1 was working in the basement below the arena of the Colosseum one Easter when I heard the strains of ‘Ave, Ave, Ave Maria’ wafting down to me. A small group of pilgrims had gathered to remember the Christian martyrs who had suffered and died there for their beliefs, nearly two thousand years ago.
The Colosseum is the most impressive, and the most notorious, of Rome’s classical ruins, a building forever associated with death and gory spectacle. Some years ago, when I decided to investigate how the world’s most famous amphitheatre had functioned, a colleague said to me, ‘Why glorify that disgusting place?’ It often provokes that sort of reaction, but to the millions of visitors who have been drawn there over the years it still holds a gruesome fascination.
Many of us look upon the ancient Romans with ambivalence. We may admire their achievements as a sophisticated civilization while abhorring the brutality of a society that built a huge and powerful empire based on warmongering, slavery, tyranny and torture. When we think about the Colosseum and the gladiatorial games that took place there most of us think of the popular Hollywood image of the mob, urged on by a mad emperor, baying for blood. But is modern society so very different? We all have an instinct for violence, even if most of us manage to control it most of the time. Bear-baiting, bull-fighting, foxhunting, hare-coursing - blood sports have been popular since the beginning of time. Some countries still allow public executions, and we have only to look back 135 years or so to Thomas Hardy (who died in 1928) to find an Englishman who witnessed a public hanging.
And just as public executions were always bound to draw not just the common rabble but people from all comers of society, so did the bloodthirsty gladiatorial games in ancient Rome. They were not put on just to please the lower classes, as is sometimes claimed. There are plenty of examples of mosaics and bas-reliefs that came from wealthy people’s
Houses or tombs glorifying the gladiators, and their images have been found on everyday household items, such as vases, lamps and bone knife-handles. One would perhaps expect that most Roman intellectuals would find the games distasteful, but this is not always the case. While some writers and philosophers saw the gladiators and those who sponsored them as professional murderers, others could not help appreciating their courage and skill. Seneca the Elder (c. 55 BC-AD 39) appreciated their artistry while condemning the culture in which they flourished and Cicero (106-43 BC), though critical, could still admire them:
Look at gladiators who are either ruined men or barbarians; whai blows they endure! How is it that men, who have been well trained, prefer to receive a blow than basely avoid it? How frequently it is made evident that there is nothing they put higher than giving satisfaction to their owner or to the people! Even when weakened with wounds, they send word to their owners to ascertain their pleasure; if they have given satisfaction to them they are content to fall. What gladiator of ordinary merit has ever uttered a groan or changed countenance? Who of them has disgraced himself, I will not say on his feet, but who has disgraced himself in his fall? Who after falling has drawn in his neck when ordered to suffer the fatal stroke? A gladiatorial show is apt to seem cruel and brutal to some eyes, and I incline to think that as now conducted it is so.
But in the days when it was criminals who crossed swords in the death struggle, there could be no better schooling against pain and death at any rate for the eye, though for the ear perhaps there might be many.
The twentieth century will probably be remembered as the most violent period ever: two world wars, the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the Holocaust - genocide perpetrated on an unimaginable, unprecedented scale, not only in Europe but also in Africa and the Far East. The only real difference is that the Romans openly and without a shred of hypocrisy organized deliberate acts of violence for their own entertainment and built arenas specifically for the purpose. If people today were honest many would admit that the effect the gladiatorial contests had on Alypius, the Christian friend of St Augustine of Hippo (AD 354-430), might also apply to them. St Augustine offers the following anecdote in his Confessions:
He [Alypius] had gone to Rome before me in order to study law, and in Rome he had been quite swept away, incredibly and with a most incredible passion, by the gladiatorial shows. He was opposed to such things and detested them; but he happened to meet some of his friends and fellow students on their way back from lunch, and they, in spite of his protests and his vigorous resistance, used a friendly kind of violence and forced him to go along with them to the amphitheatre on a day when one of those cruel and bloody shows was being presented. As he went, he said to them: ‘You can drag my body there, but don’t imagine that you can make me turn my eyes or give my mind to the show. Though there, I shall not be there, and so I shall have the better of both of you and of the show.’
After hearing this his friends were all the keener to bring him along with them. No doubt they wanted to see whether he could do this or not. So they came to the arena and took what seats they could find. The whole place was seething with savage enthusiasm, but he shut his eyes and forbade his soul to go into a scene of such evil. If only he could have blocked up his ears too! For in the course of the fight some man fell; there was a great roar from the whole mass of the spectators which fell on his ears; he was overcome by curiosity and opened his eyes, feeling perfectly prepared to treat whatever he might see with scorn and to rise above it.
But he then received in his soul a worse wound than that man, whom he had wanted to see, had received on his body. His own fall was more wretched than that of the gladiator which had caused all that shouting which had entered his ears and unlocked his eyes and made an opening for the thrust that was to overthrow his soul - a soul that had been reckless rather than strong and was all the weaker because it had trusted in itself when it ought to have trusted in you. He saw the blood and gulped down savagery. Far from turning away, he fixed his eyes on it. Without knowing what was happening, he drank in madness, he was delighted with the guilty contest, drunk with the lust for blood. He was no longer the man who had come there but was one of the crowd to which he had come, a true companion of those who had brought him.
There is no more to be said. He looked, he shouted, he raved with excitement. He took away with him a madness which would goad him to come back again, and he would not only go with those who first got him there; he would go ahead of them and he would drag others with him...
World History
