The World of the Gladiator

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RITUAL COMBAT:
THE EVOLUTION OF THE GLADIATOR

And human blood would be an enjoyable sight.

(Seneca, De Tranquillitate Animi)

To us, the gladiator has become a metaphor for Rome, a kind of shorthand way of saying what is generally perceived as the Roman attitude to life and death. The image of the gladiator conveys the whole sweep of casual cruelty; the cheapness of life, the sheer incomprehensibility of a civilisation apparently built on blood and suffering (1). In looking at all of this, we must be careful of imposing our own values on Rome; they do not necessarily reflect what actually goes on in our own society, and certainly have no place in one born nine centuries before Christ.

Nowadays, the idea of two armed men fighting each other to the death as an entertainment and a spectacle for a cheering crowd is held up as an affront to the civilised mind. For a couple of seconds we can sign up to that belief, before the modern equivalents to gladiatorial combat start to occur to us. Hypocrisy is an ancient vice still practised today. Living as we do in a society where the most popular forms of mass entertainment use increasingly graphic images of bloody violence and pointless cruelty, we are in no position to assert our moral superiority. So perhaps the history of gladiators, and especially their origins, can provide relevant and useful insights towards that most modern of preoccupations - the quest to 'know ourselves'. Many writers through the centuries, even to the present day, have felt drawn to speculate on the meaning of the brutality played out on the sand of the arena, and especially what it reveals of human nature.

The pathology and practice of ritualised and institutionalised violence within an organised society deserve closer scrutiny, not least because of what they tell us about the extraordinary human ability to transform something 'bad' like violent death into something 'good' such as public reassurance in time of crisis. The truth is that we are just as fascinated by the prospect of two men locked in a life and death struggle as our ancient Roman counterparts in the Colosseum were; the insatiable public appetite for celluloid gore, celebrity mayhem and graphic newsreel footage bears witness to that. The modern excuse that we are too civilised to make people fight to the death makes it sound as if there would be no spectators if such a match were actually staged, when in fact common sense tells us that tickets would fly out of the touts' hands. In fact, the very word 'fascinate', coming as it does from the Latin verb fascino, meaning 'to bewitch, enchant', and additionally, with fascinum being a phallus-shaped amulet to ward off the evil eye, as well as slang for the male member itself, gives ample indication of the kind of influence such a spectacle, whether real or simulated, has on the spectators, whatever century they happen to find themselves in. It must be better to look steadily into the face of the monster than to turn away and deny its existence.

1 Third-century AD tombstone depicting retiarius type of gladiator, showing several of his victories. Museo Nuovo Capitolino

After all, the Romans, in several hundred years and body counts running into many hundreds of thousands, had the business of bloodshed as performance down to a fine art. That cannot be airbrushed out of the picture if there is to be any sincere attempt to grasp the total reality of Rome. Political correctness has no place in the ancient world; indeed, the phrase would have made no sense to a Roman, to whom politics were not chopped up and kept in a separate box from the rest of life. To understand the gladiatorial phenomenon, we must put aside our modern perspective and sensitivities, or we will miss the whole point of all that spilt blood.

Despite our tendency to interpret the past by using the present as a template, the gladiators and their world seem to exert as strong a pull now as they did then. For a start, the audience's appetite for endless reruns of Spartacus and, more recently, Gladiator, has not abated. They supply us, however historically flawed they may be, with our own sanitised version of the heroes of the arena. However, it would be a mistake to think, just because we share a predilection for bloody spectacle, that our cultures are the same and that the parallels are obvious, although it is tempting to think that the Romans would enjoy the celluloid cruelty regularly served up to us. Over several centuries, the Western European mindset has developed into a highly analytical, demarcating tradition, where every aspect of life is identified, labelled, categorised. It is important to remember that the Romans would not understand or recognise our insistence on separating the private and public aspects of life, such as religion, politics, social interaction, emotions. For them, daily life was a complex interweaving of all of those influences and more besides, in a way that seems utterly alien to us now. The interaction of social, political and religious spheres made public life in Rome a subtle balancing act.

Gladiators were just one of many cultural expressions that Romans had at their disposal, quite a few of which we would find hard to stomach, such as sacrificing puppies to avert mould growth on garden plants. This should be kept in mind whenever we feel the urge to make any moral judgments on the bloody business of the arena.

It would be satisfying to be able to follow the trail right back through the centuries to its source, to point at one thing and say with confidence, 'yes, this is definitely how gladiators began', in order to understand what gave rise to the phenomenon of the munus gladiatorum, the gladiatorial combat, in the first place. However, the sum total of all the evidence, when drawn from the literary, iconographic and archaeological fields, unfortunately fails to point in any one particular direction. No matter how much we may long to solve the mystery with a convenient and tidy explanation, we may have to accept that the gladiator's origins can never be pinpointed with absolute certainty, unless or until some fresh discovery is made.

In addition, we may be guilty of a failure of imagination in assuming that the development of the gladiatorial games, the munera, can be attributed to a single cause or easily explained by one set of circumstances in the first place. Very few forms of entertainment or sport owe their birth to a specific and singular event. Why should gladiators be any different? They arose out of a very specific set of conditions, a combination of history and circumstance. The background for gladiatorial combat is Rome itself.

ROME'S FIRST GLADIATORS

Down by the Tiber, where the river bends round the Tiberine Island, the Palatine hill overlooks the Forum Boarium, the old cattle market of Rome (2). It is a public space now, smaller than the Forum Romanum, but big enough for the modest combats about to take place. Today human livestock may be slaughtered here, as three pairs of gladiators prepare to fight in honour of one of Rome's important public figures, the recently deceased ex-consul Junius Brutus Pera. His sons, Decimus and Marcus have put on these combats as part of the funeral games, as a duty and an obligation they owe to the manes, the shade or spirit of their dead father. The men who are to fight aren't even called gladiatores in the earliest sources; instead, they are known as bustuarii, from the Latin for a tomb or a funeral pyre, bustum. Not that they are necessarily going to fight by the side of the tomb or the pyre, though they often did; their name derives from their association with the funeral rites, whenever and wherever they were conducted.

It is 264 BC. This is the accepted date for the earliest record of gladiatorial combat, the munus gladiatorum, at Rome itself. Whether there were crowds of onlookers, in the manner of a public event, or just mourning family and friends, is not recorded. Whether they sat on hastily erected bleachers, or just stood in the ancient windswept forum to witness the performance of a rite that would spill blood to purify the pollution of death and propitiate the dead man's spirit, it is impossible to say.

In fact, even the identity of the deceased is a mystery. Some writers have called him Junius Brutus Pera, but it is possible that he was another illustrious Roman by the name of Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva, who, as consul in 292 BC, had defeated the northern Faliscan tribes; alternatively, he was father to the Decimus Junius Pera who, as consul in 266 BC, had military success against Italic tribes. All three possibilities have their supporters, but the confusion serves as a reminder that certainty on this subject as with so much else in the world of the gladiator is elusive. It is interesting that in all three cases the potential honoree had connections to the consulship, and recent military success.

2 Map of early central Rome BC, showing the location of the first gladiator contests at the Forum Boarium

What is beyond doubt is that this duty to the dead, usually performed at the end of full mourning, at least nine days later, was an expensive business. It would not have formed part of the average funeral, as the cost of using several captives or slaves to fight in the munus would have been unaffordable for all but the very rich. From its inception, the munus was the prerogative of the elite, the wealthy, the bluebloods, and as such,...