Gladiators

Violence and Spectacle in Ancient Rome

Roger Dunkle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317905202
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The games comprised gladiatorial fights, staged animal hunts ( venationes ) and the executions of convicted criminals and prisoners of war. Besides entertaining the crowd, the games delivered a powerful message of Roman power: as a reminder of the wars in which Rome had acquired its empire, the distant regions of its far-flung empire (from where they had obtained wild beasts for the venatio ), and the inevitability of Roman justice for criminals and those foreigners who had dared to challenge the empire's authority. Though we might see these games as bloodthirsty, cruel and reprehensible condemning any alien culture out of hand for a sport that offends our sensibilities smacks of cultural chauvinism. Instead one should judge an ancient sport by the standards of its contemporary cultural context. This book offers a fascinating, and fair historical appraisal of gladiatorial combat, which will bring the games alive to the reader and help them see them through the eyes of the ancient Romans.

It will answer questions about gladiatorial combat such as: What were its origins? Why did it disappear? Who were gladiators? How did they become gladiators? What was there training like? How did the Romans view gladiators? How were gladiator shows produced and advertised? What were the different styles of gladiatorial fighting? Did gladiator matches have referees? Did every match end in the death of at least one gladiator? Were gladiator games mere entertainment or did they play a larger role in Roman society? What was their political significance?

Chapter 1
Cultural Context and Origins of Gladiatorial Combat

On the day before she was to be thrown to the beasts for refusing to sacrifice for the well-being of the emperors, a young Christian woman named Vibia Perpetua had a dream that, like most dreams, was a combination of reality and fantasy with an admixture of incoherency.¹ In her dream, Perpetua is led into the amphitheatre, but not to face the wild beasts. She finds herself facing a frightening Egyptian opponent in a yet undetermined contest and when her seconds strip off her clothes, she has been transformed into a man.

The Egyptian rolls in the dust and Perpetua is rubbed down with oil, both typical preparations for a wrestling match or for the pankration, a no-holds-barred contest that is a combination of boxing and wrestling. Then there arrives a gigantic man taller than the walls of the amphitheatre, who is wearing a tunic with two vertical stripes and carries a rod and a green branch on which are golden apples. His dress and rod identify him as a referee of gladiator matches.² The branch seems to be a substitution for a palm branch, one of the symbolic prizes given to winners of Greek athletic contests, but also to victorious gladiators. When the official explains the terms of the contest, saying that the winner must slay the opponent with a sword, we are led to expect a gladiatorial match. Once the contest begins, however, the exchange of blows with fists and feet combined with wrestling holds reveals that the contest is the pankration. After defeating the Egyptian, Perpetua leaves the arena in triumph through the Porta Sanivivaria (‘the Gate of Life’), through which victorious gladiators leave the arena. With the typical freedom of a dreamer, Perpetua has merged the pankration and gladiatorial combat.³ For Perpetua, the dream in which she defeats the Egyptian is prophetic of her victory over the Devil (for which the Egyptian is a stand-in), which she will achieve the next day as a martyr when she and her friends are thrown to the wild beasts in the arena.⁴ The golden apples attached to the branch are a symbol of immortality, suggesting the eternal life in heaven that Perpetua will win through her martyrdom.⁵

Perpetua’s subconscious identification of herself with a pancratiast and a gladiator seems odd. Indeed, Christianity was extremely hostile to all pagan spectacles, especially gladiatorial combat, but in her concluding remarks on her dream, Perpetua glories in her dream victory as a pancratiast/gladiator.⁶ Despite official Christian antagonism, the athlete and the gladiator were admired by those Christians who yearned for the crown of martyrdom.⁷ These embodiments of masculine energy and power seem to have been inspiring exemplars, particularly for female martyrs, whom even their fellow Christians might expect to be weak in the face of the horrific mental and physical demands of martyrdom. The encyclical letter from the Christians of Vienne and Lyons in Gaul to their fellow Christians in the Near East describes Blandina’s famous martyrdom in Lyons (AD 177) in athletic terms, presenting Christ as her athletic model:

… tiny, weak, and insignificant as she [Blandina] was, she would give inspiration to her brothers [in Christ], for she had put on Christ, that mighty and invincible athlete, and had overcome the Adversary [the Devil] in many contests, and through her conflict had won the crown of immortality.⁸

As Brent Shaw points out, the athlete and the gladiator, both arena performers, were empowering figures, because of their strength of will and discipline.⁹ Christianity was quick to adopt the athlete as a figure to be emulated in a spiritual context. For example, athletic imagery is prominent in advice to prospective martyrs given by Tertullian, a Christian apologist of the second century AD. He presents God and the Holy Spirit as officials in charge of athletes, whose rigorous training is an inspirational model for Christians preparing for martyrdom. Just like athletes, martyrs must build up their moral strength by strict training to achieve victory. He describes the prison in which martyrs await their ordeal in the arena as a palaestra (‘athletic training ground’).¹⁰ Even more germane to the martyr was the experience of the gladiator who faced the real possibility of death every time he appeared in the arena. The oath taken by volunteer gladiators emphasized the horrific physical trials they will have to endure during their training and in the arena: burning, binding, beating and death by the sword, all of which were especially pertinent to martyrs.¹¹ It is not surprising that the popular image of the gladiator as a heroic figure of great moral and physical power, willing to suffer wounds and even death in the all-out struggle for victory, found its way into her dream. The dream must have been a source of great comfort in as much as it encouraged her to see her execution in the arena the next day not as a degrading defeat, as her captors hoped, but as a triumphant victory. The ending of her life as a martyr would follow the glorious example of the gladiator. Just as the gladiator was able to transcend and defeat death by courageous behaviour in battle, she would achieve the same result through her martyrdom. In fact, Perpetua prominently displayed two notable characteristics of the gladiator during the tribulations of her last day on earth. As she and her friends were led from the prison to the amphitheatre, Perpetua stared down the hostile crowd that lined their path.¹² An unflinching stare was prized in gladiators because it signified a powerful will to win. In the gladiator school of the emperor Caligula were two gladiators who did not blink no matter what threat they faced and thus were invincible opponents.¹³ Perpetua’s death also closely followed the gladiatorial tradition. When the crowd protested the order that Perpetua and her friends be put to death out of the sight of the spectators in the spoliarium, she and her colleagues were more than happy to display the strength of their faith in the arena.¹⁴ We know that death in the spoliarium was a matter of shame for gladiators: Seneca explains that a true gladiator would rather die in the middle of the arena than in the spoliarium.¹⁵ An even more significant similarity to the gladiator was Perpetua’s conduct when faced with death in the arena. Since the animals were able to kill only two of her Christian colleagues, an apprentice gladiator was assigned the task of executing Perpetua and two other members of her group with a sword. The executions were accomplished efficiently until it came to Perpetua, who was last in line. It seems that the young gladiator was nervous about killing Perpetua because his first blow hit a bone and she had to guide his wavering (errantem) sword to her throat. This situation duplicates the scene that Seneca the Younger describes, in which a losing gladiator, who at first had fought tentatively, redeemed himself by calmly accepting his death as decreed by the giver of the games. He offered his throat to his opponent and guided his wavering (errantem) sword to its destination.¹⁶

Although the legacy of the gladiator lay dormant for centuries after the disappearance of gladiatorial combat in late antiquity, it was revived with the excavations of Pompeii beginning in the eighteenth century. The discovery of an amphitheatre, gladiatorial school (with a store of gladiator armour), and numerous inscriptions gives eloquent testimony of how important a role gladiators had played in the life of the town. Popular novels such as Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) also did much to popularize the gladiator as did Jean-Léon Gérôme’s famous painting Pollice Verso (1872) (Figure 24 in this volume) that was inspired by the artist’s visit to the Naples museum where he saw the gladiatorial armour discovered at Pompeii. This painting became (and still is) immensely popular and has had enormous influence on the depiction of gladiators in film, which itself has turned out to be an even more effective medium for shaping public awareness of, and interest in, the gladiator.¹⁷ In a more popular vein, the last two decades of the nineteenth century saw a craze for all things Roman, especially arena events. Show business promoters such as P. T. Barnum and the Kiralfy brothers cashed in on this fad and presented onstage in America and in England various aspects of Roman life, with a special emphasis on arena events (portrayed harmlessly), to satisfy, like an ancient sponsor of a gladiator show, their audience’s ‘fascination with blood in the arena’. Imre Kiralfy’s Nero or the Destruction of Rome (1888) presented depictions of gladiatorial combat and martyrdoms of Christians by wild beasts and other scenes illustrating the decadence of Rome.¹⁸

In the academic world, scholars took up research on the historical gladiator with enthusiasm. From Germany came a carefully researched account of gladiators and gladiatorial combat in the second volume of Ludwig Friedländer’s four-volume work Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms in der Zeit von August bis zum Ausgang der Antonine (Representations from the History of Roman Customs in the Period from Augustus to the End of the Antonines, 1862–71). The contribution of French scholars has been especially notable. The authoritative article of Georges Lafaye on the gladiator in Daremberg and Saglio’s Dictionnaire des antiquités greques et romaines (Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1896) began a tradition that culminated in two magisterial tomes: Louis Robert’s Les Gladiateurs dans l’Orient grec (Gladiators in the Greek East, 1940) and Georges Ville’s La Gladiature en occident des origines à la mort de Domitien (The Phenomenon of the Gladiator in the West from its Origins to the Death of Domitian, 1981). The spate of books on gladiators in English, French and German in the past forty years give further graphic proof of continued scholarly interest in the topic.

Today, the word ‘gladiator’ is still highly charged; in addition to its literal meaning, it has been applied figuratively to athletes and even practitioners of non-athletic professions, indicating an aggressively courageous nature and a willingness to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of success. There must be very few people today, young or old, who could not explain what a gladiator is and identify his historical context in a general way. The popularity of the gladiator is probably due in great part to his exotic character, originating in an ancient culture in some ways alien to our own that found entertainment in a sport that involved the very real risk of death. Obviously, no civilized country today would tolerate gladiatorial combat. Real sword-play for entertainment runs counter to the ethical concerns of major modern religions and is objectionable on purely human terms. After all, most modern states have outlawed blood sports involving animals, such as bull-fights, dogfighting and cockfighting. A question comes to mind: why did the violent and bloody sport of gladiatorial combat achieve great popularity among the ancient Romans, who are credited with bringing civilization to the western world? The answer to this question reveals how much we moderns are both like and different from our cultural ancestors.

First, we must understand the role of gladiatorial combat in ancient Roman culture. There is a letter written by Pliny the Younger (early second century AD) to a friend named Maximus that provides an interesting insight into the place of gladiatorial combat in Roman society:

You were right to promise a gladiatorial show [gladiatorium munus] to our fellow citizens of Verona, by whom you have long been loved, looked up to and praised. Also, your most beloved and loyal wife came from that city, to whose memory either some building or spectacle and above all, this one [gladiatorial combat], which is especially appropriate to a funeral, was owed. Moreover, this gladiatorial show was requested by so many citizens of Verona that it seemed not resolute but rude to say no. That show reflected outstandingly on your great generosity, through which you displayed your magnanimity. I wish that the African panthers, which you bought in great numbers, had arrived on the appointed day, but although they were detained by the weather, you nevertheless deserve the credit since you were not responsible for your inability to present these animals …¹⁹

The purpose of this letter is to congratulate Maximus, a wealthy and well-respected member of the aristocracy in Verona, for a gladiator show he has given in memory of his dead wife.²⁰ Pliny praises gladiatorial combat as ‘especially appropriate to a funeral’. This is because gladiator games from the very beginning of their history at Rome were closely asso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Cultural Context and Origins of Gladiatorial Combat
• Chapter 2 Recruitment and Training of Gladiators
• Chapter 3 Gladiator Games in Action
• Chapter 4 A Brief History of Gladiator Games
• Chapter 5 A Brief History of the Arena Hunt
• Chapter 6 The Roman Amphitheatre and the Colosseum
• Chapter 7 Gladiators in Film
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index