In the early years of the second century ad, the satirist Juvenal lamented that the Roman people, once concerned with weighty issues of war and peace, were now devoted solely to bread and circuses (Juv. 10. 78-81). The line is often quoted as summary of the impact of the imperial system on the city of Rome, of the effective disenfranchisement of the Roman people by the increasingly autocratic monarchy. A few years later an advisor to Marcus Aurelius remarked that the emperor had to do what the people wanted at the games, while legislation from this period sought to check the tendency of the crowd to demand the release of the guilty, the condemnation of the innocent, and the freedom of slaves belonging to the emperor (Fronto Aur. 1.8; Dig. 4.9.17; Cod. lust. 7.11.3). In point of fact Juvenal’s comment is wholly misleading. Centuries earlier, in the last generation of formally democratic government at Rome, Cicero listed the theater and games as the best places to discern the true feelings of the Roman people, and reasonably so (Pro Sestio 106). Far more people could be accommodated for chariot races than in the voting pens of the Campus Martius.
From the earliest to the last years of the classical city-state, public entertainment played a crucial role in defining the political order. The fact that sport and entertainment occupy a very similar position in early twenty-first century society is one of the genuine debts that the modern world owes to the ancient. For it was the admittedly bogus image of the amateur athlete in classical Greece that inspired the modern Olympic movement, and the inclusion of competitive sport in elite Anglo-American educational curricula (Young 2004: 138-57; Karabel 2005: 42-44; Guttmann 2004: 89). In both cases, although sport was intended to reinforce hierarchical relationships, the result was the development of vast networks of professional athletics that encouraged social mobility and restricted elite domination of society.
To suggest that ancient civic society, based upon rigid hierarchical structures that were ostensibly reinforced by monarchical governments throughout most of its
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
History, could possibly support structures that allowed members of the lower classes an opportunity to improve their status simply on the basis of talent might seem to be a blatantly false statement. My point will be to demonstrate that this is not so. Power in the ancient world was ultimately dependent upon the possession of wealth, and recent work on the economics of professional entertainers have revealed that quite staggering amounts of money were there to be made by extremely successful performers, both on the stage and in the arena (Lebek 1996; D. Potter 2006: 399). More importantly, even average performers had the ability to change the conditions of their lives. Then, as now, careers in entertainment involved a great deal of risk, but they still offered paths to advancement that were not completely controlled by the interests of those who held power in the aristocratically dominated states of the Greco-Roman world. Successful entertainers developed fan bases that could not be ignored, and often required respect.
World History
