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Gladiatorial Contests in Ancient Rome
Rome was a warrior state. After the defeat of Carthage in 201 BC, Rome embarked on two centuries of
almost continuous imperial expansion. By the end of this period, Rome controlled the whole of the
Mediterranean basin and much of north-western Europe. The population of her empire, at between 50
and 60 million people, constituted perhaps one-fifth or one-sixth of the world's then population.
Victorious conquest had been bought at a huge price, measured in human suffering, carnage, and
money. The costs were borne by tens of thousands of conquered peoples, who paid taxes to the Roman
state, by slaves captured in war and transported to Italy, and by Roman soldiers who served long years
fighting overseas.
The discipline of the Roman army was notorious. Decimation is one index of its severity. If an army unit
was judged disobedient or cowardly in battle, one soldier in ten was selected by lot and cudgeled to
death by his former comrades. It should be stressed that decimation was not just a myth told to terrify
fresh recruits; it actually happened in the period of imperial expansion, and frequently enough not to
arouse particular comment. Roman soldiers killed each other for their common good.
When Romans were so unmerciful to each other, what mercy could prisoners of war expect? Small
wonder then that they were sometimes forced to fight in gladiatorial contests, or were thrown to wild
beasts for popular entertainment. Public executions helped inculcate valor and fear in the men, women
and children left at home. Children learned the lesson of what happened to soldiers who were defeated.
Public executions were rituals which helped maintain an atmosphere of violence, even in times of peace.
Bloodshed and slaughter joined military glory and conquest as central elements in Roman culture.
With the accession of the first emperor Augustus (31 BC – AD 14), the Roman state embarked on a
period of long-term peace (pax romana). For more than two centuries, thanks to its effective defense by
frontier armies, the inner core of the Roman Empire was virtually insulated from the direct experience
of war. Then in memory of their warrior traditions, the Romans set up artificia1 battlefields in cities and
towns for public amusement. The custom spread from Italy to the provinces.
Nowadays, we admire the Colosseum in Rome and other great Roman amphitheatres such as those at
Verona, Arles, Nimes and El Djem as architectural monuments. We choose to forget, I suspect, that this
was where Romans regularly organized fights to the death between hundreds of gladiators, the mass
execution of unarmed criminals, and the indiscriminate slaughter of domestic and wild animals.
The enormous size of the amphitheatres indicates how popular these exhibitions were. The Colosseum
was dedicated in AD 80 with 100 days of games. One day 3,000 men fought; on another 9,000 animals
were killed. It seated 50,000 people. It is still one of Rome's most impressive buildings, a magnificent
feat of engineering and design. In ancient times, amphitheatres must have towered over cities, much as
cathedrals towered over medieval towns. Public killings of men and animals were a Roman rite, with
overtones of religious sacrifice, legitimated by the myth that gladiatorial shows inspired the populace
with 'a glory in wounds and a contempt of death'.
Philosophers, and later Christians, disapproved strongly. To little effect; gladiatorial games persisted at
least until the early fifth century AD, wild-beast killings until the sixth century. St Augustine in his
Confessions tells the story of a Christian who was reluctantly forced along to the amphitheatre by a
party of friends; at first, he kept his eyes shut, but when he heard the crowd roar, he opened them, and
became converted by the sight of blood into an eager devotee of gladiatorial shows. Even the biting
criticism quoted below reveals a certain excitement beneath its moral outrage.
Seneca, Roman senator and philosopher, tells of a visit he once paid to the arena. He arrived in the
middle of the day, during the mass execution of criminals, staged as an entertainment in the interval
between the wild-beast show in the morning and the gladiatorial show of the afternoon:
All the previous fighting had been merciful by comparison. Now finesse is set aside, and we have pure
unadulterated murder. The combatants have no protective covering; their entire bodies are exposed to
the blows. No blow falls in vain. This is what lots of people prefer to the regular contests, and even to
those which are put on by popular request. And it is obvious why. There is no helmet, no shield to repel
the blade. Why have armor? Why bother with skill? All that just delays death.
In the morning, men are thrown to lions and bears. At mid-day they are thrown to the spectators
themselves. No sooner has a man killed, than they shout for him to kill another, or to be killed. The final
victor is kept for some other slaughter. In the end, every fighter dies. And all this goes on while the
arena is half empty.
You may object that the victims committed robbery or were murderers. So what? Even if they deserved
to suffer, what's your compulsion to watch their sufferings? 'Kill him', they shout, 'Beat him, burn him'.
Why is he too timid to fight? Why is he so frightened to kill? Why so reluctant to die? They have to whip
him to make him accept his wounds.
Much of our evidence suggests that gladiatorial contests were, by origin, closely connected with
funerals. 'Once upon a time', wrote the Christian critic Tertullian at the end of the second century AD,
'men believed that the souls of the dead were propitiated by human blood, and so at funerals they
sacrificed prisoners of war or slaves of poor quality bought for the purpose'. The first recorded
gladiatorial show took place in 264 BC: it was presented by two nobles in honor of their dead father;
only three pairs of gladiators took part. Over the next two centuries, the scale and frequency of
gladiatorial shows increased steadily. In 65 BC, for example, Julius Caesar gave elaborate funeral games
for his father involving 640 gladiators and condemned criminals who were forced to fight with wild
beasts. At his next games in 46 BC, in memory of his dead daughter and, let it be said, in celebration of
his recent triumphs in Gaul and Egypt, Caesar presented not only the customary fights between
individual gladiators, but also fights between whole detachments of infantry and between squadrons of
cavalry, some mounted on horses, others on elephants. Large-scale gladiatorial shows had arrived. Some
of the contestants were professional gladiators, others prisoners of war, and others criminals
condemned to death.
Up to this time, gladiatorial shows had always been put on by individual aristocrats at their own
initiative and expense, in honor of dead relatives. The religious component in gladiatorial ceremonies
continued to be important. For example, attendants in the arena were dressed up as gods. Slaves who
tested whether fallen gladiators were really dead or just pretending, by applying a red-hot cauterizing
iron, were dressed as the god Mercury. 'Those who dragged away the dead bodies were dressed as
Pluto, the god of the underworld. During the persecutions of Christians, the victims were sometimes led
around the arena in a procession dressed up as priests and priestesses of pagan cults, before being
stripped naked and thrown to the wild beasts. The welter of blood in gladiatorial and wild-beast shows,
the squeals and smell of the human victims and of slaughtered animals are completely alien to us and
almost unimaginable. For some Romans they must have been reminiscent of battlefields, and, more
immediately for everyone, associated with religious sacrifice. At one remove, Romans, even at the
height of their civilization, performed human sacrifice, purportedly in commemoration of their dead.
By the end of the last century BC, the religious and commemorative elements in gladiatorial shows were
eclipsed by the political and the spectacular. Gladiatorial shows were public performances held mostly,
before the amphitheatre was built, in the ritual and social centre of the city, the Forum. Public
participation, attracted by the splendor of the show and by distributions of meat, and by betting,
magnified the respect paid to the dead and the honor of the whole family. Aristocratic funerals in the
Republic (before 31 BC) were political acts. And funeral games had political implications, because of
their popularity with citizen electors. Indeed, the growth in the splendor of gladiatorial shows was
largely fuelled by competition between ambitious aristocrats, who wished to please, excite and increase
the number of their supporters.
In 42 BC, for the first time, gladiatorial fights were substituted for chariot-races in official games. After
that in the city of Rome, regular gladiatorial shows, like theatrical shows and chariot-races, were given
by officers of state, as part of their official careers, as an official obligation and as a tax on status. The
Emperor Augustus, as part of a general policy of limiting aristocrats' opportunities to court favor with
the Roman populace, severely restricted the number of regular gladiatorial shows to two each year. He
also restricted their splendor and size. Each official was forbidden to spend more on them than his
colleagues, and an upper limit was fixed at 120 gladiators a show.
These regulations were gradually evaded. The pressure for evasion was simply that, even under the
emperors, aristocrats were still competing with each other, in prestige and political success. The
splendor of a senator's public exhibition could make or break his social and political reputation. One
aristocrat, Symmachus, wrote to a friend: 'I must now outdo the reputation earned by my own shows;
our family's recent generosity during my consulship and the official games given for my son allow us to
present nothing mediocre'. So he set about enlisting the help of various powerful friends in the
provinces. In the end, he managed to procure antelopes, gazelles, leopards, lions, bears, bear-cubs, and
even some crocodiles, which only just survived to the beginning of the games, because for the previous
fifty days they had refused to eat. Moreover, twenty-nine Saxon prisoners of war strangled each other in
their cells on the night before their final scheduled appearance. Symmachus was heart-broken. Like
every donor of the games, he knew that his political standing was at stake. Every presentation was in
Goffman's strikingly apposite phrase 'a status bloodbath'.
The most spectacular gladiatorial shows were given by the emperors themselves at Rome. For example,
the Emperor Trajan, to celebrate his conquest of Dacia (roughly modern Romania), gave games in AD
108-9 lasting 123 days in which 9,138 gladiators fought and eleven thousand animals were slain. The
Emperor Claudius in AD 52 presided in full military regalia over a battle on a lake near Rome between
two naval squadrons, manned for the occasion by 19,000 forced combatants. The palace guard,
stationed behind stout barricades, which also prevented the combatants from escaping, bombarded the
ships with missiles from catapults. After a faltering start, because the men refused to fight, the battle
according to Tacitus 'was fought with the spirit of free men, although between criminals. After much
bloodshed, those who survived were spared extermination'.
The quality of Roman justice was often tempered by the need to satisfy the demand for the condemned.
Christians, burnt to death as scapegoats after the great fire at Rome in AD 64, were not alone in being
sacrificed for public entertainment. Slaves and bystanders, even the spectators themselves, ran the risk
of becoming victims of emperors' truculent whims. The Emperor Claudius, for example, dissatisfied with
how the stage machinery worked, ordered the stage mechanics responsible to fight in the arena. One
day when there was a shortage of condemned criminals, the Emperor Caligula commanded that a whole
section of the crowd be seized and thrown to the wild beasts instead. Isolated incidents, but enough to
intensify the excitement of those who attended. Imperial legitimacy was reinforced by terror.
As for animals, their sheer variety symbolized the extent of Roman power and left vivid traces in Roman
art. In 169 BC, sixty-three African lions and leopards, forty bears and several elephants were hunted
down in a single show. New species were gradually introduced to Roman spectators (tigers, crocodiles,
giraffes, lynxes, rhinoceros, ostriches, hippopotami) and killed for their pleasure. Not for Romans the
tame viewing of caged animals in a zoo. Wild beasts were set to tear criminals to pieces as public lesson
in pain and death. Sometimes, elaborate sets and theatrical backdrops were prepared in which, as a
climax, a criminal was devoured limb by limb. Such spectacular punishments, common enough in preindustrial states, helped reconstitute sovereign power. The deviant criminal was punished; law and
order were re-established.
The labor and organization required to capture so many animals and to deliver them alive to Rome must
have been enormous. Even if wild animals were more plentiful then than now, single shows with one
hundred, four hundred or six hundred lions, plus other animals, seem amazing. By contrast, after Roman
times, no hippopotamus was seen in Europe until one was brought to London by steamship in 1850. It
took a whole regiment of Egyptian soldiers to capture it, and involved a five month journey to bring it
from the White Nile to Cairo. And yet the Emperor Commodus, a dead-shot with spear and bow, himself
killed five hippos, two elephants, a rhinoceros and a giraffe, in one show lasting two days. On another
occasion he killed 100 lions and bears in a single morning show, from safe walkways specially
constructed across the arena. It was, a contemporary remarked, 'a better demonstration of accuracy
than of courage'. The slaughter of exotic animals in the emperor's presence, and exceptionally by the
emperor himself or by his palace guards, was a spectacular dramatization of the emperor's formidable
power: immediate, bloody and symbolic.
Gladiatorial shows also provided an arena for popular participation in politics. Cicero explicitly
recognized this towards the end of the Republic: 'the judgment and wishes of the Roman people about
public affairs can be most clearly expressed in three places: public assemblies, elections, and at plays or
gladiatorial shows'. He challenged a political opponent: 'Give yourself to the people. Entrust yourself to
the Games. Are you terrified of not being applauded?' His comments underline the fact that the crowd
had the important option of giving or of withholding applause, of hissing or of being silent.
Under the emperors, as citizens' rights to engage in politics diminished, gladiatorial shows and games
provided repeated opportunities for the dramatic confrontation of rulers and ruled. Rome was unique
among large historical empires in allowing, indeed in expecting, these regular meetings between
emperors and the massed populace of the capital, collected together in a single crowd. To be sure,
emperors could mostly stage-manage their own appearance and reception. They gave extravagant
shows. They threw gifts to the crowd – small marked wooden balls (called missilia ) which could be
exchanged for various luxuries. They occasionally planted their own claques in the crowd.
Mostly, emperors received standing ovations and ritual acclamations. The Games at Rome provided a
stage for the emperor to display his majesty – luxurious ostentation in procession, accessibility to
humble petitioners, generosity to the crowd, human involvement in the contests themselves,
graciousness or arrogance towards the assembled aristocrats, clemency or cruelty to the vanquished.
When a gladiator fell, the crowd would shout for mercy or dispatch. The emperor might be swayed by
their shouts or gestures, but he alone, the final arbiter, decided who was to live or die. When the
emperor entered the amphitheatre, or decided the fate of a fallen gladiator by the movement of his
thumb, at that moment he had 50,000 courtiers. He knew that he was Caesar Imperator, Foremost of
Men.
Things did not always go the way the emperor wanted. Sometimes, the crowd objected, for example to
the high price of wheat, or demanded the execution of an unpopular official or a reduction in taxes.
Caligula once reacted angrily and sent soldiers into the crowd with orders to execute summarily anyone
seen shouting. Understandably, the crowd grew silent, though sullen. But the emperor's increased
unpopularity encouraged his assassins to act. Dio, senator and historian, was present at another popular
demonstration in the Circus in AD 195. He was amazed that the huge crowd (the Circus held up to
200,000 people) strung out along the track, shouted for an end to civil war 'like a well-trained choir'.
Dio also recounted how with his own eyes he saw the Emperor Commodus cut off the head of an ostrich
as a sacrifice in the arena then walk towards the congregated senators whom he hated, with the
sacrificial knife in one hand and the severed head of the bird in the other, clearly indicating, so Dio
thought, that it was the senators' necks which he really wanted. Years later, Dio recalled how he had
kept himself from laughing (out of anxiety, presumably) by chewing desperately on a laurel leaf which
he plucked from the garland on his head.