Those About to Die

"I understand," said the rabbi. He turned and translated. The people listened despairingly. A new volley of questions went up and the rabbi asked of Carpophorus, "How do we know that you will keep your word and spare the children?"

"You don't," said Carpophorus frankly. "But what have you got to lose? The kids will be killed anyhow."

The rabbi said sadly, "It is true," and addressed the people. More cries and sobs went up while Carpophorus listened with increasing restlessness. Finally the rabbi said, "Select the children you will spare, if being sold into slavery is to spare them" He turned away, unwilling to watch the sight.

Carpophorus approached the crowd. The worried mothers pushed their children forward, anxiously smoothing their hair in place, wiping their noses, and trying to twitch their rags into some semblance of neatness. Carpophorus made his selections rapidly. The mothers clung to the children, rejected and selected alike, sobbing over them while the children stared at Carpophorus curiously and tried to finger his soft tunic and glittering belt buckle.

Carpophorus called the guard and told him to make sure that the two groups didn't mix. Then he went to find the Master of the Games.

The Master was supervising the rebuilding of the inner barrier. This time the barrier was constructed of plaster boulders to represent the Masada hills. A model of the prin­cipal city, originally built by Herod the Great about 50 B.C., was cleverly incorporated among the artificial rocks. The scenery used in the shows was so elaborate that not even the vast storehouses under the Colosseum could hold it, and these props had been kept in rooms under the Temple of Venus nearby. The lions would enter the arena through openings among the rocks as though issuing from their lairs. The remnants of the Meridiani were still fighting in the arena to amuse the mob while the work was going on.

Carpophorus explained his deal with the Jewish prisoners and the Master nodded abstractedly while watching the work.

"That's all right. We'll still have plenty of prisoners to make a good show. The extra children can be killed by baboons later. Are many of them little girls?"

Carpophorus fidgeted uncomfortably. "I promised the old priest that I'd have them sold as slaves."

"You promised? Do you think a damn bestiarius is running this arena?"

"I swore to them by my gods."

"Well, unswear then. Do you think an oath to rebels counts with the gods?"

"Why not? I'm a Roman freeman. Before the gods, my oath is as good as the emperor's."

The Master looked at him curiously. "You're not getting soft in your old age, are you? All right, I'll see what I can do. But remember that I'm running an arena here, not a slave market. Start loading the lions into the barrier wall"

Carpophorus glanced up at the stands. The podium was filling up again as the patricians returned from their noonday meal. The Master shouted to the Meridiani: "Finish it up there, or I'll get some action out of you with the hot irons." Carpophorus went off to attend to the loading.

The lions were kept in far better quarters than the prisoners. The cells that contained them (still visible in the Colosseum) were inside the podium wall but below the level of the arena. Each cell was about eight feet deep and seven feet square. A water channel ran before the cells so the animals were sure of a constant supply of fresh water. The lead pipes and bronze turnkeys of these systems are still functional.

Directly above the cells and on a level with the arena floor were a series of passageways so the slaves could race around on their various chores without disturbing the beasts. From these upper passageways down to the cells were narrow openings through which burning straw could be thrust into the animals' cells to force the inmates out into the lower passageways. From hence they were driven up ramps, covered with herringbone paving to give the animals a better grip, to the arena.

Carpophorus went to the second level to check the cells. The door of each cell was an iron grill that could be swung back on a hinge against the wall of the lower passageway. The door was nearly as big as the whole side of the cell so that the animal, panic-stricken by the burning straw, would have no trouble finding the opening and be able to rush out into the passageway before he got badly burned or suffocated by the smoke. As soon as he was out of the cell, the iron grill door was slammed shut after him and the movable barrier was shoved along the passageway, forcing him up the ramp toward the arena. By this system, a whole line of cells could be opened almost simultaneously by slaves sta­tioned by each door and then the animals rushed to the arena. How the slaves caught between the animals and the movable barrier got out of the way in time I haven't been able to figure out. Probably a lot of times they didn't. But slaves were cheap.

Carpophorus didn't want to keep the lions in the cramped spaces provided for them in the barrier cages any longer than was absolutely necessary. On the other hand, as soon as Domitian returned from lunch and settled himself in the royal box, he would give the signal for the afternoon games to begin, and those lions had better start pouring out of the barrier wall when he waved his royal hand. As Carpo­phorus went along the passageways, he passed slaves standing by the massive bronze sockets (still there) which held the windlasses to haul cages up the ramps and work the elevators. After making sure that the slaves were ready with the straw in the upper passageway and that there was a man by each grill in the lower section, Carpophorus returned to the arena level. The patricians were back in the podium, including the foreign nobility who had obviously taken advantage of the break to get well liquored up. The young editor was also in his box. Carpophorus reflected that the young patrician looked in worse shape than did the Jews who'd spent a week in the underground cells.

A frantic slave rushed to him. "Where in Venus' name have you been? The Master of the Games is furious. The emperor is coming through the passage that leads to the Baths of Titus and the lions aren't in place. The Master says that if you don't..."

Carpophorus didn't wait to hear the rest. The emperors had had three underground passageways built for their con­venience, connecting the Colosseum with the palace, the baths, and the Lateran hill. You never knew which one they'd use. As Carpophorus raced down the passageway he shouted to the slaves in the lower level to open the cell doors. Imme­diately came the clang of the iron gratings being flung back and the slaves in the upper passageway fired their straw and thrust it down the holes.

From below came roars, snarls and strangled gasps as the burning straw fell into the cells, then the crash of the grills being slammed shut followed by the creak of the barrier being pushed forward and fresh snarls from the desperate animals. The lions were being herded onto movable platforms like freight elevators that would take them up inside the inner barrier in the arena. As the lions from each line of cells were pushed onto the platforms by the movable barrier behind them, the slave gang boss gave the signal, the slaves started turning the windlasses, and the animals were hoisted up inside the line of artificial rocks above them.

A slave watched from an opening in the podium wall gave Carpophorus a running commentary on what was going on above. "The emperor's coming into his box. He's stopped to speak to the Lady Livia. Now he's waving to the crowd. Now he's talking to that pinheaded kid he takes around with him. Now he's getting ready to sit down."

Carpophorus ran out through the Door of Death and dived into an opening in the plaster boulders. The lions were in the cages prepared for them, the movable platforms composing the cage floors. Now the lions had to be sprung out of these cages into the arena when the signal came.

Meanwhile, the Jewish prisoners had been introduced by another elevator into the model of the city which they had once called home. When Domitian gave the signal for the afternoon games to begin, the Jews opened doors in the sides of the model and stepped out into the glare of the arena. As Carpophorus had directed, they had been covered with animal skins. The captives were greeted by boos, insulting shouts, and cries. "Circumcised dogs! Traitors! Now see if your God can save you. Let out the lions!"

The backs of the cages in the artificial hill were movable and could be pushed forward to force the lions out into the arena. Doors were opened among the rocks and as the cage backs were shoved in, the lions began to pour onto the sand. Carpophorus watched anxiously through a peephole.

The lions slunk rather than walked into the arena or ran with great leaps along the sides of the inner barrier, looking for some way to escape. Several of them sprang up, hung to the plaster rocks for a few seconds with their claws, and then fell back. Occasionally a lion running around the circle would suddenly turn and bump into the lion following. There would be angry snarls, lightning-like blows with the great paws and then the contestants would back away from each other to resume their anxious pacing. A few of them approached the crowd of people standing in the middle of the arena, studied them for a moment, and then turned away.

The children still with the group had begun to cry and several of the women had fainted. Some of the men were trying to sing a hymn but their voices faltered at the sight of the terrible beasts around them and the sound died away. A lioness circled the group nervously, unsure what to do. Carpophorus saw the old rabbi step forward and move his hands slightly as he had been instructed to do. The lioness only backed away. A young male with an orange mane had been scratching in the sand, either trying to find water or because he scented blood under the clean sand which had been spread over the arena after the last of the Meridiani had been dragged out. He looked up and snarled at the rabbi. The rabbi took a few steps forward. After all, Carpophorus reflected, there was no reason why he shouldn't want to get the business over. What the people were suffering now was far worse than death.

The lion crouched down. Carpophorus watched the animal's tail. The man swayed slightly from side to side. Suddenly the tip of the lion's tail began to twitch. It's coming, it's coming, thought Carpophorus. Another step forward will do it. Why don't you take another step, you fool? He was tempted to shout to the man but restrained himself. His voice might frighten the lion.

Then he saw the lion gather himself together for the charge, digging in with his claws to get better purchase. The rabbi swayed again. So sudden was the lion's attack that he was on the man before Carpophorus saw him leave the ground. The rabbi fell and a scream went up from the crowd. The lion grabbed the man by the waist and ran with him as easily as a cat carrying a mouse, trying to find some secluded spot where he could eat in peace. A young black-maned lion from Nubia rushed forward and seized the man by the head. The woman screamed again.

At the scent of blood, the other lions became restless. A lioness charged the closely packed group, bounded into the air and came down into the middle of them, striking blindly left and right. Two half-grown males, possibly her cubs, followed her. The crowd scattered like sheep when a collie rushes into their midst. The lions lashed out at them as they passed, more in fear than from hunger. A scream and a woman was down. Another scream and a child fell, his head smashed by one fearful blow. A full-grown male reared up and seized one of the men. The man's whole head vanished in the jaws. A woman was dragging herself across the arena with a half-grown cub clinging to her leg. The cub was shaking his head and growling, trying to pull the woman down.

Now Carpophorus could hear the insane, unnatural yelling of the crowd. As Petronius, the Arbiter of Elegance, remarked contemptuously, "These rag-pickers enjoy their carnival of blood" This yelling was not the usual cheering of an excited crowd during a chariot race, or the enthusiastic cries that greeted a skillful exhibition of swordplay. The pitch of the crowd's voices changed as does the cry of a pack of hounds when they see their quarry in front of them. Carpophorus knew that when the mob was in this mood, men and women had been known to hurl themselves into the arena in a frenzy of excitement and drink from the pools of blood on the sand. He knew that women in the stands were tearing long gashes in their cheeks with their fingernails and men were beating on the marble seats with their clenched fists until their hands were raw. The dull, pointless existence of the Roman mob would be unbearable unless their emotions were given some vent. For this purpose, the games existed. Death, torture, blood were the only spectacles that could really gratify the people's basic longing. They became drunk on suffering. Death and sex were the only emotions that they could still really grasp. The sight of a lion tearing a screaming woman apart gratified both instincts.

The Jews were dead. The lions had begun to devour the bodies. The corpses were jerked back and forth between the big cats and the sound of cracking bones was clearly audible. Carpophorus took his eye from the peephole. He knew what was coming next. These lions would not be saved as were the trained man-eaters and the arena must be cleared for the next act.

Ethiopian bowmen, magnificent in ostrich plume head­dresses, were forcing their way through the crowded aisles to balconies projecting over the edge of the podium. Even as Carpophorus turned away he heard the twang of the bow­strings and the roars of the stricken beasts. As he left the inner barrier, slaves were already rushing out with their hooks for dragging out the dead animals and humans, carrying baskets of fresh sand and jars of perfume to pour on the arena.

There was need for the perfume. On the podium, the patricians were holding sachets of scent to their noses and even the plebeians in the stands had covered their faces with handkerchiefs. In the hot stadium, the blood and guts cover­ing the arena sent up a fearful stench. Slaves were setting braziers full of burning incense in the stands, and the foun­tains were sending up sprays of saffron and verbena-scented water. Carpophorus noticed that the young editor of the games was standing up in his box, trying to crack jokes with the crowd to prove how democratic he was. The crowd good-naturedly kidded him back. So far, the games had been well up to standard and the mob felt friendly toward the young office seeker. But if the shows on the following days were not equally good, they would turn on him even though the youngster and his mother had bankrupted them­selves trying to entertain the mob.

The inner barrier was hastily struck and the arena cleared for chariot races. These were to be novelty races, the real chariot races were held in the Circus Maximus which had been specially designed for them. To gratify the demand for racing, Domitian had increased the original four teams to six, adding Gold and Purple to the other colours. For the Saecular Games, he had staged one hundred races a day, cutting down the number of laps around the Spine from seven to five to speed things up. However, vast as the arena of the Colosseum was, it wasn't quite big enough for six four-horse teams to manoeuvre, so these races were more in the nature of a joke.

The first race was between chariots drawn by ostriches (called by the crowd "overseas sparrows"), the next by camels and the third by oryxes (African antelopes). As it was vir­tually impossible for the charioteers to control the animals, the results were an ungodly mess and meant to be. After the hysterical excitement of the massacre of the Jews, this inter­lude served as comic relief. Dwarfs in extravagant costumes ran alongside the chariots, deliberately frightening the animals, and pretending to get run over. One of the dwarfs got dis­embowelled by an ostrich kick—he forgot that an ostrich kicks forward instead of backwards like a horse—and the crowd considered this accident the funniest of the whole show.

CHAPTER NINE

By now, it was growing late and time for the main presentation of the day. As the sun dropped below the edge of the stadium, it became noticeably cooler and the sailors were sent aloft on the great masts to furl the awning. As it was pulled back, the overheated air rushed upwards, making the sailors' task more difficult as the vast expanse of cloth napped wildly up and down but sucking in fresh air through the colonnade of arches surrounding the building. There were audible sighs of relief as the crowd relaxed, the slaves removed the braziers of incense which were unnecessary now that there was circu­lation of air, and the patricians put away their scented sachets. The podium was fuller than it had been at any other time during the day. Many patricians despised the usual run of the games, but now was the time for the gladiatorial contests, and even the most discriminating members of the nobility took an interest in them.

Led by a band, the gladiators marched into the arena, spreading out as soon as they reached the open sand so that they covered the entire arena. They saluted the royal box and the young editor, who was betting desperately with everyone around him. The gladiators were the only part of the games which the sickly youth really enjoyed and, like all patricians, he considered himself an expert on manly arts. The crowd was wildly partisan, greeting the different units with shouts. "Hurrah for the Puteolaneans! Good luck to all Mucenans! The hook for Pompeians and Pithecusans!" Here and there fights started among members of different factions.

The gladiators made a stirring sight in their magnificent armour and accoutrements. Trained to march in military for­mation, they swept across the arena keeping perfect step. Each group marched together with their special arms; the Hoplite in full armour, the Myrrnillones with their curved scimitars, the Retiarii with their nets and tridents, the Paegniarii with their wooden shields and long bullwhips, the Essedarii coming last in their chariots with their lariat throwers beside them. There were many classes of gladiators and many types of arms, but the mob not only knew each class but also most of the individual men.

At this time, the gladiators were still a highly trained group of professional fighting men with tremendous pride in their calling. They had a great tradition to live up to. A hundred years before, Mark Anthony's gladiators, whom he was training for a big battle in celebration of his expected victory over Augustus Cassar, had stayed by him after his troops had deserted. They had formed* themselves into an army and tried to reach their master in Egypt, and when they could not find ships to transport them, had sent Anthony a message urging him to return and let them defend him with their lives. Anthony, however, had refused to leave Cleopatra. Other groups of gladiators had acted as bodyguards for emperors. An important gladiator was still the best-known personality in the Empire. Horace wrote bitterly, "If Malcenas says it's cold today, it becomes the talk of Rome." Nero had asked to have his tomb decorated with carvings showing the victories of Petraites. Boys scribbled the names of famous gladiators on the walls of their rooms, and innkeepers had signs up "Tetraites ate here," much as Sardi's has pictures of stage person­alities on the walls.

But already the rot that was to overtake this bravest and most terrible of professions had appeared. It first manifested itself when gladiators were set to fighting wild beasts. Pompey had pitted gladiators against elephants. Claudius had cavalry fight leopards. Nero forced the Praetorian Guard to fight four hundred bears and three hundred lions. Neither the gladiators not their lanistia managers knew when the men might be pitted against bears, lions or wild bulls at the whim of the crowd. As long as the bouts were man against man, there was a fifty per cent chance of survival—or say forty per cent allowing for men who died of their wounds afterwards. At that rate, it paid a lanistia to build up a great fighter like Flamma. But when men were sent out against wild beasts— unless they were trained bestiarii, who possibly ran little more risk than does a modern bullfighter—the casualties were ninety or a hundred per cent. Under those conditions, the enormous cost of creating an expert gladiator wasn't justified, any more than building up a boxer whom you know will be killed in his first or second fight

As a result, anything was grist that came to the gladiatorial mills. Supposedly a man could be sentenced to the arena only for robbery, murder, sacrilege or mutiny. But with the enor­mous turnover caused by the animal fights, the demand for gladiators far exceeded the supply. In the law courts, "sen­tenced to the arena" was the commonest of all verdicts. As the mob grew increasingly indifferent to good sword play, any criminal might have armour slapped on him and be thrust into the arena. Flamma would have been shocked at the exhibitions some of these men put on.

However, good fighting was still understood and appreciated by many of the mob. In the stands were old soldiers who knew how to handle a sword themselves, and the patricians in the podium had a traditional interest in fine fighters. Today, the young editor, or rather his stern old mother, was deter­mined to put on a really good show, one that a descendant of Horatius might be proud to present. All the men in the arena were experts in their own line and there was to be no sham­ming. Nothing like that miserable exhibition that had taken place at the time of Caligula.

On this unfortunate occasion, five Retiarii had been marched against five Secutores. At that time, it was fairly common practice for gladiators to take a dive and the emperor would then give the thumbs-up signal. This trick preserved well-trained gladiators, and cut down the cost of the games.

On this occasion, the Secutores defeated the Retiarii as had been previously arranged, for the whole match was as phony as a modern wrestling bout. The mob became so furious that Caligula decided to give the thumbs-down signal. At this double-cross, one of the Retiarii jumped up, grabbed his trident and kilted all five of the Secutores who had their backs to him bowing to the crowd. The whole affair had been a public scandal, and the mob was still highly suspicious of any gladiator who dropped without obvious wounds.

After the parade, all the gladiators left the arena except the Retiarii and the Secutores. In the old days only one such fight was held at a time, but now fifty pairs were to fight together. The mob had come to regard gladiatorial combats mainly as an excuse for betting, so the more the merrier. The crowd considered the gladiators much as race track fans regard the horses: animated roulette balls or dice designed only for gam­bling. As man after man fell on the bloody sand, a groan went up from the losers and a yell of delight from the winners. An unknown gladiator might be spared if he held up his hand after putting up a good fight. He was only a long shot and no one had expected him to win. But heaven help a favourite who went down before the sword or trident of a dark horse. People had often waged their life savings on him and he had let them down. Then the stands were full of furious faces thrusting out their clenched fists with the thumb turned downwards, or stabbing at the prostrate man with an outstretched thumb. In such case, the young editor always followed the verdict of the crowd. He was putting on this show to get votes, not to antagonize the mob.

Carpophorus, his work finished for the day, strolled back to the Gate of Death to watch the fights. Near him, Negrimus, a Retiarius, was fighting Priedens, a Secutor. Carpophorus remembered the tip he'd given the guards on Negrimus and watched the fight with interest.

Negrimus threw his net and caught the Secutor, but before he could jerk the heavily armed man off his feet, Priedens had rushed forward still enveloped in the net and plunged his sword into the Retiarius' thigh. Negrimus went down but .recovered himself, backing away from the Secutor still ham­pered by the folds of the net. Again Priedens struck, slashing his adversary on the left arm that gripped the net while the Retiarius tried to hold off the Secutor with the trident in his right hand. That portion of the crowd watching this particular fight yelled with eagerness as the Retiarius received a deep gash on the leg that crippled him. As the Retiarius relied mainly on agility to avoid the armoured Secutor, Carpophorus supposed that the guards had lost any money that they might have wagered on his tip, but Negrimus managed to run his trident between the Secutor's feet and bring him down. Instantly Negrimus pinned his opponent to the ground with the trident, and then leaning with both hands on the shaft, looked to the editor of the games while the helpless Priedens made the sign for mercy. The crowd voted for death and the young editor turned thumbs down. As the trident was a poor weapon which to inflict a mortal wound, the Retiarius usually dispatched his fallen adversary with a dagger thrust through the visor, but Negrimus had either lost his dagger in the scuffle or preferred not to use it. Instead, he called over a Secutor named Hyppolitus who had won his bout to kill the prostrate man for him. Priedens managed to struggle to his knees when the trident was removed and as Hyppolitus ran his sword into the Secutor's throat, Negrimus pushed him from behind onto the blade. (We know this bout happened, even to the names of the men and where they were wounded, as it is told in a series of pictures scratched on a wall in Pompeii. However, it happened in the Pompeian amphitheatre rather than in Rome.)

Carpophorus was mildly pleased with the result, and deter­mined to look up the two guards afterwards and demand a percentage of their winnings. As the other fights did not inter­est him and he was feeling the effects of his wounds, he returned to the spoliarium to have a drink and he down. After this first bout, there was a full-scale battle between the Essedarii in their chariots, with laqueurii (lariat throwers) riding with them, and Hoplite infantry in armour and carrying spears. The Hoplites were Greek mercenaries who fought for hire under their own officers, either against an enemy or in the circus. On entering the arena, the Hoplites formed a closed

'phalanx, the equivalent of the British hollow square that broke Napoleon's chasseurs eighteen hundred years later. The phalanx was six men deep, the men in the last rank having spears twenty-four feet long, if we can believe Livy. How they were able to manage such long weapons Livy does not say. The men in the next rank had somewhat shorter spears, and so on to the men in the front rank who had spears only six feet long. This meant that the chariots were faced by a solid wall of spears and the front rank men were protected by six spears each.

The Hoplite did not stand in close order as might have been expected but at intervals of three feet apart, to allow the spears in the back to come through and give the men more room to handle their weapons. The officers stood inside the phalanx with drawn swords shouting orders. "Polybius, your spearhead is a good two hand's breadth out of line. Philip, keep your dress to the right. Epaminondas, you're not braced; a fly could knock you over in that position"

The Essedarii were using light, two-horse chariots. They galloped around the immovable phalanx with wild cries, suddenly swinging their horses in as though to force them on the spears and then whirling away again at the last moment. They were hoping to induce some of the younger Greeks to follow their motions with the spears, then the following chariot could dart into the opening thus formed, but under the iron discipline of the Hoplite officers the line of spearheads never wavered.

After a few false rushes, the Essedarii changed their tactics. They could nor afford to tire their horses. There were two men in each chariot, the charioteer and the lariat man. As they came in again, the lariat man in the leading chariot built himself a loop by the spin known today as the Butterfly—that is, he spun a small loop vertically in front and to the left of his body. Then he brought it abruptly to the right and tossed the open noose toward one of the second rank Hoplites. If the Essedarii had been trying to catch a running animal he would have swung the loop several times around his head before making the throw to give him more control over the loop, much as a baseball pitcher winds up before a throw, but the Greek would have seen the cast coming and ducked or turned the loop with his spear. This quick, unexpected, under­hand toss was by far the better technique.

Even so, the toss failed. The loop struck the horsehair crest in the helmet of a front-rank man and was deflected. Instantly the Essedarii jerked his rope clear for fear that a Hoplite might grab it and pull it from his grasp. As the chariot thundered past, another Essedarii tried the same throw. He also missed, but in a following chariot still another Essedarii dared the overhead throw, knowing that the Greeks were concentrating on the other ropes. The long lariat snaked out over the ranks and settled around the neck of a man in the last rank. With an exultant whoop the Essedarii took a turn of the rope around a horn projecting from the rim of the chariot while the driver swung his team away and gave them their heads. The half-strangled Hoplite was dragged through the ranks, losing his spear and breaking the formation. Instantly half a dozen chariots rushed for the gap, the drivers yelling to their horses and beating the reins on their backs.

"Close ranks!" shouted the Hoplite officers, and the chariots were again confronted by a line of unwavering spears. All but one driver was able to swing away in time. The foremost chariot plunged into the spears. The horses screamed like humans as the spearheads plunged into their chests and they came down on their knees. The lariat man jumped out and ran, but the charioteer could not escape in time. He died as his horses had, with a spear through his chest.

Other chariots darted in to take advantage of the gap, hoping to break the phalanx before the Hoplites could dis­engage their spears from the bodies of the thrashing horses. The horses had been impaled on spears held by men in the third and fourth ranks. The officer in charge of that section of the phalanx took in the situation at a glance.

"Third and fourth ranks, kneel!" he shouted with lungs of brass. "Fifth and sixth ranks, three paces forward."

As one man, the third and fourth ranks dropped to their knees, elevating their spears as they did so and bracing the butt against the ground. The last two ranks took three meas­ured steps forward to preserve the spear level. The oncoming chariots veered away.

The spears were torn clear of the kicking horses and the beasts dispatched by an officer's sword with two quick strokes at the base of the animal's skulls. From the rear came the shouted order: "Fifth and sixth ranks, three paces to the rear —march! Third and forth ranks, rise!"

The phalanx was itself again, ready to meet the next charge of the Essedarii.

Two chariots were coming in abreast now. Surely they intended to hit the phalanx full on, sacrificing themselves so the following chariots could plow through the broken line. The Hoplites braced themselves for the shock. At the last instant the chariots split, turning to left and right. The lariat man in the left-hand chariot threw his noose with the quick, underhand toss, aiming for a man in the rear rank. An officer cut the rope through with a single slash while it still hung poised in mid-air. He had served in the Near East and his sword was of Damascus steel. The other lariat man took advan­tage of the distraction. He had been playing his rope, doing a spin now known as the Ocean Wave, in an attempt to hold the Hoplites' attention and distract them from his friend. When he saw that his comrade's throw had been foiled, he instantly flung his own rope, leaning far over the side of the chariot and putting the whole force of his body into the motion, using his arm mainly to guide the rope. He caught a man in the fifth rank, jerked him off his feet, and began towing him through the other lines.

Among the Hoplites, homosexuality was regarded not only as natural but as an idealized and noble relationship between an older and a younger man. In the phalanx, the young man in the front ranks each had a lover among the older men in the rear ranks. This situation was believed to increase the efficiency of the regiment for no man would run away and forsake his lover in a crisis. But the relationship also posed difficulties. As the Essedarius dragged his captive through the ranks, the man's boy-lover dropped his spear and threw him­self on his friend's body to save him. The two men together cut a wide swathe through the ranks. An officer passed his sword through the boy's throat and the cry of "Dress ranks! Dress ranks!" went up from the officers and the non-coms alike. But the damage had been done. The phalanx was broken, and the yelling Essedarii were charging in from all directions.

The commanding officer saw that the solid phalanx could not be saved, but there was one desperate expedient left. He gave the order, "Squads right and left! Open lanes and hold!"

The phalanx was divided into squads and each man knew his position in the squad as well as in the phalanx. The men on the right of the squads took two steps to the right and those on the left, two steps to the left. Lanes appeared through the phalanx through which the chariots raced. Before the Essedarii could recover, the commanding officer had snapped another order and the phalanx had begun to close again.

The commander of the Essedarii was a tough old experi­enced Briton, his red hair twisted into pigtails and his face and arms blue with tattooing. He had fought the Romans under the great warrior Queen Boadicea and knew something about charging disciplined troops with chariots. He realized that if the phalanx was once allowed to reform it might never be broken again. Shouting his war cry, he urged his shaggy little ponies into one of the lanes and then, springing from the chariot, started laying about him with his battleaxe. Other Essedarii followed his example and within seconds the phalanx was broken up into little groups of desperate men fighting back to back against the charging chariots.

"Reform! Reform!" shouted the officers, but the phalanx could not reform. The men flinched from the plunging horses and were forced back into each other so that there was no room to wield their spears. The long spears of what had been the rear rank men were now useless and only the short spears of the front rank men could be employed. Attacked on all sides, no man dared to look over his shoulder for fear of being brained from in front with an axe or of finding one of the fatal lassos settling around his neck, but from behind him came screams and groans as his companions were cut down and at any instant he might feel a stab in the back as the Essedarii pressed in on the remnants of the phalanx.

The Hoplite commanding officer stood within a circle of his men who had turned at bay before the wild rush. Around them the rest of the Greeks were being massacred by the blood-splashed Essedarii. The savages' yells, their crouching figures, the delight with which they dispatched the wounded men, made them seem like Furies released from the pit. The fight was over, and in the stands the members of the crowd who had bet on the Essedarii were already yelling for the bookies to pay off.

The Hoplite general raised his voice in a last order. "Form the Leuctrain wedge and forward!" he shouted.

The disciplined group around him broke their ring and with the general taking his position at the point of the wedge, moved forward behind their spears. It was a formation much like the old "flying wedge" in football—a triangle of men moving forward with increasing speed. Their spears were shortened and held close to their sides in the same direction as the point of the triangle. The wedge plowed through the Essedarii, picking up more of the Hoplites as it progressed until it became a formidable body of men against which nothing could stand. The Essedarii refused to face it and ran for their chariots but the horses had stampeded. Dismounted, the Essedarii were helpless before the steady advance of the spear­men. The wedge swept around thearena,crushing all resistance and hamstringing the horses still attached to the chariots. When the Hoplite general saw that all real opposition was over, he gave another order.

"Break ranks. Deploy and kill at will!"

With the first shout that they had given throughout the battle, the Hoplites broke their rigid formation and scattered over the arena. They paid no attention to thumbs-up or thumbs-down decisions and, indeed, the crowd was too awe­struck by what they had seen to make any motion. One after another, the Essedarii were hunted down and speared. Then the Hoplites re-formed and marched across the arena towards the gate, heads back, chests out, the non-coms calling the step. They would leave Rome the next day to fight in the arena at Pompeii and from thence proceed to Africa to take part in subduing a Nubian chief who had revolted against Rome.

The Hoplites' victory was not popular with the mob. They despised Greeks as effeminate, and no one likes to have his illusions shattered. Besides, the Essedarii had won the favour of the crowd because of their picturesqueness and their un­usual skill with their lassos. The Hoplites with their rigid dis­cipline and haughty airs antagonised the rabble. Taunting cries of "Dog's-head, Dog's-head!" were raised to remind the arrogant Hoplites of the great battle of Cynoscephalae (Greek for Dog's-head) in which the forces of Greece went down in defeat before the Roman legions. The Hoplites paid no attention to the jeers. Only once did a Hoplite deign to reply to the taunts. A half-drunken man shouted, "Why don't you relax, Greek? The war's over!"

A young Hoplite officer glanced up at him. "Which one?" he inquired contemptuously. Then the Hoplites marched out through the Gate of Death still holding their faultless forma­tion.

As a climax, a fight was staged with war elephants supported by two companies of the heavily armed Samnites. Thirty elephants took part in the battle, fifteen on each side, all carrying castles on their backs full of armed men. One group was composed of Indian elephants and the other of African. To the patricians and generals in the podium, this battle was of particular interest because it would prove, once and for all, whether the Indian or African elephant was superior for warfare.

The elephants were all males and had tusks. The females were useless for warfare as they would instinctively run from a tusked bull. Curiously, the African elephants were generally smaller than their Indian cousins although a full-grown African elephant is much bigger than an Indian one. This discrepancy was because the Indian mahouts were much more skilled at capturing and keeping elephants than were the Numidian mahouts. The Numidian animals were young bulls and many of them in poor condition.

All the elephants were heavily padded for protection. Most of them came from the government herd in Laurentum near Rome. The Romans occasionally found them useful for war­fare, especially against a savage foe who would panic at the sight of the great creatures. It was the policy to spare the elephants as much as possible, both for reasons of economy and because the crowd disliked seeing them killed. When Pompey first exhibited an elephant hunt in the Circus Maxi­mus, a wounded elephant had raised his trunk toward the crowd in the same appealing gesture that a fallen gladiator used when asking for mercy. The sight was so pitiful that even the brutalized mob rioted and the hunt had to be called off. (This gesture is apparently instinctive with elephants. J. A. Hunter, the famous Kenya professional hunter, told me that he had seen mortally injured elephants make the same motion when he moved in to finish them off. His native trackers refused to allow him to shoot, saying, "The elephant is asking to be allowed to die in peace.")

However, although it was the men rather than the elephants who were to die in this engagement, the elephants like every other living thing that entered the arena had to take their chances. The crowd watched, tense with excitement, as the two groups approached each other, the elephants trumpeting as they saw what was ahead of them and curling up their delicate trunks to keep them out of harm's way.

The Indian mahouts sat astride their elephants' necks while the Numidians rode sidesaddle; that is, sat sideways on the necks. The Indians used an ankus to control their mounts, a goad with a curved end like a fishhook. The Numidians' goads were shaped like the letter L. We know these details from a study of the coins put out to commemorate the fights with pictures of the different types engraved on them.

There were three armed men in each howdah, or "castle" as the Romans called them, on the elephants' backs. As the two herds rushed together the elephants used their trunks to pull the opposing mahouts off their perches. If they succeeded, the battle was won, for an elephant without his mahout would not fight and simply turn tail. When this manoeuvre was not successful, the two elephants fought with their tusks, giving angry gurgling cries and each trying to plunge a tusk into his opponent's soft belly. Meanwhile, the men in the howdahs hurled javelins at each other or tried to pick off their oppo­nents with arrows.

One of the young African elephants was the first to flee. Buffeted and gored unmercifully by his bigger, better trained Indian adversary, the young bull could take no more. He turned and ran, pursued by the victorious Indian bull. As he dashed around the arena in terror, the howdah came loose and the occupants were flung to the sand. Directed by his mahout, the Indian bull stopped the chase and turned on the men. Each war elephant had his own special technique for killing men and once he had killed a man, he would always afterwards use the same method no matter what the circum­stances. This bull grabbed the men with his trunk and then impaled them on his right-hand tusk. Other victorious ele­phants were kneeling on their victims, trampling them, or picking them up with their trunks and then throwing them on the sand or against the podium wall.

Meanwhile, the two companies of Samnites had broken into small groups and were following the elephants, sheltering themselves behind the great beasts to avoid the hail of javelins and arrows as modern troops often go into battie under cover of a tank. Once the attack had joined, the Samnites went into action, trying to hamstring the opposing elephants with their swords or rush under the animals and plunge spears into their vitals. The men in the howdahs protected their mounts as best they could. Sometimes they were not successful. One elephant dropped stone dead, killed by a javelin-hit in the eye. Another bull, hamstrung by the Samnites, continued to fight on his knees, grabbing the shields of the Samnites who closed in for the kill and tossing them into the air until he was surrounded by a circle of shields. The applauding mob gave the thumbs-up signal that this heroic animal might be spared, but a crippled elephant is worthless and a well-thrown javelin finished him off.

In spite of the efforts of the Numidians, the African con­tingent was going down to defeat. The Indian mahouts had pulled several of their elephants out of the fight, and the elephants were picking up thrown javelins from the sand with their trunks and handing them up to the men in the howdahs. The Indians re-formed and prepared to finish the battie. But here came an interruption, the first one of that long and bloody day. Domitian, after a hurried parley with the generals who shared the imperial box, instructed the young editor to stop the fight. There was no longer any question in the minds of the high brass watching the combat that the Indian ele­phants had proved their superiority, and there was no point in killing more of the valuable animals. The crowd, generally so blood-thirsty, applauded the decision. The Romans liked elephants. Later, Commodus would amuse himself by killing three elephants in the arena, probably by shooting them full of arrows from the safety of the royal box, but at the time of Domitian, there was still some lingering feeling of sports­manship, especially when it involved such a huge, noble animal.

The elephant fight concluded the first day's entertainment. It was growing dark and torches had been lighted in the wall brackets. The crowd trickled out of the vast stadium, tallying up losses or winnings, arguing over the events, making plans for the morrow, and quarrelling as they tried to force their way through the packed entrances.

CHAPTER TEN

After checking to make sure that his beasts were cleaned, fed and watered, Carpophorus went to Chilo's tavern near the Via Appia to discuss the day's events and drink himself into a blind stupor before the trials of the next day.

Each of the different professions attached to the circus had a certain wineshop it frequented, and outsiders were not encouraged to intrude. Chilo's catered to the bestiarii. The shop was several paces from the main highway, up a dark alley and near the "Wolf Den," as the Romans called the red-light district. When Carpophorus entered, he saw to his sur­prise and disgust that there was a distinguished company; the Master of the Games was sitting at one table and there were also a number of wealthy patricians, each with a gladiator bodyguard. The patricians were wrapped in cloaks and were ostensibly incognito although, of course, everyone knew who they were. Many of the patricians were connoisseurs of the games and the present groups specialized in bestiarii. Although these aristocrats could make or break him, Carpophorus only gave them a surly nod as he sat down.

The walls of the inn were decorated by crude paintings, one of which was a copy of the fresco on the monument at Minturae to the eleven gladiators who had killed (and were killed by) ten bears, while another was a portrait of the famous venator, Aulus, inscribed: "To my good friend Chilo in memory of many a pleasant evening, Aulus." The inscrip­tion, however, had not been written by Aulus himself as he was illiterate. Another painting showed two men being thrown out of the inn, with the caption: "Watch yourself or you'll get the same."

Carpophorus shouted for wine. Chilo, a plump Greek, answered the summons. Chilo had been, by turns, a bandit, a fence for stolen goods, a beggar, and a cageboy at the arena. In addition to his present profession as innkeeper, he also pimped for the bestiarii and robbed travellers after slipping them a Micky Finn composed of belladonna and hemlock.

"That was a fine show you put on with that tiger," remarked the fat Greek sociably. "How about some good Rhodian wine to celebrate. Just got a shipment in from Greece."

"I wouldn't use your damned resined wine to clean out a cage," retorted the venator.

"What do you want, a hundred-year-old Falernian?' deman­ded the Greek, stung by this insult to his native wines.

The innkeeper was made bold by the presence of the patricians and their gladiators. Carpophorus raised his head and stared at the man.

"Give me wine," he said slowly and distincdy. Chilo opened his mouth to retort, thought better of it, and pulled one of the long wine jars out of a hole in the counter top. Holding it by the two handles, he rested it on the pouring block and filled an earthenware cup. Carpophorus drained it at a draught and the innkeeper filled it again.

One of the patricians spoke up. "My friend—er, the cobbler here," everyone smiled for the friend was a well-known senator, "and I were discussing which was the more dangerous anta­gonist—a lion or a tiger. What is your opinion ?"

Carpophorus was about to tell the man to go jump in the Tiber but restrained himself and answered the question civilly. Several other patricians entered the argument, some of them asking not too unintelligent questions. Carpophorus, after they had stood him several drinks, began to feel more friendly.

The Master of the Games remarked quietly, "That was a brilliant job you did, getting those raw lions to kill the Jewish rebels."

"Aw, you just have to know your lions and your Jews," said Carpophorus, pleased with the praise.

"Still, it was a fine piece of work. We have fifty zealots who are to fight seventy bears day after tomorrow, the zealots using only their daggers. That should be a good show."

"Haven't you got any prisoners except Jews?" demanded Carpophorus irritably. For some reason the memory of the old rabbi moving out to bring on the lions' charge bothered him.

"Thank Hercules for them," said the Master sincerely. "They built the Flavian amphitheatre, they were the first people to die there, and they're still our main source of supply with their constant revolt. These damn Nazarenes or Christians or whatever they call themselves are no good—die like sheep without fighting. I refuse to use them, myself"

Everyone nodded agreement. The group would have been considerably surprised if they could have forseen that the Colosseum would be preserved only because of the edict of Pope Benedict XIV who wished it to remain as a shrine to the Christian martyrs—although comparatively few Christians ever died there; the great Neroian persecutions were in the Circus Maximus.

One of the young patricians was a friend of Titus, the juvenile editor giving the games. This adolescent lordling had been drinking too much and now burst out in praise of his friend. (This speech, by the way, is taken from the "Satyricon" of Petronius.)

"The next three days ought to be really good—no cheap slave gladiators but nearly all the fighters freemen. Good old Titus has a heart of gold and a hot head—the boys will have to fight it out and no thumbs-up. Titus will see that they have sharp swords and no one backs out. The arena will look like a butcher's stall before the day's over. Titus is lousy rich. Suppose he does spend four hundred thousand sesterces a day on the games, his old man left him thirty million so why should he worry? These games will make his name live for­ever. He's got some fine chariot horses and a female charioteer and Glyco's boy friend who's going to be tossed by a wild bull. Glyco found the youngster knocking-up his mistress. It wasn't the kids fault; he was only a slave and had to do what the woman wanted. She's the one who ought to go to the bull, but if you can't beat a donkey you have to beat his pack, I suppose. Anyhow, it'll be a good show. What did the other candidate for magistrate give us? A lousy show with stinking gladiators—if you farted you could knock half of them over. I've seen better bestiarii, too. The shows were staged at night by torchlight; what did he think he was giving us, a cockfight? The gladiators were either knock-kneed or bow-legged and the substitutes for the dead men ought to have been ham­strung before the fight started. The only one to show any guts was a Thracian, and the slaves had to burn him with hot irons to get him going. The crowd was crying, 'Tie 'em up!' for they were all obviously escaped slaves. Afterwards, the louse said to me, 'Well, anyhow, I gave you a show.' 'You did and I applauded,' I told him. 'The way I look at it, I gave you more than I got."'

Carpophorus was drunk by now as were most of the men. He shouted for food and the innkeeper brought him a steak. "I've seen bullock's eyes that were bigger than this," snarled the venator, hurling the plate to the floor. He grabbed for his wine cup and managed to spill it over the table. "More wine!^’ roared the venator, pulling himself to his feet by holding on to the bar. "More wine for the greatest man in the empire! I'm greater than the emperor, you know why? That son of a diseased sow couldn't hold his throne a week if it wasn't for men like me. Who was it who broke the Lucius Antonius mutiny? Me! I arranged to have forty little blonde girls all under ten years old raped by a band of baboons. The soldiers stopped the mutiny to watch the show. And what about the time lightning struck the Capitoline Temple, a very bad omen? The mob rioted and would have wrecked the city if I hadn't staged that chariot race, using naked women instead of horses. What's that dog's-dung, Domitian, ever done? I'm running this empire and I can lick any man in the house!"

An old bestiarius sitting in the corner cackled obscenely. He looked like a mummy, hairless, and eyes so sunk into his head that only the sockets showed, his skin taut against his bones.

"Ah, you bestiarii are nothing but geldings today," screeched the old man as he gummed his winecup. "In my day, we were men. I made the sand smoke under me, I can tell you. We fought aurochs with swords and . .."

"Hold your noise, you old wreck," bellowed the venator. ^“I know you old-timers—a lion, to hear you talk; and a fox, to see you act. None of you were worth your own dirt. Look at you now!"

"Yes, look at me now!" screamed the old man. "Wait 'til you're too old for the arena and have eaten your clothes and can't even get employment as a cageboy. I've seen you in the arena. You run around like a mouse in a pot. In my day . .."

He got no further. Carpophorus had rushed across the room and seized the old man by the head and throat. Instantly half a dozen men threw themselves on the rabid venator while Chilo rushed up flourishing a heavy wooden stool. He brought it down with all his strength on Carpophorus' head, but before the venator was knocked out, he had twisted the old man's neck in the grip he had learned in the arena. There was a sharp crack as the aged bestiarius dropped lifeless to the floor.

"The Watch! The Watch!" shouted a dozen voices. Into the wineshop strode a young centurion in gleaming armour fol­lowed by a squad of soldiers with iron-tipped staves.

"What's going on here?" snapped the young man. "Chilo, you'll lose your licence for this. Who's this man. By Mars, it's Carpophorus! Throw some water on him—I have fifty ses­terces riding on the bastard for tomorrow's games."

"He killed a man!" shouted Chilo, dancing in agony.

"Who, this old sack of bones? Don't lie to me, Greek, the man died of a stroke. Here, Telegonius, drag the corpse out and have it thrown in the Tiber. Keep better order, Chilo, or you'll find yourself in the arena one of these days. See that Carpophorus is ready for the hunt tomorrow afternoon or it'll go hard with you."

Several bestiarii carried Carpophorus to the nearest baths where expert masseurs kneaded him back to life, a feather was thrust down his throat to make him vomit up the wine, and a doctor patched his head and resewed the tiger scratches which had began to bleed again. By next morning, Carpo­phorus was back at the Colosseum, feeling as though his mouth was the Cloaca Maxima, but able to enter the arena.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The arena had been flooded during the night with salt water carried from the port of Ostia. (And how the Romans even with their unlimited manpower and wealth were able to accomplish this miracle I can't imagine.) The arena had been transformed into an enormous aquarium full of "sea mon­sters"—I suppose sharks and giant rays. Sicilian sponge divers with knives between their teeth dove from the podium wall into the artificial lake and fought the monsters. After­wards, there was a nautical engagement between two fleets of galleys, one fleet sailing in by way of the Gate of Life and the other through the Gate of Death. While the arena was being drained, a seal act was put on; the seals barking in response to their names and retrieving fish for their masters. Then a bullfight was staged on the soggy sand.

The bulls were aurochs, a species of wild cattle now extinct, musk ox and the European bison. The Romans perfectly understood the difference between these animals, having seen them many times in the arena, but as late as the eighteenth century naturalists were still confusing the different species. The aurochs somewhat resembled the long-horned cattle of the old West except that they were considerably heavier and had short beards. An old bull's horns might be over six feet long. The European bison is much like his American cousin but rather smaller. The musk ox are the same. Bullfights were first introduced into the games by the Emperor Claudius because they were comparatively cheap. Probably even semi-wild animals could be driven to Rome by mounted men just as the wild longhorns were herded by cowboys or the modern Spanish fighting bulls can be herded by mounted men with wooden lances. As long as the animals remain in a herd, they are fairly docile. Only when a single animal is cut off from the group does he become savage.

When the wild cattle first entered the arena, they were thrown dummies to toss. This trick put them in the mood to handle humans. Then the bestiarii dodgers entered the arena. The inner barricade to keep the animals in the centre of the arena had been erected and burladeros (the Romans called them cochleas) such as are used in a modern bullring had been put up at intervals. The dodgers darted out from behind the shelter of these burladeros and rushed across the arena, encouraging the bulls to pursue them. An experienced dodger could tell without looking back how far the bull was behind him. If he had a lead, he'd slow down to make it look good. When the bull began to catch up, he'd put on a sudden sprint to reach the burladeros. As the man slipped behind the burladeros, the pursuing bull would often hit the wood with his horn, sometimes knocking off a large splinter two or three feet in length. One such splinter shot into the stands and killed a spectator.

Often two dodgers would work together, "spinning⁵' a bull by keeping one man at the head and the other at the tail while the animal whirled around trying to reach first one and then the other of his tormentors. This trick could only be played with an inexperienced animal. A bull who had been in the ring several times before knew the ropes and would con­centrate on one man, but the dodgers could recognize such an animal almost immediately by the way he took up a stand and forced the men to come to him instead of charging about blindly.

After a few minutes of this work, the bull-tumblers entered. They were both men and women, naked except for a loincloth. These performers were Cretans and were performing a traditional art which can still be seen in the frescos at Cnossus. I'll admit that most antiquarians doubt if Cretans ever per­formed in an arena, but there are Roman murals of men turning somersaults over a bull's back, and I don't think that there's any question that this was a fairly standard act. It's still occasionally done in modern rodeos. One man would distract the bull's attention while the other ran forward and grabbed the bull's horns, immediately springing up and putting his feet on the bull's forehead (aficiondos will please remember that these were not Spanish fighting bulls but wild cattle). As the bull tossed his head, the tumbler would shoot into the air, turn a somersault, and land on the bull's back, instantly sliding off while his friends shouted and ran in front of the bull to keep him occupied. A variation of this stunt was to turn a back somersault and be caught by two waiting friends. A man with impetus of the bull's toss to help him could go nearly fifty feet. Usually the bull instead of pursuing the man would stop, shake his puzzled head as if to say, "Where did he go?" and charge another tumbler.

In all these stunts, the tumblers were more afraid of the bulls' hooves than their horns. If a man slipped he could often avoid the great horns but he could not keep the bull from trampling him. Then the animal's great weight crushed his lungs and ruptured his liver.

There were frequent fights between the animals. An aurochs bull approached one of the bison who was lying down. The aurochs snorted, pawed the sand, but would not attack. A dodger ran between the two animals, inciting the aurochs to charge, but instead of the aurochs, the bison was enraged. He sprang to his feet and charged the man with the speed no aurochs could have equalled. The dodger ran for the burladero as he had never run before but the bison would have had him if the aurochs had not attacked the bison. The bison whirled and tossed the aurochs, lifting him clean off the sand. When the aurochs landed, the bison gave him a quick, short thrust in the eye, breaking of part of the horn in the aurochs' skull. Then he spun away on his forelegs, not his rear, and trotted off leaving the mortally wounded aurochs dying on the sand. At this moment a wildly excited patrician lady tore off a valuable brooch and, for no reason except that she was mad with excitement, hurled it into the ring. Her escort, a young knight, sprang from the podium, ran to the inner barrier, vaulted it and retrieved the brooch. But the bison saw him. The animal turned and charged, killing the man almost instantly.

The head dodger nodded toward the Master of the Games, who had been watching closely from the edge of the inner barrier. The animals were sufficiently excited now for the next step. Also, they were growing sullen. Except for the bison bull, none of them had succeeded in killing any of their tormentors and they were beginning to take up stands —called a querencia in modern bullfighting. Either the animals herded together or picked a section of the arena and stood there motionless. The dodgers and the tumblers could now do nothing with them until the animals had been given new confidence by a kill.

The condemned criminals who were to be killed by the animals to give them this confidence (in the bullring, horses are used for this purpose) were now driven into the arena. Among them was the pitiful young boy who had been Glyco's minion, or male mistress. The boy—he could not have been more than fifteen or sixteen—staggered out into the blinding light of the white sand, for the awning did not cover the central part of the arena and protected only the spectators. Glyco, sitting in the podium with his mistress, leaned over the marble balustrade and called to the boy. The youngster, hearing the familiar voice and hoping for a reprieve ran toward the sound. The motion attracted an aurochs which promptly charged. Just before he struck the boy, the lad was jerked into the air by an invisible wire that had been tied around him before he entered the arena and was operated by the sailors in the overhead scaffolding. The boy soared into the air with a scream, only to be dropped almost instandy in front of a bison. The bison also charged, the boy was again pulled upwards, and this farce continued while Glyco and his mistress roared with laughter and the crowd howled its mirth. Eventually, either by accident or design, the boy was impaled by a charging aurochs. The long horn went com­pletely through him and the bull charged madly around the arena, the shrieking boy pinwheeling around the horn with every shake of the bull's head.

When the criminals were dead, the dodgers and tumblers rushed out again. This time they were followed by Thessalian horsemen who galloped alongside the bulls, grabbed them by the horns, and then flung them down—bulldogging as in modern rodeos. Pliny describes this trick. Mounted men with lances also engaged the bulls while the venatores on foot, armed with swords and capes, also entered the arena. Carpo­phorus was one of these last.

Some of the wild cattle had been in the arena many times before. A pole vaulter made the mistake of trying to show his skill with one of these experienced animals. He ran toward the bull and when the animal charged, tried to vault over his head. The old bull simply stood back and waited for the man to come down. The expression on the man's face as he clung to the top of his pole put the crowd into convulsions. Carpo­phorus was armed with a javelin and seeing the vaulter's plight, stepped forward and drove his weapon into the aurochs' side.

He had meant the bull to drop dead instantly but his stroke missed and the wounded animal rushed away, tearing the javelin from Carpophorus' hand (a Pompeian fresco shows this scene). The bull wheeled and came back. Carpophorus, a venator rather than a dodger, could not avoid the rush. He went down between the bull's spreading horns.

The horns saved him. He clung to them while the mortally wounded animal smashed him repeatedly against the sand. Other venatores had run to his assistance. One of them grabbed the bull's tail (also in the frescos), another threw his cape over the bull's head, another plunged his sword into the animal's side. Between them they managed to drag Carpo­phorus to one of the burladeros. Even while they were carrying the wounded venator around the outside of the inner barrier to the Gate of Death, the bull followed them on the inside, watching the men. When they finally disappeared, the bull returned to the battle so suddenly that he caught the venatores following him. He tossed one man fifteen feet in the air, bounded around like a spring lamb while the man was coming down, and then gored him again. The venatores finally managed to get the corpse away from him and over the inner barrier. Then they stood back to let the mortally wounded animal die.

When the bull was sure the dead man was gone, he walked slowly over and stood sniffing the bloody sand as though it were incense. Then he looked up at the howling mob with quiet satisfaction and stood there proudly until his legs buckled under him and he fell dead.

Carpophorus had two broken ribs and the arena doctor had to strap him up before he could go out for the next event. If you think that I'm exaggerating the punishment a man can take and still keep going, I'd like to mention that Carnecerito, the famous Mexican matador, was carried from the ring after a bad goring and put on the operating table. When Carnecerito heard the crowd yelling for the next matador who'd been sent out to kill his bull, he jumped off the table, wrapped a towel around his belly to keep his guts from falling out, and ran back to the ring. He killed the bull and then fainted from loss of blood. Louis Procuna once drove eight hundred miles from Mexico City to Nuevo Laredo after a goring and when he arrived the floor of the car was literally awash with blood. He still fought. I don't know what wounds the Roman bestiarii were able to take, but I do know that they fought in event after event and must have often received terrific injuries. They had to be tough to survive.

The next act had a popular tie-in. A few weeks before, a whale had been stranded at the port of Ostia and thousands of people had travelled down from Rome to see the monster. A mock-up of the whale was raised to the arena on one of the elevators and then a trap door opened in its side, allowing the escape of several dozen lions, bears, wild horses, wild boars, stags, antelope, ibex, ostriches and leopards. Meanwhile a number of see-saws had been placed in the arena, each with two condemned criminals in the seats. As the man on the bottom was sure to be eaten, the desperate efforts of the prisoners to out-see-saw each other provided great amusement for the crowd.

Then the bestiarii came out again. Some of them were swung back and forth in baskets. The baskets were hung by a pendulum arrangement and at the bottom of their swing were close enough to the arena so an animal could grab them. The bestiarii in the baskets could control the rhythm of the pen­dulum as a man on a swing can control his speed. The trick was to control your basket so when it reached the low point there wouldn't be an animal waiting for you. Venatores, entering the inner barrier by turnstiles or through swinging doors guarded by slaves who quickly barred them if an animal tried to escape, decapitated the ostriches by shooting curved arrows at them. These arrows must have operated on the principle of a sharp-edge boomerang although how they could have been shot from a bow beats me.

Carpophorus came on with a pack of fighting dogs which he had trained himself. Some of these dogs could only have been Tibetan mastiffs from the description, and as die Romans were getting elephants and tigers from India, there's no reason why they couldn't have got dogs too. He also had boarhounds, much like a harlequin Great Dane except they had slender muzzles. He had some of the enormous Molossian hounds from Epirus and the Hyrcanians, which were so savage that the Romans thought they must be part tiger.

Carpophorus' best dogs were British, the British dogs being universally admitted the best of all breeds for fighting. The British used them in warfare and the Roman legionnaires were terrified of the brutes. It is said that one of them could break a bull's neck. Unfortunately, we don't know what they looked like. They are described both as "enormous" and "not very big." Possibly they were like a Norwegian elkhound. Personally, I think that they were probably not bred basically for type, but for courage as with the bull terriers used in pit fighting which may be almost any colour and weigh fifteen pounds or forty-five pounds.

Carpophorus loosed these dogs and then went in with his spear. The dogs attacked any animal that their master indi­cated. The stags and antelope they killed by themselves, chasing the animal around the arena until it turned at bay, and then pulling it down. One deer fell on its knees before the royal dais as though imploring mercy. In response to the shouts of the crowd, Domitian spared the animal. The dogs surrounded the more dangerous animals, rushing in and snap­ping to keep their quarry turning so he could not attack any individual member of the pack. Only when Carpophorus moved in for the kill would the dogs take hold, grabbing the animal by the paws, muzzle or testicles to hold him long enough for the spear to go home. They were also employed to dispatch the last of the wild cattle. Certain of the dogs were trained to grab a bull by the nose and hold his head down for the fatal stroke. These dogs had undershot jaws, elevated nostrils so they could continue to breathe without loosening their grip, and bowlegs; the ancestors of the modern English bulldog. Sometimes a bull would toss a dog. When this happened, handlers were ready with long poles to guide the dog into the arms of another handler who broke the dog's fall. One bull, left for dead, suddenly sprang up and killed a venator.

After this attraction, a number of fast-moving novelty acts were introduced. Women were dragged behind chariots and the hounds set on them. "Legendary pageants" were staged showing the castration of Alys, Hercules being burned alive on a pyre, and Mucius Scaevola having his hand burned off. A prostitute and her pimp gave an exhibition of the various positions of sexual intercourse, but in the middle of an embrace, Carpophorus set the Molossian hounds on the couple and they were quickly torn to pieces. A robber was crucified and bears encouraged to jump up and tear the dying man from the cross. A man representing Prometheus was chained to a rock and a trained eagle turned loose to pull out his liver. By the time the eagle was done with him, Martial tells us, "his mangled limbs still lived although all the parts dripped blood and in all his body was nowhere a body's shape." A man dressed as Daedalus with wings tied to his shoulders was thrown from the top scaffolding. When he crashed on the sand, a wild boar was released to gore the corpse. A lion, who had turned on his trainer when beaten, was killed by a venator using a sword and a cloak. "Although the beast won't take the whip, he learned to take the steel." A bear, trapped in the mountains with bkdlime, was sur­rounded by a ring of bestiarii and whirled around on the bloody sand with lowered head until a javelin dispatched him. A pregnant sow was cut open by a venator's spear and the litter of piglets spilled out of her side onto the sand. One piglet even lived.

Under the direction of the bestiarii, animal fights of all kinds were staged: lion versus tiger, a buffalo versus an elephant. A rhino tossed a bull as though it were one of the straw dummies. Then he killed a bear, a bison and two aurochs in quick succession. Finally an elephant was sent against him. According to the story, the elephant picked up a sweeper's broom and blinded the rhino with the coarse bristles. The blinded rhino charged straight through the inner barrier and crashed into the podium wall. The elephant finished the stunned animal by trampling him, and was then given candy by his proud mahout. At last, the legionnaires were sent to clear the arena with their shield wall and line of spears.

Now came a delightful novelty. Instead of having the crowd find their own lunch, by order of the editor catapults flung roast partridges and pheasants among the stands. Slaves dragged basketfuls of other fancy foods up and down the aisles. Then the catapults showered the crowd with lottery tickets. The holder of a lucky ticket might win a set of fur­niture, a suit of clothes, a sack of gold coins or a valuable jewel. To get in on the act, Domitian ordered that government lottery tickets also be distributed. A winner might get a merchant ship, a house, or even a large estate.

Some of the tickets were fakes. A man might get a ticket giving him a beautifully carved box. When he opened 'it, a hive of bees would pour out. Other people would find that they'd won ten man-eating bears, ten dormice, or ten heads of lettuce. As a joke, Elagabalus even had the catapults throw poisonous adders in the stands.

When distribution of the lottery tickets began, many people left the stands. The distribution was always the signal for a free-for-all fight, only slightly less bloody than the battles in the arena. Only the lowest members of the crowd cared to expose themselves to the riot. After the distribution was over, speculators flooded into the stands offering to buy sight unseen any of the tickets. Not knowing what they might get, many of the crowd sold their tickets without bothering to cash them in.

During lunch, there were a number of novelty acts. There was a dog race with monkeys as jockeys. There was a fight between big cranes and African pygmies, the pygmies armed only with sharpened reeds. Men fought huge pythons with their bare hands and snake charmers from the Marsi Snake Training School in Greece handled cobras. At the end, there was a fight between women and dwarfs. As Statius wrote, "It was enough to make Mars and the Goddess of Bravery split their sides laughing to see them hacking each other."

In the late afternoon, the gladiators came on again. Domi­tian had given permission for the court gladiators to take part in the games. These men were all freemen, fighting for hire, and made a magnificent show in their golden armour and waving peacock plumes as they entered the arena. Their armour was solid gold, embossed with scenes of gladiatorial combats done by the leading artists in Rome. Julius Caesar provided solid silver armour for his gladiators; Nero topped him by giving his gladiators armour made of carved amber. Now Domitian had tried to surpass both men by arming his gladiators in gold. I don't know how many of these gladiators there were, but Trajan had five thousand pairs of gladiators fight to the death to celebrate his victory over Decebalius in 106 a.d.

These men were too important to use up in a general melee. Individual combats had been arranged. The crowd knew virtually every man in the outfit, and cries went up of "Tetraites! Primus! Pamphilus!" We know these men's names for their tombs still remain with a carving of the gladiator, usually holding a palm in one hand as symbol of victory, and his sword or trident in the other.

For these individual fights, unless they were between a Retiarius and a Secutor, a referee drew a line in the sand with his staff to mark the point where the two warriors were to meet. The two gladiators stood on either side of the mark while the referee gave the men their final instructions and slaves held their helmets and shields. The gladiators not fighting lounged under the statues of Victory which lined the podium walls.

The signal for the fight was given by a trumpeter, using a curved instrument like a French horn. The two men came together slowly, their faces obscured by their visored helmets, almost completely covered by their huge curved shields. Huck­sters selling souvenir glasses and small trays with the pictures of the gladiators painted on them moved through the stands. The crowd stopped breathing as the arena was filled with the clash of steel for many of the spectators had wagered all they owned and possibly their liberty on the outcome of the fight.

One man staggered. He recovered himself but blood was staining the golden armour. From fifty thousand throats came the shout, "Habet!" (He's wounded!) Some shouted the word gleefully, some in despair, depending on how they had placed their bets.

The wounded man fell to his knees. His opponent pressed in on him, using his shield and the full weight of his body to force the injured man down. The gladiator fell and made the sign for mercy as a great shout went up from the stands. Few people bothered to give either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision; they were too busy either paying off or collecting their bets.

Another pair entered the arena and still another. As the fights went on the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, howled with rage, clapped with delight or flung miracles of insults at the fighters. There were constant cries of "Good! Aim for breast! What's the matter with you, you filth-gorged privy maggot! Let him have it! Give it to him!" When one man went down and the victor turned to face the stands, the crowd went into a frenzy of delight, especially if they had been betting on him. Women especially broke into hysterical spasms, and not only the common women in the upper tiers. The noble ladies on the podium often lost their heads. When one hand­some young Myrmillo, only a few weeks before a simple farmboy living on the slopes of Apennine, paraded before the podium with his bloody sword upraised a great lady screamed uncontrollably and flung her brooch and necklace into the arena. Then she stripped off her rings, tossed them onto the sand, and finally ripped off her undergarments and threw them also. When the young Myrmillo came on the crumpled gar­ments, he thought that the lady had simply thrown him her scarf or cloak. As he picked up the clothing to toss it back, the underwear unfolded. The simple boy stood gazing horrified at what he was holding. Then he dropped the garments and fled from the arena "more terrified of a woman's underwear than he had been of his enemy's sword" The crowd thought this was killingly funny and nearly died laughing. The patrician lady's husband was not so amused.

At that, he was more fortunate than the husband of Hippia, a noble lady who left her husband and children and fled to Egypt with a gladiator named Sergius. Juvenal says bitterly, "Sergius was maimed, getting old, had a battered face, his forehead was covered with welts from his helmet, his nose was broken and his eyes were bloodshot. But he was a swords­man!" Whether Juvenal intended any pun, I don't know. Many great ladies enjoyed the company of famous gladiators in their private apartments, but few ever ran off with their lovers.

Retiarii and Secutores were fighting now. One of the Reti-arii was wearing a visored helmet which concealed his face; a very unusual uniform for a net-man. The Secutor was a steady old fighter while the helmeted Retiarius was a clumsy, nervous young man obviously unsure of himself. Suddenly the Secutor took a quick step under the circling net, knocked the trident out of his oponent's hand, and threw him down. The angry crowd contemptuously gave the death signal, which the editor instandy duplicated. The despairing Retiarius tore off his helmet and stretched out both hands in supplication to the crowd. A horrified gasp went up. Everyone recognized the young man as Gracchus, a descendant of one of the noblest of the great patrician families. A drunkard and spendthrift, the young patrician had been abandoned by his family, and sinking lower and lower had finally ended in the arena as a professional gladiator.

Unflinchingly, the Emperor gave the death sign, but the Secutor shrank from killing one "so noble and so vile." Amid a dead silence, the young man slunk from the arena.

The fights continued to rage. Slaves pushing two-wheeled carts collected the wounded, for these men were too valuable to be burned by hot irons or knocked on the head by a hammer.

The referees had trouble in saving the wounded even when the verdict of the crowd was for them, for the victorious gladiator, mad with the excitement of battle, would often dispatch his defeated adversary on the spot. A mural in Herculaneum shows a referee trying to stop a Myrmillo from killing his helpless Samnite opponent.

When the crowd tired of the individual combats, companies of gladiators engaged. A platoon of Gauls fought a platoon of Thracians. Domitian was always a strong supporter of the Thracian gladiators; people became fanatical fans of certain types of gladiators just as they backed the Reds or the Blues in the chariot races. One excited man in the stands leaped up during the fight to shout, "Smear 'em Gauls! Those Thra­cians may be the Emperor's pet but they can't stand up against you boys!" The furious Domitian had the offender dragged from his seat and thrown in the arena. Then he ordered Carpophorus to turn his Hyrcanian hounds loose on him.

After the gladiators had finished there were jousts between Equestres—mounted men on horseback in full armour with lances. The armour these men wore was not plate armour like the Mediaeval knight's but breastplates, visored helmets, and greaves on their legs. However, the Romans did know how to make jointed armour, that is, armour that can slide in and out like an armadillo's plates as a man moves. The Secutores wore such armour on their right arms. Possibly the Equestres were similarly equipped and may even have worn chainmail. Their lances were probably light like the lances used by the Light Brigade at Balaclava. I can't understand why the Romans didn't make more use of the Equestres in warfare. An armoured man on horseback can handle almost any number of footmen as the Mediaeval knights demonstrated. After all, King Arthur lived only a couple of hundred years after the time of Domi­tian, and may even have been a British governor trained by the Romans. He certainly used knights to good effect. But apparently the Romans always put their faith in the legions manoeuvring on foot. It was a great mistake.

By the time the Equestres had finished their jousting, it was dark, but the games still continued. The catapults flung figs, dates, nuts, cakes and plums to the crowd. Free wine was distributed. Torches sprinkled with incense were lighted. The incense was of different kinds so the torches burned red, yellow, blue and green. Silver stars were hung from the awning. In the arena, cavalry fought against chariots and heavily armoured Hoplomachi fought equally well-armed Provocatores, the varicoloured lights dancing on the sword blades and shields. At the end, the arena was flooded again for a fight between African natives in war canoes, while barges full of beautiful nude girls floated around the podium wall, chanting songs and throwing favours into the stands.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor and philosopher, remarked: "I wouldn't mind the games being brutal and degrading if only they weren't so damned monotonous."

Although the Romans devoted an enormous amount of ingenuity to ringing the variations, there is no doubt that Marcus was right. But the mob had developed a morbid taste for the spectacles which had to be gratified. Nietzsche believes that the great driving power which had made the Romans masters of the world had to be given a vent. With no worlds left to conquer, their force was dissipated in watching these holocausts.

So I'll only touch on some of the high points of the re­maining four days of the games. A walled city was constructed overnight in the arena and besieged the next morning by legionnaires with battering rams, catapults and burning arrows. The city was defended by Persian troops. The Romans advanced under cover of their interlocked shields, while the Persians threw down boulders, boiling oil and beams on the "testudo", or tortoise, as the formation was called. Under shelter of the testudo, other legionnaires rushed the wall with a battering ram, its head a carved ram's head made of bronze. Movable towers were brought up on rollers, and drawbridges dropped from their tops over which the troops attacked. From other levels of the towers, catapults threw stones and clusters of javelins against the defenders. The legionnaires captured the city, but only after heavy losses.

Afterwards, there were fights with single-stick and quarter-staffs, the Paegniarii fought with their bullwhips, protecting themselves with their wooden shields, and the Postulati fought with darts. To keep the crowd amused during the noon hour, women were tied to bulls and dragged to death and little boys assaulted by men dressed as satyrs. A confessed Christian named Antipas was put in a bronze figure of a bull and a fire lighted under the image. The man's screams came out of the bull's open mouth as though the animal were bel­lowing. Chimpanzees were made drunk on wine and then encouraged to rape girls tied to stakes. When these mansized apes were first discovered in Africa, the Romans believed that they were genuine satyrs, the mythological beings who were half man and half goat. There were also man-sized apes called tityrus with round faces, reddish colour and whiskers. Pictures of them appear on vases, and they were apparently orang-outangs, imported from Indonesia. As far as I know, the Romans never exhibited gorillas, although these biggest of all apes were known to the Phoenicians, who gave them their present name which means "hairy savage."

There were also amusing touches, or what the Romans considered amusing. A jeweller who had sold some fake stones was sentenced to the arena. The wretched man was driven into the arena and a lion's cage rolled out before him. While the jeweller fell on his knees and prayed for mercy, the door of the cage was pulled back—and out walked a chicken. The jeweller fainted from shock while the emperor had the heralds announce: "As the man practised deceit, he has now had it practised on him." The jeweller was allowed to leave the arena alive. (This actually happened during the reign of the Emperor Gallienus in 250 a.d.)

The Romans had a robust sense of humour. At the time of Caligula, a gladiator had his right arm cut off so he was helpless. The crowd considered this uproariously funny. Another gladiator, named Bassus, strolled around the arena defending himself with a golden chamber-pot. But at least one trick played by Caligula would seem to us today, if not funny, at least a grim form of poetic justice.

There was a group of people who used to wait under the stands by the passageway along which condemned prisoners were led to the arena. These people were degenerates of the most revolting type. They would follow the prisoners, pawing spitting and mauling them while recounting the tortures they would soon face. The sight of the cringing wretches acted as a sexual stimulant to them. (Ilsa Koch, the wife of the German supervisor at Buchenwald, was a pervert of this same sort. She used to fondle the condemned prisoners being taken to the gas chamber as they were led past her.)

These perverts were a great nuisance to the guards in charge of the prisoners, and strict orders were given to keep them away from under the stands, but somehow they always managed to bribe or force their way in. In their efforts to enjoy the suffering of the prisoners to the last moment, they crowded into the passageways that led to the podium and sometimes even onto the podium itself. On one occasion, Caligula gave orders for the guards not to drive them away. Delighted, the sadists flung themselves on a batch of prisoners headed to the arena, kicking and punching them as the cap­tives struggled along. These degenerates became so absorbed in their sport that they didn't notice where they were going. Suddenly they heard a gate slammed behind them and found themselves in the arena with the condemned prisoners! The perverts ran wildly up and down before the podium wall, screaming that they were Roman citizens and that a terrible mistake had been made. After enjoying their antics for a while, Caligula ordered the wild beasts to be loosed and the perverts died with the others.

Not all the acts put on dealt with blood and sex, although unquestionably these became the main attractions. The Roman shows went through somewhat the same evolution as did burlesque in America. Originally, burlesque shows were a rough-and-ready sort of vaudeville featuring dancers, novelty routines, comedians and, of course, plenty of pretty girls although the girls were only a background to the feature acts. As the tastes of the audiences grew more crude, the girls became strippers and the whole show revolved around them. Burlesque, which had produced such great comedians as W. C. Fields, Fanny Brice, and Bert Lahr, finally featured comedians who did nothing but tell dirty jokes and only came on to give the girls a chance to change their G-strings. How­ever, to break up the steady series of strip routines, there always had to be an occasional singer, an occasional vaudeville turn, a few dance teams, and so on.

In much the same way, the Roman mob had to be given some kind of break between the gladiatorial combats and the wholesale slaughter of animals by the venatores. These "fill-ins" might be ballet dancing, litde skits like our "black-outs," or exhibitions of trained animals. Apuleius describes one of the dances:

"A number of beautiful girls and boys in costume gave a Greek Pyrrhic dance. Lines of dancers wove in and out of circles, sometimes all joining hands and dancing sideways and then separating into four wedge-shaped groups with the base of the triangles making a hollow square. Then the boys and girls would suddenly separate and dance opposite each other."

The skits given in the arena were typical bedroom farces which have remained unchanged for two thousand years. A man and a woman would be in bed. There's a loud knocking. "By gracious Vesta, it's my husband!" the woman screams. The man dives under the bed but the new arrival is only another of the woman's lovers. They get in bed and there's another knock. That man also dives under the bed and so on until the husband really does arrive. Then after some byplay, one of the lovers crowns him with a chamber-pot and everyone runs out of the arena.

The trained animal acts must have been very remarkable. The Romans had an unlimited number of animals available for the games, and the bestiarii could select only those indi­vidual animals which showed promise—a long cry from today when a lion tamer, for example, has to take virtually any animal he can buy, borrow or beg. Also, the Romans had unlimited time and plenty of cheap labour for cageboys, train­er's helpers, and so on. They taught elephants to walk a tightrope, horses to dance on their hind legs and bears to pull chariots while another bear acted as driver. They also had trained ducks and geese as well as performing monkeys. The Thessalians had "bulls as well trained as chariot horses" which would lie down, ride in chariots or right each other on command. All these feats modern trainers can duplicate, but the Romans also taught lions to retrieve hares and bring them to their master's feet uninjured, after first having them kill bulls to prove their ferocity. They also staged special hunts: trained cheetahs (the African hunting leopard) coursing ante­lope, and caracals (African lynx) catching rabbits and par­tridges.

The Romans also exhibited unicorns. These animals were really oryx antelopes from Africa but the bestiarii would take a young oryx and bind his horns together as though grafting twigs. The soft young horns would grow together, producing

one straight horn which was a far better weapon against other animals in the arena. The legend of the unicorn probably originated from this custom although some students believs that the original unicorn was the one-horned rhinoceros of India.

Individual fights were often staged between animals, and some of the animals became as well known as the famouj gladiators. Statius wrote a beautiful ode to a lion who was killed by a younger opponent in the arena at the time of Domitian:

"Poor fellow, what good has it done you to learn to obey a master weaker than yourself, to learn to leave and re-enter your cage on command, to retrieve your quarry for him and even let him put his hand between your jaws? Once you were the terror of the arena and all the other lions shrank back when you marched past. You died fighting, as bravely as any soldier, and even when you knew that you'd received your death wound, you waited with open jaws for the enemy to finish you off.

"Yet know that the people and the senate mourn for you as though you were a famous gladiator and among thousands of other beasts gathered from Scythia to the banks of the Rhine, Cesar's face only fell when you died although it was nothing but another lion lost"

There are accounts of trained lions being used to pull chariots for the editor of the games, and also several cases when trained lions saved their bestiarii masters from wild animals. Then, of course, there's the famous story of Androcles and the lion. Androcles was a Greek slave who escaped from his master and while wandering around the desert, met a lion with a thorn in his foot. Androcles pulled out the thorn and the lion never forgot the kind deed. Later, the lion was captured and shipped to the arena and so was Androcles. The starved lion was turned loose in the arena to devour the escaped slave but the lion refused to harm the man who had befriended him. A leopard was turned loose to do the job and the lion killed the leopard to defend his pal. The crowd demanded that both Androcles and the lion be freed. Afterwards, Androcles made a living by exhibiting the lion in taverns. Gellius and Aelian both swear to the truth of this story (it happened during the reign of Claudius) so I'll believe it. Ordinarily, I'd have my doubts. Anyhow, it's one of the best authenticated legends in history.

What happened to Carpophorus? I don't know so I'll invent an ending suitable for this strange man.

A wealthy noblewoman asked Carpophorus to bring one of his trained jackasses to her room at night, promising him a fabulous sum of money. Carpophorus naturally complied. The lady had made elaborate preparations for the event; four eunuchs had placed a feather bed on the floor, covered with Tyrian purple cloth embroidered in gold, and had arranged soft pillows at one end. The lady instructed Carpophorus to lead the jackass to the bed, get him to lie down, and then with her own hands rubbed him with oil of balsam. When the preparations were complete, Carpophorus was ordered to leave the room and return the next morning. This perfor­mance is described in great detail by Apuleius in "The Golden Ass."

The lady demanded the jackass's services so often that Carpophorus was afraid that she might kill herself, but after a few weeks his only concern was that she might totally exhaust the valuable animal. Still, he made such a fortune from the business that he was able to purchase a genuine unicorn's horn. Of course, Carpophorus knew all about the oryx-uni­corns used in the arena, but this horn was different. It was pure ivory and over seven feet long. There were only a few of these horns in Rome and they were enormously valuable because if poisoned wine were served in a cup made of a unicorn's horn, the poison would bubble and betray its presence. Carpophorus suspected that these horns were faked in some way, but after carefully examining his purchase he became convinced that it was real ivory and did not come from any known animal. The bestiarius' ambition was to find a unicorn and exhibit it in the arena.

Unicorns were supposed to be tropical animals, but Carpo­phorus discovered that these horns were imported from the Baltic. This, he decided, explained why the Roman animal catchers in Asia and Africa had never gotten any unicorns. He managed to scrape up acquaintance with the crew of a Viking ship that had come to Ostia to trade and do a little piracy on the side during the voyage home. The Vikings had some broken pieces of unicorn horns with them and Carpophorus was able to get one member of the crew drunk at Chilo's tavern. The sailor told him that the horn came from a great fish which fishermen occasionally caught in their nets. The Vikings called it a narwhal. The fish might be called a sea unicorn for it had one long horn growing from the tip of its nose.

Carpophorus didn't swallow this yarn. The horn was ivory and fish didn't grow ivory. Still, he thought that unicorns might sometimes swim rivers and be caught in nets so that was how the legend started. He travelled to the Baltic with a "negotiator ursorum," a bear-catcher, but was unable to get any unicorns. But he got something almost as valuable— three great white bears unlike any he had ever seen before. These bears came in on icebergs near Ultima Thule, the last outpost of land to the north. Today we call it Iceland.

Carpophorus had the crazy idea that these bears must come from some great land lying to the west, for surely they could not spend all their lives on the floating icebergs. On his way back with the bears, he advanced this theory to a young centurion who was in charge of one of the frontier forts in Scotland built to keep the Picts and Scots from raiding down into Roman Britain.

"There is no land to the west," the centurion told him confidently.

"How do you know?" the bestiarius demanded.

"Because if there were, this damn government would have us legionnaires over there policing the place," said the centurion downing a cup of strong wine.

The bears made a great hit in the arena. The Roman writer Calpurnius describes how the arena was flooded and the bears dove into the water and fought seals. (Polar bears were exhibited in the arena, but at what period is uncertain.) But when the time came for the next act, the bears couldn't be moved. They were still eating the seals, and polar bears are mean animals to handle at the best of times.

The emperor motioned to the archers to kill the beasts for the shows ran on a strict time schedule. Carpophorus refused to see his precious bears killed. He plunged into the knee-deep water, and tried to drive out the bears with his flail. Hampered by the water, he could not avoid the animals' angry rushes. So he died, as did most of his profession, under the teeth and claws of his savage wards. The Romans never realized that they held in their hands the clue to the discovery of a great new world.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

You may wonder where the Romans got all the animals they used in the games. You'll wonder more after reading a few statistics. Trajan gave one set of games that lasted 122 days during which eleven thousand people and ten thousand animals were killed. Titus had five thousand wild animals and four thousand domestic animals killed during the one hundred-day show to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum. In 249 a.d., Philip celebrated the one thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome by giving games in which the following were killed: one thousand pairs of gladiators, thirty-two elephants, ten tigers, sixty lions, thirty leopards, ten hyenas, ten giraffes, twenty wild asses, forty wild horses, ten zebras, six hippos and one rhino (Rome and the Romans, by Showerman).

Statistics in themselves don't mean too much so let's take some specific examples. The Emperor Commodus killed five hippopotami himself one day in the arena, shooting arrows from the royal box. Hippos were fairly common in the arena as this and other accounts show. After the Roman Empire fell, the next hippo to reach Europe was in 1850. A whole army division had to be used to capture the animal. Getting the hippo from the White Nile to Cairo took five months. The hippo spent the winter in Cairo and then went on to England in a tank containing four hundred gallons of water to keep it cool. Yet the Romans imported hippos wholesale for their games; in fact they actually exterminated the hippos in the Egyptian Nile. The Romans imported both the African and the Indian rhinoceros, and even the most ignorant members of the crowd could distinguish between the two beasts readily. Mosaics showing the capture of an Indian rhino have recently been uncovered in Sicily. The next Indian rhino to reach Europe was in 1515. Today, there are only six of them in captivity.

Whole territories were denuded of wild animals to supply the arena. The early Christian fathers could only find one good thing to say about the bloody spectacles—the demand for animals cleared entire districts of dangerous predators and opened them to farming. Several species were either exterminated or so reduced in numbers that they later became extinct: the European lion, the aurochs, the Libyian elephant and possibly the African bear. There are no bears in Africa

today and most scientists believe that there never were any, but the Romans did get a "bear" from East Africa and Nubia. What was it?

We don't know, but curiously in Kenya today there is a persistent legend of a "Nandi bear,'' supposedly a very large and ferocious bear which lives in the Aberdare Mountains. It occasionally attacks natives and has been seen by a few white people although no specimen had ever been brought in. Recently, the site of a Roman "trapping station" has been found in this locality. Perhaps the Romans' "African bear" still exists.

Collecting and shipping these thousands of animals was an enormous industry. Wild animals were the most valuable gift a barbarian monarch could make to his Roman overlords, and even Roman governors had to collect animals. There is an interesting and amusing series of letters between Cicero, a newly appointed governor of a province in Asia Minor, and Cselius Rufus, who was running for the office of aedile in Rome. Rufus wanted leopards for the games he was giving. Cicero was busy trying to administer his province and wasn't interested in catching leopards. Even before poor Cicero got to his province, he got a letter from Rufus: "Dear Cicero: please try to get me some good leopards . . . ten will do for a start. Tell your natives to hurry." When no leopards arrived, Rufus wrote: "My dear friend Cicero: In nearly all my letters I've mentioned the subject of leopards to you. It would be a terrible disgrace if, after Patiscus (a local Roman businessman in the same area) has sent me ten, you can't send me any more. I have those ten and ten more from Africa. If I don't hear from you, I'll have to make arrangements elsewhere." Later: "If I hadn't got some African animals from Curio, I wouldn't be able to put on a show at all. If you don't send me some leopards, don't expect any patronage from me."

Cicero wrote to a friend: "Another letter from Rufus . . . all he talks about is leopards." Then Rufus gave his games and got elected to the aedileship. Right away Cicero wrote him: "Dear, dear Rufus: I can't tell you how sorry I am about the leopards. I've put all the professional hunters to work, but there seems to be the most remarkable scarcity of wild beasts at this time of the year. But don't worry, I have everyone working on it and anything we get will be for you and no one else "

Rufus had a right to be annoyed. Sulla, who became dicta­tor, freely admitted that the people had originally voted him into office only because he had a tie-in with Bocchus, an African monarch, and could get plenty of animals for the games. In search of animals, the Roman trappers went to Norway, where they brought back moose and elk; to Burma, for rhino, cobra and elephants; and to Lake Victoria in the heart of Africa. As today, Africa was the great trapping ground for wild animals. The Romans even exhibited African porcupines in the arena; naked boys had to catch them with their bare hands. Plautus, a Roman humorist, wrote: "By the gods, next they'll be giving exhibitions of trained African mice."

From various sources, let's create the character Fulcinius, a professional animal trapper whose territory was Africa. We can suppose that Fulcinius was a half-caste, the son of a Roman legionnaire stationed in Algeria, by a Negro mother. As today, half-castes were not popular with either race, and Fulcinius grew up a lonely boy, considering himself superior to his mother's people but knowing that he would never be accepted by Romans. Roman writers describe such a man as a "savage among savages, a shy, sullen man who hated society and was only happy in the jungle."

Fom his mother's people, Fulcinius learned the tricks of animal catching, which have remained unchanged to the present day. He learned how to dig a pit, surround it with a high wooden fence, and tether a young calf in the pit. When a lion heard the kid bleating, he would jump over the fence, fall into the pit and be caught. He learned how to direct natives to drive heards of antelope into rivers where they could be lassoed by men in boats, or herded down ravines covered with slippery rawhides so the animals would lose their footing and could be hogtied by waiting men. He organized hundreds of beaters to move in from all sides through a stretch of jungle, driving the animals into a smaller and smaller space. At last, Numidian spearmen with their great oval shields formed a wall around the captives and held them long enough so men with lassos and nets could complete the capture. Apparendy even lions were caught in this manner. There's a picture of it in the Roman villa at Bona, Algeria.

The recently uncovered villa near the village of Armerina, Sicily, contains frescos—some of them sixty-six yards long— showing in great detail how animals were captured and crated for shipment. The villa is thought to have been the summer home of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maximianus who ruled about 300 a.d. That the emperor should have de­voted so much space to pictures of capturing animals shows how vital this profession was to the Romans.

In one mosaic, mounted men are shown driving stags into a circle of nets, one stag having already been caught by his antlers. Another shows men loading elephants onto a galley while others drag an unwilling rhino calf toward the gang­plank as trained dogs snap at the animal from the rear. Still others show a Roman animal catcher with a huge shield pointing to a lion who is eating an oryx he has just killed. The animal catcher is directing his Moorish assistants how to sur­round and net the animal. One mosaic shows a cart pulled by oxen with native drivers and on the cart is a big wooden shipping crate containing a lion or a leopard. An animal catcher walks beside the crate, steadying it with his hand. On top of the crate is a funnel-like arrangement which is often shown in these pictures. Unless it was used for pouring water into the cage, I can't imagine its purpose. A mural shows men carrying cranes onto a ship and two men are wrestling a hartebeest onboard. Others are carrying up the gangplank wild boars wrapped in nets and suspended from poles.

Fulcinius must have done all these things and many more too. He must have caught elephants by driving them into box canyons and, as he probably didn't have enough trained elephants to take them out, starved them into submission by giving them only enough barley water to keep them alive. He also hired Numidians to crawl among a herd and hamstring the mothers with their spears so the young could be captured. He caught chimpanzees and baboons by putting out bowls of wine and then picking up the animals after they were drunk. To catch pythons, he prepared a long bag made of rushes which he put near the snake. The snake was then driven to­ward the bag and dunking it a hole, would crawl inside. Then the cords closing the mouth of the bag were closed. When a "bear" (whatever the African bear was) was found in its den, nets were hung on the outside and the bear driven out with trumpet peals and yells. Nooses were set in game trails and animals driven into them. Along the sides of the trails, coloured streamers were hung from lines so that the animals, alarmed by the strange objects, would stay on the trails and not bolt off into the bush.

Organizing these hunts must have been a tremendous under­taking. The catchers could demand that legionnaires stationed in their area help with the drives and the commanders had to co-operate, for getting the animals was crucial to the politicians in Rome. The whole civilian population could be drafted for this work and, as some of Cicero's angry letters show, this often crippled the local economy for many of these drives lasted for weeks.

As with all animal collectors, Fulcinius' main trouble was not in getting the animals but in shipping them. The animals had to be taken by ox cart to the coast or floated down rivers on rafts. This journey could take months. Fulcinius established way stations along the route where the animals could be released in large enclosures for periods of rest and exercise. According to Roman law, the villagers were forced to provide food for the animals, but collecting the food often proved so difficult that Fulcinius had to appeal to the local Roman garrison for help. If there was no garrison, he used his native mercenary spearmen who travelled with the animal caravans. These men were merciless. On one occasion they dug up corpses in a local cemetery and fed them to the animals. Fulcinius got frequent complaints from Rome but probably his in­variable answer was: "Do you want the animals or don't you?" However, the situation got so bad that an imperial order had to be passed prohibiting animals being kept more than a week in any one resting station.

Even after the animals had been loaded on ships, the voyage to Ostia, the port of Rome, was a long and dangerous affair. "The sailors were afraid of their own cargo," wrote Claudian. The trip up the Red Sea was particularly treacherous because of the reefs and shoals. To make matters worse, the voyage had to be made at night and the ships tied up during the day to spare the animals from the heat of the sun.

As far as Fulcinius was concerned, a human life meant nothing compared to the successful shipment of the animals. Once when he was unloading cages on the docks at Ostia, a famous sculptor named Pasiteles set up his table on the dock and began making models of the lions. Fulcinius told the man to get out but Pasiteles refused. A few minutes later, a cage containing a leopard was smashed during the unloading and the animal nearly killed the sculptor. Fulcinius' only reaction was a blind fury at the sculptor for getting in the way. (This incident did happen although I don't know the name of the animal collector.)

It's rather interesting that some two thousand years later another animal collector made a great reputation for himself by capturing and importing animals under much the same conditions as did Fulcinius, supposedly for zoos, but actually so fights could be staged between the animals in corrals and pits for Hollywood motion picture cameras. The pictures of these fights were so popular that they are still appearing in re-run theatres and on TV. If you want to know what the Roman arena must have been like, tune in on one of these programmes. I saw one showing a fight between an African lion and an Indian water buffalo supposedly taken "in the heart of the Dark Continent" Of course, nobody cares whether the pictures are faked or not. Like the Romans, all they want to see is the fight. I've also seen pictures of "native spearmen fighting man-eating lions" which were staged by order of a local governor in Africa as a tourist attraction. The lions arrived in crates and the natives got their spears and shields through a European supply house. I've heard that three men died as a result of the fight. A good, average, arena spectacle.

How did a man like Fulcinius die? Probably of blackwater or malaria fever. Or perhaps he was one of the men who died in the mud-walled Roman fort some 250 miles north of Mom­basa, the remains of which still stand. Mombasa was then the main port of East Africa and galleys waited there to be loaded with rice, sesame oil, ivory and wild animals for Italy.

The fort may well have been put there as a way station for the animal collectors. If so, the local tribes would have long learned to avoid the place; otherwise they might at any time be pressed into service to haul the cages, or their fields stripped to feed the wild cargo. So the fort would have been isolated and the sentinels have no warning of an attack.

Perhaps at dawn, a Masai war party suddenly rushed the walls, giving their terrible yodelling cries as they hurled their spears and then drew their simis (long daggers) for the close work. The fort covers some five acres and the garrison was not strong enough to hold all the walls. Fulcinius would have fought to the end, side by side with his native troops and his big Molossian hounds which he used to drive animals aboard ship and to bring quarry to bay. Probably his trappers fought with their hunting spears, while the legionnaires used their swords and shields. At the end, they were overrun. Now only a few coins, some from the time of Nero, some of the time of Antonius Pius, and one from the time of Trajan remain to show their fate. The victorious Masai left the coins on the ground, but took the valuable weapons and armour from the dead men.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Up until the second century a.d., there still remained some sense of fair play in the games. A gladiator had a chance to leave the arena alive. He could even insist that the lanista put a price on him and if he could raise the sum he was free. An animal generally had a good chance to kill his human opponent, so the contest was often fairer than a modern bullfight. There was at least a pretence that the games were still contests—bloody, brutal and cruel, but still retaining some idea of giving the contestants a sporting chance unless they were condemned criminals.

Gradually the games began to degenerate into spectacles of pointless massacre. People develop an immunity to scenes of cruelty and bloodshed and demand more and more in­genious methods to titivate their jaded interest. A favourite trick was to pit an armed man against an unarmed man. Naturally, the armed man always won. Then he was disarmed and another armed man sent out to kill him. This routine would go on all day.

Seneca, the famous philosopher, said of these exhibitions: "All previous games have been merciful, these are pure murder. The men have no defence, their bodies are open to every blow and every attack is bound to be successful. Most spectators prefer this to the regular duels of skill. They would! Protection and training only postpone death, which is what the crowd have come to see."

Exhibitions like this began to take the place of the regular gladiatorial combats. Actually, a fight between two trained and evenly matched swordsmen is about as interesting as a chess tournament. It can go on for an hour or more and there's comparatively little action until the final thrust, each man conserving his strength and feeling out his opponent with light jabs and thrusts. The early Romans were all swordsmen themselves and could appreciate the fine points of combat, but the mob wanted something faster and bloodier, much as modern sports fans want to see plenty of action in a wrestling bout whereas honest wrestling is a slow business and a man may take twenty minutes to break a difficult hold.

Also, the shows had constantly to be "bigger and better than ever." Every emperor had to outdo his predecessors. Barnum and Bailey's went through a similar period. I remem­ber a time when there were seven rings all going at once and no one had the slightest idea what was happening. By the end of the third century, there were a dozen amphitheatres in Rome, most of them in almost continuous operation. Some of the best known were the Circus Maxentius on the Via Appia, the Circus Flaminus near the Circus Maximus, the Circus of Caligula-and-Nero where St. Peter's now stands, the Circus of Hadrian, the Circus Castrense (for the Praetorian Guard) and the Circus of Sallust. There was also, of course, the Flavian Amphitheatre or Colosseum. Emperors stamped their coins with the heads of famous gladiators rather than their own images, and politicians had the number of games they gave engraved on their tombs.

What did these things cost? They finally got so expensive that the government and the aspiring politician had to share expenses to pay for a big spectacle. We only know what the government contributed toward these big games as we have only the governmental records. But it is almost impossible to translate the sums into modern currency. Today, labour costs are the principal factor in any enterprise, while in Rome all labour was done by slaves. Then, too, trying to compute the sums in modern purchasing power is very difficult. For ex­ample, King Herod of Judea gave a series of games that cost him five-hundred gold talents. Thomas H. Dyer in Pompeii (written in 1871) computes this sum as being equal roughly to Ј200,000. But Dyer wasn't thinking of modern purchasing power. Even computing Herod's five-hundred talents as being worth Ј400,000, the actual purchasing power of the money at the time was far more. This doesn't take into consideration slave labour, gifts of gladiators and animals from subject kings, and contributions from private citizens who needed to stay in with the administration.

Simply to name some figures as a rough estimate, Titus' one hundred days of games which opened the Colosseum cost nearly three million pounds, and the six days of Domitian's games described here cost about Ј12,000 a day. In 521 a.d., Justinian spent over Ј300,000 on the games to celebrate his rise to power. Yet in 51 a.d. the total cost of all games for a year had been only Ј15,000. We know that the cost became a crushing one for any politician to carry. A magistrate named Milo exclaimed: "It's cost me three inheritances to stop the mouth of the people." But the shows continued. Although originally only the emperor or some great noble was per­mitted the honour of presenting the shows, by the second cen­tury any rich man could present them to advance himself socially—just as fifty years ago many a rich man in Great Britain discovered that public philanthropy was helpful in obtaining a title. Some games were put on by rich cobblers and wealthy tailors. Still, they continued to grow in magnifi­cence. After the triumph of the Emperor Aurelian over Zeno-bia, the warrior queen of Palmyra, in 272 a.d., Aurelian entered the arena in a chariot drawn by four stags, with Zenobia chained to the wheels by golden chains. He had a guard of twenty trained elephants, and two hundred other tamed animals walked in the procession. There was a "great host" of captives, each group led by a man with a placard around his neck giving the name of the tribe. The loot was carried in ox-carts heaped high with gold and jewels or on litters borne by slaves. In the games that followed, eight hundred pairs of gladiators fought as well as ten "Amazons," women fighters from some Middle Eastern tribe.

In 281 a.d., the Emperor Probus had "large trees torn up by the roots and fixed to beams in the arena. Sand was then spread over the beams so the whole circus resembled a forest. Into the arena were sent a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand boars, one hundred lions, a hundred lion­esses, a hundred leopards, three hundred bears and numerous other animals. These were all killed in a great hunt" (Vopiscus). Later, antelope were released and members of the crowd could amuse themselves trying to catch the animals. Sometimes naked girls were turned loose and any member of the crowd could keep anything he caught. Other emperors used silk imported from China for the awning instead of wool, had the nets employed to keep the animals off the podium woven of gold cords, plated the marble colonnades with gold and put mosaics of precious stones on the tier walls.

Sadism, instead of being incidental to the games, became the order of the day. Claudius used to order a wounded gladi­ator's helmet removed so he could watch the expression on the man's face while his throat was being cut. Girls were raped by men wearing the skins of wild beasts. Men were tied to rotting corpses and left to die. Children were suspended by their legs from the top of high poles for hyenas to pull down. So many victims were tied to stakes and then cut open that doctors used to attend the games in order to study anatomy.

Wholesale crucifixions in the arena became a major attrac­tion, and the crowd would lay bets on who would be the first to die. As with every betting sport, a lot of time and trouble was devoted to fixing the business. By bribing an attendant, you could arrange to have a certain victim die almost imme­diately, last an hour, or live all day. If the spikes were driven in so as to cut an artery, the man would die in a few minutes. If driven so as to break the bones only, the man would live several hours. Occasionally, though, a victim would cross you up. He might deliberately pull at the spikes to make himself bleed to death or even beat his brains out against the upright. You could never be sure.

As far as being exhibitions of skill or courage, the games became a farce. Of course, there had always been scandals. Back in 60 a.d., a young charioteer had gone flying out of the chariot when his team made their usual jackrabbit start from the stalls. He was still given first prize. Still, the fact that he was the Emperor Nero might have had something to do with it. There was also the time when the Emperor Caligula had decided to auction off his victorious gladiators to a group of nobles. One man fell asleep and Caligula insisted on taking his nods for bids. When the man woke up, he found that he owned thirteen gladiators costing him nine million sesterces. However, generally people frowned on that sort of thing. Yet in 265 a.d., the Emperor Gallienus presented a wreath to a bullfighter who had missed the bull ten times. When the mob protested, the emperor explained via heralds, "It's not easy to miss as big an animal as a bull ten times running." Augus­tus had had to pass laws forbidding knights and senators from becoming gladiators, so eager were these men to show their valour in the arena. By the third century, no such laws were necessary. No one, patrician or plebeian, had any desire to climb into that arena.

For fifteen hundred years historians and, lately, psycholo­gists have wondered why these games, which not only cor­rupted but bankrupted the greatest empire of all time, were such an obsession with the Roman mob. Orgies of death and suffering are forbidden today, but we know they exert a strong fascination for most of us. Crowds gather around an auto­mobile accident, go to bullfights, and block traffic if there's someone on a high ledge threatening to commit suicide. Even the early Christians, who were themselves often sufferers in the arena, felt this intoxication with torture. St. Augustine tells of a young boy, Alypius, who was studying to be a monk. Some friends dragged him off to the arena against his will. Alypius sat with eyes closed and his fingers in his ears until an especially loud shout made him look. Two minutes later, he was out on his feet yelling, "Give him the sword! Cut his guts out!" He became an habituй of the games and gave up all thoughts of joining the church. St. Hilarion was such a devotee of the games that he could not stay away from them. He finally had to flee to the African desert where there were no circuses. Even so, in his dreams charioteers used to drive him like a horse and gladiators fight duels at the foot of his bed.

There is a definite connection between cruelty and sex, especially among weak, ineffectual people. Ovid remarked humorously, "Girls, if you can get a man to play with you while watching the games, he's yours." As the mob gradually lost all interest in finding work, serving in the legions or taking any civic responsibility, the games became increasingly more brutal and lewd. Finally they were simply excuses for sadistic debauches.

The more intelligent Romans were perfectly conscious of this deadly trend but they were helpless to prevent it. Augus­tus tried to limit the games to two a year. He found it impos­sible. Marcus Aurelius, who defined the games as an "expen­sive bore," passed a law that the gladiators had to fight with blunted weapons. The popular opposition was such that he not only had to rescind the order but even ended by increasing the number of games from 87 to 230 a year. His annual bill for gladiators alone was about a million pounds. Vespasian, who was famous for being a tightwad and swore that he was going to put an end to this game nonsense, finished by building the Colosseum.

Curiously, the Roman philosophers were almost unanimous in their endorsement of the games. Cicero said, "It does the people good to see that even slaves can fight bravely. If a mere slave can show such courage, what then can a Roman do? Besides, the games harden a warrior people to sights of carnage and prepares them for battle." Tacitus couldn't understand why Tiberius didn't like the fights and quotes the emperor's habit of turning away from scenes of slaughter as a sign of weakness in his character. Pliny speaks of the games appro­vingly and so do many other serious thinkers.

Almost the only Roman philosopher who came out openly against the games was Seneca, who lived at the time of Nero. He records a conversation he had with a spectator at a show.

"But," my neighbour says to me, "that man whom you pity was a highway robber."

"Very well, then hang him, but why nail him to a cross and set wild beasts on him?"

"But he killed a man."

"Let him be condemned to death in his turn. He deserves it. But you, what have you done that you should be condemned to watch such a spectacle?"

Seneca was cordially disliked and finally committed suicide by order of Nero.

Originally only a few Criminals of the worst type were killed in the arena, but when it became obvious that the mob regarded these killings as the main attraction, holocausts of victims were arranged. Finding enough prisoners for these spectacles became increasingly difficult. Probably the persecution of the Christians eventually became only another way of getting fresh fodder for the arena.

The first of the Christian persecutions were under Nero. According to Roman historians, Nero dreamed of turning Rome from a rabbit warren of twisting streets and wooden slums into a city of marble. He also wanted to clear away a large section in the centre of the city where he could build a palace worthy of him—"The Golden House." Later, the Colo­sseum was built on the site of the Golden House as an apology to the people. Nero's agents fired the city, but popular resent­ment forced the emperor to find a scapegoat. He settled on the despised and suspected sect called Christians.

Tacitus tells us: "Nero had all admitted Christians seized. These informed on others who were also arrested, not so much for setting fire to the city as for their hatred of mankind.

Everything was done to make their deaths humiliating. They were dressed in animal skins and torn to pieces by dogs, crucified, or covered with pitch and used as torches to light the arena after dark. Although as Christians they deserved punishment, still people felt that they were being punished to satisfy the emperor's love of cruelty and not for the good of the nation."

Suetonius supplies some other details. Nero used to dress himself up as a lion or a leopard and attack the private parts of men and women tied to stakes in the arena. Afterwards, one of his freemen named Doryphorus would enter the arena dressed as a venador and pretend to kill the emperor. It was probably exhibitions like this that caused St. John to speak of the arena as the "mother of fornication . . . the church of sacred sanguinary." Nero also spent large sums trying to locate a legendary Egyptian ogre who was supposed to kill and eat people. Nero wanted to exhibit him in the arena. The ogre never turned up.

Some of the most terrible persecutions of the Christians took place under Marcus Aurelius in 166 a.d. Marcus Aurelius was one of the most enlightened emperors Rome ever had, but he didn't like Christians. As pacifists, Christians refused to serve in the legions at a critical period when the barbarian hordes were breaching the defences on all sides, they de­nounced wealth which made the Romans regard them as dangerous radicals, and they refused to sacrifice to the em­peror's genius—roughly equivalent today to refusing to salute the flag or repeat the oath of allegiance. Scratched on a wall in Rome there is a crude drawing showing a donkey nailed to a cross with the legend below: "All Christians are donkeys." Marcus Aurelius decided to stamp out this vicious cult and went about it systematically.

Records by the early church fathers tell us that Christians in the arena had red-hot plates of iron strapped to their bodies, their flesh was torn from their bones with hot pincers, they were chained in iron seats over fires, and roasted on spits. Eusebius tells of the death of Blandina, one of these martyrs. She was first forced to watch the death of her friends in the arena. When that didn't break her resolve, she was made to run the gauntlet between two lines of men armed with whips and iron bars. She was then hung from a pole as bait for starved hyenas and wolves. Half-dead, she was cut down and forced to watch her little brother flogged, burned over a fire and finally flung to wild beasts—constantly told that if she would recant, the child's life would be spared. As Blandina still stood firm, she was finally put in a net and swung from the scaffolding of the arena for wild bulls to gore.

We have an eye witness account of these martyrdoms left us by two brothers, Felix and Verus Macarius. The events described took place on October ii, 290 a.d. under the Emperor Maximus.

"The stadium was crowded; Maximus also attended. A number of wild beasts being let loose, many criminals were devoured. We Christians in the stands kept ourselves con­cealed and were awaiting with great fear to see the martyrs brought forth. The martyrs were Tharacus, Probus, and Andronicus. They were carried by other condemned people, having been tortured so they could not walk. They looked so pitiful that we wept, hiding our faces so the crowd would not notice. They were tossed like refuse on the sand. Many people murmured and Maximus shouted to the soldiers, 'Note those people. They'll be down with those Christians if they're so fond of them.'

"The wild beasts were let loose, especially a very frightful bear; then a lioness. Both roared fearfully at each other but did not attack the martyrs, much less devour them. The Master of the Games became enraged and commanded the spearmen to kill them. The bear was pierced through, but the lioness made her escape through a door left open by some of the bestiarii who ran away in terror. Then Maximus com­manded the Master of the Games to let the gladiators kill the Christians and afterwards fight to the death among them­selves. When this tragedy was over, Maximus before he left the podium ordered ten soldiers to mutilate both the martyrs and the gladiators so the Christians couldn't tell them apart"

It was usual for Christians to bribe the arena slaves for the bodies of the martyrs so that they could be given decent burial.

How many Christians were martyred we have no idea. Taci­tus only says that Nero "killed a great multitude of Christians." However, later we have a few statistics. During the persecu­tions under Maximus, nineteen hundred Christians were martyred in Sicily alone. Diocletian killed seventeen thousand in one month. Eusebius says that during one of the persecu­tions, ten thousand men (not counting women and children) were killed in Egypt. The executioners blunted their swords and had to work in relays. Of course, compared to Hitler, who killed 2,500,000 people in concentration camps within a few years, this is pretty small potatoes, but the Romans did their best.

Very few of the Christians recanted, although an altar with a fire burning on it was generally kept in the arena for their convenience. All a prisoner had to do was scatter a pinch of incense on the flame and he was given a Certificate of Sacri­fice and turned free. It was also carefully explained to him that he was not worshipping the emperor; merely acknowledg­ing the divine character of the emperor as head of the Roman state. Still, almost no Christians availed themselves of the chance to escape. Naturally, there were a few exceptions. Polycarp tells of one man in a provincial amphitheatre who held out until actually in the arena. Then he collapsed and begged to be allowed to sacrifice. The editor refused and demanded that the animals be released. The only animal was a lion who had been starved to make him savage. But the bestiarius had overdone it, and when the lion was released, the poor brute just lay down and died. The martyr had to be burned at the stake.

By the end of the fourth century, the games had fallen into the hands of promoters and the spirit of competition had vir­tually disappeared. The charioteers had organized a power­ful union and now demanded that a man had to be allowed a certain number of wins. A charioteer might race for the Blues in one race and for the Greens in the next. He did not know what horses he would have before he climbed into the chariot—a far cry from Diocles and his perfectly trained teams. The gladiator was finished as a highly trained profes­sional. Obtaining sufficient wild animals for the games had become almost impossible; Europe, north Africa and Asia Minor had been swept bare. The Romans were even running out of Christians, Jews and criminals for the spectacles.

A series of letters left by a senator named Quintus Aurelius Symmachus shows what a problem giving a series of games had become. Symmachus wanted to put on a week's games in honour of his son who had just been made an officer in the swagger Praetorian Guard and would run for praetor in 401 a.d. Symmachus started preparing for the games two years ahead of time.

Symmachus, in addition to being a senator, was a very wealthy man. He owned three palaces and had held nearly every high office in the state. Being a devout man, Sym­machus was greatly shocked at the growth of this new cult called Christianity, and he determined to put on some real old-fashioned games to impress the people with scenes of skill and courage in order to disgust them with the namby-pamby doctrines of the new religion. The Master of the Games tried to talk the senator out of putting on anything but the usual run of stuff then current, but Symmachus in­sisted that he wanted the real thing.

Poor Symmachus ran into nothing but headaches. To get really well-trained chariot horses, Symmachus had to import them from Spain. The nags used in Rome by then were only good enough to go around the track in a fixed race and stage a few smash-ups for the crowd. Eleven out of the sixteen horses Symmachus imported died before they reached the arena from bad handling on the voyage. The four left were so much better than the ordinary chariot horses that the race would have been a walk-away so the team had to be broken up. As a result, their charioteer quit. Four other charioteers were collected and more horses imported. Then it was discov­ered that the best charioteer was a Christian. As the whole point of the show was to prove that the weak Christians couldn't compete with the manly adherents of the old Roman religion, he had to be fired. But as he was a member of the union; the union called a strike. In a rage, Symmachus threat­ened to stage a race using dogs instead of horses because, as he said, the regular chariot horses were nothing but dogs anyhow. This caused a riot in which the Prajtorian Guard had to be called out.

Meanwhile, Symmachus was trying hard to get wild animals for the games. He wrote to animal collectors, to friends in distant provinces, to officials, pointing out that they should co-operate in this great crusade to put on some really good shows to restore national morale. He spent months trying to unscramble the red tape. As professional collectors were now scarce, he had to hire his own men. This meant that he had to get them trapping licences, as lions and elephants could only be trapped by special permission of the emperor. He had to get special permission to give the shows in the Colosseum. The customs officials charged him an import tax on the animals although, as Symmachus explained in letter after letter, this tax was meant only to apply to pro­fessional dealers who retailed their animals after arrival.

In spite of all this trouble, Symmachus couldn't get any lions, tigers, elephants or even antelope (he wanted topi and impala especially). All that arrived were some "weak and starving bear cubs" and a few crocodiles. The crocs hadn't eaten for fifty days and most of them had to be killed before the shows. Apparently the only animals that arrived in fit condition were some Irish wolf-hounds.

Symmachus had even more trouble getting gladiators. He managed to purchase twenty-nine Saxon prisoners, supposed to be terrific fighters, but the prisoners never got out of gladiatorial school. They strangled each other until there was only one man left—and he beat his brains out against the wall.

What sort of games Symmachus finally put on, I don't know. We only have his correspondence trying to get the acts lined up. We do know that the seven days' games cost him Ј148,000, and I'll bet his son never did get elected praetor.

By the beginning of the fifth century, Rome found herself fighting for her life against the barbarian hordes along her frontiers. With the tremendous cost of the continual wars, it became increasingly difficult to pay for the games. Yet they continued, always catering more and more to the mob. The emperors abandoned the royal box as being undemocratic and sat with the crowd. The patricians made a great point of eating the food thrown to the mob, instead of leaving the amphitheatre for lunch or having slaves serve their own repast.

The chariot races were a joke. People threw wine jars in front of the horses' feet and women encouraged their children to dart under the opposing teams hoping to make their team win. If the child was trampled, the indignant parents sued the racing stables for reckless driving. The crowd still con­tinued to call themselves Blues, Greens, and so on, even though they no longer knew anything about the horses or the men. A somewhat similar trend has occurred in modern big league baseball. Once every man on a team was a local boy; the crowds knew each player individually and turned out to root for friends. Today, the teams are recruited from men all over the country and are sold as commodities without any regard for community feelings. Pliny's remark about the char­iot factions would apply today: "The people know only the colour." Yet with no political parties and no feeling of belonging to any specific group, the people centred all their devotion on being a White or a Gold. People who were born Reds swore eternal enmity toward all other factions, supported the Reds under all circumstances, and considered a Green victory a national disaster.

With the economic and military position of the empire too hopelessly complicated for the crowd to comprehend, they turned more and more toward the only thing that they could understand—the arena. The name of a great general or a brilliant statesman meant no more to the Roman mob than the name of a great scientist does to us today. But the average Roman could tell you every detail of the last games, just as today the average man can tell you all about a movie star's marriages but has only the foggiest idea what NATO is doing or what steps are being taken to fight inflation.

For an ambitious man to get anywhere in public life, he had to establish a tie-in with the games. The Emperor Vitellius had been a groom for the Blues. As a result, he was made governor of Germany by a politician who was a Blue. After Vitellius became Emperor, he had anyone killed who booed the Blues. The Emperor Commodus went to gladiator's school and used to fight in the arena to win popular support. The Emperor Macrinus had been a professional gladiator. Even finding victims enough to be killed in the arena became a serious drain on the empire. "We are sacrificing the living to feed the dead," protested Caracalla, referring to the fact that the games were supposedly given to appease the souls of the departed. Yet the games kept on. Without them, the mob could not be controlled, and by now the entire national economy was tied up with the great spectacles. To have stopped them would have caused as serious a crisis as if our government suddenly abandoned dams, farm relief, and military spending.

Yet the end could not be postponed for ever. Rome began to be overrun by foreigners. Thousands of Gauls, Germans, and Parthians were living in the city, brought there to bolster the weakening empire. These "barbarians" had no interest in the games which, after all, required a rather special taste to appreciate. A Parthian prince left the circus in disgust, re­marking, "It's no fun seeing people killed who haven't a chance." The crowd yelled, "Burr-head! Why doncha go back to Parthia where ya belong?" but the savages gradually obtained the balance of power. After all, the emperors de­pended on these foreign auxiliaries for support and placating the Roman mob became less and less important.

The Christian church was growing in power and did every­thing possible to stop the games. In 325 a.d., Constantine tried to put an end to the games but they still continued. Then in 365 a.d., Valentinian forbade sacrificing victims to wild beasts. He was able to make bis edict stick, and that took all the fun out of the spectacles. In 399 a.d. the gladiatorial schools had to close for want of pupils.

Then in 404 a.d., a monk named Telemachus leaped into the arena and appealed to the people to stop the fights. Tele­machus was promptly stoned to death by the angry mob but his death ended the spectacles. The Emperor Honorius was so furious at Telemachus' lynching that he closed the arenas. They were never reopened. The last chariot race was held after the fall of Rome by Tolila, a Goth, in 549 a.d. He was merely curious to see what the business looked like.

Yet so deeply had the games entered into the national con­sciousness that people still considered themselves as support­ing the Red, White, Green or Blue faction—although many of these people had no idea what the colours meant. In 532 a.d., riots broke out between the Blues and the Greens that threatened to wreck what remained of the empire. The Emperor Justinian had to call out troops to restore peace, and in the fighting over thirty thousand people were killed.

The only remaining relics of these titanic spectacles are some crude pictures scratched on the walls of gladiator bar­racks, a few cracked tombstones, references in the literature of the times and, here and there, the ruins of the amphitheatres. The games followed the legionnaires as chewing gum follows American GIs, and wherever the legions were stationed there was sure to be a circus. Roman governors built stadiums as soon as they arrived in their province, confident that this was the only way to keep the population contented. Many of their letters express amazement that the Greeks, Gauls and Britons seemed more interested in having enough to eat than in watching the games.

Establishing these amphitheatres was a difficult job. The Greeks fought them to the last (Plutarch describes the games as "bloody and brutal"), but in other countries the games slowly gained a following, although they never enjoyed anything like the popularity they had in Rome. Egypt held out against them for a long time but at last had to yield— in every nation there is always a certain proportion of people who enjoy such sights. So all over the Roman world great amphitheatres appeared, hardly less magnificent than the ones in Rome itself: at Capus, Pompeii, Pozzuoli and Verona in Italy; at Aries and Nimes in France; at Seville in Spain; at Antioch in Palestine; at Alexandria in Egypt; at Silchester in Britain; at El Dien in Tunisia.

Many of these amphitheatres still remain. You can sit in the "maeniana" (stands) with a cold chicken and a bottle of wine and speculate out of which door the animals were re­leased, where the inner barrier ran, and how they got the lions out of the "cavea" (interior) into the arena. As your guess is probably as good as anyone's, it's an interesting way to spend an afternoon.

The largest amphitheatre remaining is, of course, the Colosseum. Although the prodigious structure has been used as a quarry for a thousand years and a large part of Mediaeval Rome was built with stone taken from it, much still remains. Byron wrote:

A ruin! Yet what ruin! from its mass

Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been rear'd;

Yet oft the enormous skeleton ye pass,

And marvel where the spoil could have appear'd.

You can crawl through the "enormous skeleton" with a copy of J. H. Middleton's The Remains of Ancient Rome and go nuts trying to find all the places he mentioned. You can see the huge traventine blocks used in the construction, some seven feet long, and held together with iron clamps as mere mortar couldn't carry the fantastic strain put on them. In the Middle Ages when iron was desperately needed, people dug thousands of these clamps out of the stone, a murderously laborious job. Although as late as 1756, a French archaeologist computed that there was still 17,000,000 francs worth of marble remaining in the Colosseum, almost all of it is now gone. However, you can still see many of the carved marble curule chairs used by the patricians on the podium. They're in Italian churches being used as episcopal thrones.

Next to the Colosseum, the largest of the remaining amphi­theatres is in Verona, Italy. It is 502 feet long by 401 feet wide and 98 feet high. It held about thirty thousand people and is still used for the mild Italian bullfights. The next largest remaining circus is in Nimes, France. It measures 435 by 345 feet and held about twenty thousand people. It is two stories high with 124 entrances. The Pompeian amphitheatre is comparatively small but interesting because it is so well preserved and the gladiator barracks are nearby.

In the Middle Ages these amphitheatres were regarded with superstitious awe. People living in Pola, Italy, thought the amphitheatre there must have been built by supernatural beings as no mortal man could accomplish such a task. They claimed that the stadium was a fairy palace, built in a single night. They explained the fact that the building had no roof by saying that a cock was awakened by the hammering and crew: the fairies thought it was daybreak and left without finishing the job.

Many of the amphitheatres were used as fortresses during the Middle Ages. Some of them were used as barns and crops were planted in the arenas. The farmers were astonished at how well the crops grew, not knowing that the soil was well fertilized.

The ludi, as the Romans called the games, were not, of course, games in our modern sense. Nor were they merely spectacles or shows as we understand the terms. They were a vital and integral part of Roman life and psychology. The closest modern parallel would be the Spanish bullfight which to a Latin is an emotional experience rather than a sport or an exhibition of skill. For over five hundred years the ludi continued in one form or another. Hundreds of generations of Romans were born, grew up and died under their influence. At last, they came completely to dominate the life of the average inhabitant of Rome. His one interest—almost his one cause of living—was to attend the ludi.

The growth, character, and final degeneration of the ludi closely paralleled the growth, character and degeneration of the Roman empire. In the old, simple days of the republic, the games were simply athletic contests. As Rome became a conquering power, the games became bloody, ruthless and fierce, although still retaining a conception of fair play and sportsmanship. This was the era when Augustus had to pass laws forbidden patricians from jumping into the arena and fighting it out with professional gladiators, and a young noble would challenge a victorious German prisoner to a fight to the death. When Rome finished her conquests and became merely a despotic power, the games became pointlessly cruel. Toward the end they were nothing but sadistic displays. Shortly after this period, the empire collapsed.

Any modern promoter who cared to put on a series of shows duplicating the Roman games would easily be able to fill the house. Mickey Spillane could be Master of the Games. Bullfights, cockfights, dogfights, and the Indianapolis Speed­way (our closest approach to the chariot races) are all popular. I even find it hard to believe that all boxing fans are primarily interested in the fine points of the sport rather than in seeing two men half kill each other. If they knew that one man really would be killed, they'd enjoy it all the more. The most popular programmes on TV are the Westerns showing men shooting each other. The next most popular are the gangster films. Of course, the men don't actually kill each other—if they did you couldn't get people away from their sets.

The Roman games were probably the biggest argument against "spectator sports" that can be advanced. As long as the Romans were themselves a nation of fighting men, there might have been some truth to the beliefs of Cato and Pliny that the games encouraged manly virtues. But there is a big difference between tough fighting men, appreciatively watching a struggle between equally matched opponents, and a de­praved crowd gloating over scenes of meaningless cruelty.

The same tendency can be seen today in rough sports. The spectator who hollers, "Murder the bums! Knock his teeth out! Kill him!" is usually a meek little guy in a rear seat who has just got a bawling out from his boss and had to sneak out of the house when his wife wasn't home. He wants to see somebody else get hurt ... he doesn't care who.

the end

Author's Note

So many sources were used in preparing this volume that it would be impossible to name them all. In many cases, only a single reference was taken from a book. However, some of the main works dealing with the games are listed in the Bibli­ography. Some of the sequences, especially in the description of the shows at the time of Carpophorus, are a compendium of many sources. In describing how Carpophorus trained the animals that had relations with women, I used Apuleius and also the technique employed by a Mexican gentleman I met in Tia Juana who was making 16mm. stag films on the subject.

The description of the venatores' battle with the lions and tigers is a combination of original sources, J. A. Hunter's account of Masai warriors spearing lions, and comments from Mel Koontz and Marbel Stark, both of whom are professional lion tamers. The crocodile wrestling is described by Strabo, but I added material told me by a Seminole Indian who wrestled alligators in Florida. The gladiatorial combats are all taken from contemporary accounts or from graffiti (wall drawings) in Pompeii. The bullfights are from graffiti of the fights, con­temporary descriptions, the murals in Knossus, incidents I've observed in Spanish bullfights, and suggestions made by Pete Patterson, who is a rodeo clown.

The battle between the Essedarii and the Greek Hoplites is a combination of Tacitus' description of British war chariots, Hogarth's description of the Hoplite phalanx in Philip and Alexander of Macedon, extracts from Mason's Roping, and the manner in which a British square was handled in the early nineteenth century. The elephant fights come from con­temporary sources and Capt. Fitz-Barnard, who saw war elephants in action in India.

The description of Chilo's tavern is taken from Amedeo Maiuri's Pompeii and my own notes on a wine shop there. The conversation between the men is nearly all from Petronius' Satyricon. Although my account of Carpophorus' death is completely fictitious, polar bears were seen in the arena, pos­sibly as early as Nero's reign. The Romans did believe that the narwhal's horn was that of a unicorn. The narwhal, being a mammal like a whale or porpoise, can produce ivory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms, L. Friedlander Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome,

George Jennison The Spectacles, Martial

The Remains of Ancient Rome, J. H. Middleton

Trebaid, Stattus

Historia Ecclesiastica, Eusebius

Martyr's Mirror, Thielem von Bracht

Acts of the Martyrs, P. I. Twisck

Pompeii, Thomas H. Dyer

Philip and Alexander of Macedon, David G. Hogarth

Les Gladiateurs dans l'orient Grec, Louis Robert

Roping, Bernard Mason

Fighting Sports, Capt. L. Fitz-Barnard

The Satyricon, Petronius

The Memoirs of Diocles

And the writings of Tacitus, Suetonius, Apuleius

Fiction

I, Claudius and Claudius the God, Robert Graves

Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz

Confessors of the Name, Gladys Schmitt (Mainly the martyrdom of the Christians)

Ben Hur, Lew Wallace (The famous chariot race is very accurate) The Gladiators,

Arthur Koestler (The Spartacus Rebellion)

Androcles and the Lion, Bernard Shaw (Humorous but accurate)