History and Interpretation of Gladiatorial Games
The Romans believed that they inherited the practice
of gladiatorial games from the Etruscans who used them as part of a funeral
ritual (servants would duel to the death for the right to provide companionship
to their owners in eternity). We don't have any evidence, however, that
the Etruscans, in fact, did any such thing. Conversely, we do have evidence
of gladiators in Campanian society, perhaps of Samnite origin. The early
Christians interpreted the gladiatorial games as a type of human sacrifice.
While it is true that gladiatorial games involved the attempted killing
of one person by another, and that the Romans associated them with funeral
rituals, in fact, the analogy by the Christians seems to have been more
a brilliant rhetorical move in the service of a larger anti-pagan polemic
than a fair description of how Romans themselves understood the games.
The first gladiatorial games were offered in Rome in
264 BCE by sons of Junius Brutus Pera in their father's honor after he
had died. Gladiatorial combat became a very popular form of public spectacle
very quickly in Rome. Those who offered games began to compete in terms
of the numbers of matches offered. Whereas the sons of Brutus Pera offered
three matches, a century later, Titus Flamininus offered 74 pairs in games
in honor of his father that lasted over three days. Julius Caesar promised
320 matches in funeral games for his daughter, Julia, but the Senate passed
legislation limiting the amount of money that could be spent on gladiatorial
games to stop him. Thus, during the Republic, gladiatorial combat was associated
in Rome with a) a death and b) elite competition. Such displays provided
members of the elite with a vehicle by which to advertise the newest generation
in a family which sought to rule Romans.
The funeral association is as important for our analysis
as the association with competition within the elite. Not merely were the
games linked to a specific person's death, but they were also very much
about death (during the Republic they were only held around the time of
the winter equinox; Augustus later permitted gladiatorial games at the
spring equinox as well). Gladiators entered the arena with the intent to
kill each other. Roman spectators thus observed men facing death, and attempting
to overcome it. In a metaphorical sense as well, gladiators were socially
dead - they were infamis under Roman law (typically slaves, prisoners
of war and convicted criminals who had a much more restricted set of rights
under Roman law than ordinary citizens). If they fought well enough, however,
they might, with the crowd's support, win both their lives (crowds could
and did urge the editores, the sponsors of the games, to spare a
defeated gladiator before the kill) and their social identities (crowds
urged emperors to free gladiators who were popular). Thus, gladiators,
from a Roman's point of view (if not a Christian's) offered at least the
opportunity to observe death defeated and transcended.
What gladiators did (indeed what they were trained to
do) was kill and die well. These were tasks of extraordinary urgency for
Romans. On the one hand, Romans (as most premodern societies and impoverished
modern societies) faced daunting mortality rates. They did not have the
opportunity to "grow into their deaths" as a matter of course (as moderns
in materially successful societies do). A Roman at the age of 20 knew he
would probably die before he was 30, and he wanted to meet death with honor
and dignity. He could observe gladiators do it in the arena. Conversely,
as members of a relentlessly militaristic culture, Romans valued the art
of killing in a way we simply don't understand. Roman soldiers, moreover,
enjoyed a much greater autonomy in their line of battle than Greeks did.
In fact, the success of the Roman battle line often depended on the courage
of individual soldiers in hand to hand combat. Thus the ability of an ordinary
citizen to kill single handedly was a skill that the entire empire depended
on to survive.
Gladiatorial games proved immediately and immensely
popular within the Roman empire. There are reports, for example, of people
in towns where prominent citizens died virtually extorting promises of
gladiatorial games from the survivors. Eventually, the emperors had to
regulate how much could be spent on gladiatorial performances to prevent
members of the elite from bankrupting themselves. As Rome expanded, so
did the performance of the games. We have evidence of gladiatorial performances
in virtually every part of the Roman empire. The games themselves became
a vehicle for the Romanization of the empire. On the one hand, Roman soldiers
liked to observe gladidatorial matches. Thus, lanistae (owner/managers
of gladiatorial troops) would follow the troops to new quarters and offer
matches for entertainment. This could be a highly profitable enterprise
and it was not unusual for members of the elite to invest in gladiatorial
troupes. Cicero's friend, Atticus, for example, made back his investment
in a troupe after two performances. The games themselves provided ways
for Rome to demonstrate the power of their empire. The sheer cost of the
producing games was stunning. Contests involving animals from distant provinces
demonstrated in a material way how far Rome's dominance reached. Inhabitants
of towns in lands conquered by the Romans built amphitheaters and sponsored
competitions as a way of demonstrating their Romanness. Historians traditionally
had a great deal of difficulty accepting that the Greeks, for example,
enthusiastically embraced the games (cf. Japanese enthusiasm for baseball),
but, in fact, the Greeks loved gladiators. The Greeks were not alone. Mosaics
and wall paintings from North Africa and other parts of the empire routinely
use depictions of gladiatorial combat for their themes.
There are a number of reasons why gladiatorial combat
proved so enthralling for Romans. The arena was a liminal site where fundamental
human conflicts were symbolically fought. The gladiator as outlaw confronted
the forces of civilization and law. Contestants who specialized in the
fighting of animals fought in the guise of bears, leopards and lions -
wild and, to folks living then, daunting forces of nature. Finally, at
issue in every gladiatorial contest, was the most basic question of life
and death.
|
|
