I started thinking about this in a roundabout way… somehow I was thinking about boxing, and wondering how people can enjoy watching people beat the crap out of each other… then from there I thought about gladiators… and I started wondering if there is a genetic predisposition to liking that sort of thing, or if it could be anyone… I mean the whole idea is horrific to me, but if I were raised in a different way, would I be there cheering, too? Obviously there hasn’t been a really fundamental change in humanity from then to now because people still enjoy watching things like boxing, bull fighting, dog fighting, etc. People still enjoy horror movies. People enjoy watching brutality, so clearly the same types of urges in people are around today that were then (now please don’t go off on a tangent saying that I’m somehow saying that if you got that PPV boxing match on your TiVo that you would also have no problem with gladiators and actual killing and so on–that’s not my point and please don’t distort it that way).
So… what about the urges that make people pacifists? Certainly there is plenty of historical precedent for humanitarian points of view…
Which is the roundabout way that I arrived at wondering… do we have any historical evidence that there was any counter-gladiator-culture movement? I’m not talking about just “at the end when it was about to go away” but just overall… were there protests? Demonstrations? Do we know?
Not that I’m aware of. When Constantine banned gladitorial matches in the 4th century they continued all the way into the 5th century. I can’t think of any major movements to end gladitorial matches prior to the age of the Christian Empire, though I might be missing something.
I’m not really talking about “major movements” though (which is kind of what I meant to say when I said I wasn’t looking for whatever may have been going on when they were finally banned). I’m talking about the equivalent of a bunch of outraged college students holding a march a few times a year, things like that. “Civil disobedience” type stuff.
I don’t know about human-rights based protests (unless you count the general reports of Christian martyrdom), but the gladiatorial contests were criticized in their day. A letter written by the Roman philosopher Seneca survives in which he roundly condemns the games. By this time the letters of prominent men were written with an eye to future publication, so when he says “Do not, my Lucilius, attend the games, I pray you. Either you will be corrupted by the multitude, or, if you show disgust, be hated by them. So stay away.”, one could argue that Seneca is urging a general boycott.
But that’s a shaky argument at best. The strictly divided class structure of the ancient world, I think, put up strong barriers to the kind of empathy required for decent-enough human-rights protests to even begin, much less go large-scale (at least prior to Christianity; whatever one may say about the merits of religion, the Christian movement was the single most powerful reason the gladiatorial games were disbanded). There were three problems:
Gladiators were all slaves, and Roman society depended strongly on slavery to maintain its lifestyle. Claiming human rights for gladiators opens up questions about slavery, and no one (other than, obviously, the slaves) was prepared to deal with that.
The Romans were a violent society, and although the upper classes saw a certain nobility in resisting baser emotions like bloodlust, the nobility also conceded that the “lesser classes” were incapable of this (that’s what made the nobility so special). A careful review of Seneca’s moralizing is less an indictment of the system in general than a criticism of the type of folks who find death-spectacles amusing. Not quite the same as a genuine concern for humanirghts (then again, Seneca was Nero’s tutor, and saw some value in “looking the other way” at some of Nero’s excesses, so he could be fairly charged to be a hypocrite).
From early on, the gladiatorial games were associated with religious ceremonies (from ancient times games were staged at funerals, and many graves were solemnized with ritualized combat). So you had a religious angle to overcome as well. This may explain some of Christianity’s success in getting the games to become unpopular; they had no tolerance for the native religion anyway, so the supposed “sacredness” of the games was a non-starter for them.
If there was any instance of organized peaceful demonstration against something as popular as gladiatorial combat, it seems likely that a Roman historian would have commented on it, and as far as I know none did. Like CJJ pointed out, there were individual condemnations by the thinkers of the day, but people didn’t engage in peaceful protests against the practices of the emperor or the state a whole lot. That was a good way to get yourself crucified or fed to lions. The Thoreaus, Kings, and Ghandis of recent centuries get locked up and write memoirs, but the civil disobedients of ancient Rome were martyrs.
Saint Telemachus comes to mind. Yes, he did pay for his beliefs with his life, although he was spontaneously killed by the crowd, not by the state.
And I love boxing. I don’t enjoy watching people “beating the crap” out of each other, or else I’d hang out in dive bars, or watch stupid shit like cage-match fighting. I hope it becomes less corrupt, and I’d be happier with it if they wore head gear. But I don’t equate modern boxing with Roman gladiatorial fights anymore than I equate modern pornography with the sexual torture that the Romans also enjoyed.
I’ve seen this claim before, and it is true on a technicality only. The first paragraph of the cited article makes it clear:
Even if they weren’t technically slaves when made gladiators, prisoners of war were routinely enslaved, and criminals were de facto slaves (there were really no large-scale penal operations in ancient Rome; you either got sent to the salt-mines in Spain. chained to a galley, or dumped in a gladiatorial school).
As for the auctorati, the article makes it clear they were de facto slaves, even if they volunteered for the profession. In fact there is no instance of true-slave gladiator and auctoritatus being differentiated in any way by the crowd, and though their condition could be temporary, it was always possible for slaves to become emancipated, and in fact the gladiatorial games gave slaves a way to earn their freedom rather than rely on the benevolence of the master. And as for aristorcrats and emperors volunteering to enter the arena, this is routinely cited by ancient historians as a mark of insanity or base character; calling someone a cladiator (or, for that matter, a lanista) was not a compliment.
In summary, while not all gladiators were technically slaves, they were for all intents and purposes treated as slaves, both physically and with regard to social class. If you were to question the morality of gladiatorial combat, would would be questioning the morality of slavery in general, and the very foundation of the Roman living standard.
I’ll agree with the above, except to note that simply stating flatly, and without qualification, that all gladiators were slaves is misleading, at best. I only wanted that point clarified.
We recently watched a History Channel show on the Colosseum, and they said that the crowd’s bloodlust had to be balanced against the cost of training up a gladiator for top level bouts. A gladiator, whether slave, or free, as some of them were, was an expensive commodity that was not dispensed with lightly. According to the narrator, it sometimes was a bit like professional wrestling, in attempting to thrill the crowd with seemingly lethal tactics that weren’t really.
The Colosseum did continue to be used almost to the 600s, but, so they said, finally they presented only such events as cock and dogfights to small crowds. Not to defend gladatorial combat and the elaborate sea battles and animal hunts of the glory days, but that does seem like a case of ending with a whimper.
Too bad the Romans never discovered team sports. The organizational skills necessary to run a football league, if developed, might have staved off the Dark Ages.
While it wasn’t a team sport, exactly, chariot racing reached a pretty high level of organizational sophistication. Indeed major racing clubs could become polarizing political factions unto themselves.
No, not really. Agriculture was the big dumping ground for unskilled slave labor, probably followed by urban/domestic use, then mining. “Chained to a galley” was a surprisingly bad way to run a ship, not to mention somewhat suicidal since the last place you’d want to be is at sea with a bunch of slaves in charge of where your boat is going. Free rowers were the norm, quickly freed slaves would do in a pinch, but controlling a multi-decked galley was not something anyone entrusted to some nimrod tribal who’d never seen salt water. Crewing a fiver was skilled and often well-paying labor.
Lastly, gladiatorial schools were expensive, so if the state had a large number of slaves to ‘dump’ they’d just toss them in the arena to be chopped up by pros or eaten by wild animals. Why bother with school, this was the demolition derby of gladiatorial games. If someone was in the business of schooling gladiators they’d select by hand, and not buy in bulk if they could help it. Not least of all because a bulk buy would mean a bunch of new slaves from the same geographic area, probably the same tribe, an instant recipe for rebellion.
Wow, thanks CJJ. That was a really interesting and informative post (I didn’t reply earlier because I had just sneaked a peek at the thread while on a break in class, and didn’t have time to read the longer posts).
Good point. I guess that the list of societies which have had things like protest/rallies and so on is probably similar to the list of societies which have allowed freedom of expression, which certainly isn’t all of 'em! I hadn’t really thought about it from that angle so much.
I don’t either, and never meant to imply that I did (in fact I went out of my way to head off people thinking that is what I meant). I do, however, think that it is an evolution* of entertainment which is clearly designed to satisfy a desire in humans to watch other people engage in combat. As I attempted to explain, my line of thinking was looping around the ideas of how humans now are not fundamentally different from humans then, and so it’s not like there is some “freakishly violent gene” that people used to have that has since been bred out of the species. Culture has changed and society has just found different acceptable outlets for the drives that humans have and have always had**. (And from that line of reasoning, I went on to wonder about another drive which people obviously didn’t invent in the last couple of centuries–the drive to impose peace, and wondering how or if it manifested in that particular society.)
*not a linear evolution, obviously. Just can’t think of a better word at the moment.
**I feel like I have to qualify everything I say in this thread…sigh…this sentence is not meant to say that people still have the drive to watch gladiators, and just settle for boxing or whatever these days because it’s what we have. What I mean is that our society has fundamentally changed, yet human nature has not. The desire to watch combat in some form is obviously some inherent feature of humanity and not a deviant manifestation. Different cultures have found different ways of going about it. Grr… I feel like no matter how carefully I try to phrase this, some people are going to do their damnedest to get offended and assign motives and meanings to what I’ve written.
I’m busted, Opal, you clearly did not draw a straight line from gladiators to todays boxers. I regret implying that you did. But you did clearly say that people like me “enjoy watching people beat the crap out of each other.” Actually, well before that point, we enjoy the ref stopping the fight, if for no other reason so that a better matched pair of fighters can take the ring.
As for non-violent protest, when is that supposed to kick in? Shit, even Gandhi’s message was “Hey, I’m all for non-violent change, so the only person I’m going to hurt is myself while I stop eating. But if I do starve to death, 300 million people are going to go batshit. I’m just sayn’”
