I’ll agree with this–“unskilled” and “slave” being the keys here. I wasn’t suggesting that these were the best jobs for any condemned criminal, merely that in lieu of a prison sentence many would serve under forced labor. Agriculture, quarrying, and mining would be their likely destination, not galley ships.
I agree that criminals and prisoners of war placed into slavery by the state–servi poeni–were sold at auction, not dumped or assigned to various tasks by the state. I’m pretty sure there was an aedile in the city specifically assigned the job of managing and running the slave auctions as a government concession. I perhaps should have been clearer on this point.
I think this is a semantics issue more than anything. It is perhaps a liberal usage of the term, but for my usage, two guys hitting each other* = “beating the crap out of each other”. I wasn’t meaning to imply a specific level of injury or anything like that, just the idea of two people fighting.
*(obviously except for playful hitting like friends do when teasing, and stuff like that)
Just stepping into the waters here…
I think the point that underlies Opalcat’s OP, which he clarifies for us, is a good one. It seems that people enjoy watching others get hurt, as typified by the popular appeal of gladiators of old or the boxing of new. (Other examples might include popular tv shows that rank the “greatest hits” of the recent football weekend.) But if there were no significant protests against gladiatorism (?) in those days, there are certainly those who are critical of boxing these days. So, on the one hand, we have become more civilized, in that we hear criticism of boxing, there are efforts to ban and regulate it, and it is not wildly popular everywhere. On the other hand we appear to be no more civilized than we were in as much as the sport has not been outlawed and it has not disappeared from our culture, and we still have people being entertained by people “beating the crap” out of each other. I think it’s an interesting paradox.
I’m sure there were some Jewish protests. These would not be due to violence but due to public nudity and the perceived glorification of body over mind.
My copy of History Of Torture does mention the occasional Roman protesting the violence of the games. In one case one protester laments that another has gone from protester to fan of the games.
The main points of my answer would be: yes, there were protests, but they were not for ‘humanitarian’ reasons. Even Seneca’s objections were more about how being emotionally roused by such spectacles was detrimental to the watcher - he wasn’t so much worried about the dying people.
The best book on the subject, IMHO, is T. Wiedemann’s Emperors and Gladiators, if you desire further reading.
Not generally, no. I think they were mostly intracity compeititions. However the racing factions that sponsored the teams tended to have branches in any city that had a hippodrome ( and later, as they took on certain other civic duties, a few that didn’t ).
I’ve always ran under the personal assumption that it is likely that there was such diversity of opinion in human interactions as to make it reasonable to believe some people would vocally dispute Roman bloodsport. I think instead our historical viewpoint is limited and skewed by the fact that historical records, either intentional or otherwise, were quite limited through the centuries, simply because few possesed the ability to record observations. If written testament was only done by a few well educated or monied individuals than theirs is the viewpoint that gets written as fact.
The opinions of a ‘minor’ or ‘kook fringe’ may not be recorded by the history writers simply because it does not serve their purposes to do so.
