Wargames

by Martin van Creveld

  The end of expansion dried up the flow of booty and prisoners on which the gladiatorial shows, along with so much else in Roman life, rested. Instead of relying on captives, lanistae had to buy convicted criminals from the Imperial treasury which sold them at six gold pieces each. Another factor may have been the growth of the armed forces in comparison with the Empire’s resources in terms of both money and manpower. The process, which first becomes visible under Marcus Aurelius, accelerated during the third century AD, straining the treasury. To speak with one modern scholar, it was a clear case of Imperial overstretch.108 Whereas gladiatorial shows had always been the most expensive by far, now the cost of holding them skyrocketed. As magistrates, instead of being elected, came to be appointed from above, holding games also lost much of its attractiveness in promoting one’s career. The growing monopolization of the games by the emperors must have worked in the same direction.

  During the fourth decade of the first century AD Caligula already had some difficulty in making consuls and praetors do their duty as editores and provide shows of every sort, gladiatorial ones presumably included.109 By one interpretation, the measures taken by Marcus Aurelius in respect of the games were meant to prevent the price of gladiators from going through the roof, and in this way ruining the magistrates responsible for holding them.110 Apparently to no avail: during the third century AD the size and frequency of the shows seems to have declined. This happened first in the western provinces, which were more subject to barbarian invasions, and then in the eastern ones as well. Only in Rome itself did the practically unlimited wealth coming in from all directions allow emperors such as Gordianus I and III (reigned AD 238 and 238–44 respectively), Probus (276–82), and above all Philip the Arab (244–49) to proceed as before. The shows of the last-named, held in honor of the first millennium since the foundation of Rome, were especially spectacular. Included among them were the last naval battles on record. All in all, a thousand gladiators were killed. If our calculations are anything near correct, that would indicate that the total number involved may have been ten thousand and more, though one must allow for the possibility that some fought more than once, which would have increased the odds against them emerging alive and reduced the total number.

  Enormously popular as the games were, there had always been a few men – we know nothing about women – who did not much like them. In particular, first-century BC Greek Stoic philosophers such as Apollonius and his contemporary Epictetus criticized the shows for the passions they raised among the spectators. Participating in the debate concerning the relative merits of the two civilizations already referred to in the previous chapter, they worried lest Greek cultural superiority would be smothered by Roman vulgarity and brutality.111 This kind of attitude seems to have been fairly widespread among the urban elites of the Hellenized eastern part of the Empire.

  In Rome itself the earliest known reservations were expressed by Cicero. In 55 BC he wrote that there was no pleasure in watching “a variegated display of cavalry and infantry equipment in some battle or other.”112 However, he did admire the courage of individual fighters and has nothing to say about the blood being shed. Seneca, in a letter to a friend, took a different line. His objections centered on the games’ effect on the crowd – whose members, he says, were always crying out for more and more violence, proof of their own unruliness.113 All ran against the Stoic philosophy of which he was the chief representative at the time. It presented passion as the root of all evil – with a man like Nero in power, not an unreasonable attitude to take – and called for self-control and courage in the face of adversity as the greatest virtues of all. Yet Seneca did not take issue with the combats as such. None of his letters or the rest of his opus suggest that the shedding of human blood as a form of entertainment made him lose his sleep. Like Cicero, he treated gladiators, always provided they behaved courageously, with considerable respect. The same applies to Pliny the Elder, who tells us that they were taught not to blink even when weapons were brandished in front of their faces. In Tertullian’s words, they were taught how to die.

  Like Cassius Dio, Tacitus considered the shows to be beneath the dignity of history which, he believed, should concern itself with important public matters rather than with mere gossip. Unlike Dio (and Suetonius) he did not succumb to the temptation of describing particularly nasty episodes that took place in the arena in order to blacken this emperor or that. Instead he is careful to mention only shows that were unusually large or somehow linked to some exceptional event. Several second-century AD Greek writers, including the orator Dio Chrysostom (“Golden Mouth”), and the historian and philosopher Plutarch, did the same. Lucian mentions the protest of a second-century cynic philosopher, Demonax, against the shows; before permitting them, he told his Athenian countrymen, they should pull down the statue of pity.114 Somewhat later, the Christian apologist Minucius Felix expressed a similar sentiment.115 His and Demonax’s are the only known attacks on the morality of the fights. The rest either followed Seneca in their fear of the passions they roused among the low-born in particular, as Chrysostom did, or else claimed that the shows were a waste of resources better employed in combating Rome’s ever-growing list of enemies.

  Originating with high-class men, almost certainly these views had no impact on the masses most of whom probably never read a word any of these authors had written; over a period measured in centuries, only once do we hear that a crowd disapproved of an editor because of his extraordinary relish for bloodshed.116 It is, however, true that, during the first centuries AD, some of the harshest aspects of the shows were slowly – very slowly – prohibited or modified. Augustus himself showed the way by trying to ban the form of combat known as munus sine missione in which a vanquished gladiator could obtain no reprieve. Under Trajan a law was contemplated, and perhaps passed, allowing a gladiator who survived his fights to retire after three years and regain his freedom after another two.117 Around AD 130 Hadrian issued a decree which prohibited owners from selling their slaves as gladiators unless they (i.e. the slaves) had either volunteered or been condemned for a crime.

  Somewhat to Cassius Dio’s consternation, Marcus Aurelius had gladiators fight with blunted weapons, “like athletes, without danger.” Inscriptions and images dating to the third and fourth centuries show that this form of mock combat, though it was not universally adopted, did not die with him. All these decrees may well have owed something to humanitarian feeling – Marcus Aurelius, after all, was also the author of the celebrated Meditationes. However, other considerations may have been involved. First, the measures can be understood as part of ongoing legislation aimed at increasing Imperial control over every aspects of their subjects’ life. Second, editores often hired gladiators for specific shows. If they lived, good and well; if not, though, the full price would have to be paid, which could be up to fifty times as high. Hence the last-named reform in particular may have represented a cost-reducing measure.118

  All these reforms may well act as one indication that, slowly but steadily, the entire cultural-ideological basis on which the combats rested was starting to erode. The way the Romans understood themselves, their greatest quality had always been virtus, manly prowess, which in turn was both absolutely necessary for war and best demonstrated by engaging in it. In the Aeneid, Virgil, who was Augustus’ semi-official poet, celebrated this part of their civilization as well as anybody could:119

  Strong from the cradle, of a sturdy brood,

  We bear our newborn infants to the flood;

  There bath’d amid the stream, our boys we hold

  With winter harden’d, and inur’d to cold.

  They wake before the day to range the wood

  Kill ere they eat, nor taste unconquer’d food.

  No sports, but what belong to war, they know;

  To break the stubborn colt, to bend the bow.

  Our youth, of labor patient, earn their bread;

  Hardly they work, with frugal diet fed.

&nbs
p; From plows and arrows sent to seek renown,

  They fight in fields, and storm the shaken town.

  No part of life from toils of war is free,

  No change in age, or difference in degree.

  We plow and till in arms; our oxen feel,

  Instead of goads, the spur and pointed steel;

  Th’ inverted lance makes furrows in the plain;

  Ev’n time, that changes all, yet changes us in vain;

  The body, not the mind; nor can control

  Th’ immortal vigor, or abate the soul.

  Our helms defend the young, disguise the gray

  We live by plunder, and delight in prey.

  Virgil’s contemporary Horace says that youth was expected to harden its limbs, treat poverty as a friend, learn to fight, and grow accustomed to a harsh life in the open.120 Once in the army, they were expected to conquer or die with very little leeway in between. Naturally there is always a wide gap between theory and practice, a gap of which many Romans were well aware. The banquets given by Lucullus and Nero’s Golden Palace have become proverbial. Still, much in Livius and Polybius confirms what the poets have to say. One does not start as a small city-state and end up by conquering the world for nothing. For centuries hardly a year went by without the gates of the Temple of Mars being thrown open and the citizens assembling at the Campus Martius and going to war; in the words of one modern historian, confronting death was not so much a question of exceptional heroism as of proving oneself a Roman.121 If only because military service was a prerequisite for entering upon an official career, the cursus honorum, until Imperial times few if any aspiring politicians got very far without giving proof of competence as soldiers or commanders. To emphasize the role of military prowess, from Augustus on the first and most important title every emperor carried was Imperator, victorious commander, even if he had never taken part in a campaign and even if he was, at heart, a coward, as some undoubtedly were.

  As Epiphanes may have understood when he adopted the shows and spread them in his realm, what the games really did was to provide a living illustration of this ur-Roman code of values. As each combat opened, everything that normally surrounds fighting – and, often enough, prevents it from taking place, such as distance, friction, and uncertainty − was systematically excluded. So, of course was any possibility of taking shelter or escaping from the field. War was stripped to its most elementary form, i.e. killing and being killed – courageously, relentlessly, without pity or remorse. It was to make sure that this should indeed be the case that weapons were tested for sharpness and the gladiators prohibited from wearing body armor. Yet the gladiators themselves were a special breed: regardless of whether they had volunteered for the arena or been compelled to fight in it, they were condemned men. For them the games represented one last chance to redeem themselves – albeit one that was extremely dangerous and often led to premature death. Conversely, those who tried to flee their opponents might be subject to derisive graffiti, several of which were found at Pompeii; watching such gladiators, the spectators felt cheated and humiliated.122

  It was at this point that the new and fast-spreading religion coming from Palestine, Christianity, entered the picture. Josephus himself did not explicitly criticize Agrippa for holding the shows at Berytus. However, the context leaves no doubt that they did offend many of his fellow Jews.123 The Talmud, while it does tell us that some Jews (including one, Reish Lakish, who later became a famous rabbi) sold themselves to a lanista to be trained as gladiators, makes no secret of its disapproval of the games.124 The problem is complicated by the fact that the text uses various terms taken from various languages, with the result that it is often hard to say just what kind of fighter is meant. Jesus’ immediate followers probably took the same line. After all, they had started out as a branch of Judaism and one that was more peacefully minded that most. Though the relevant literature does not contain other references to gladiatorial fights, it is explicit in its condemnation of athletics in general.125

  Later on, references to the games, as well as condemnations of them, multiply. Around AD 200 Clement of Alexandria, the teacher of the great Origen, called the amphitheater cavea saeviens, best translated as “a den of savagery.”126 Tertullian, the other outstanding Christian writer of the period, agreed with him. Yet contrary to what a modern reader might perhaps expect, what most disturbed both men was neither the fact that huge numbers of innocent animals were being butchered nor that condemned men and women – including, of course, Christians – were being thrown to the beasts or publicly executed in the most horrible ways. Rather, their main objection was to the gladiatorial combats, the reason being that, to quote Tertullian, “men gave their souls to the gladiators and women, both their souls and their bodies.” The way they saw it, for fighters and spectators alike there was only one road to salvation, i.e. the one that led through the Lamb of God and took the believer into the afterlife. The idea that prowess, displayed either in war or in the arena, was the highest virtue of all – higher even than faith, and, since it offered condemned men a chance at redemption of a kind that many might find attractive, a substitute for it – was anathema.

  In AD 325, twelve years after he had his famous vision and his army first started operating under Christian symbols, the Emperor Constantine issued an edict in which he “totally prohibit[ed]” the existence of gladiators. At a time when peace reigned everywhere and order had been restored to the known world, he wrote, bloody shows could no longer provide any delight; henceforward condemned criminals would be sent to the mines so they could pay for their crimes without their blood being spilt.127 This should not be regarded as a sign of humanity on Constantine’s part. If anything, being sent to work in the mines represented the more severe sentence. At least gladiators, as long as they remained in training, were well looked after. They also stood a chance, however slight, of leaving the arena alive and even of regaining their liberty. The situation of miners – “wretched manikins . . . their entire skin covered with bluish welts, their backs torn into bloody strips” – was entirely different. Invariably they faced a slow, painful, and of course unnoticed and inglorious, death.128

  In any case the emperor does not seem to have followed up on this decree. First, a mere two years later he passed a law that condemned freeborn kidnappers to fight as gladiators.129 Since the same decree specified that slaves and freedmen should continue to be thrown to the beasts, obviously it was considered that being made to fight in the arena was not the very worst fate that might overtake a man. Second, there is no record of any attempt on his part to suppress the shows held at Antioch, which at that time was one of the Empire’s principal cities, only three years later. Third, towards the end of Constantine’s reign a Sicilian senator by the name of Firmicus Maternus prepared a handbook on astrological lore. Not only did he include several horoscopes of gladiators, but he spelled out the exact way in which they were fated to die.130

  What was true of Constantine also applied to his successors in both parts of the divided Empire. All but one, Julian the Apostate, were Christians, yet none is known to have tried to interfere with the fights. It is true that literary evidence concerning their development is scant. However, though it may be an accident, some of the largest mosaics that show the combats in all their gory detail date from precisely this period. Christian propaganda against sports of any kind was unrelenting: for example, the influential fourth-century theologian Basil of Cappadocia claimed that “the athlete of Christ” was marked by leanness, pallor, and weakness of body.131 We know that Valentian I decreed in 367 that Christians would no longer be condemned to the arena. Some three decades later Saint Augustine argued that gladiators, along with prostitutes and pimps, should be refused baptism, a measure that can only have had any meaning if it were applied to volunteers whose continued existence is thus confirmed. One way or another, the opposition made itself heard.

  As late as the middle of the fourth century the orator Libanius found warm words of
praise for the gladiators who fought in games held by his uncle, comparing them with Leonidas’ three hundred Spartan heroes at Thermopylae.132 In 393 a former consul by the name of Symmachus spent a vast sum to hold a lavish show in Rome itself, i.e. right under the nose of the Christian Emperor Theodosius I. His objective was to clear the way for his son, who at that time was a mere boy under a tutor’s care, to mount the first steps in the Imperial administration; deeply conservative in everything he did, he also saw it as part of his duty to the Populus Romanus.133 His letters give a vivid image of the importance he attributed to the matter and also of the difficulties any editor who was planning to give a large show had to overcome. Animals destined for the arena died, some Saxons prisoners gave proof of cowardice by preferring suicide to fighting, and more. Two facts point at the underlying clash of values between pagans and Christians which had not yet been decided. First, this was the same Symmachus who, eleven years earlier, had unsuccessfully tried to convince the equally Christian Emperor Gratian to refrain from removing the statue of victory, a pagan deity, from the Senate House. Second, Symmachus was attacked by the contemporary Christian poet Prudentius. The latter in his Contra Symmachum, demanded an end to the shows. But he did not object to men being thrown to the beasts; instead, he suggested that punishment as an alternative to the shows he hated so much.

  To Augustine the trouble with gladiators was that, as desperate men who considered themselves beyond fear or hope, they felt free to do as they pleased.134 To make things worse, people could not take their eyes off them. In his Confessions, written just before AD 400, he described one of his fellow students at Carthage who had long resisted attending the shows. When his fellows dragged him to the amphitheater he kept his eyes shut, determined not to watch. Then a roar from the crowd caused him to open them:135