The Emperors of Rome

by David Potter

  Secular public spectacles came in three basic forms: theatrical events, athletic contests and public combats. Theatrical events might take the form of full productions of plays – usually, but not exclusively, works that were part of the standard canon of didactic works. However, they might also include solo performances of excerpts of ‘greatest hits’ from famous plays, sometimes set to musical accompaniment; poetic recitations, musical performances and choral acts; mimes (a generic term for ‘low-brow’ performances that ranged from situation comedies and clown routines to dancing displays); and pantomime, a form of tragedy involving a dancer, accompanied by a singer and percussion band, who performed a routine on a mythological theme. On some occasions, these events would be supplemented with performances illustrating an important event in the history of the empire – for instance, a papyrus has survived containing part of the script for a depiction of Trajan’s ascent to the gods, which was staged in an Egyptian town after his death.

  Athletic contests were based on the festivals of pre-Roman Greece, in which naked athletes competed in a series of races and track-and-field events such as the pentathlon. Another popular attraction was the triumvirate of combat sports: boxing, wrestling, and pancration, a brutal combination of the two. Athletic contests might also involve equestrian events. These included both horse races as we know them and races with chariots drawn by two- or four-horse teams. Such chariot races were run on courses of varying dimensions, which could accommodate a large number of contestants – as many as 48 chariots at the hippodrome at Olympia in Greece.

  By contrast, circus chariot races, which evolved in Rome’s valley of the Circus Maximus, were run on a track of set dimensions. A maximum of 12 teams took part in such races, completing seven laps around a central barrier with tight turns at each end. These spectacles were fast and furious and extremely dangerous for the participants, with accidents a frequent occurrence. Another feature that distinguished chariot races within the circus from those elsewhere was that circus races were dominated by four professional factions – known from the colours worn by their drivers as the Blues, Greens, Reds and Whites. These factions had been responsible for organizing the circus races from as early as the fourth century BC.

  Public combat had existed as a form of entertainment since Republican times, but was only expanded into a major spectacle throughout the empire after the Battle of Actium. It appeared in several guises, the most common of which were gladiatorial bouts between two or more men, variously armed. These gladiators might be free men or slaves (fighting as a gladiator could be financially rewarding) and were organized into familiae, or troupes, whose managers would sell or rent them to people who were going to provide games – which all civic magistrates were required to do each year. Given the very high cost to magistrates of gladiators, it was usually in the magistrates’ best interests to make sure that all gladiators survived, so that they could be sold back to the manager of the troupe or so that they did not have to pay the death benefits that free men would negotiate in case of an unfortunate accident. Gladiatorial duels, which usually ended when one fighter was wounded, were seen as a quintessentially Roman event, summing up the martial virtues that had made the empire great and that could now be shared, at least vicariously, by all Rome’s subjects.

  Other types of public blood sports were a good deal bloodier. These included events in which professional hunters stalked and killed wild animals, and, most notoriously, the execution of criminals in combat. Such gruesome charades might involve the men being tortured in ways that recalled the mythological punishments of famous offenders against the gods. Alternatively, in a form of punishment known as ‘exposure to the beasts’, they were sent unprotected into the arena to be mauled to death by lions, tigers, bears or wolves. Another variant was to force condemned men to fight one another to the death in duels.

  Unlike modern spectators, who avidly follow championship events that last for weeks or even months, the ancient audience required instant gratification. When people gathered to watch a sporting event, be it athletic, gladiatorial or equestrian, they expected to see close contests, thrilled to rapid changes of fortune and found it an added bonus if one or more of the contestants failed to make it out of the arena in one piece. In combat sports, for instance, all the contests would be crammed into a single day so that the spectators did not have to wait for the outcome. This meant that the eventual winner needed to record a gruelling series of decisive victories on the way to securing the championship, with almost no time between bouts. Since, in a sport like boxing, the victor had to win by an equivalent of a technical knockout each time, the final would be as much a test of stamina as it was of technical skill. Endurance, and the ability to withstand pain, were traits that were deeply admired by Romans.

  The Roman psyche

  But what did it mean, in essence, to be a Roman? Difficult though it is to divine the collective psyche of a former age – and a distant one at that – certain leitmotifs emerge clearly from looking at diverse aspects of Roman culture. One of these is a fascination with pain and suffering. For example, aside from their sheer entertainment value, gladiators struck such a resonant chord with the Roman public because they were powerful symbols of fortitude, putting life and limb at risk in bouts that almost invariably ended with some sort of injury.

  This is not to say that the Roman attitude towards gladiators was unambiguous; on the one hand, they were reviled for being as low as slaves in the social hierarchy, but on the other they were greatly admired for their bravery, with some even being accorded celebrity status. A similar equivocal attitude attached to the question of suffering on the part of the fighters. A certain amount of bloodshed added to the spectacle, but mass deaths were neither inevitable (the fatality rate was only around 5 per cent in any given set of games) nor especially desirable. Gladiatorial contests were less about slaking a crowd’s bloodlust than about providing a protracted display of fighting skill. It is for this reason, and not out of any solicitude for the gladiators’ welfare, that fights to the death were banned everywhere except Rome after the Julio-Claudian period. Even there, they were rare occurrences, being staged only when the emperor was in attendance. Interestingly, by the time of Marcus Aurelius, combat with steel swords and tridents was often supplanted by the use of wooden weapons. This innovation was presumably designed to prolong the entertainment.

  The motif of fortitude recurs in the epic tales that emerged as the one original literary genre of the imperial period. The heroes of these stories, such as Aeneas, were redoubtable wanderers who endured great hardship to achieve their ultimate goal of finding a home. Often they had to confront the threat or actuality of intense suffering during their journey. Both in the works of contemporaries like Virgil and Ovid and in those of the earlier Greek writers Homer and Sophocles, the Roman audience found itself captivated by lurid examples of suffering, such as that undergone by the character Philoctetes. The greatest archer to accompany the Greeks to the siege of Troy, Philoctetes was bitten by a serpent and, in intense pain from the suppurating wound that developed, was abandoned on the island of Lemnos by his companions when they could no longer bear to hear his cries of agony or smell the stench from his wound.

  On stage, preferred themes also ran to the more extreme episodes from mythology: Medea, who murdered her children, was a great favourite with Romans – the young Augustus even wrote a play on the theme – as was the banquet at which Atreus fed his brother Thyestes the stewed bodies of his children, the madness of Hercules, or the bizarre sexual encounter between a Spartan woman, Leda, and the god Zeus, who had disguised himself as a swan.

  The counterpoint to this fascination with pain was Romans’ admiration for outward displays of intense calm. The ideal Roman man was a person who stoically kept his passions to himself, comporting himself in life with every bit as much serenity as the graceful stone statue that every prominent citizen aspired to have his native city erect in his honour. Yet behind this façade he might, like Marcus
Aurelius, write letters to friends detailing the illnesses he suffered and the pain that he overcame. The orator Aelius Aristides, whose medical conditions strike modern readers as deeply psychosomatic, spent years seeking treatments from the priest of the god Asclepius and regarded his ailments almost as a religious devotion that brought him closer to the divine.

  Religion and culture

  Lacking the scientific and medical knowledge we now use to understand – and in some cases avert or alleviate – natural catastrophes, the Romans had only the gods to turn to when plague, earthquakes, storms or famine struck. Thus Marcus Aurelius consulted the mystic Alexander of Abonuteichos and his oracular snake Glycon when the barbarians threatened, and appealed to the god Apollo when the empire was blighted by the Antonine Plague. His conviction that the gods would speak through oracles and respond to his prayers derived from the Stoic philosophy that lay behind all his thoughts and actions. It was a basic tenet of Stoicism that the seamless nexus of events – Fate, in other words – was indistinguishable from the divine will of Zeus. This belief in a form of providential design entailed understanding the laws of Nature as the material presence of the divine in the universe. To exist in harmony with these laws was therefore Marcus’ main aim:

  So far as concerns the gods, the messages sent from them, their aids and revelations, nothing prevents me from living according to Nature, even though I slip from this at times, through my own fault, by not observing the reminders and virtual instructions from the gods. (Meditations 1.17.6)

  What distinguished Marcus’ Stoic belief in fate and the gods (as well as that of other leading philosophical movements of the age such as Platonism and Pythagoreanism) was the idea that the many gods in the Roman pantheon all acted in accordance with the will of a single divine organizing principle. This was a highly sophisticated, intellectual viewpoint, however. For many others in the empire, the gods who were the focus of their devotions were considerably less well organized. The Roman empire was filled with shrines and temples to gods of all sizes and shapes, many of distinctly local origin, and people sought out the ones who could respond to their specific concerns. The highly undogmatic Roman approach to faith, which did not attempt to impose any official, authorized religion on diverse peoples, was one of the most significant stabilizing factors in the empire. Belief in the gods was hallowed by tradition, and was often backed up by extensive anecdotal evidence of divine intervention. For instance, temples dedicated to Asclepius, the god of healing, kept records of the ways in which he had cured the sick within their walls.

  In addition, oracular shrines documented the responses that the gods had given there, while cities recorded moments when the gods had averted disaster or revealed new rites to them to heal rifts in their relationship. People were in no doubt that the gods existed, because they could see the results of their actions all around them. Moreover, they knew how to worship the gods because the gods themselves had instructed them how to do so. They were also aware that the gods gave different instructions to different people.

  The most commonplace form of religious observance in the Roman empire was the act of sacrifice. People brought whatever offerings they could afford, either burning them on an altar if they were trying to reach a god thought to dwell in the heavens, or pouring them on the ground if they were trying to petition one of the deities that lived beneath the earth. The rich were expected to make greater sacrifices than the poor, for the order of worship ideally reflected the order of society. In the Roman mind, there was no separation of the political and religious spheres because the maintenance of the social order depended upon the happiness of the gods. Thus the Roman emperor was also a priest – from the time of Augustus onwards he held a variety of priestly offices in the state, chief among which was that of pontifex maximus. The leaders of communities throughout the empire would also usually hold some sort of priesthood in their lifetimes.

  Oracles, charlatans and visionaries

  The inseparability of politics and traditional cult was another manifestation of the key role that religion played as a force for social cohesion. For some, however, traditional devotions did not go far enough. Such was the importance of the gods that many sought more direct ways to appeal to them outside the established limits of cult, which they regarded as an essentially passive religious activity. One such mechanism used to establish a more immediate relationship with the gods was divination.

  Modes of divination were immensely varied. One way was to pay a visit to oracles, where the gods were thought to speak through inspired prophets. In the main, at established shrines, the gods only spoke directly to people of a high enough social standing to merit direct communication. A more indirect method of approaching a god was to consult an oracle that worked by a system of lot. A classic form of this type of divination in Egypt involved putting two notes, each containing an identical query and an alternative response, into an urn and taking the one that was drawn out as the god’s answer. Other methods involved rolling dice and matching the number rolled against a list of predetermined responses, or observing fish feeding in a sacred pool, the eating habits of sacred chickens, or the way that a cheese floated. At sacrifices the slaughtered beast would be inspected after it had been killed to see if some sign was evident in its entrails, the behaviour of the animal would be closely watched to make sure that it comported itself properly on the way to its death, and, in the Roman tradition, a close eye was kept upon the weather and the flight of birds.

  Where these activities began to overstep the boundaries of acceptable behaviour was when people solicited the wisdom of the gods from clairvoyants, magicians or seers who claimed to possess sacred writing from the sages of the distant past. Worse still, they could be employed to cast a spell on enemies: another common form of ancient religious text that has been unearthed by archaeologists is the defixio, usually a lead tablet with a curse upon it that was buried in some place where it was hoped that a demonic spirit would be called forth. The second-century Greek satirist Lucian (AD 120–c. 180) lampooned such all-purpose charlatans in his essay Alexander The Oracle-Monger (an attack on the prophet consulted by Marcus Aurelius, Alexander of Abonuteichos) as ‘those who advertise enchantments, miraculous incantations, charms for your love-affairs, visitations for your enemies, disclosures of buried treasure, and successions to estates’.

  For all its tolerance of local religious practices, the Roman state took a very dim view of prophets who operated outside the parameters of the state, especially magicians who claimed to be able to invoke supernatural visitations. Such people were potentially very dangerous – visionary prophets were responsible for fomenting the Jewish revolt in the time of Trajan, and the German rebellion that raged after Vespasian ascended the throne was fuelled by the visions of a woman named Veleda. Every emperor from Augustus onwards issued edicts against all manner of unauthorized contact with the divine. People who dabbled in magic to jinx their neighbours, along with the magicians who advised them how to do so, were liable to be sentenced to death. Even so, people who felt driven to desperate measures could not be prevented from appealing to them, and even emperors were known to consult independent ‘experts’. Hadrian, for example, showered gifts on an Egyptian magician named Pancrates, while Marcus let it be known that the miraculous downpour that saved his soldiers during the Northern Wars was the work of another Egyptian magician named Harnouphis. Hadrian also published the horoscope of one of the senators whom he executed as a way of proving that he had done the right thing: conveniently, it showed that the man was destined to be a traitor. The huge gulf between what the law demanded and popular practice in consulting such practitioners attests to the abiding Roman fascination with divine revelation.

  One especially famous visionary of the Roman world was a long-lived man by the name of Apollonius of Tyana (c. AD 1–97). Credited with what seems to have been a preternaturally long life, Apollonius was also credited with having saved the city of Ephesus from a plague demon and with curing the sick t
hrough faith-healing. When he died, many people believed that he had ascended to heaven, and sacred objects that he was thought to have used to ward off demons were widespread throughout the Eastern empire centuries after his death.

  Eastern cults

  The Romans also had the sense that Graeco-Roman culture was relatively young compared with the ancient cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Tourists – including the emperor Hadrian – travelled to Egypt to marvel at ancient books of wisdom and sit at the feet of members of obscure cults. Egyptian temples were repositories of texts that dated back to the time of the Pharaohs, and Egyptians were more than happy to supply this tourist market with purported Greek ‘translations’ of books of ancient wisdom (usually the ideas were deeply Hellenized to suit the buyers’ tastes and bore only a passing resemblance to the original text). Another powerful Eastern influence on Roman religious thought was the ancient Persian sage Zoroaster; again, however, as with the learning of Egypt, Romans’ understanding of Zoroastrianism was not primarily based on scholarly study of the core texts, but rather on debased, mediated forms of the religion. This somewhat dilettantish interest in the wisdom of the East was part and parcel of educated Romans’ unquenchable sense of cultural superiority.