Emperors and Gladiators

Thomas Wiedemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134990399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

Of all aspects of Roman culture, the gladiatorial contests for which the Romans built their amphitheatres are at once the most fascinating and the most difficult for us to come to terms with. They have been seen variously as sacrifices to the gods or, at funerals, to the souls of the deceased; as a mechanism for introducing young Romans to the horrors of fighting; and as a direct substitute for warfare after the imposition of peace.
In this original and authoritative study, Thomas Wiedemann argues that gladiators were part of the mythical struggle of order and civilisation against the forces of nature, barbarism and law breaking, representing the possibility of a return to new life from the point of death; that Christian Romans rejected gladiatorial games not on humanitarian grounds, but because they were a rival representation of a possible resurrection.

1 Gladiators and Roman Identity

DOI: 10.4324/9780203204696-1

Munificence, Games and Glory

Gladiatorial contests, munera gladiatoria, hold a central place in modern popular perceptions of Roman behaviour. They were without a doubt also of major significance to the way the Romans themselves ordered their lives. Although the popular image of the Roman mob spending most of the year looking on from its comfortable seats in the Colosseum while men killed each other and killed or were killed by wild beasts in the arena is a considerable distortion, the investment of time, wealth, and emotion into the games was nevertheless enormous. Attending the games was one of the practices that went with being a Roman. They were held in the most visible single building in a Roman city — whether a purpose-built amphitheatre as was usual in the west, or a reconstituted theatre as in the Greek east. Notwithstanding the unease and embarrassment that many apologists for Rome have felt at what went on in these buildings, they cannot be dissociated from Roman civilization.

Roman tradition held that the activities that took place in the amphitheatre were not originally Roman at all. Where they came from, in terms of both cultural and geographical origins, is considerably less certain than many scholars, ancient as well as modern, have assumed. Roman writers believed that the traditional spectacles of the Roman community were not munera but the ludi, ceremonial processions followed by chariot-races which took place in the Circus Maximus or in the so-called Circus Flaminius, an open space (not a building) in the Campus Martius. These ludi were thought to have developed hand-in-hand with Rome’s own development as a Mediterranean city-state under the ‘Etruscan’ kings in the sixth century bc. Other activities, especially theatrical ones, came to be associated with these ‘games’ in the course of the centuries. The circus-games were state occasions, presided over by magistrates, and financed (at least in part) by the state treasury. On the other hand gladiatorial shows and the wild-beast ‘hunts’ (venationes) which came to be associated with them did not appear at Rome until very much later.

There were respects in which the two types of spectacle played a similar social and ritual role, and many studies of Roman social life rightly discuss them together; but there are also significant distinctions to be made between them. The Romans themselves, before the third century ad, used different words for the two types of ceremonies: chariot races in the Circus and theatrical shows were called ludi (‘games’ or ‘exercises’: the same Latin word was used for ‘school’, including — confusingly — gladiatorial schools), while the activities associated with the amphitheatre were munera.¹ The two words reflect their different origins. Gladiatorial contests did not originate as state occasions, but as obligatory offerings (munera) owed to important men at their deaths. It would be misleading to call them ‘private’ occasions, since the men so honoured had generally been public figures, and the object of the exercise was to broadcast their prestige, and that of their families, to the Roman public in general. When the Caesars permanently took on the role of being Rome’s rulers, and monopolised the giving of munera in the capital, the distinction between public and private as applied to the imperial family lost much of its relevance. Nevertheless it is not without significance that, in the context of wild-beast hunts and gladiatorial games, emperors were generally acclaimed and referred to as ‘Caesar’, rather than by any of their constitutional titles such as ‘Augustus’, ‘Imperator’ or ‘Princeps’.²

The traditional public ceremonies of Rome did not, then, include gladiatorial games. Nevertheless it is worth examining the role of such ludi, since they give us a context for public spectacles at Rome. When Cicero drew up a blueprint for a revised Roman constitution, probably during Pompey’s sole consulship in 52 bc, he defined the ludi publici as follows:

Public games are to be divided into those which take place in the cavea (theatre) and those which take place in the Circus. In the Circus, footraces, boxing, wrestling, and chariot racing; in the theatre, singing, lyre-playing and flute-playing.³

The public nature of the ludi can be seen from the description given by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the time of Augustus. Originally, Dionysius tells us, the people took their places by curiae, tribal or electoral units. The Circus, and at least some theatres, were templa, sacred places belonging to the gods. And the Circus Maximus was said to have been laid out by Tarquinius Priscus at the same time as he laid out the Roman Forum. Although the individual magistrate who presided over each occasion was given credit for putting on a particularly splendid programme — credit which would be realised in the form of votes at his next election — ludi were an offering to the gods by the whole community, and not by the presiding magistrate alone. They were suitable occasions for parading the power of the Roman community. Once Rome had come to dominate the entire Mediterranean, one way of symbolising that power was to display various exotic beasts imported from the territories Rome had conquered, and then slaughter them in the presence of the Roman people assembled in the Circus or theatre as a visual symbol of Roman control: perhaps the most famous such display was presented by Pompey during his second consulship in 55 bc, when over a thousand lions and leopards were killed, and the Roman people was shown a northern European lynx and an Indian rhinoceros for the first time.⁴

Roman spectacles were a public display of power, and that power was primarily military. The central role which the exercise of power in warfare played within the system of political competition and in the self-esteem of the Roman elite (and in Roman life generally) during the republic is well-known. Military success was rewarded in all ranks of the Roman army; for those who commanded successful armies, the highest sign of public recognition was the award of a triumph. Triumphal processions, with the associated games thanking or repaying the gods for their support (‘Votive games’), were another of the occasions on which the power of the Roman state was publicly associated with the glory of an individual political leader. They have to be distinguished from the regular ludi. Although triumphal games had to be authorised by the Roman Senate, they were financed by the general who had won the victory, normally out of the spoils, and reflected on him: as Livy says of Romulus, the first Roman to hold a triumph, it had the effect of making him personally more respected, augustiorem.⁵ Unlike ludi, the triumphal display centred on the person of the returning general to such an extent that it temporarily gave him a monarchical position, visibly represented by his dress — something that conflicted with the ideals of a republican city-state, and made his peers, and even his followers, uneasy: hence the need to break the tension by letting the soldiers make obscene jokes about the triumphator, and even placing a slave behind him on his chariot to remind him that he was only another mortal. At the same time the power that the triumphal procession advertised was the power of the Roman people, as put into effect by a Roman army. The extent of that power was visually symbolised by placards containing written statements and representations of the army’s successes under the general’s command (‘I came, I saw, I conquered’), as well as by the procession of captured prisoners. A fragment from Sallust’s Histories describing how Sulla’s supporter Metellus Pius returned to his provincial base from a successful campaign illustrates both how these displays symbolised Rome’s claim to universal power, and the unease and resentment that a general’s peers might feel against such private claims:

When Metellus returned in great glory from his year in Further Spain, men and women came to meet him from everywhere, and people watched him in every street and from the rooftops. His quaestor Gains Urbinus and others knew what he wanted; when they invited him to dinner, they took greater pains than Romans and indeed human beings generally do to adorn the house with tapestries and insignia, and set up stages for actors to perform. The ground was covered with crocuses and other flowers, as the finest temples are. When he had sat down, they sprang a surprise on him by letting down a representation of Venus to the sound of artificial thunder, to place a crown on his head. As he went in to dine, they honoured him with incense like a god. As he reclined, he wore the embroidered toga and cloak (sc. of a triumphator), and the banquet included the choicest foods, not just from all the provinces but even from across the seas, with many varieties of fowl and flesh from Mauretania that had not been known before. These things lost him some of his reputation, especially among the older and more conservative men, who thought such things haughty and dangerous and unworthy of Roman power (superba illa, gravia, indigna Romano imperio).⁶

These features of traditional Roman displays, the ludi and the triumph, deserve our attention because in the course of time they became associated with something that had developed under different circumstances as a different form of display, the gladiatorial munus, originally connected not with public power, but with individual mortality.

The historical tradition pinpointed the first occasion of a munus at Rome: it was at the funeral of Junius Brutus Pera in 264 bc, on the eve of the first Punic war. His sons Marcus and Decimus had three pairs of gladiators fight to the death on the Forum Boarium (between the Palatine and the Tiber).⁷ The very fact that references to this, and many subsequent, gladiatorial displays survive in the historical record shows their ambiguous position between Roman private and public life. Like other funerals of members of the Roman elite, Junius Pera’s funeral was a private occasion which his sons chose to turn into a public one in order to enhance their father’s status, and of course their own. The importance of funerals as occasions which the deceased’s personal or political heirs tried to exploit for their own purposes is well attested: Mark Antony’s speech over the body of Julius Caesar is perhaps the most notorious. The Greek historian Polybius, in his account of the workings of the Roman political system in the first half of the second century bc, had already remarked upon the public and political nature of these private events, with the procession of actors bearing the wax masks (imagines) of earlier members of the deceased’s kin-group. The competitive nature of republican politics meant that ever more imagines were displayed on these occasions. At the funeral of M. Claudius Marcellus after his death at the Battle of Petelia in 208 bc, in his fifth consulship, the funeral masks of 600 Claudii were paraded; at the funeral of the dictator Sulla in 78 bc, there were said to have been 6,000.⁸

It was in the context of such munera, obligations carried out in honour of the dead, that gladiatorial contests at Rome are first recorded. They were, literally, a spectacular way of attracting the attention of the Roman public to the importance of the deceased man and his family. The relative completeness of Livy’s account of the period 218–167 bc allows us to trace how, over this period, the competitiveness of Roman public life meant that on each occasion the spectacle presented — like the number of ancestral masks — had to improve on what had gone before; for Romans felt the need to compete, not just with their contemporaries, but also with those who had achieved great honour before them. In 216 bc, at the funeral of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, there were twenty-two pairs of gladiators; in 200 bc, at that of Marcus Valerius Laevinus, twenty-five; in 183 bc, at that of Publius Licinius, sixty pairs. Of several shows presented in 174 bc, that given by Titus Flamininus at his father’s funeral was the most spectacular. Seventy-four men were said to have fought over a period of three days.⁹

Hitherto the editores, the men who presented these displays, had been privati, men who were not holding (and sometimes had not yet held) any public magistracy, and who hoped that by drawing attention to the virtues of their deceased parents they would improve their own standing in the eyes of the electorate. Unlike the funerals themselves, the munera had the very great advantage that they did not have to be put on immediately after the death of the deceased: his son could make a vow promising to put on gladiatorial contests, but leave the fulfilment of that vow to some occasion which suited his own political calendar, such as the campaign for election to a higher magistracy (when the competition would be fiercest). Towards the end of the republic, politicians seeking election to a praetorship or consulship were under great pressure to find appropriate relatives to honour in this way. Where there was no ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of abbreviations
• List of dates
• Map of the Roman Empire
• Introduction
• 1 Gladiators and Roman Identity
• 2 The Context
• 3 The Gladiators: Background and Status
• 4 Opposition and Abolition
• 5 Conclusion: Imperial Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty
• Glossary
• Select Bibliography
• Index