were established.

In fact, from the third century BC onwards, there was a steady increase in the number of festivals and games, whilst the existing feriae and ludi were extended to occupy more days. The marked growth of Rome’s entertainment calendar reflected its new, improved status in the Italian peninsula and the Mediterranean world. The last serious wars fought by Rome against coalitions of its enemies in Italy, the Samnite wars, had been won by 295 BC, ensuring plentiful supplies of prisoners of war, and by 264 BC Roman domination of most of the Italian peninsula was complete, at which point Rome turned to challenge Carthage, its only real rival for supremacy in the Mediterranean. After three Punic Wars, and despite suffering heavy losses, Rome wiped Carthage from the face of the earth in 146 BC, and emerged as the undisputed new superpower of the western world.

As a direct consequence of so much military success, the wealth of the Mediterranean started to pour into Rome’s coffers; not only monies exacted from defeated enemies, but also booty, treasure, artefacts and slave labour provided by prisoners of war. This vast influx of new money stimulated grand new building projects, as temples, aqueducts, monuments, sprang up throughout Italy, not just at Rome; much of the money was used by the elite to buy up vast tracts of land in central Italy for farming enterprises run on slave labour, such as vineyards, olive groves, market gardens, sheep farming.

This was the dynamic economic and political climate in which all of Rome’s instruments of celebration – the festivals, the games, the triumphs and even the gladiators – began to proliferate. The Roman people’s desire to enjoy this newly acquired importance and dominance expressed itself in their appetite for display of all kinds.

As each fresh victory was enjoyed, Rome had more reason to give thanks to the gods and more wealth to show off; and so, by the foundation of new games and festivals, both needs were satisfied.

Between 212 and 173 BC, four more sets of games were instituted, in addition to the ludi Romani (5–19 September), and the ludi plebeii (4–17 November): the ludi apollinares (6–13 July), the ludi megalenses (4–10 April), the ludi ceriales (12–19 April), and the ludi florales (28 April–3 May). During the Republic, the games were specifically devoted to theatre shows (ludi scaenici) or to chariot-races (ludi circenses). At this stage, the gladiatorial contests had not yet joined the ludi as public games; nor had beast spectacles, venationes, been incorporated as regular features of public entertainment.

VENATIONES

It was not until 186 BC that M. Fulvius Nobilior, in fulfilment of a vow after his victories in Greece, presented a hunt of lions and panthers (leopards) as part of votive games, ludi votivi, in the Circus Maximus during the magni ludi for Jupiter Optimus Maximus (10). Before Nobilior’s venatio, no substantial evidence of animals in spectacles or hunts in the circus is available to build a picture of its use as a widespread practice.

However, even as a side-product of religious ceremonies, we should not ignore rituals like the releasing of foxes with burning torches tied to their tails on the last day of the festival of Cerialia, or the hunting of hares and deer in the circus games at the ludi florales at the end of the festival of the goddess Flora. In these, the victims are nothing like the large fighting animals such as the lions and tigers; the role of small wild herbivores relates more to their association with goddesses like Flora, whose purlieu was the domesticated landscape, the gardens and cultivated fields, and Ceres, the goddess of cereal crops and regenerative nature. They are akin to blood sacrifices with a ritual activity preceding the offering, presumably to increase its efficacy.

10 Roman mosaic of a leopard; many such exotic beasts were imported into Rome and other major cities for the games. Musei Capitolini. Photograph: author

These kinds of customs, whose origins were long forgotten, in which Romans tormented, abused, hunted and killed small wild animals, from hares and foxes to goats, deer and wild boar, not forgetting the domestic animals often used in sacrifice, were already well-established long before the exotic beasts started to make appearances in the votive games and triumphs. As a rule, the bigger the animal, the more likely it was to be killed for a show. This was especially so under the empire, when the most popular beasts were big and dangerous ones like bears, lions, tigers, leopards, bulls and elephants, all preferably taken from the wild rather than captive-bred or tamed. In 26 hunts put on by Augustus, he boasted in his Res gestae that 3,500 beasts had been slaughtered. By AD 80, Titus had 9,000 animals killed in the dedicatory games for the Colosseum, and 30 years later, Trajan’s games used 11,000 beasts. In the arena holocaust, the numbers of animals killed far exceeded the human deathcount.

If the hunts that were staged in the circus were rituals subliminally underlining territorial hunting rights and the power of Rome over the realm of nature itself, then the wild beast shows were over-the-top extensions of this principle. The big cats, elephants and giraffes and all the rare and strange creatures that Rome’s resources could track down and transport back to the arena, were like prisoners of war, exhibited as proof of Rome’s dominion over foreign lands. An account of games in AD 248 in the reign of Gordian lists 32 elephants, 10 elk, 10 tigers, 60 tame lions, 30 tame leopards, 10 hyena, 2,000 gladiators, 6 hippos, one rhino, 10 wild lions, 10 giraffes, 20 wild asses, and 40 wild horses.

Plenty of evidence exists for the practical methods by which these animals were hunted, trapped and transported back to Rome, from mosaics to Cicero’s letters, but Petronius sums it up nicely:

The wild beast is searched out in the woods at a great price, and men trouble Hammon (as in Baal-Hammon, the god) deep in Africa to supply the beast whose teeth make him precious for slaying men; strange ravening creatures freight the fleets, and the padding tiger is wheeled in a gilded palace to drink the blood of men while the crowd applauds. (Petronius, Satyricon 119.14–18)

Roman attitudes to the displays of animal cruelty and death need some explanation to put the beast spectacles in perspective. Again, there is no point in condemning the apparently callous disregard for suffering. How they regarded venationes would have been similar to their perception of the moral value of gladiatorial combat and bloodshed; beneficial effects to the individual and to the state were taken as read. In a society based on farming, hunting and military virtues, the regular exposure to human and non-human sacrifice and other rituals, like beast hunts, venationes and combats, munera, in which blood was spilt, all demonstrated for the people’s benefit the proper relationships between man, nature and state. It also had the effect of training out any response of squeamishness in the face of death, whether animal or human.

From childhood onwards, Romans, in common with most ancient societies, were quickly habituated to regular killing: small creatures and domestic beasts were sacrificed, larger animals were hunted; decimation arbitrarily punished the innocent soldier alongside the guilty, men of status were executed in the Forum by the sword, ad gladium, and criminals by less straightforward, but more inventive, means (11). Turning away from the sight of men being executed was thought to be puerile, something to grow out of, though the emperor Caracalla as a boy was praised for this supposed weakness:

… if he ever saw condemned men thrown to the wild beasts he wept or turned away his eyes; and this was more than pleasing to the people. (Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Caracalla 1–5)

Obviously, if the Augustan Histories are to be believed, (many historians feel they have limited credibility), he overcame his childish sympathies; once he was emperor, again in the words of the Historiae Augustae, ‘thereafter there was slaughter everywhere’. Punishment by flogging was also carried out in the Forum, in the ancient fashion, more maiorum. In particular, the unusual punishments, such as that of the poena cullei, the ritual penalty for the parricide (or murderer of any close relative), who could expect to be tied in a leather sack with a dog, a monkey, a snake and a cock, which was then thrown in the river Tiber, were intended to be seen, in order to assure society that the polluting presence of the killer had been fully expunged. This was the purpose of the unfortunate animals; as they struggled and attacked the victim in the sack, it was thought that the miasma of the foul deed would be cancelled out, leaving no trace of the evil behind. Denied the dignity of burial in earth, the evildoer and the wickedness of his deed would literally be washed out of the city, and into Hades. This was exceptional, however; the Forum was the normal venue for corporal and capital penalties, until gradually, the arena, with its convenient viewing, replaced the Forum as the most practical and popular site of public punishments and executions.

11 Roman beast hunt relief in marble. Musei Capitolini. Photograph: author

By adulthood, most Romans would have witnessed a great deal of physical punishment. It is not surprising, therefore, that attitudes to it would have been completely shaped by these experiences. This must be remembered when we start to wonder how people can comfortably watch thousands of frightened, crazed animals being despatched, let alone the gladiatorial fights. However, as with bullfights, it is likely that the key to their popularity was not the bloodshed itself, as the appetite for it must undoubtedly have become jaded with time, but how it was achieved; the sheer level of showmanship is what elevated the venationes from mere slaughterhouse spectacle. Once people had become hardened to the actual sight of death in the arena, they were able to focus on the different forms that killing took, rather as spectators at a bullfight may learn to recognise the various death-strokes, once they have overcome their squeamishness and sensitivities.

As for the beginnings of the venatio itself, it is true that much earlier than 186 BC four elephants were brought to Rome in triumph, in 275 BC, by M. Curius Dentatus, as part of the war booty from his victory against the Greek king, Pyrrhus. They were probably Indian elephants, exhibited as spoils of war rather than used in games. This attitude would especially apply to any animals being seen for the first time. Because of their novelty, the likelihood is that they would be put on show, as in a zoo or menagerie, rather than be hunted and killed. A similar approach was taken with ostriches when they first appeared at the Circus in 197 BC.

Although the Romans had great enthusiasm for all kinds of wild beasts, there was no zoo in Rome: Ptolemy II had set one up at Alexandria, but strangely, the Romans never tried to copy it. However, they did have game reserves and menageries for exotic birds and beasts, and later, there was even an imperial herd of elephants kept outside Rome, according to the second century rhetorician, Aelius Aristides.

A much more lavish display, with 142 elephants, had been put on in 252 BC by L. Caecilius Metellus. Then, in 186 BC, came Nobilior’s lion hunt, which was the first recorded instance of a true venatio in which the animals were actually killed. After that, in 169 BC, in a jump from triumphal or votive games, a venatio was given as part of the regular ludi circenses, within the Roman religious calendar, when Scipio Nasica and Cornelius Lentulus exhibited 63 big cats, and 40 elephants and bears (10). These are just the cases we know about; it is probable that somewhere between 275 and 186 BC, animal spectacles were incorporated into the state games.

Having been incorporated, they proved an economical part of the programme, as it was always going to be cheaper to put on beasts than men, despite the expense of shipping and housing. However, one thing is clear: by 169 BC, the animal spectacles were very definitely an official part of the state festivals, with the big animals, the carnivores, bulls and bears being the most popular. According to Cassius Dio and other literary sources, carnivores like the big cats were often known as africanae and libycae, after their places of origin.

The first crocodiles and hippos were seen at the games of Aemilius Scaurus in 58 BC; Pompey’s games were the first to show the rhinoceros (‘Ethiopian bulls’ as the Greek writer Pausanias later called them), and Caesar was first to put on a giraffe in his magnificent games of 46 BC. The same competitive escalation occurred with animal exhibitions as was happening in the munera.

This pressure to find new and exciting animals is perfectly illustrated by Cicero’s experience when he was governor of Cilicia (southern Turkey) around 51/50 BC, and was being harassed by letter about getting hold of some panthers (leopards) to send to Rome. His friend Marcus Caelius Rufus had been elected aedile, and he was putting pressure on Cicero in his post as provincial governor to supply as many panthers as possible, to use in the shows he would be organising later that year:

Dear Caelius,

About the panthers! The matter is being handled with diligence and according to my orders by men who are skilful hunters. But there is a remarkable scarcity of panthers. And they tell me that the few panthers left are complaining bitterly that they are the only animals in my province for whom traps are set. And therefore they have decided, or so the rumour goes, to leave my province and move to Caria. But the matter is receiving careful attention, especially from Patiscus. Any animal found will be yours. But whether any will be found, we really don’t know… (Cicero, Epistulae 2.11.2)

This letter speaks volumes about the voracious Roman appetite for animal shows, and from the difficulties Cicero was having in finding some panthers, it sounds like the Roman hunters, in responding to the excessive demands for wild beasts, may very well have hunted the big cats in Cilicia to near extinction. This is what is thought to have happened to the desert lions of Namibia, perhaps helped on their way by Pompey’s games of 55 BC, when 600 lions and 400 leopards were slaughtered. In environmental terms, the effect of Rome’s inexhaustible appetite for beast shows was disastrous for the animal kingdom, particularly in North Africa.

AD BESTIAS

We can see the very beginnings of the public method of execution known as damnatio ad bestias, which would later become such a notorious part of the activities in the arena, at some triumphal games held at Amphipolis in 167 BC, when, so Valerius Maximus tells us, Aemilius Paullus had army deserters publicly trampled to death by elephants. Although the process by which the elephants were made to crush the condemned men underfoot is not recorded, this ancient punishment has a parallel in India. It may have taken place as late as the times of the British Raj; provided the following method is not simply anecdotal, the victim was staked to the ground, while an elephant, tethered by a long line to the same stake, was encouraged to walk in ever-decreasing circles until the inevitable occurred. Whatever variant of this method the Romans practised, it must have been both cruelly compelling and exemplary. Other accounts tell of herds of elephants intoxicated by myrrh and incense being encouraged to rampage around the arena, trampling human victims at random.