The Colosseum

‘HEART-THROBS OF THE GIRLS’?

Gladiators were marginal outsiders in Roman society. Some of them literally so: captives of war, the poor and destitute who saw in possible success in the arena their only (desperate) hope, slaves sold to the gladiatorial ‘training camps’ (in Latin ludi, usually rather too domestically translated as ‘schools’), condemned men sent there as punishment. They were, in fact, almost exclusively men. Apart from a few exceptional and usually scandalous cases – such as the emperor Nero’s reputed display of an entirely black troupe of gladiators, women and children included – female gladiators are more a feature of modern over-optimistic fantasy than Roman practice. The body of a Roman woman found in London in 2000 and eagerly identified as a female gladiator, on the basis of some lamps found with her carrying gladiatorial scenes, was probably nothing of the kind but just an ‘ordinary’ woman buried with her favourite trinkets, if anything a fan rather than a contestant.

A gladiator’s life was dangerous, painful and probably short – even if for the skilled or lucky few success might bring rewards and eventually discharge. It is significant that the most famous doctor of the Roman world, Galen, who ended up as the court physician to the second-century emperor Marcus Aurelius, started his career treating gladiators in Pergamum (in modern Turkey). He claims to have found the experience useful in his studies of human anatomy and various therapeutic methods and regimes, and he drew on it in writing his voluminous medical treatises. When we read his account of the problems of replacing intestines hanging out through a gaping wound, we are probably getting close to some of the real-life gladiatorial experience in the arena. The simple presence of a doctor, however, hints at the economic interests that may have mitigated the physical conditions experienced by most of the fighters. A dead gladiator was an expensive gladiator. Likewise mangy specimens were probably no crowd-pullers. Their living quarters, clothing and rations must have varied enormously through the many different troupes and camps in the empire: some were small private-enterprise affairs (much like that of the gladiatorial impresario Proximo, played by Oliver Reed, in Gladiator); others were effectively part of the imperial state organisation in Rome itself, located conveniently close to the Colosseum. But, wherever they were based, logic suggests that they would not have been kept in starvation. Some Roman writers refer to standard gladiatorial fare as ‘sagina’, ‘stuffing’ – a characteristically snobbish disdain for humble food, and at the same time hinting unpleasantly at the similarity of the fighters to dead animals. But coarse diet or not, it would probably have been eyed enviously by large sections of the Roman poor.

Beyond the physical dangers they faced, gladiators were marginalised in a civic and political sense. Many were of slave status anyway, which meant that they had only the most limited legal and personal rights. But even those who were by origin freeborn Roman citizens suffered a whole series of penalties and stigmas when they became gladiators, which in many respects amounted to losing their status as full citizens. It involved much the same ‘official disgrace’ (‘infamia’ in Latin) as prostitutes and actors suffered by virtue of their profession. We know of Roman legislation from the first century BC that prevented anyone who had ever been a gladiator from holding political office in local government; they were also not allowed to serve on juries or become soldiers. Even more fundamentally they seem to have lost that crucial privilege of Roman citizenship: freedom from bodily assault or corporal punishment. Roman civic status was written on the body. Part of the definition of a slave was that, unlike a free citizen, his body in a sense no longer belonged to him; it was for the use and pleasure of whoever owned it (and him). A gladiator fell into that category, as the notorious oath said to have been sworn by recruits when they entered the gladiatorial camps proclaimed. Its terms no doubt varied from place to place, but Seneca quotes a version that has a gladiator agreeing on oath ‘to be burnt, to be chained up, to be killed’. Such a promise of bodily submission was completely incompatible with what made a free Roman citizen free.

It is hardly surprising then that gladiators are often treated as the lowest of the low in Roman literature, and symbols of moral degradation. Not for ancient Rome the modern political heroisation of Spartacus, the first-century BC gladiator who led a, temporarily successful, rebellion of slaves against their Roman oppressors and has starred in countless modern novels, movies, ballets, operas and musicals – including in 2004 a French blockbuster show Spartacus le Gladiateur, who ‘dreamed of being free’. By contrast, Roman politicians looking for a slur to cast on their rivals would often reach for the term ‘gladiator’. And Seneca again, when writing a rather pompous philosophical essay in the form of a letter of condolence to a man who had just lost his young son, attempts to cheer him up by reminding him of the boy’s uncertain and possibly ghastly future: he might have squandered his wealth and ended up as a gladiator. It is hardly surprising too that we know of repeated attempts by the Roman authorities legally to prohibit senators from fighting as gladiators in the arena.

But this prohibition should give pause for thought. For if the gladiators were so completely despised and abominated, why on earth would legislation have been necessary to prevent senators from joining them? One answer is that these regulations were more symbolic than practical. The function of law is often to proclaim the importance of boundaries, rather than literally to prevent people crossing them. The reason most of us do not commit incest is not, after all, that there is a law against it. Here we might be seeing another instance of Roman insistence that there was a firm line to be drawn between fighters in the arena and civilised (especially elite) Roman society.

There is, however, plenty of evidence to suggest that gladiators were as much admired and celebrated as they were abominated. Far from just flirting with the idea of gladiatorial combat, some members of the Roman elite did enter the arena; even some emperors (admittedly ‘bad’ ones) left the imperial box in the Colosseum and joined in the fight – as we shall see later in this chapter. The admiration of the gladiators took a variety of forms. While philosophers such as Seneca might with one breath deplore the degradation of the gladiators or their corrupting effect on the crowd, with the next they were seeing in the arena an example of true courage, of a ‘philosophical’ approach to death, even a model for how the truly wise man should act. More generally Roman households seem to have been littered with images of gladiators, combat and equipment. The lamps with gladiatorial decoration buried alongside the woman from Roman London are only one example among thousands upon thousands of such objects, from the elegant to the kitsch: not just the expensive mosaic floors or paintings with scenes of the arena (though there are plenty enough of them decorating up-market houses all over the empire), but ivory knifehandles carved as gladiators, lamps moulded in the shape of gladiatorial helmets, even, from Pompeii, a baby’s bottle with the image of a gladiator in full fight. And this is not to mention the signet rings, the glass beakers, the tombs, marble coffins, water flasks, candlesticks – all displaying characters from the arena. How any of this relates to the odd custom of Roman brides parting their hair with a spear that had been dipped into the blood of a dead gladiator is frankly a mystery. It may anyway have been more a piece of antiquarian folklore than a regular practice, as puzzling and quaint to the Romans as it is to us. One of the Roman scholars who did puzzle over it came up with various possible explanations. Perhaps the union of the spear with the gladiator’s body symbolised the bodily union of husband and wife. Perhaps it was supposed to help her chances of bearing brave children. Who knows?

The strongest image of the gladiator in Roman culture, however, was as a virile sex-symbol. Graffiti from Pompeii, probably written by the gladiators themselves (and so a boast as much as a comment), call a Thracian by the name of Celadus (or ‘Crowd’s Roar’) ‘the heart-throb of the girls’ and his partner Cresces (perhaps ‘Bigman’, a retiarius) ‘lord of the dolls’. It was in fact a standing joke at Rome that women were liable to fall for the heroes of the arena. The satirist Juvenal, writing around AD 100, famously turned his wit on a senator’s wife, Eppia, who had apparently run off with a sexy thug from the Colosseum:

The joke here is, of course, on the woman, satirised for an insatiable sex-drive that leads her to abandon everything for this brute. This is Roman misogyny speaking loud and clear. But the last line of this extract hints at a telling pun. ‘Steel’s what they crave’. The Latin is ‘ferrum’ – literally ‘iron’, or ‘sword’. Another common Latin term for sword (and one embedded in the word ‘gladiator’ itself) was ‘gladius’ – which was also Latin street-talk for ‘penis’. The point about the gladiator is that he was, for better or worse, as one modern historian has aptly put it, ‘all sword’.

Juvenal is satiric fantasy. But similar stories, true or not, were told of historical figures too. The empress Faustina, for example, wife of the philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius and mother of the notorious Commodus, was rumoured to have conceived Commodus during an affair with a gladiator. One particularly lurid ancient account claims that when she confessed this passion to her husband, he consulted soothsayers who recommended that he have the gladiator killed; after this he was to make his wife bathe in the dead man’s blood and then have sex with her. The story goes that he followed these recommendations, and then brought Commodus up as his own son. Historians have, understandably, been dubious about this tale, and guess that it was invented to provide a convenient explanation for Commodus’ obsessive enthusiasm for the arena.

A notorious find from Pompeii is often seen as positive confirmation of the fondness of upper-class Roman women for rough gladiatorial trade. In the excavations of the gladiators’ barracks, the skeleton of a heavily jewelled lady came to light – presumably, it has often been suggested, caught in the act with her paramour, trapped for eternity (as every adulterer’s nightmare must be) in the wrong place at the wrong time. If so, she was taking part in a very squashed session of group sex. For in this tiny room were found not only the rich lady plus partner, but no fewer than eighteen other bodies, children included, plus a variety of bric-à-brac, chests with fine cloth and so forth. Much more likely we have the remains of a group of people fleeing the city with their prize possessions who had taken refuge in the barracks when the ash and pumice rained too hard, never to re-emerge. But if this turns out to have been no adulterous tryst after all, it is still the case that in the Roman imagination the gladiator was a figure of larger-than-life sexual power.

How then do we account for these conflicting images? How do we explain why a figure of such social and political stigma was also the object of admiration and fantasy? All kinds of ideas have been canvassed. In part we are no doubt dealing with a common fascination of elite culture for its opposite: a combination of nostalgie de la boue and Marie Antoinette playing at milkmaids (or, for that matter, female members of the British royal family cavorting around London clubs dressed up as policemen). In other words, gladiators were not sexy and exciting despite being beyond the social pale, but because they were. Maybe also, in a highly militaristic culture such as Rome, gladiatorial combat played a special role. Whether the Romans were engaged in active military combat or not (and long before the first century AD fighting normally took place miles from the centre on the remote frontiers), the lust for battle was replayed in – or displaced into – the arena, and military prowess found its expression in the skill of the gladiators; this could not simply be abominated. Even more important, though, must have been the power of the spectacle itself. To be the centre of attention of a vast crowd is always empowering. Hence, for example, the almost heroic status of the condemned criminal in early modern Britain giving his gallows speech in front of those assembled to watch his hanging; and hence, in part at least, the celebrity of modern football stars. To be watched by tens of thousands of people in the Colosseum, to have all eyes on you, transcended the invisibility of social disadvantage. Emperors realised this as well as anyone: when they left the imperial box to take their place in the arena, it was partly a gambit to recapture the gaze of the crowd. The emperor always risked being upstaged by the abominated creatures whom everyone was watching.

Yet there was more to the allure of the gladiator than the familiarising image of the modern footballer might suggest. The gladiator was a crucial cultural symbol at Rome because he prompted thought, debate and negotiation about Roman values themselves. Of course, there is something tautological about that claim: all crucial cultural symbols prompt negotiation about their society’s values; that’s what makes them ‘crucial cultural symbols’ in the first place. Nonetheless, gladiators and gladiatorial combat do focus attention on many of the ‘jagged edges’ of Roman culture: on the question of what bravery and manliness consist in; on power and sexuality; on proper control of the body; on violence and death and how to face it. Their position in Roman society, and in the Roman imagination, was bound to be contested and ambivalent.

Or so it must have been from the point of view of the audience, and of those Romans who quaffed their wine from gladiator glasses, or sealed their letters with a gladiator signet-ring. What we are missing (apart from some blokeish boasting on the part of Celadus and Cresces and the occasional ghoulish bon mot on a tombstone) is the point of view of the gladiators themselves. There is no account from any arena fighter of what it felt like on the other side of the barrier that separated the spectators from the slaughter. The hints we get, however, suggest terror was as powerful a feature as heroism. This is presumably the message of Symmachus’ twenty-nine Saxons who pre-empted the agony and humiliation of the performance by strangling each other. Even this is rather upstaged by a tale told by Seneca of another arena performer, an animal hunter, not technically a gladiator. The man, a German by birth, went off to the lavatory just before the show (‘the only thing he was allowed to do without surveillance’); there he grabbed the stick with a sponge on the end (which was the Roman equivalent of lavatory paper) and rammed it down his own throat, suffocating to death. Seneca treats this as an instance of consummate courage (‘What a brave man! How worthy of being allowed to choose his own death!’). We might detect desperation and terror, as well as bravery.

But Romans too could, on occasion, envisage the fearful plight of the arena fighter. In one of those strange rhetorical exercises through which budding Roman orators practised their skills, by arguing different sides of imaginary legal cases, the student was asked to plead on behalf of a rich young man who had been captured by pirates, sold to a gladiatorial troupe and later disinherited by his father. A polished version of this survives (rather like the ‘fair copy’ or crib of a modern school exercise), with a tear-jerking section describing the man’s initiation into the arena:

But then, in true rhetorical style, fate intervened. A friend of the young man appeared and bought him out, by offering himself to the trainer instead. That was fiction; reality must often have been more severe.

SOME DEADLY STATISTICS: AN INTERLUDE

Exactly how much more severe? How soon after they entered the arena did most gladiators die? How many lived into honourable retirement? We get very different impressions from the surviving evidence. Some tombstones commemorate exgladiators dying in their beds (or so we guess) at relatively ripe old ages, leaving behind loving wives, grieving children and a clutch of slaves. There is other evidence too that some gladiators were skilled survivors. There are some evocative graffiti from Pompeii which record the results of bouts at various shows, as well as the past ‘form’ of the gladiators concerned. We find an interesting selection of different styles of contest: classy bouts between experienced fighters (a 15-fight man vs a 14-fight man; 16 vs 14 and so on), newcomers pitched against each other; the occasional newcomer versus an old-timer. But what is really surprising (although it may be more boasting) is that a handful of fighters have over fifty contests to their credit. That said, there are are a good number of memorials to gladiators who died young. A man called Glauco, we are told on his tomb, fought seven bouts and died in the eighth, aged 23 years and 5 days. His wife Aurelia and ‘those who loved him’ put the monument up, quoting the dead man’s words: ‘My advice to you is to find your own star. Don’t trust Nemesis [the goddess of Vengeance]. That is how I was deceived.’

This is haphazard information and much of it comes from outside the city of Rome itself (as always, the evidence is skewed towards Pompeii and we can only assume that, writ large, it would apply to the Colosseum too). But if we put together all the evidence from Rome and the rest of Italy about the gladiators’ life-expectancy – tombstones and graffiti – we do get a clearer glimpse into the frequency of gladiators’ fights and their chances of survival into something approaching old age. In fact some expected and unexpected conclusions emerge. The average (median) age at death of gladiators as noted on tombstones was 22.5 years. Of course, gladiators who got such a commemoration were probably an exceptional bunch. They had to have a spouse or a comrade who cared about their deaths sufficiently to set up and inscribe a memorial, which cost cash. In general terms the sample is likely to be biased towards the successful. Even so there is a striking contrast here with the life expectancy of ‘normal’ Roman males. Supposing (and it is only a guess) that gladiators entered the arena around the age of 17; then, on the basis of these figures, they could expect to live just another 5.5 years. Normal males at age 17, on the other hand, had a life-expectancy of 31 years; that is, their average age at death, if they lived to be 17 (a big if: infancy would have killed off most), was 48. Unsurprisingly perhaps, even for these successful gladiators, the chances of dying early was very high.

The tombstone records are revealing in other ways too: we know that Glauco died at 23 after 8 fights; another gladiator died at 27 with 11 fights; another at 34 with 21. These figures suggest either a late age of starting a gladiatorial career, or perhaps more probably – but also more startlingly – a low frequency of fighting, at least among elite gladiators. Assuming a starting age of 17, and assuming also that they were in continual gladiatorial service up to their death, we must reckon something under two fights a year. Were gladiators afraid to fight? More likely, their owners were reluctant to have them risk death. The second-century AD philosopher Epictetus tells us that gladiators belonging to the emperor had been known to complain of not being allowed to fight often enough: ‘they pray to god and pester their overseers to let them fight’. It makes a wry image to think of gladiators strenuously training every day and putting on practice bouts perhaps with wooden weapons – while fights for real were relatively rare. Though not always. In some of the biggest imperial shows (where demand perhaps outstripped the number of gladiators available) we know that individual fighters would sometimes enter the arena more than once. We saw (p. 51) that this was implied by the ‘half pairs’ noted in the inscriptions commemorating Trajan’s blockbuster in 117. Likewise the man who came to Rome from Alexandria, probably for later shows celebrating Trajan’s success (illustration 10, p. 62), fought at least three bouts in the same series: the inscription explains that after his first bout ever, his second came just seven days later; something then took place ‘at the same games’, but as the text frustratingly breaks off at that point we do not know what that ‘something’ was – perhaps the fight that killed him.

So what were the chances of death in each fight? The figures from Italy are sparse, but suggestive, and again probably biased to the relatively successful. They under-represent the cheap ‘extras’ (gladiators sometimes referred to in Latin as ‘gregarii’, the ‘chorus’ or the ‘B-team’), who would surely have been likely to die sooner. One set of graffiti from Pompeii gives information on 23 bouts with 46 fighters: 21 gladiators won outright, 17 were let go without penalty and 8 were killed or died from their wounds. The sample size is ridiculously small, but it is almost all we have and it implies a death rate of about one gladiator in six in each show. This roughly fits with another index of the scale of slaughter. Notwithstanding the occasional veteran with more than fifty fights to his name, if we count up all those living gladiators from Pompeii whose fight record we know, only a quarter had over ten fights’ experience. Three-quarters had died before completing ten fights, implying a cumulative loss of about 13 per cent per fight. Gladiatorial combat, as Gérôme pictured it, with left-over corpses strewing the Colosseum’s arena must have been an expensive rarity. In fact the emperor Augustus had banned the luxury (in Roman terms) of shows in which all fights were to the death. Not that the regulation was universally obeyed: an inscription honouring a man in a small Italian town boasted: ‘over four days he put on 11 pairs, and of these he had 11 of the best gladiators in Campania killed, and also 10 bears cruelly’.

We can push these conclusions a little further, if we bring into the picture one more piece of evidence from the late second century AD, about a hundred years after the Colosseum was built. It is all very speculative and the calculations get rather more complicated, but that is part of the fun. At the time, it seems, aristocrats in the Roman provinces were becoming extremely worried about the cost of putting on shows (which was part of the duty of local magistrates). The central government, under the emperor Marcus Aurelius, intervened in 177, abolishing the tax on the sale of gladiators (reluctantly perhaps as the treasury netted a considerable amount from it) and fixing, or attempting to fix, the maximum prices which presenters in the provinces paid for gladiators. Surviving inscriptions give us the detailed terms of this legislation, all amounts in which are expressed in the standard unit of Roman currency, the sesterce. Five hundred sesterces was sufficient to feed a peasant family on minimum subsistence for a year; 2000 sesterces was the notional price of an unskilled slave. 1 million sesterces was the amount of wealth necessary to qualify for senatorial rank. The figures in the decree of 177, combined with what we have already seen about rates of death, allow us very roughly to estimate the total empire-wide expenditure on gladiators (excluding the big shows at Rome) and to estimate how many gladiators all the shows in the empire consumed.

The law divides gladiators into different pay bands. It insists that half the gladiators used in each show should be ‘chorus’, the maximum price for these chorus members being 1,000–2,000 sesterces each. By contrast, skilled gladiators were priced much higher, at ten levels ranging from 3,000 to 15,000 sesterces each. All the same the pyramid of differential seems low. Opera divas today, to say nothing of football superstars, get paid fantastically more than the chorus or the pack. Perhaps these low differentials reflected the high chance of death (it was not in the owners’ interest to pay a fortune for a star with limited life expectancy) or a low skill pyramid (were the stars really that much more expert at this brutal game?) or, of course, the producers’ desire to contain the costs.

At the same time total costs for the acquisition of gladiators at each provincial show were put into five price bands, ranging from 30,000 to 200,000 sesterces – small beer indeed when compared with the metropolitan shows in the Colosseum, which were of a quite different order of grandeur (compare, for example, Hadrian reputedly spending 2 million sesterces on a show before he became emperor – though that cost would also have included beasts, gifts to the crowd and so forth). If we imagine a relatively cheap show of, say, 60,000 sesterces and remember that half the gladiators had to be ‘chorus’, that would mean twenty-four gladiators: twelve chorus and twelve stars. And even if a provincial grandee spent the maximum 200,000 sesterces and put on forty gladiators (twenty chorus, twenty stars), he could still afford only two bouts between stars of the highest grade if each gladiator fought only once (and even putting them back in the ring would not greatly increase the number of star bouts, unless he made the same pairs fight each other more than once). If these regulations were followed, all provincial shows must have been small shows.

The decree of 177 also tells us that the tax on the sale of gladiators had yielded between 20 and 30 million sesterces a year for the central government, levied at either 25 or 33 percent of the price (the decree is unclear on both points). The total price of the gladiators traded in the empire each year was, as declared for tax purposes at least, between 60 and 120 million sesterces. If we work within the coordinates we have, simplified as they must be (half of all gladiators were chorus, one in six died at each show), we can tentatively work out how many gladiators there must have been in the Roman empire as a whole and how often shows were put on in provincial venues.

Given what we know, with half the gladiators fixed as chorus, and assuming a reasonable distribution between all ten grades of star, 16,000 gladiators traded among showpresenters would have cost the bottom figure of 60 million sesterces. Is this the right order of magnitude, for provincial shows which featured normally between twenty and forty gladiators each? The answer depends on balancing the number of shows there were in a year, the number of venues, the number of fights a gladiator undertook each year and the rate of death. If we take the number of amphitheatres firmly known (over 200), add over a hundred other venues, especially in the eastern empire, which were adapted for gladiatorial shows, plus a few more for luck (to take account of gaps in our knowledge), we can guess a total of 400 venues. Allow them to stage two shows a year with an average of thirty gladiators who each fought twice a year – this was an enterprise which could all have been launched with an initial army of 12,000 gladiators. But 12,000 gladiators (400 venues × 30 gladiators) would have generated 2000 deaths in the first show and 2000 more in the second. The total throughput of gladiators empire-wide would have been 16,000. In other words, it fits!

We have taken no account here of gladiators being sold between shows (which would have added to the treasury’s profits), of tax evasion, disobedience to the law, of changing patterns over time (some scholars, on not very good evidence, have claimed that the shows became crueller in the second and third centuries), or of other factors such as replacement costs caused by retirement of gladiators. It is all a very rough estimate. But some of the implications are striking. First of all, we must be dealing with very few shows in each venue per year. On our calculations, most amphitheatres, those iconic glories of Roman cruelty, luxury and profligacy, must have been empty, or used for something tamer, on 360 days out of 365. The functions of all those thousands of gladiatorial images must in part have been to memorialise and keep in the mind events that in real life were rather few and far between. Spectators were likely to have been much more familiar with gladiators practising than fighting in ‘real’ combat. On the other hand, 16,000 gladiators outside the capital amounts to roughly the manpower of three legions of the Roman army. Added to that, however, must be the many who were based in Rome itself (Pliny claims that before the building of the Colosseum, under Caligula, there were 20,000 in the imperial training camps – only two of whom, apparently could look danger in the eye without blinking!). We are then dealing with a gladiatorial machine perhaps equal to something like a quarter of the strength of the Roman legions combined.

What, finally, of the toll in casualties? In individual contests, as we have stressed, slaughter was far less common than our popular image suggests. But what of the aggregate of deaths in the arena? At a death rate of one in six, we have already estimated 4000 gladiatorial fatalities per year outside Rome. We need to add to that the condemned criminals executed at the shows and the deaths, accidental or not, among animal attendants and hunters; say 2000. The figures for the casualties in Rome itself are harder to estimate, partly because of the enormous fluctuations between years which saw vast displays hosted by the emperor and those when only the regular shows of senators were laid on. It may be reasonable to guess that the capital on average saw something like one third of the deaths in the rest of the empire; say 2000 again. A grand total of 8000 deaths in the arena a year is then our best tentative guesstimate. Not much of a burden, one might initially think, for an empire with a total population of 50 to 60 million people. But, in fact, 8000 deaths per year, mostly of trained muscular young adult males, would be equal to about 1.5 per cent of all 20-year-old men. Seen in these terms, the death of gladiators constituted a massive drain on human resources. Gladiatorial shows were a deadly death tax.

LIONS AND CHRISTIANS

Whatever the death rate of gladiators in the Colosseum, it must have been much worse for the beasts which took part in the shows. There were many more animals than humans involved in the arena displays – both killed and killing. For the big spectaculars at least, the practical arrangements for their capture, transportation and handling must have demanded time, ingenuity and personnel far beyond the acquisition and training of the gladiators. Not for Romans the tame pleasures of a modern zoo, safe entertainment for young children and indulgent grandparents (though who knows if some perhaps did visit the animals kept before the show in the Animal House near the Colosseum). Their chief pleasure was in slaughter, either of the animals or by them. Sophisticated this may sometimes have been, in elegantly constructed settings, rocks and trees appearing in the arena as if from nowhere, or tableaux of execution cleverly mimicking (as Martial evokes) the stories of mythology. But it is hard to see how the end result could have been anything other than a morass of dead flesh. As we saw, Dio’s total of animal deaths at the shows opening the Colosseum was 9000, and 11,000 at Trajan’s shows in 108–9. Even if we suspect exaggeration on the part of either emperor or historian, and even if (as must be the case) these lavish spectacles were the exception rather than the norm, there can be no doubt that we are dealing with, for us, an uncomfortable amount of animal blood.

It seems that animal hunts and displays often took place in the morning of a spectacle, conducted by a special class of trained hunters and animal handlers. Though not gladiators in the strict sense of the word (and without the charisma of gladiators in Roman culture), these venatores and bestiarii (‘hunters’ and ‘beast men’) were almost certainly drawn from the same underclass, slaves and the desperate poor. One of the training camps in Rome was called the Morning Camp; and it was here, we guess, that these men were trained for the job. Part of their act was to lay on animal displays, the cranes battling cranes, for example, which Dio reported among the highlights of the Colosseum’s opening, or what appears to be a fight between a bull and a mounted elephant on a coin of the early third century, showing the Colosseum. Part was more straightforward hunting. To judge from surviving images in paintings and mosaics, marksmen mostly on foot, but some on horseback, picked off the animals with spears, swords and arrows. It is hardly too fanciful to imagine that graffiti on one of the marble steps in the Colosseum itself, showing scantily clad spearmen rounding up some hounds and chasing or taking aim at a group of bears, represent what the doodling artist was watching, hoped to see or fondly remembered as taking place in the arena (illustration 17).

Most ancient writers assume that the outcome of these contests was death for the animals (and presumably in the process for some of the hunters); in fact when listing the total carnage, they tend to note the number of gladiators who fought, but the animals which were slain (suggesting that survival was an option for the former, but not for the latter). Modern scholars have occasionally flirted with the idea that some of these acts may have been ‘exhibitions’, in the sense that the animals survived. In fact one idea has been that a particular rhinoceros extolled by Martial for its victory over a bull at the inaugural Colosseum games is exactly the same animal as a rhinoceros mentioned in a later book of Martial’s poetry, written under the emperor Domitian, and none other than the rhino commemorated on some coins of Domitian. He was an animal star, in other words, with several bouts to his credit, much on the lines of star gladiators. Maybe. But we cannot help thinking that a degree of modern sentimentality is creeping in here – although the sheer trouble and expense of acquiring such rare specimens might always have made saving their lives for future appearances a prudent economic move.

The accounts we have of the animal hunts and shows always lay most stress on the fierce and exotic. In the middle of the first century BC, the great general Pompey (Rome’s answer to Alexander the Great until he was defeated in civil war by Julius Caesar) is said to have laid on, amongst other creatures, twenty (or seventeen depending on who you believe) elephants, 600 lions and 410 leopards. The emperor Augustus, in his autobiography, boasts of ‘finishing off’ a combined total of 3500 animals in ‘African beast hunts’ in the course of his reign (according to Dio, this included thirty-six crocodiles on one occasion). One notoriously unreliable late Roman historian let his imagination run away with him, we must hope, when he listed the animals shown by the emperor Probus in the Circus Maximus (‘planted to look like a forest’) in the late third century AD: ‘a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand boars, then deer, ibexes, wild-sheep and other herbivores’. On a fantastical variant of the usual procedure, the people were said to have been let in to take what animals they wanted. The same emperor, on another occasion, is said (by the same historian) to have put on a rather disappointing show in the Colosseum. It included a hundred lions which were killed as they emerged sluggishly from their dens, and so ‘did not offer much of a spectacle in their killing’.

The logic of these shows is clear enough. Whether fact or fiction, the killing (and the tales told about it) vividly dramatised Rome’s conquest of the (natural) world. It would, for example, have been hard to watch the slaughter of Augustus’ crocodiles without reflecting on the fact that Egypt had just been brought under direct Roman control. But the practicalities of handling all these animals must surely baffle us. This is partly a question of managing these dangerous creatures in the arena itself. Even if not when it first opened, the Colosseum was eventually equipped with an elaborate system of hoists and cages, which could have delivered animals from the basements, through trapdoors into the arena. But it is hard to imagine how the big animals could have been reliably controlled with the strings and whips that are shown on most of the surviving visual images. Maybe that would have been sufficient for the sort of animals that we suspect made up the regular fare at the Colosseum, the ones ancient and modern writers and artists are much less interested in: the goats, small deer, horses and cattle, even rabbits. With the large and dangerous specimens of the celebrity occasions, things could and did go nastily wrong. Pompey’s elephants, for example, caused all kinds of problems in the Circus in 55 BC. The crowd reputedly much enjoyed the elephant crawling on its knees (its feet wounded too badly for it to stand up) snatching shields from its opponents and throwing them up in the air like a juggler. But it was hardly such fun when the beasts en masse tried to break out of the palisading that enclosed them. It caused, as Pliny remarks in a disconcertingly deadpan way, ‘some trouble’ in the crowd.

It is even more amazing to contemplate the organisation and expertise that must underlie the acquisition and transport of these wild animals. True, if we think of the more run-of-the-mill shows, then probably the animals could be supplied by local livestock markets – and some emperors apparently kept a herd of elephants just outside Rome, under the charge of a ‘Master of the Elephants’. But – that apart – how were the more impressive and exotic victims obtained? The scale of the problem of animal procurement can be gauged by a single comparison. In 1850 a young hippo was brought to western Europe, the first for more than a thousand years, and caused a great stir in London, where it ended up in the Regent’s Park Zoo under the name of Obaysch. It took a whole detachment of Egyptian soldiers and a fivemonth journey from the White Nile to transport it as far as Cairo. A specially built steamer equipped with a 2000-litre water tank took it from Alexandria to London, accompanied by native keepers, two cows and ten goats to provide it with milk. Compare that with the five hippos, two elephants, a rhino and a giraffe killed (according to an eye-witness account) by the emperor Commodus himself in a single twoday exhibition in the late second century AD.

How did the Romans do it? How did they capture the animals in the first place, without the convenient aid of the modern tranquillising dart? The answer seems to be by a variety of traps and pits and the cunning use of human decoys dressed up in sheepskins! And how did they manage to get these fierce and no doubt frightened creatures delivered from distant parts of the empire to the capital alive and in good fighting condition? Sceptics will answer that they often did not. Symmachus, after all, was disappointed with his emaciated bear cubs and maybe more corpses arrived than living animals. All the same, behind the exaggeration and the failures that are not trumpeted in ancient literature, the stubborn reality remains that on occasion at least large numbers of these beasts did make it to Rome. Private enterprise and personal arrangement played their part. In the late 50s BC, as we know from his surviving letters, Cicero, the new governor of the province of Cilicia (in modern Turkey), was being badgered to get hold of some panthers for shows of his disreputable friend Marcus Caelius; Cicero was evasive, claiming that the animals were in short supply. But later it seems that state requisitioning of animals also made use of army detachments. It was perhaps a convenient way of keeping the troops occupied while on peacetime garrison duty. We know from inscriptions, for example, of a ‘bear-hunter’ serving with the legions on the Rhine and of fifty bears captured in six months in Germany.

Animals were not only brought to the Colosseum in order that they themselves should be killed. They were also used to kill criminals and prisoners in the executions that took place in the arena as part of the shows. One notorious form of execution was ‘condemnation to the wild beasts’ (‘damnatio ad bestias’), where prisoners, some tied to stakes, were mauled and eaten by the animals. This is the fate to which Christian prisoners were often sentenced and is the origin of all those novels and films which take as their centrepiece the clash between ‘Christians and Lions’, not to mention the series of sick jokes along the lines of ‘Lions 3, Christians 0’.

The fact is that there are no genuine records of any Christians being put to death in the Colosseum. It was only later (as we shall see in Chapter 6) that Christian writers invested heavily in the Colosseum as a shrine of the martyrs. No accounts of martyrdoms there are earlier than the fifth century AD, by which time Christianity had become the official religion of Rome; they look back to the conflicts between Christians and the Roman authorities centuries earlier. It is likely that Christians were put to death there and that those said to have been martyred ‘in Rome’ actually died in the Colosseum. But, despite what we are often told, that is only a guess.

One of the possible candidates for martyrdom in the Colosseum is St Ignatius, a bishop of Antioch (in Syria) at the beginning of the second century AD, who was ‘condemned to the beasts’ at Rome. His writings, and those of other Christians describing death in the arena, not only offer a different perspective on the amphitheatre from the point of view of the victim, but also show how important that ideology of victimhood was in the community of the early church. Of course, we know next to nothing of the actual death experience of Christian martyrs, but Ignatius’ letters, apparently written to the community of Christians in Rome on the journey to the city for his death, are full of highly charged, and blood-curdling, anticipations of the moment. He was going to his death voluntarily:

What is astonishing in Ignatius’ letter is the degree to which he and his intended audience internalised ‘pagan’ ideals about death in the arena and subverted them to their own ends. The cruelty and suffering of the arena are now idealised as instruments of believers’ salvation.

St Ignatius’ letter is not an isolated example of Christian fixation with the arena. From the second century onwards Christians created a new genre of literature, known as ‘Martyr Acts’, which celebrated the capture and trial (often before a capricious pagan judge) of a steadfast Christian who was willing to suffer terrible tortures and death rather than give up his or her faith. Hugely embellished no doubt, they acted as a kind of sacred pornography of cruelty, tying the Christian message to gruesome and gory death at the hands of the Roman authorities. One of the most vivid and shocking is the account of the martyrdom of two female saints, Perpetua and Felicity, at the beginning of the third century AD in Carthage. After the narrative of their trial and imprisonment, the story turns to their final moments in the amphitheatre. They were brought out, at first naked and tied up in nets, to face ‘a mad heifer which the Devil had prepared’; their male friends had faced leopards, bears and boars. But, apparently, even the crowd was horrified at the sight of the two young women, one of whom – Felicity – had just given birth, her breasts still visibly dripping milk. So they were taken off, dressed again in tunics and sent back to the arena. Tossed and crushed, they nevertheless remained alive, until the crowd demanded their execution in full view. Perpetua’s killer was a novice, and – despite the agony caused by his mishits – she guided his sword to her throat. ‘O most valiant and blessed martyrs. Truly you are chosen for the glory of Christ Jesus our Lord.’

How far this and other such accounts are in any sense eye-witness description is a moot point. They claim to ‘tell it how it was’, but almost every element in the depiction is tinged with Christian symbolism and a Christian message. The bloodshed is treated as a second baptism; Perpetua (as a good modest Christian woman) does not forget to pull down her tunic when the heifer has lifted it to expose her thigh; and so forth. What is certain is that the Martyr Acts are at once an apparent rebuttal of Roman savage sadism, yet at the same time they exploit its seductive appeal. Vulnerable young women, cruelty and wild animals were as much weapons in the triumph of Christianity as in the attempt to suppress it. There can be no doubt whatsoever that the amphitheatre was the setting for dreadful violence inflicted on innocents; but it may have been a more cheapskate, tawdry, even (if this is possible) amateurish kind of violence. Our modern image of the larger-than-life cruelty of the arena is, in part at least, a product of two very different types of investment in such a picture: the boastful exaggeration by Roman emperors and the boastful denunciation by Roman Christians.

THE PEOPLE ON PARADE

It is the first rule of any spectacle that the audience is as important an element as the display itself: we go not only to watch, but to watch other people watching, and to be seen watching ourselves. The audience is part of the show. In the case of the Colosseum, the biggest amphitheatre in the Roman world, the role of the audience was even more loaded than usual. As many recent studies have insisted, the serried ranks of the Roman people, seated in hierarchical ranks according to status, were in effect a microcosm of the Roman citizen body. This was much more extreme than the social segregation of modern spectacles, where the front seats go to those who can (and choose to) pay for them, but may equally well include those who have saved up for months for a special treat as those who would never sit anywhere else. The basic, official rule in Rome, at least by the end of the first century AD, was that civic status determined where you sat. Senators sat closest to the arena in the front rows; behind them the next official status rank of Roman society, the ‘knights’; and so on up to the top of the seating area (what in a British theatre would be called ‘the gods’) reserved for slaves, noncitizens – and women, apart from the state priestesses known as the Vestal Virgins, who sat with the senators in the front. The senators, and maybe the knights too, sat on movable seats; the rest were on fixed benches of either brick faced in marble or, at the very top, in wood. Relegating the women to the back probably ensured that, amongst the elite at least, the audience was overwhelmingly male: no woman of any social pretensions was likely to relish sharing this distant viewpoint with the great unwashed.

Exactly how and when this detailed stratification of the audience had developed is hard to pin down (though it was certainly mirrored in other Roman entertainment venues, such as the theatre). Nor is it certain how carefully it was policed. But ancient writers certainly tell warning – or salacious – stories of what was likely to develop if this kind of segregation was not in place. One of the most bloodthirsty dynasts of the first century BC, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, was reputed to have picked up (or to have been picked up by) his wife Valeria at a gladiatorial spectacle, ‘when the seating was not yet separated’. It is a tale rather reminiscent of the modern story of brushing up against a would-be partner in a row of cramped cinema seats. According to his biographer Plutarch, she walked behind the place where Sulla was sitting, as she made her way to her own; resting her hand on his shoulder, she removed a piece of fluff from his cloak and followed this up with some witty flirtation when he looked a bit taken aback. After the predictable collusive glances, longing looks and knowing smiles, a proposal of marriage followed: ‘he was seduced’ carps Plutarch, ‘by looks and languishing airs, through which the most disgraceful and shameful passions are naturally excited’. But all that was officially off the menu once the regulations were introduced.

An idea of the complexity surrounding the question of who sat where comes from an extraordinary set of Roman priestly documents. A prestigious Roman priesthood, the Arval Brethren (‘the Fraternity of the Fields’), over centuries of the Roman empire kept a record, inscribed in stone, of their activities, decisions and privileges. It is a unique and sometimes surprising document of what Roman priests did and what Roman religious ritual entailed; in AD 80 it included a record of the seats allocated to the priesthood and their various dependants in the newly opened Colosseum. The allocation specifies the particular block (accessed by one of the corresponding seventy-six numbered public entranceways into the amphitheatre, still numbered on the monument), the level of the seating from the front and the row number. The priests were not allocated numbered seats, but roughly 130 Roman feet of seat space in all (the Roman measure was a little shorter than the modern one). Different ranks among the priests and their hangers-on would presumably have occupied places at different levels in the building. So, for example, the allocation specified 42.5 Roman feet spread over eight rows of level one, in block 12; and almost 64 feet in block 53 of the top tier, spread over 11 rows.

No entrance tickets to the Colosseum survive, but we have examples from elsewhere and they must have existed: small tokens of wood, bone or lead, specifying (to judge from the details of the Arvals’ seating) the block or entranceway, level and row number. So far as we know spectators did not pay for their tickets; attendance was one of the perks of citizenship. But how they were distributed is not clear. Given that everything in ancient Rome, ‘free’ or not, had its price, then we should probably imagine that people paid for membership of clubs and societies to which free tickets were issued. Or men of influence, powerful patrons, distributed tickets to their dependants and clients. When they arrived at the Colosseum, spectators would find that the entrance and exit routes for different classes of seating were planned (as we shall see in the next chapter) in a complex pattern so that citizens of different status were kept rigidly separate. Roman snobs did not like to rub shoulders with the less privileged, even if they were squashed side by side with their equals.

Squashed they sometimes were, at least behind the ranks of the elite on the front rows, with their much more ample individual seating. We know from lines etched into the stone benches in other Roman amphitheatres that the average space allocated to ancient spectators was only 40 cm. This is less than the space given to economy passengers on a cheap airline. We also know from elsewhere (no seats survive in the Colosseum itself) that the seatback-to-seatback leg-room averaged 70 cm. Probably Romans were on average slimmer than modern couch-potatoes; they were certainly shorter (adult males on average only 165 cm, or about 5 feet 5 inches). Even so, if the Colosseum broadly followed the space allocations known elsewhere, when it was full most spectators must have been close packed together. It was perhaps this overclose proximity that made the audience a volatile group – as when a riot broke out in the amphitheatre in Pompeii between the home crowd and the people of the neighbouring town of Nuceria and prompted the authorities in Rome to ban gladiatorial shows there for ten years.

Modern writers – ourselves included – have often laid enormous stress on the political stratification and collective identities paraded in the Colosseum audience. The spectators were a microcosm of properly regulated Roman society, sitting in their official Roman costume (the emperor Augustus, a stickler for restoring or inventing traditions, had insisted that all citizens attend shows in a toga), with the highest ranks occupying the best seats in the front and so on up to the slaves and women at the back. They acted out the social order in a ‘political theatre’. This is true – up to a point. But it can be over-stated. For in other ways the audience in the Colosseum displayed the ambivalences of Roman political status and the impossibility of fitting the messy realities of the Roman population into neatly ranked status groups. Part of this is the universal problem that it is always impossible to decide which the best seats in the house really are. The senators may have had a premier ringside position. But, that said, the oval shape and the steep raking of the amphitheatre gave everyone a goodish view, provided that the fight did not end up against the wall of the arena. Besides, if shade and a view of the audience below was what you most valued, then the upper seats might seem much more attractive. For the awnings that were spread over the building to keep off the fiercest heat of the sun only protected the top half of the seats when the sun was at its zenith; the largest area they could possibly have covered given a structure of linen, ropes and wooden ribbing is around 10,000 square metres, roughly half the auditorium. Unless they brought their own parasols or wide-brimmed hats, prestige at the ringside carried a price in sweat and sunburn.

But Roman society did not fit as easily as we often like to imagine into straightforward vertical status groups and the seating in the Colosseum probably blurred the legal distinctions as much as reinforcing them. Was it only the senators who sat in the ringside seats? Or could they bring guests and clients? Did some slaves actually sit at the front with their elite masters, or did the senators pay for their exclusivity by having to do without their everyday attendants at the ringside? We do not know the exact area of the senatorial seating (there is no precise archaeological indication of how far it extended), but the best guess would suggest that it offered space for 2000 spectators, assuming that they had twice as much space as the people in the squashed rows behind. There were only about 600 senators, and many of those would have been out of Rome at any one time (commanding the army, governing the empire). We are left with one of two conclusions. Either senators in practice occupied about eight times as much space as the ordinary citizen, which even by Roman standards of inequality seems extreme. Or seating in this area was in practice socially mixed, not just senatorial sons, but friends and contacts too.

There were other factors which would upset the neatness of the stratification of the Colosseum and other groups who found a place in its system, cutting across the official hierarchy. Fragments of inscriptions, for example, have been discovered which originally identified collective seating for ‘boys’ and probably also for their tutors (who, though usually slaves, would have presumably sat near their charges); another marks out space for ‘citizens of Cadiz’. It seems very probable that other groups such as official delegations, artisans or traders from big cities acquired the right to sit in particular places, whether by favour or purchase, quite separately from their formal place in the legal hierarchy. In the later empire, individual aristocrats had their names carved in marble to indicate their personal or family seating space. The Colosseum was not, as is sometimes implied, simply a place where the political collectivity of Rome was on view; it displayed individual variance, power and influence too.

And what proportion of that collectivity would be included in the audience anyway? Almost no one now believes the late Roman account which seems to suggest that there were 87,000 seats in the Colosseum; at best, it has been argued (though for no particularly strong reason), this really meant 87,000 feet of seating space, not individual seats. Modern estimates cluster around an estimated capacity of about 50,000. But Rome in the first century AD is thought to have had a population of one million, which suggests some 250,000 adult male citizens. On this reckoning, even when it was completely full, the Colosseum would have held only one fifth of those citizens, and even less in that some space was taken up by women, boys, slaves and outsiders. Our guess is that, even though the shows were free, the poor and the very poor were systematically under-represented (as they are in most social benefit systems in any place or at any period). If this is correct, the audience at the Colosseum was more of an elite of white toga-clad citizens than the rabble proletariat often imagined today.

THE EMPEROR – IN AND OUT OF THE BOX

The emperor was the sponsor of the most spectacular shows in the Colosseum, which he watched in the presence of his people from the imperial box in a prominent position at the centre of one of the long sides of the arena’s oval. Ancient writers devote so much attention to the emperor’s role at these Colosseum shows that it is now hard to recapture any image of the monument without the imperial presence or to recover any information on shows that were sponsored by ‘ordinary’ aristocrats. That is partly the point. For the Colosseum quickly became one of the key contexts (if not the key context) in which the emperor’s quality and worth were judged.

‘Good’ emperors were defined as such by their behaviour in the arena: they generously showered the audience with presents or tokens that could later be exchanged for yet more valuable objects; they offered lunch (or at least the ancient equivalent of a cheeseburger and Coke in their seats) to the onlookers; they never ever looked bored with what was going on, never used the privacy of their box to get on with some paperwork, but they did not take too much pleasure in the shows either (a difficult tightrope to tread, no doubt, between disdain and fanaticism). They also sprang witty surprises. It was presumably in the Colosseum that an emperor in the middle of the third century AD, Gallienus, played an ingenious trick on a man who had sold his wife glass jewels instead of real gems. He is supposed to have ordered the man to be taken off as if to be thrown to the lions, but when the cage was opened, a capon tottered out. The emperor had his herald proclaim to the astonished audience, ‘He practised deceit and had it practised on him.’

‘Bad’ emperors were just the opposite. Typically they were supposed to transgress the boundaries on which the logic of the shows rested, most obviously by turning themselves into gladiators and the audience into victims. The notorious emperor Caligula, in the mid first century AD, about fifty years before the Colosseum itself was built, is said to have been so short of criminals for execution that he had some of the spectators thrown to the beasts instead. Domitian, among others, had members of the Roman elite fighting as gladiators. But it was the emperor Commodus (as in the movie) who offers the most vivid case of the intersection of the emperor’s image with gladiatorial combat.

Commodus was assassinated in AD 192, by a lethal consortium of his mistress, chief chamberlain and commander of the guard. They had supposedly discovered his plans to kill them all, which the emperor had carelessly left written on a wooden tablet, when he fell into a drunken sleep after lunch. Besides, Commodus was also said to have been planning on the very next day, 1 January 193, to murder the consuls and present himself as holder of this traditional office dressed not in a toga, but as a Roman gladiator, emerging to meet the people not from the palace but from the gladiatorial training camp where he had lodgings. True or not, it is the closest we ever come in Roman history to the image of the emperor being, as it were, completely re-branded as a gladiator. And it goes along with all kinds of other evidence for the promotion of the figure of ‘emperor-as-gladiator’ during Commodus’ reign. He is supposed to have fought hundreds of gladiatorial bouts himself (in private, it was said, these were fights to the death, or at least he clipped off a few of his opponents’ noses; in public it was display bouts only, with wooden swords and no bloodshed). According to a late scandalmongering biographer, which may at least reflect rumour at the time, he had the great statue of the Colossus altered so that it bore his own features, and his titles inscribed at the base of the statue included two new imperial sobriquets: ‘Gladiator’ and ‘Cross-dresser’ (in Latin, ‘Effeminatus’). When he was assassinated, the gleeful acclamations of the senate apparently included the refrain ‘Cast the gladiator into the charnel house’.

The most extraordinary account of Commodus’ exploits in the arena comes from the historian and senator Dio, who was himself an eye-witness to many of them from his ringside seat in the Colosseum: ‘I was there myself and I saw and heard everything and took part in what was spoken; so I have thought it right to suppress no details, but to hand them down just as they happened, just like anything else of the greatest weight and importance.’ On one occasion, Commodus opened the extravaganza by killing a hundred bears with spears, throwing them from specially constructed walkways which divided up the arena. As Dio implies, this was more a demonstration of accuracy than courage – but even Edward Gibbon, whose tart denunciation of these antics in the Colosseum is a marvellous set-piece in Decline and Fall, was forced to concede that ‘some degree of applause was deservedly bestowed on the uncommon skill of the Imperial performer’. The next day he killed some relatively harmless domestic animals, some of which were in nets in any case (just to be on the safe side presumably), plus a tiger, hippo and elephant. That was a morning’s work. In the afternoon he fought a demonstration bout as a gladiator, armed with a shield and wooden sword, against an opponent armed only with a wooden pole. Unsurprisingly, Commodus won, and then settled down to watch the real bouts – some of which he oversaw from a platform in the arena, dressed up as the god Mercury.

Dio insists that when the emperor was fighting, the senators and knights always attended. Only one principled character stayed away, who would rather have died (literally) than be forced to watch all this or join in the chanting that was required of the elite: ‘You are lord, and you are first, and the most blessed of all. Victor you are, and victor you will be…’ The common people, however, had more choice than their betters and were much more inclined to give the proceedings a miss, partly out of disgust, partly because they had heard a rumour that the emperor was planning to shoot some of the spectators, in the guise of Hercules shooting the Stymphalian birds. (This must have been one of those occasions when even an imperial blockbuster in the Colosseum was not playing to a full house.) Not that the senators were any less anxious. Dio in fact describes one particular unforgettable incident which panicked as much as it disgusted and amused the senators in the front rows. Commodus had just killed an ostrich in the arena and cut off its head. Approaching the senators in the audience he held up the ostrich head in his left hand and a bloody sword in his right and, without speaking, grinned at them – as if to say that he would or could do much the same to them. ‘And,’ to quote Dio’s exact words, ‘many of us would have died by the sword there and then, for laughing at him (for it was laughter not indignation that took hold of us), if I had not myself chewed on some laurel leaves which I picked from my garland, and persuaded the people sitting near me to do the same, so that we might conceal the fact we were laughing by the steady movement of our jaws.’

In this story, the Colosseum is the setting for one of those very rare occasions when we can, almost physically, empathise with the Romans. We know exactly what that laugh of Dio’s – caused by a mix of hilarity and sheer terror – would have felt like. And most of us have vivid memories, from school if not later in life, of suppressing a giggle that would inevitably get us into trouble by biting our lips, a sweet paper, a ruler or whatever. But what on earth was going on in these extraordinary gladiatorial antics by the emperor? In part, as we suggested earlier, the arena and the gaze of the people sets up a competition for popular attention between emperor and performers. It is one of those awful ambivalences of Roman imperial power: the emperor sponsors the show, but always risks being upstaged by the déclassé stars of the fighting; yet he is bound to humiliate himself if he decides to direct the people’s gaze to himself by usurping the position of the fighter. The Colosseum was, in other words, a venue that is central to the emperor’s image as benefactor of his citizens, but one in which he found it hard to win. In part too, as Dio’s tale of the ostrich head waved in front of the senators must hint, the arena provided a context for the display not so much of the Roman collectivity, but of its conflicts and fissures. The bitter rivalry between aristocrats and emperors is a leitmotif of Roman history. And yet there they were, staring at each other across the Colosseum. It is hardly surprising that the two sorts of conflict (fighter versus beast; emperor versus senate) were repeatedly intertwined, that one infected the other, that one was used as a means of fighting the other. In short, the Colosseum dramatised the emperor’s struggles with himself and with his rivals.

VIEWS AND COUNTER-VIEWS

What, finally, did the spectators think of what they saw in the arena? Modern accounts tend to divide ancient reactions into far too simple categories. Most Romans (bloodthirsty culture that Rome was) did not disapprove of the shows. A few oddballs, such as Seneca, expressed their revulsion. Christians, for obvious reasons, saw in them the cruelty of Roman paganism to which they were so strongly opposed. We have already seen several reasons to query this simple picture. Martial’s poetry hinted that the touchstone of approval/disapproval was not necessarily appropriate for understanding his response to the events in the arena. Despite all the Christian attacks on the institution, ‘sincere’ as many of these undoubtedly were, the rise of Christianity, as we have argued, was paradoxically tied to the violence of the amphitheatre. In the case of Seneca, he may have expressed his horror at the executions at midday, but he was nonetheless there in the arena (not) watching, and in his philosophical work he could use gladiatorial combat as a positive model in ethics.

The fact is that Romans (or at least the elite Romans whose words survive) were reflective about their own culture, the culture of the arena included. Their reactions to it were certainly different from our own, but there is no reason to suppose that they were any less complicated. Roman historians and anthropologists, for example, wondered about where the different elements of the shows – especially the gladiators and the animal hunts – came from and what their original function had been. They claimed to know that, long before the regular arena performances, the first display of gladiators in Rome had happened in 264 BC as part of the funeral celebrations of a leading aristocrat. This funerary connection was developed by Tertullian and other early Christian writers to suggest that this form of combat lay in human sacrifice to the spirits of the dead, thus damning its very origin with the worst religious crime of all, for Christians and pagans alike. (Despite the obviously ideological slant of this theory, modern scholars often repeat it as if it were known fact.) Other ancient writers were more interested in the geographic origins of the gladiators. A Greek historian in Rome under the emperor Augustus, puzzled by the Roman practice of sometimes bringing on gladiators at the end of a dinner party, linked it with customs in Etruria and claimed an Etruscan origin for gladiators as a whole. This has sent modern scholars scurrying off to the paintings in Etruscan tombs, where they claim (unconvincingly in our view) to have found traces of proto-gladiatorial combat. For others, both ancient and modern, Campania, south of Rome, seemed, or seems, the most likely home of the first gladiators – which fits conveniently, though not necessarily significantly, with the fact that the earliest surviving stone amphitheatres are in this part of Italy.

Romans also reflected on the ethics of the arena, with many of the doubts, ambivalences and contradictions we ought to expect. So, for example, Marcus Aurelius, Commodus’ father (unless we believe that story about Faustina’s gladiator lover), claimed in the sixth book of his philosophical ramblings, euphemistically known as the Meditations, to have found gladiatorial shows ‘boring’. And in 177, in his reign (along with his son Commodus as coruler) the legislation we used in our calculations of gladiator numbers was prefaced with one of the most striking criticisms of the cruelty of the shows that is recorded in Roman history. In abolishing the tax on the sale of gladiators, the authorities argued that the treasury ‘should not be stained with the splashing of human blood’ and that it was morally offensive to get money from what was ‘forbidden by all laws of gods and humans’. What Commodus’ attitude to this was we can only guess! But even with Marcus Aurelius himself there are odd contradictions; not least of which is the fact that in AD 175 he himself had apparently put on a massive show at Rome with 2757 gladiatorial fights. Whether we are dealing with a change of heart, political expediency, vacillating moral purpose, or a combination of all three, is impossible to know. But it certainly suggests that it is harder to pin down ancient attitudes to gladiators than is often assumed.

It is out of the question for someone in the early twentyfirst century not to deplore the slaughter of the arena. In antiquity intense enthusiasm for the shows went hand in hand with a whole range of rather different ethical doubts (and snobbish expressions of disdain). Both philosophers and theologians questioned the effect on the audience of watching the bloodshed. Did it, as some argued, damage the capacity for rational thought? What was the effect on the human mind and character? St Augustine writes memorably in his Confessions of one Alypius, who was eventually to become a Christian bishop, going unwillingly to some shows with his friends. Though determined to keep his eyes shut, as soon as he peeped he was hooked. The spectacle had done its work: ‘when he saw the blood, it was as though he had drunk deeply on savage passion’. Others wondered about the moral differences in shows involving different legal categories of victim: killing criminals was one thing, killing Roman citizens quite another. Of course, these are not our own objections; nor, in pagan antiquity at least, do they amount to anything approaching a campaign for the abolition of the shows. That said, they show the Romans thinking rather harder about these spectacles than their popular image would have it.

We have already in this chapter wondered whether the shows in the Colosseum were always quite the extravagant displays that they are painted; whether the roaring crowd did always fill every vacant seat (as the digital technology of Gladiator made it). We end it by wondering whether the crowd – different in their reactions as they must be from us – were quite the conscience-free and murderous enthusiasts for indiscriminate killing that it is convenient for us to imagine. True, in our terms, they were horribly cruel. Their ethical boundaries were drawn in very different places from our own; but that does not mean they had no ethical boundaries, or ethical doubts, at all.