Those About to Die

by Daniel Pratt Mannix

  By the end of the fourth century, the games had fallen into the hands of promoters and the spirit of competition had vir­tually disappeared. The charioteers had organized a power­ful union and now demanded that a man had to be allowed a certain number of wins. A charioteer might race for the Blues in one race and for the Greens in the next. He did not know what horses he would have before he climbed into the chariot—a far cry from Diocles and his perfectly trained teams. The gladiator was finished as a highly trained profes­sional. Obtaining sufficient wild animals for the games had become almost impossible; Europe, north Africa and Asia Minor had been swept bare. The Romans were even running out of Christians, Jews and criminals for the spectacles.

  A series of letters left by a senator named Quintus Aurelius Symmachus shows what a problem giving a series of games had become. Symmachus wanted to put on a week's games in honour of his son who had just been made an officer in the swagger Praetorian Guard and would run for praetor in 401 a.d. Symmachus started preparing for the games two years ahead of time.

  Symmachus, in addition to being a senator, was a very wealthy man. He owned three palaces and had held nearly every high office in the state. Being a devout man, Sym­machus was greatly shocked at the growth of this new cult called Christianity, and he determined to put on some real old-fashioned games to impress the people with scenes of skill and courage in order to disgust them with the namby-pamby doctrines of the new religion. The Master of the Games tried to talk the senator out of putting on anything but the usual run of stuff then current, but Symmachus in­sisted that he wanted the real thing.

  Poor Symmachus ran into nothing but headaches. To get really well-trained chariot horses, Symmachus had to import them from Spain. The nags used in Rome by then were only good enough to go around the track in a fixed race and stage a few smash-ups for the crowd. Eleven out of the sixteen horses Symmachus imported died before they reached the arena from bad handling on the voyage. The four left were so much better than the ordinary chariot horses that the race would have been a walk-away so the team had to be broken up. As a result, their charioteer quit. Four other charioteers were collected and more horses imported. Then it was discov­ered that the best charioteer was a Christian. As the whole point of the show was to prove that the weak Christians couldn't compete with the manly adherents of the old Roman religion, he had to be fired. But as he was a member of the union; the union called a strike. In a rage, Symmachus threat­ened to stage a race using dogs instead of horses because, as he said, the regular chariot horses were nothing but dogs anyhow. This caused a riot in which the Prajtorian Guard had to be called out.

  Meanwhile, Symmachus was trying hard to get wild animals for the games. He wrote to animal collectors, to friends in distant provinces, to officials, pointing out that they should co-operate in this great crusade to put on some really good shows to restore national morale. He spent months trying to unscramble the red tape. As professional collectors were now scarce, he had to hire his own men. This meant that he had to get them trapping licences, as lions and elephants could only be trapped by special permission of the emperor. He had to get special permission to give the shows in the Colosseum. The customs officials charged him an import tax on the animals although, as Symmachus explained in letter after letter, this tax was meant only to apply to pro­fessional dealers who retailed their animals after arrival.

  In spite of all this trouble, Symmachus couldn't get any lions, tigers, elephants or even antelope (he wanted topi and impala especially). All that arrived were some "weak and starving bear cubs" and a few crocodiles. The crocs hadn't eaten for fifty days and most of them had to be killed before the shows. Apparently the only animals that arrived in fit condition were some Irish wolf-hounds.

  Symmachus had even more trouble getting gladiators. He managed to purchase twenty-nine Saxon prisoners, supposed to be terrific fighters, but the prisoners never got out of gladiatorial school. They strangled each other until there was only one man left—and he beat his brains out against the wall.

  What sort of games Symmachus finally put on, I don't know. We only have his correspondence trying to get the acts lined up. We do know that the seven days' games cost him Ј148,000, and I'll bet his son never did get elected praetor.

  By the beginning of the fifth century, Rome found herself fighting for her life against the barbarian hordes along her frontiers. With the tremendous cost of the continual wars, it became increasingly difficult to pay for the games. Yet they continued, always catering more and more to the mob. The emperors abandoned the royal box as being undemocratic and sat with the crowd. The patricians made a great point of eating the food thrown to the mob, instead of leaving the amphitheatre for lunch or having slaves serve their own repast.

  The chariot races were a joke. People threw wine jars in front of the horses' feet and women encouraged their children to dart under the opposing teams hoping to make their team win. If the child was trampled, the indignant parents sued the racing stables for reckless driving. The crowd still con­tinued to call themselves Blues, Greens, and so on, even though they no longer knew anything about the horses or the men. A somewhat similar trend has occurred in modern big league baseball. Once every man on a team was a local boy; the crowds knew each player individually and turned out to root for friends. Today, the teams are recruited from men all over the country and are sold as commodities without any regard for community feelings. Pliny's remark about the char­iot factions would apply today: "The people know only the colour." Yet with no political parties and no feeling of belonging to any specific group, the people centred all their devotion on being a White or a Gold. People who were born Reds swore eternal enmity toward all other factions, supported the Reds under all circumstances, and considered a Green victory a national disaster.

  With the economic and military position of the empire too hopelessly complicated for the crowd to comprehend, they turned more and more toward the only thing that they could understand—the arena. The name of a great general or a brilliant statesman meant no more to the Roman mob than the name of a great scientist does to us today. But the average Roman could tell you every detail of the last games, just as today the average man can tell you all about a movie star's marriages but has only the foggiest idea what NATO is doing or what steps are being taken to fight inflation.

  For an ambitious man to get anywhere in public life, he had to establish a tie-in with the games. The Emperor Vitellius had been a groom for the Blues. As a result, he was made governor of Germany by a politician who was a Blue. After Vitellius became Emperor, he had anyone killed who booed the Blues. The Emperor Commodus went to gladiator's school and used to fight in the arena to win popular support. The Emperor Macrinus had been a professional gladiator. Even finding victims enough to be killed in the arena became a serious drain on the empire. "We are sacrificing the living to feed the dead," protested Caracalla, referring to the fact that the games were supposedly given to appease the souls of the departed. Yet the games kept on. Without them, the mob could not be controlled, and by now the entire national economy was tied up with the great spectacles. To have stopped them would have caused as serious a crisis as if our government suddenly abandoned dams, farm relief, and military spending.

  Yet the end could not be postponed for ever. Rome began to be overrun by foreigners. Thousands of Gauls, Germans, and Parthians were living in the city, brought there to bolster the weakening empire. These "barbarians" had no interest in the games which, after all, required a rather special taste to appreciate. A Parthian prince left the circus in disgust, re­marking, "It's no fun seeing people killed who haven't a chance." The crowd yelled, "Burr-head! Why doncha go back to Parthia where ya belong?" but the savages gradually obtained the balance of power. After all, the emperors de­pended on these foreign auxiliaries for support and placating the Roman mob became less and less important.

  The Christian church was growing in power and did every­thing possible to stop the games. In 325 a.d., Constanti
ne tried to put an end to the games but they still continued. Then in 365 a.d., Valentinian forbade sacrificing victims to wild beasts. He was able to make bis edict stick, and that took all the fun out of the spectacles. In 399 a.d. the gladiatorial schools had to close for want of pupils.

  Then in 404 a.d., a monk named Telemachus leaped into the arena and appealed to the people to stop the fights. Tele­machus was promptly stoned to death by the angry mob but his death ended the spectacles. The Emperor Honorius was so furious at Telemachus' lynching that he closed the arenas. They were never reopened. The last chariot race was held after the fall of Rome by Tolila, a Goth, in 549 a.d. He was merely curious to see what the business looked like.

  Yet so deeply had the games entered into the national con­sciousness that people still considered themselves as support­ing the Red, White, Green or Blue faction—although many of these people had no idea what the colours meant. In 532 a.d., riots broke out between the Blues and the Greens that threatened to wreck what remained of the empire. The Emperor Justinian had to call out troops to restore peace, and in the fighting over thirty thousand people were killed.

  The only remaining relics of these titanic spectacles are some crude pictures scratched on the walls of gladiator bar­racks, a few cracked tombstones, references in the literature of the times and, here and there, the ruins of the amphitheatres. The games followed the legionnaires as chewing gum follows American GIs, and wherever the legions were stationed there was sure to be a circus. Roman governors built stadiums as soon as they arrived in their province, confident that this was the only way to keep the population contented. Many of their letters express amazement that the Greeks, Gauls and Britons seemed more interested in having enough to eat than in watching the games.

  Establishing these amphitheatres was a difficult job. The Greeks fought them to the last (Plutarch describes the games as "bloody and brutal"), but in other countries the games slowly gained a following, although they never enjoyed anything like the popularity they had in Rome. Egypt held out against them for a long time but at last had to yield— in every nation there is always a certain proportion of people who enjoy such sights. So all over the Roman world great amphitheatres appeared, hardly less magnificent than the ones in Rome itself: at Capus, Pompeii, Pozzuoli and Verona in Italy; at Aries and Nimes in France; at Seville in Spain; at Antioch in Palestine; at Alexandria in Egypt; at Silchester in Britain; at El Dien in Tunisia.

  Many of these amphitheatres still remain. You can sit in the "maeniana" (stands) with a cold chicken and a bottle of wine and speculate out of which door the animals were re­leased, where the inner barrier ran, and how they got the lions out of the "cavea" (interior) into the arena. As your guess is probably as good as anyone's, it's an interesting way to spend an afternoon.

  The largest amphitheatre remaining is, of course, the Colosseum. Although the prodigious structure has been used as a quarry for a thousand years and a large part of Mediaeval Rome was built with stone taken from it, much still remains. Byron wrote:

  A ruin! Yet what ruin! from its mass

  Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been rear'd;

  Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,

  And marvel where the spoil could have appear'd.

  You can crawl through the "enormous skeleton" with a copy of J. H. Middleton's The Remains of Ancient Rome and go nuts trying to find all the places he mentioned. You can see the huge traventine blocks used in the construction, some seven feet long, and held together with iron clamps as mere mortar couldn't carry the fantastic strain put on them. In the Middle Ages when iron was desperately needed, people dug thousands of these clamps out of the stone, a murderously laborious job. Although as late as 1756, a French archaeologist computed that there was still 17,000,000 francs worth of marble remaining in the Colosseum, almost all of it is now gone. However, you can still see many of the carved marble curule chairs used by the patricians on the podium. They're in Italian churches being used as episcopal thrones.

  Next to the Colosseum, the largest of the remaining amphi­theatres is in Verona, Italy. It is 502 feet long by 401 feet wide and 98 feet high. It held about thirty thousand people and is still used for the mild Italian bullfights. The next largest remaining circus is in Nimes, France. It measures 435 by 345 feet and held about twenty thousand people. It is two stories high with 124 entrances. The Pompeian amphitheatre is comparatively small but interesting because it is so well preserved and the gladiator barracks are nearby.

  In the Middle Ages these amphitheatres were regarded with superstitious awe. People living in Pola, Italy, thought the amphitheatre there must have been built by supernatural beings as no mortal man could accomplish such a task. They claimed that the stadium was a fairy palace, built in a single night. They explained the fact that the building had no roof by saying that a cock was awakened by the hammering and crew: the fairies thought it was daybreak and left without finishing the job.

  Many of the amphitheatres were used as fortresses during the Middle Ages. Some of them were used as barns and crops were planted in the arenas. The farmers were astonished at how well the crops grew, not knowing that the soil was well fertilized.

  The ludi, as the Romans called the games, were not, of course, games in our modern sense. Nor were they merely spectacles or shows as we understand the terms. They were a vital and integral part of Roman life and psychology. The closest modern parallel would be the Spanish bullfight which to a Latin is an emotional experience rather than a sport or an exhibition of skill. For over five hundred years the ludi continued in one form or another. Hundreds of generations of Romans were born, grew up and died under their influence. At last, they came completely to dominate the life of the average inhabitant of Rome. His one interest—almost his one cause of living—was to attend the ludi.

  The growth, character, and final degeneration of the ludi closely paralleled the growth, character and degeneration of the Roman empire. In the old, simple days of the republic, the games were simply athletic contests. As Rome became a conquering power, the games became bloody, ruthless and fierce, although still retaining a conception of fair play and sportsmanship. This was the era when Augustus had to pass laws forbidden patricians from jumping into the arena and fighting it out with professional gladiators, and a young noble would challenge a victorious German prisoner to a fight to the death. When Rome finished her conquests and became merely a despotic power, the games became pointlessly cruel. Toward the end they were nothing but sadistic displays. Shortly after this period, the empire collapsed.

  Any modern promoter who cared to put on a series of shows duplicating the Roman games would easily be able to fill the house. Mickey Spillane could be Master of the Games. Bullfights, cockfights, dogfights, and the Indianapolis Speed­way (our closest approach to the chariot races) are all popular. I even find it hard to believe that all boxing fans are primarily interested in the fine points of the sport rather than in seeing two men half kill each other. If they knew that one man really would be killed, they'd enjoy it all the more. The most popular programmes on TV are the Westerns showing men shooting each other. The next most popular are the gangster films. Of course, the men don't actually kill each other—if they did you couldn't get people away from their sets.

  The Roman games were probably the biggest argument against "spectator sports" that can be advanced. As long as the Romans were themselves a nation of fighting men, there might have been some truth to the beliefs of Cato and Pliny that the games encouraged manly virtues. But there is a big difference between tough fighting men, appreciatively watching a struggle between equally matched opponents, and a de­praved crowd gloating over scenes of meaningless cruelty.

  The same tendency can be seen today in rough sports. The spectator who hollers, "Murder the bums! Knock his teeth out! Kill him!" is usually a meek little guy in a rear seat who has just got a bawling out from his boss and had to sneak out of the house when his wife wasn't home. He wants to see somebody else get hurt ... he d
oesn't care who.

  the end

  Author's Note

  So many sources were used in preparing this volume that it would be impossible to name them all. In many cases, only a single reference was taken from a book. However, some of the main works dealing with the games are listed in the Bibli­ography. Some of the sequences, especially in the description of the shows at the time of Carpophorus, are a compendium of many sources. In describing how Carpophorus trained the animals that had relations with women, I used Apuleius and also the technique employed by a Mexican gentleman I met in Tia Juana who was making 16mm. stag films on the subject.

  The description of the venatores' battle with the lions and tigers is a combination of original sources, J. A. Hunter's account of Masai warriors spearing lions, and comments from Mel Koontz and Marbel Stark, both of whom are professional lion tamers. The crocodile wrestling is described by Strabo, but I added material told me by a Seminole Indian who wrestled alligators in Florida. The gladiatorial combats are all taken from contemporary accounts or from graffiti (wall drawings) in Pompeii. The bullfights are from graffiti of the fights, con­temporary descriptions, the murals in Knossus, incidents I've observed in Spanish bullfights, and suggestions made by Pete Patterson, who is a rodeo clown.

  The battle between the Essedarii and the Greek Hoplites is a combination of Tacitus' description of British war chariots, Hogarth's description of the Hoplite phalanx in Philip and Alexander of Macedon, extracts from Mason's Roping, and the manner in which a British square was handled in the early nineteenth century. The elephant fights come from con­temporary sources and Capt. Fitz-Barnard, who saw war elephants in action in India.