At the fights — Roman Style

It is nearly impossible to read about Rome, the city, without also coming across some reference to the Colosseum or Circus Maximus and the games the ancients played there.  As edifices, they were magnificent.  No matter what else one might think about the Romans, they were brilliant engineers.  Their roads, bridges, aqueducts, and tunnels continue to exist today.  My wife and I have walked many miles on Roman-constructed roadways, and little has been necessary in modern times to maintain them.

The Romans may not have “invented” buildings that became functional works of art, but they were amazingly innovative in copying the ideas of earlier civilizations, and it was Roman materials and techniques that explain why so many of their projects still exist.  One innovation that stands out in my mind is their central heating scheme.  They called it hypocaustum.  It was a system that produced and circulated hot air below the floor of a room, channeled by piping that also allowed the warming of the upper and main floors of a building.

Today, we may regard Roman engineering as a fantastic accomplishment, and in some instances, it was precisely that, but for most Romans, their engineering skill was just a fact of life.  As an example, Roman legions marched up to fifty miles a day — by itself an amazing feat — but then, at the end of the day’s march, legionnaires would fortify their encampment with earthworks and timber — an undertaking they had to complete before any soldier could take their evening meal.  Before setting off once more in the morning, the men would completely dismantle the fortification as if it never existed.

One should note that Rome’s legions were massive, with 5,000 to 6,000 armed fighters accompanied by a large logistics train of wagons.  During Julius Caesar’s campaign in Northern Gaul, German tribesmen used hit-and-run tactics against the legions and withdrew across the Rhine for safety.  The German assaults were more harassment than anything else, but Caesar was not known for either tolerance or having a sense of humor.  He decided the Germans needed to learn a lesson.

Caesar had his legions construct a bridge across the Rhine to teach that lesson.  When the bridge was finished (I don’t know how long it took the men to complete it), Caesar marched his legions across the Rhine, severely chastised German tribes, and laid waste to their villages.  When Caesar reasoned that his demonstration was sufficient, he returned to Gaul and dismantled the bridge.  The effect was that the German tribesmen stopped harassing Caesar’s legions — at least for a time.

The construction of Rome’s Colosseum was an eleven-year project, completed in 80 A.D.  It was mainly constructed from volcanic rock, formed brick, and concrete.  When completed, the Colosseum could hold up to 80,000 spectators; Circus Maximus held as many as 250,000 people — citizens who flocked to view games, chariot races, animal hunts, public executions, re-enactments of famous land and sea battles, acrobatic performances, dramas based on Roman mythology, and the most memorable of all — the gladiatorial contests.

Given what we know of these contests, particularly those involving Christians and Lions and gladiators, one might wonder why such ghastly events were so popular.  The answer is that despite Hollywood’s version of life in Rome, it was a miserable place: rampant crime, poverty, unsanitary conditions, malnutrition, starvation, illness, and virulent diseases permeated the entire city so that not even the courtly neighborhoods of Rome’s upper-class could escape the overpowering stench of human squalor.

But Rome’s leaders knew their people well enough to realize that one way to keep them happy, or at least otherwise occupied so they would not dwell on their misery, was to offer them games (paid for out of the Roman Treasury).  Even back then, you see, politicians could convince people that there was such a  thing as “free stuff.” 

The Colosseum drew the people in like moths to a flame.  The spectacles were weird, always ghastly, and ceaselessly depraved.  One wonders about the cost to Roman morality of so much death.  Because nearly 7 million people died in the Colosseum, there must have been some price to pay beyond the cost of chalices of mulsum (honey-flavored wine) and plates of panis castrensis (army bread).  Today, some people equate gladiatorial fights to boxing matches; it is a silly comparison.  No one decapitates the losing opponent and tosses his severed head into the stands.

Gladiator contests began around 264 B.C. to honor the memory of someone held in high regard.  From what we know of this first contest, it involved six slaves in three matches, held in honor of Decimus Junius Brutus Pera, a former consul of Rome.  In time, the games became more entertaining than ritual, and politicians, quick to capitalize on the opiate of the masses, often sponsored such events, offering free admission in hopes of winning political offices.  Julius Caesar was a master of this strategy, even to the extent of recreating the battle of Troy and creating artificial lakes inside the Colosseum to reenact sea battles.  Roman producers staged the scenes, but the battles and the killing were real.

As previously noted, the Colosseum was a remarkable edifice, but there was more to the construct than the high walls and stadia.  There was also an extensive network of tunnels, holding chambers, ramps leading from one level to another, and elaborate mechanisms for positioning animals, equipment, and scenery.

Gameday began with a parade of exotic animals, few of whom would survive the day: Elephants, hippopotamuses, ostriches, crocodiles, rhinoceros, tigers, leopards, and lions.  The Romans slaughtered as many as 11,000 animals in one day in 107 A.D.  The purpose of the killing was two-fold: to warm up the spectators for the human battles and feed the spectators from the carcasses of slain animals.  Modern scientists believe that the gladiator games explain the disappearance of several European and North African animal species, including the Lion, which disappeared around 100 A.D., Aurochs, and Hyrcanian tigers.

The Romans presented the games incrementally.  The first stage began early in the day and took up most of the morning.  Human contestants made their first appearance around noon.  This may have been the public execution of men and women convicted of capital crimes where the method of killing was as dreadful as anything that followed.[1]  Once more, in this, the Romans were innovative.  Their methods of execution involved burning criminals alive, feeding them to man-eating animals, slaying them as part of a re-enactment of mythological stories or actual history, and dragging them to death behind racehorses.

Gladiators appeared in the afternoon — following the spectator’s noon meal of roasted tiger tonsils.  The gladiators (former convicts, prisoners of war, or slaves) were well-trained as both combatants and showmen.  They were entertainers who killed for the pleasure of thousands of spectators.  The Romans occasionally would detail soldiers in training to participate in arena combat to learn about warfighting.

However, what made gladiatorial fighting different from fighting with the legions was body armor.  In the army, body armor served to protect legionnaires from lethal wounds.  The opposite was true for gladiators.  The body armor covered the arms and face while exposing the neck and chest.  The Romans wanted killing, not wounding.

Part of the gladiator training was learning how to die with dignity.  It was considered bad form for a vanquished combatant to grovel for his life.  Instead, they offered their necks for a final whack of the sword.  After every fight, attendants dressed as beings from the underworld cleared the combat area for the next event.  But before removing a body, one attendant would jab the dead gladiator with a hot iron to make sure he wasn’t faking death, and another would whack him on the head with a mallet to make sure.

The favored gladiatorial events were the one-on-one contests; spectators placed their bets on which gladiators would win.  With the introduction of the Munera Sine Missione (gifts without mission), a series of playoffs where only one person would emerge victoriously (that is, alive), wealthy spectators could be made poor, and poor spectators made rich in a single afternoon.  These games were grisly and barbaric but extraordinarily popular, which again causes us to wonder about what kind of people these ancient Romans were.  Well, for one thing, they were addicted to the lowest form of human decadence — and maybe even clinically insane.

By the way, there were also female gladiators.  They were called Gladiatrix.  They fought other combatants, females, and wild animals like their male counterparts.  They used the same weapons and armor as the men and had tremendous popularity until Roman law banned them from the games around 200 A.D.  Roman history remembers them as “exotic markers” of the times.  In 66 A.D., Emperor Nero had Ethiopian women and children fighting each other to impress the king of Armenia.  A few years later, the Gladiatrix “Mevia” made a name for herself, hunting wild boar in the Colosseum while bare-chested, and a few made names for themselves fighting from chariots.  The Romans called them “amazons.” 

Gladiatorial games took on a new flavor with the advent of Christianity; tens of thousands of Christians met their death in the arena over three hundred years.  Overall, the games lasted for more than 700 years, with experts estimating around 10,000 deaths per year.  All empires collapse sooner or later.  Rome ended around 476 A.D. for several reasons, including, I suspect, its decadence.

Modern culture claims to have matured since the gladiatorial games, but it is a debated topic.  Today, we watch automobile races with people in the stands, hoping to see a gosh-awful accident.  Pugilists still die in the boxing ring, well-armored ballplayers still die on the football field, some on high school fields, and like Rome, modern Americans spare no expense in building their stadiums.  Rome’s Colosseum cost around the equivalent of $750 million.  Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas cost $1.9 billion to construct.  Today, the highest-paid athlete is Michael Jordon, whose lifetime earnings exceed $2.6 billion; 2,000 years ago, Gaius Appuleius Diocles of Lamego (present-day Lusitania) earned 35,863,120 sesterces … or in modern currency, around $15 billion.  What did he do to make that kind of money?  He drove a chariot and raced professionally for 25 years.

But what about the gladiators?  Several “famous” combatants were classified according to the fighting they displayed.  Carpophorus was famous for defeating bears, lions, buffalo, panthers, and leopards, armed with no more than a gladius.  The most famous fighter of men was the free-born Marcus Attilius.  We don’t know if he eventually retired to Florida or if he was carried off the field of combat on his shield.  We do know what happened to Spartacus of Thrace, though.  It wasn’t pretty.

Sources:

1. Auguet, R.  Cruelty, and Civilization: The Roman Games.  Routledge Press, 1994.
2. Brunet, S.  “Women with Swords: Female Gladiators in the Roman World,” A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity.  Blackwell Publishing, 2014.
3. Fagan, G. G.  The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games.  Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Endnotes:

[1] Dr. Shelby Brown of the Archaeological Institute of America tells us that criminals were murderers, thieves, deserters, rebels, traitors, runaway slaves, psychopaths, cowards, Christians, and Jews. 

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