When he saw the blood, it was as though he had drunk a deep draught of savage passion. Instead of turning away, he fixed his eyes upon the scene and drank in all its frenzy, unaware of what he was doing. He revelled in the wickedness of the fighting and was drunk with the fascination of bloodshed . . . He watched and cheered and grew hot with excitement, and when he left the arena he carried away with him a diseased mind which would leave him no peace until he came back again, no longer simply with the friends who had first dragged him there, but at their head, leading new sheep to the slaughter.
Obviously most of the Rome’s residents remained just as enthusiastic about the shows as they had been for centuries past. A curious episode of 404 reinforces this impression. According to the church historian Theodoret of Syria, an otherwise unknown monk by the name of Telemachus traveled from his home in Asia Minor to Rome specifically to protest against the combats. In the midst of a performance he rushed into the arena, attempting to stop the fight; the spectators’ reaction was to tear him to pieces.136 The story does not make much sense – the same stringent security precautions (in the case of the Colosseum, a wall twelve feet high) that prevented gladiators and animals from climbing into the tribunes must have prevented the spectators from entering the arena. Theodoret’s claim that the incident made such an impression on the Emperor Honorius that he put an end to the shows is contradicted by the fact that they continued to be held both in the city and elsewhere. Incidentally, none of this prevented President Ronald Reagan from repeating the story and embellishing it a bit in a speech he gave at the annual prayer breakfast in February 1984.137
In 410 the inconceivable happened: Rome, the city which in its heyday had a million and a half inhabitants and which for centuries had served as the capital of one of the largest, most powerful, and most impressive empires of all times, was besieged, captured, and plundered by Alaric and his horde of Vandals. The conquest did not prove lasting. As the Vandals left for North Africa, Honorius, whose capital was in Ravenna, remained on the throne. In the absence of other evidence, from this point on we have to argue ex silentio. In AD 429 the Christian writer Salvianus penned a treatise in which he attacked theatrical shows in general and wild animal chases and chariot races in particular. Yet, exceptionally, he did not say a word on the gladiatorial combats; considering that previous Christian authors had uniformly raised stronger objections to the combats than to any other form of entertainment in and outside the theater, one can only conclude that they had already been abolished.138 Twenty years later, when emperors Anthemius and Armasius issued decrees that prohibited all kinds of shows from taking place on Sundays, gladiators were not mentioned either.
The end of the gladiatorial games did not mean that they were forgotten. Far from that being the case, they proved to be one of the Empire’s most enduring legacies, appealing to people’s imagination just as much as, if not more than, Roman law, Roman military methods, and Roman roads, baths, and other buildings. During the Middle Ages there was a tendency to associate the games with pagan ritual and to demonize them, which in view of their religious associations is not surprising. Later, during the Renaissance, things changed. For example, a famous statue, dating to Hellenistic times and representing a naked warrior, became known as “the Borghese Gladiator” even though it has nothing to do with the arena. Its existence was recorded for the first time in 1610; later, during the eighteenth century, it became one of the most admired antique statues of all, widely copied and used as a model by countless artists. Such was its fame that Napoleon had it taken to the Louvre where it may still be seen.
A stateroom in the Buen Retiro Palace, built in 1630 for Philip IV of Spain, was decorated with paintings of fighting gladiators. Nineteenth-century “historicist” artists competed as to who could produce the most realist work on the subject. The best-known painting, Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pollice verso (thumbs down, 1872) has become all but emblematic. In 1886 John Philip Sousa, who wrote Semper Fidelis, composed a Gladiator March. In 1899 the Czech Julius Fucik produced The Entry of the Gladiators which is still often performed. A 1930s British combat aircraft, a species of sparrow, and a species of frog all had the honor of being called gladiator. The last of these owes its name to the sharp bony spine males have on each hand which they use in mortal combat against others of their kind.139 The city of Cleveland has a Gladiators football team and the role of football in modern American life has often been compared with that of the gladiators. There are gladiator pickup trucks, gladiator bicycles, gladiator sandals, and gladiator shoes (by Dior, no less). One website offers a gladiator online game in which one can create a gladiator, arm him, and send him into the arena to fight other gladiators; another sells “medieval gladiator Corinthian helmets,” as if such a thing ever existed.140 For women there is a “gladiator bra” complete with beaded bronze fringe and gold trim. As the US military was experiencing morale problems when moving from conscription to an all-volunteer force in the 1970s, one sociologist suggested the troops would need a “gladiatorial ethos.”
Many of the amphitheaters in which the gladiators fought were left standing. Some continued to be used for various purposes, whereas others were abandoned and gradually disappeared. Either they fell victim to the ravages of time or they were dismantled. The most important one left standing was the Colosseum; not only was it the largest Roman building by far, but its position, near the Palatine Hill where the emperors used to live, meant that it could hardly escape the attention of residents and visitors alike. Perhaps no other piece of ground in the world – the arena, after all, only measured 281 by 177 feet – witnessed so many people fighting and killing each other. For two millennia it has stood as a gigantic memorial to the terrible things that had once taken place there, and one that became the subject of countless legends.141 Sometimes it was used by architects to provide stones for other buildings, sometimes excavated and carefully preserved. At times its lower arches were occupied by peddlers and prostitutes.
To speak with Henry James, “if nocturnal meditations in the Colosseum [were] recommended by the poets they [were] deprecated by the doctors.”142 Present-day visitors are not as sensitive. To them the structure is a tourist attraction such as few other cities can claim, complete with snacks, souvenirs, and mock gladiators ready to be photographed. It has also become quite common for gladiatorial fights to be reenacted in other cities in and outside Italy; such events are useful both for the excitement (and revenue) that they generate and as instruments in the hands of certain historians. Only by carefully reconstructing various weapons, training volunteers to use them, and trying them out in various combinations can the strengths and weaknesses of each type of gladiator be fully appreciated.143 The 1990s saw the rise and fall of a TV show called American Gladiators. In it muscular young men and women had to make it through a sort of obstacle course. However, the only goal was to earn points (there was no plot of any kind). Since the obstacles were neither dangerous nor at all similar to the kind one is likely to meet in real life the show always remained a little silly. But this did not deter others from setting up something known as Gladiator Challenge, which judging by the relevant website appears to be a traveling martial art show.
Movies with gladiators as their theme include The Last Days of Pompeii (1913), Gladiator (1955), Spartacus (1960), Gladiators of Rome (1962), Demetrius and the Gladiators (1964), See You Gladiator (1986), Colosseum, a Gladiator’s Story (2003) and the 13-part TV series Spartacus; Blood and Sand (2010). The last-named one, alternately spurting blood and sperm, focuses on the period before the hero escaped and became the rebel leader whose name was immortalized. Furthermore, the term “gladiator movies” has been applied to an entire genre of (often Italian-made) films. They were characterized by (1) stories and characters drawn from ancient history and myth; (2) a muscleman in the starring role, performing superhuman feats of strength; (3) lurid scenes of bondage and torture; and (4) a host of exotic, often half-naked and very curvaceous, heroines and femmes fatal
es. Curiously enough, many of the films’ protagonists have little or nothing to do with gladiators. Probably most memorable of all was Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), a vast production that won five Academy Awards, including that for Best Picture. Not only was it hugely successful, but it gave rise to quite a literature ranging from term papers to scholarly discussions.144 The fact that, like all the rest, it contained many inaccuracies hardly mattered. If anything it added modestly to the film’s fame by giving critics something to break their teeth on.
Books about the gladiators that target popular or juvenile readers are legion. More serious works also continue to come off the presses;145 indeed the library of my own alma mater in Jerusalem seems to have more volumes that deal with the munera than with any other kind of games, past or present. In 1582 the famous neo-stoicist philosopher Justus Lipsius estimated the number of men killed in the amphitheater each year at 240–360,000. Yet far from using that vastly exaggerated figure to impress readers with the evils of ancient society, he praised the “beautiful and amusing games” (pulchri . . . et oblectantes ludi) so suitable for a people “born to arms.” Two centuries later the even more famous Marquis de Sade, while putting the number higher still, made a similar argument.146 What both men had in common was their admiration for everything Roman. To them it represented the most powerful polity ever seen on earth, whose secret of longevity consisted partly of the games.
At that time opinion had already started to shift. In his admiration for the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon was second to none; yet when writing about the fifth century AD, he rejoiced that “the piety of the Christian princes had suppressed the inhuman combats of the gladiators.”147 Gibbon’s nineteenth-century successors likewise took a keen interest in the games. They used them as proof of just how sadistic the Romans had been; also, by implication, how enlightened their own modern bourgeois society, which at that time was busily eliminating other bloody spectacles such as public executions, was. Expressions such as “cruel” and “loathsome” abound.148 One of the last examples of this approach was Michael Grant’s Gladiators. Grant (1914–2004) was an extraordinarily productive British historian whose works tended to be on the popular side. The volume, which first saw the light in print in 1967, was republished several times and now carries the subtitle “The Bloody Truth; The Nastiest Blood Sport Invented.” Nasty the games certainly were. Yet what makes the question really important is the way this very quality translated into the vast popularity they enjoyed, and, as the above-listed facts prove, still enjoy.
In 1972 the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz published his enormously influential essay, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.”149 Based on his fieldwork during the late 1950s, it all but ignored the fights themselves. No attempt was made to describe them, nor was a single word wasted on the fact that they were quite as nasty as those between the gladiators. In fact they may have been worse, given that the victims were not human beings who at least understood what was demanded of them and why, but animals that did not have such knowledge. Instead, with razors tied to their legs, they went after one another by pure instinct. What interested Geertz was the men who organized the fights, trained their cocks to participate in them, watched them, applauded them, and of course placed bets on them. He described them in terms of a sort of poor man’s theater in which the values of Balinese society were put on show. Trials, wars, political contests, and disputes of all kinds were compared to cockfights: “cock” (sabung) also stood for hero, warrior, champion, man of parts, bachelor, dandy, lady-killer, and general tough guy. The fights served to dramatize, play out, and resolve conflicts between the cocks’ owners, thus possibly avoiding more serious violence and helping hold the community together.
Many historians found Geertz grist to their mill; unsurprisingly, his theories have often been applied to gladiatorial fights in particular. Previously they were understood as mere outlets for the sadistic impulses of the ancient Romans, their sometimes mad rulers, and many subject peoples who adopted the games and watched them almost as enthusiastically as their masters did. Now they could be interpreted as grand theater rationally used by those in power in order to obtain rational ends. To quote Tertullian again:
symbolic protection of society reaches its high point in munera. The spectators, arranged in good order – important people dressed in signs of their status, soldiers in their parade uniforms, and the emperor in triumphal garb – assist with eliminating and forcing submission of all enemies, real or potential, of order . . . How better to associate the masses with rejection of all rebels and troublemakers of every sort? . . . What better way to spread among the masses the lessons of fear overcome, of discipline, submission, courage and virile violence?
Some modern historians have used this approach to cast a more favorable light on emperors such as Commodus, whose action in (and out of) the arena had previously been considered models of insane depravity. Others went further still, presenting the games as a metaphor for everything Roman and even for at least some of what it means to be human.
Here no attempt will be made to decide which of these approaches is correct. Probably there is an element of truth in all three or, if we include the sadistic impulses, four. Probably emperors, editores, lanistae, members of the upper classes, plebeians, and of course the gladiators themselves held very different views of the subject. Some were interested in pleasing the crowd and demonstrating their own power (the emperors), others in both of those things as well as giving proof of piety (the editores) or making money (the lanistae). Some admired the shows, others treated them with contempt (Tacitus above all). The vast majority must have attended them in the hope of having fun, roaring their heads off, and placing bets. Most gladiators were unfortunates who fought under dire compulsion and were lucky to survive more than a few fights. However, a growing number, apparently including a handful of women, had foresworn life of their own free will. A few may have relished their profession and made as much out of it as they could. In spite of, or more likely because of, the massive bloodshed they involved, no other wargames in history have ever been more popular. Certainly none have engaged the imagination of subsequent generations to such an extent; at a guess, few if any ever will.
1 See, for a general account, A. Futrell, A Sourcebook on the Roman Games, Oxford: Blackwell, 2006, pp. 1–4.
2 Quoted in Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, LCL, 2007, 4.153f−154a.
3 See K. E. Welch, The Roman Amphitheater: From its Origins to the Coliseum, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 15.
4 Livy, History of Rome, 9.40.17.
5 Strabo, Geography, 5.4.13.
6 Futrell, A Sourcebook on the Roman Games, pp. 3–5.
7 According to M. Junkelmann, “Familia Gladiatoria: The Heroes of the Amphitheater,” in E. Koehne and C. Ewigleben, eds., Gladiators and Caesars, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, p. 37.
8 Herodotus, The Persian Wars, 5.8; Diylos quoted in Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters, 155a; Plutarch, Moralia, 675c−d.
9 Silius Italicus, Punica, LCL, 1934, 11.51–4 .
10 Livy, History of Rome, 16; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, LCL, 2000, 2 .4.7.
11 Cassius Dio, History of Rome, LCL, 1924, 58.29 .
12 Livy, History of Rome, 23.30.
13 All this is recorded by Livy, ibid., 31.50, 39.46, and 41.28.
14 See for this episode, Suetonius, Julius Caesar, in The Lives of the Caesars, LCL, 1914, 10 ; Cassius Dio, History of Rome, 37.8; and Plutarch, Caesar, in Lives, 5.9.
15 Plutarch, Gaius Gracchus, in Lives, 12.
16 This is the interpretation advanced by A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997, pp. 1–2.
17 Augustus, Res Gestae divi Augusti, in Compendium of Roman History, LCL, 1924, 22 .
18 Ibid.
19 Cassius Dio, History of Rome, 55.26.
20 See, on the role of training, H. R. Hale, Lords of the Sea: The Ep
ic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy, New York: Viking, 2009, pp. 20 and 112.
21 Tacitus, Annales, 12.56.
22 Cassius Dio, History of Rome. 59.10.
23 Ibid., 66.25; Suetonius, Domitian, in Lives of the Caesars, 4.
24 L. André, ed., Le testament politique du Cardinal de Richelieu, Amsterdam: Hay, 1749, p. 480.
25 Clausewitz, On War, pp. 119–21.
26 See, on Roman methods of gathering intelligence, N. J. E. Austin and N. B. Rankov, Exploratio, London: Routledge, 1995.
27 Tacitus, Annales, 12.56.
28 T. G. Cornell, “On War and Games in the Ancient World,” in Cornell and Allen, War and Games, p. 51.
29 See on this subject G. Ville, “La guerre et le munus,” in J. P. Brisson, ed., Problèmes de la guerre à Rome, Paris: Mouton, 1969, pp. 185–95.
30 Livy, History of Rome, 9.40.
31 See the illustration in F. Meijer, The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport, New York: St. Martin’s, 2007, p. 27.
32 Junkelmann, “Familia Gladiatoria,” pp. 45–64.
33 M. Junkelmann, Gladiatoren: Das Spiel mit dem Tod, Mainz: Zabern, 2008, p. 99.
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