The Roman Arena

21:56unknown:But yes, we think that probably about 5 % of fights might have ended with very serious injury or even a death. But then that's what calculated. Of course, we're basically relying on tombstones. Because gladiators, many, many, well, we don't know how many of them, but some of the gladiators are actually commemorated on tombstones. And they say proudly, or their tombstone says proudly, what style of gladiator they were. There's no attempt to hide the fact that they were gladiators. They're proud of it. Sometimes, especially in the Greek East, you have a little relief of them standing proudly there next to their shield with their helmet standing on top of the shield and all the wreaths that they've won, their distinctions carved around them.

22:47Misha Glenny:Thanks for that, Kathleen. And Matthew, I'd like to pick up something that John mentioned, and that's about how the games and the imperial project of Rome. So we've had the Republic and then after Caesar, we get Augustus becoming the first emperor. And things start to change in the relationship between the state and the games. What's all that about? The emperors start to monopolize the production of games at Rome. It's too powerful and too spectacular a gift to the people to be allowed into other hands. So Augustus and his successor as emperor gradually acquire the sole prerogative of giving games.

23:28Misha Glenny:And by the reign of Domitian, about a century into the imperial period, only the emperor can give games at Rome. Augustus does it three times in his own name, five times in the names of his sons, 26, I think, beast hunts. So an escalating diet of violent spectacle because it's so very popular. It's something the emperor needs to do and has done really since the inception of the imperial project. Even Julius Caesar, Augustus's predecessor, didn't really like the games. Apparently he used to sit at the back of his box doing his correspondence and got a rather bad reputation for being aloof and standoffish.

23:58Misha Glenny:So emperors not only have to do this, they have to go and they have to be seen to be enjoying it, but not too much. Some emperors get too fond of it and they attract criticism for that as well. So they need to be in among the crowns, but restraining themselves. But Julius Caesar organised a lot of these games. I mean, he may not have enjoyed them, but he seemed to think that they were important. Oh, he absolutely did. I mean, he put on a famous games with 320 pairs of gladiators, and he would have done more if the Senate hadn't stopped him because, as John says, people were concerned about the potential for violence and this is a kind of private army in the city of Rome.

24:31Misha Glenny:So Caesar was very well aware of the importance of games. Among many other sorts of benefaction, it has to be said, chariot racing, beast hunts, banquets, later on public bathing. All of these are things that the emperor gives to the people in this culture of bread and circuses. And just out of interest, is the idea of the thumbs down or the thumbs up to end the life of a gladiator, is that nonsense or is it based in truth? It is not quite nonsense. There is one source, Juvenal's Third Satire, that says the guy who used to play the trumpet in these arenas now gives games himself, and the mob bit him with a turned thumb, and polychae verso, to spare the life of a gladiator, but we don't know if that means thumbs up or thumbs down.

25:09Misha Glenny:It's only one source, it's echolated by Prudentius. We don't know how common it was, we don't know exactly what it means. It's not nothing, but it's not as firm as we think it might be. John? Well, it seems quite clear, as Matthew said, we don't know which way it goes, but it seems to be almost the pivotal moment of the show. It's very often shown in Roman art, when a gladiator has surrendered, holds up his finger, there's a recognisable gesture, and that seems to be the image that's created to bring back the memory. Do you remember you were there? We were in the seats when we saw this because then you're waiting for that decision.

25:42Misha Glenny:Which way will that gesture go? Either the sponsor or the sponsor extends the opportunity to the crowd to decide. So though maybe not many gladiators die as a proportion, nonetheless this is a really high-risk moment and so it's a very dramatic gesture. Lots depends on it. It's a moment of communication between the Emperor or the Giriff of the Games and the crowd And that compact between them is part of what this arena display is. It's a chance for the emperor to show himself to the people, for the people in some sense to communicate with the emperor. It's a very political moment, a very communal moment.

26:12Misha Glenny:Sounds a little bit like waiting for a VAR result in the Premier League. John, another myth-busting thing here. I was brought up being told that Christians were thrown to the lions. Were they? certainly Christians do feature among the victims of these arena executions there's an extraordinarily vivid account from the early third century AD a martyrdom of a Christian woman perpetua and that describes the various ordeals she goes through in prison beforehand and in the games at the end where a combination of animals and human executioners are used to try and kill her often to little avail. The first evidence for Christians being killed in the arena is under Nero, in one of those temporary arenas, but not by lions.

27:01Misha Glenny:Dogs are involved, but also Christians are set alight. There aren't that many martyrdom stories that have ancient authority. The instance of Perpetua in North Africa is one. There's another vivid story from Lyon in the 8170s of another. But there are many other individuals who seem to be put to death in this way. Criminals, prisoners of war quite likely as well. Kathleen Coleman, I want to drill down a little bit more on the business. Who made money out of this? By the sounds of it, the gladiators themselves didn't make money, but presumably they got something out of it if they weren't killed.

27:41unknown:Well, we assume for the gladiators that being slaves or equivalent thereof, they would have got like a little piggy bank, as it were, for when they might ultimately be retired from the spectacle, just as ordinary domestic slaves would have got a little peculium, some kind of nest egg for afterwards. But I think our modern concept is you want to make money out of everything, whereas the games are very much about the acquisition of status. So for the impresario actually putting on a spectacle, this was an opportunity for him to illustrate his generosity to his community. and so far we've been talking mainly about the games in Rome itself but we have masses and masses and masses of evidence about games in little tin pot towns around the fringe of the empire when the local impresario, the local squire, puts on a set of games very small scale.

28:39unknown:They're boasting about having four beasts or whatever it is and this is cultural capital. They get recognition from their community because they could have spent their money on a donation of oil to the baths, which is the equivalent of ancient soap, or they could have had a banquet every year if they're really rich, or maybe every four years to celebrate the birthday of their child or something like that. Or they can put on games, and that's a big, big deal. It must have cost them a lot of money. The people who would have imported the animals, we have fascinating evidence from North Africa for these companies, these sodalitates who imported animals and sent them abroad to the arenas.

29:23unknown:One of them in particular was diversified and it also exported olive oil and things like that. So this must have been a money-making operation for them but for the ultimate consumer in the form of the impresario it was a money-losing operation. But you are demonstrating your free status. The root of our word liberality is the Latin for free. As a free person, you can own property and therefore you can dispense with it. You can give it away. And that is so antithetical to the modern idea of capitalism, where we make more and more and more money all the time for ourselves. But that's not the point in antiquity.

30:04Misha Glenny:In terms of evidence, Matthew, how confident are we that the written evidence gives an accurate picture of the games and the business behind the games. Well, as we often say as ancient historians, our literary evidence is actually rather patchy and partial. It doesn't contain a single clear description of exactly what happened in the arena because most of our surviving authors aren't really directly interested in it. The biographers want to talk about how it illuminates imperial character. The historians want to talk about how it affects politics in the city of Rome. There are flattering poets like Marshall or Statius or Calpurnia Siculus who give us pictures and anecdotes but not a clear description.

30:45Misha Glenny:As we've already seen, you did some myth-busting earlier. Things that we think we know, like the thumb, actually turn out to rest on rather thin ice. Similarly, the famous Hail Caesar, we who are about to die salute you, is only attested once. And then it's not in Rome at all. It's at a naval combat on a lake outside Rome and it all goes wrong because they say that and the emperor makes a kind of feeble joke and says, oh, maybe not. And they think that they've been pardoned and refused to fight. So all of these things that we think we're sure about, actually we're not. And then our Roman writers mostly are elite male aristocrats.

31:15Misha Glenny:They're moralists. They're rather sniffy about populist entertainment. They don't really want to describe too much what goes on in the arena. Tacitus is famously disdainful about it and says these things belong in the Daily Gazette. They don't belong in my histories. So we don't have a very clear to free picture. We have anecdote and snippet. we have moralising, like the famous bit of Seneca, where he says the famous German gladiator who is so terrified of the arena, he shakes himself to death on the xylospongium, the kind of sponge on a stick they use in the latrine to escape his fate in the arena.

31:45Misha Glenny:And this is a noble end. So we get those little anecdotes and tales, but not a coherent picture. We have to piece it together, then we have to go to archaeology and material evidence too. So obviously these days we'd probably be pretty horrified by some of the things going on in the games, although, of course, hundreds, millions of people around the world watch boxing and wrestling and that sort of thing. Although there was this disgust expressed by some of the writers and the moralizers and so on, clearly these were immensely popular. I mean, the crowds coming into the arenas were absolutely, absolutely huge.

32:25Misha Glenny:So were these writers running against the tide, as it were, of social mores? Well, we don't have an absolute moral condemnation of violence. The whole games are founded on violence, and we tend not to get authors until the Christian period saying this is simply wrong in itself. You'd rather get moral critique of the wrong kind of violence, or emperors being capricious or mean, or executing the wrong kind of people, or forcing citizens into the arena. So that's the sort of moral objection that writers make. When they talk about the games, they also show us what the appeal might have been, and there are elements of any society that likes to witness violence as an entertainment, as a kind of exploration of the limits of human character.

33:02Misha Glenny:People in our society play violent video games or watch violent movies. It's the same kind of impulse. But actually, it wasn't just endless slaughter. It was also a sport with rules and maybe a referee and special costumes and conventions. And sport is a more universal and perhaps happier point of comparison. And it was also just a great big spectacle. And Rome was a society founded on spectacle in an intensely visual culture. There were processions and banquets and imperial relief art shows the emperor moving among his people. and the arena brings that to life. The emperor is there, the senators are there, the vestal virgins, the people, kind of sort of arrayed in social order in the stands.

33:35Misha Glenny:And it's a microcosm of the Roman world looking at itself and feeling part of the crowd. Unlike at a modern sporting stadium, it must have been part of the appeal to people. John, Matthew's told us about the written evidence. What about the pictorial evidence? So the pictorial evidence is, again, there are the problems of the patchiness, patchiness over time, patchiness in space, and so on. There are lots of mosaics from North Africa showing the games, very few from Britain, for example. The pictorial evidence tends to concentrate in the mid-imperial period. We don't have very much from the Republic.

34:10Misha Glenny:So as always, it's the ancient world, there's that issue of gaps. One thing, for example, I think we would not really understand from literary sources, but get a very clear understanding from visual evidence is from the different forms that gladiators take, that these are rather specialised styles of fighting. They come with their particular name you know the Thracian the Mermelo they have a very particular set of arms and armor the animal hunters often have very kind of sparkly costumes as it as it were so we wouldn't get a sense really of how does it work in practice were it not for the visual for the visual evidence and experimental archaeologists have built on that say okay if you're using this kind of arms if you're wearing this kind of armor how does it work in practice they've shown that for example you can't fight for very long wearing a lot of styles of gladiatorial armour because with these face masks very tight on your face you can't breathe deeply so you quickly run out of oxygen so it's very short sharp bursts of violence then the waiting you know waiting for your moment so the show gets kind of lengthened because of that the visual evidence is also really important i think for telling us about as kathleen said there are those multiple cities across the empire where it's really important to show up as the big generous donor and you have your moment in the sun you're there receiving the acclamation from the crowd next year someone else will do it how do you make your games remembered you create a mosaic for your reception room on your tomb you show the games that were shown so it's not just what happened but it's also the the sort of the memory culture around games that visual evidence is crucial for Kathleen talking about talking about visual evidence I think many people get most of their knowledge about gladiatorial combat from the movies.

35:55Misha Glenny:And I feel I should point out here that you were a consultant on Ridley Scott's Gladiator. And indeed, Matthew, also in the studio, was a consultant on Gladiator 2. So we really have great expertise here. Kathleen, how much do the movies, does Hollywood get right about the games? And what does it get wrong?

36:16unknown:Well, I think there are two things that really struck me as very successful with the first Gladiator movie. And one was the sheer range, geographical range of the empire, all the way from that forest in Germany in the opening scene, which is actually a forest in Hampshire, all the way down to the deserts of North Africa. And I thought that was great, actually, that they showed that the Roman Empire really extended over a huge area and was cemented, if you like, by this sort of militant gladiatorial culture. But the other thing that I thought they did really well was the camaraderie in the gladiatorial training school.

36:59unknown:And it is fascinating to think about what it must have been like to live in one of those barracks. The most famous is the Ludus Magnus. You can see a quarter of it's been excavated just next door to the Colosseum. It has its little training arena. It's got cells all the way around. There would have been maybe a couple of thousand people living in there. and when gladiators were rented, they seemed to have been rented from a single training school. So you might end up fighting in the arena with someone you knew really well and that you're trained with. So that sense of both camaraderie and rivalry, that I think is sometimes captured really well by Hollywood, maybe because it's something familiar to us from the locker rooms of sports events and so on.

37:46unknown:In terms of what they get wrong, where we've covered a lot of that already, that it's not a fight to the death. In fact, you try and avoid having people killed. The notion of a reprieve, that's when you've actually been technically defeated, but you may be missus, you may be reprieved. To go back, you fought well enough, you reprieved and sent back to gladiatorial barracks to practice for next time. The idea that a gladiator might fight a man and then turn and fight an animal is completely erroneous. As far as we know, gladiatorial combat was very, very specialized, as has just been explained with all those different forms of armor and fighting technique and so on.

38:29unknown:And the beasts were similarly in combat with people who knew how to handle them. And it's really interesting that in the late Republic, Potentate in North Africa supplies beasts for the arena in Rome and he supplies the fighters. Because, you know, if you were thrown into the arena in front of a lion, you wouldn't know what to do. But if you, I assume, maybe you would. But, you know, if you're a trained hunter who spends his time hunting lions in the forests of wherever, then, you know, you know how to do it. And we see in some of these reliefs and wonderful things that John and Matthew have been talking about, we see all these amazing structures put into the arena to try and fool the animals so that you could have a little kind of swivel that you stood behind.

39:20unknown:That, you know, that's really, it requires a lot of technique. And as far as we are aware, the gladiators were one category of person and the beast fighters were another category of person, possibly even lower in status, but also very skilled and experienced.

39:36Misha Glenny:Matthew, what was your experience doing Gladiator 2? I have to say, I started watching it quite recently, and I was quite shocked to see the first battle between gladiators and what looked like a hybrid between a baboon and a dog. Yes, it's a striking moment, isn't it? Well, like Kathleen says, they get many things right, and other things they take some artistic liberties in the making of a movie. Later on there are sharks in the Colosseum, for example. But what I think they do focus on, I think, successfully, is the idea of the Colosseum as an arena where the emperor comes face to face with his people.

40:11Misha Glenny:And we've all been talking about that all the way through the programme in different ways. Of course, in the film, it's fictionalised, but the idea that this is an arena where the emperor has to put on spectacle because the people demand it. And as has been said, holding the Roman people is like holding a wolf by the ears. You've got to, you dare not let it go. You've got to keep feeding it or entertaining it. So that broader perspective, I think, is an interesting one. I think we've got time for about one more question. And I'm going to ask John Pearce. Why did the games die out? It's probably the main factor is one we've been talking about quite a lot, which is to do with money.

40:46Misha Glenny:That gladiators are very expensive. We've talked about the investment that you need to put in to create a trained fighter who will give you a good show. Kathleen, I think, alluded to the edict from the 8170s where there's an attempt to put a price cap on the rental for gladiators because people responsible for putting on shows have been complaining that it's bankrupting them. So those urban elites seem always to be under pressure, and it's likely that by the 4th century AD that pressure has become too much for many of them. That's a time when the cities of many of the Roman provinces are shrinking.

41:22Misha Glenny:They're becoming less significant as places of ceremony, places of political theatre. People seem, where they're spending their money, they're spending it on their rural villas. So the combination of cost, possibly availability of performers is shrinking. Those territorial wars on the margins of empire are cutting off the supply of animals, sometimes perhaps from North Africa or captives who are being fed into the arena. So performer availability goes down. Elite incentive to invest because they're no longer so engaged with urban political process. So that probably has a sort of a gradual effect on reducing arena culture.

41:59Misha Glenny:it tends to then focus on places that are closely connected to the emperor who is still invested or his nearby kind of political associates who remain invested in doing that. So Rome continues to see them. Places like Trier, these regional capitals, continue to see them. There is also ideological opposition to some degree. Christians are concerned, but they're much more concerned about the effect on the viewer than they're concerned for the effect on the people in the arena because the Christians who write about the games tend to be the same kinds of people like the Ciceros and the Tacituses. They come from that elite class.

42:35Misha Glenny:They're more worried about what it does to you. If you show up as a spectator, you lose your mind. You kind of, you're overtaken by the spirit of the crowd, by bloodlust. You stop rationalising. It's not good for you to go to the games. So you have kind of that opposition and then intermittent emperors who are Christians closing off the supply to by saying AD 325, for example, Constantine says it's no longer a penalty to send someone to the arena. They go to the mines instead if you want to severely punish a criminal. Well, my thanks to John Pearce, Kathleen Coleman and Matthew Nicholls. Next week, it's Full Staff, Hotspur and Howell, how Shakespeare explored succession crises through Henry IV, part one.

43:21Misha Glenny:Thank you for listening.

43:22unknown:And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

43:31Misha Glenny:Is there anything else you feel we missed here that should be mentioned?

43:36unknown:I'd love to mention that the games were accompanied by music. The main evidence for that comes from some mosaics in North Africa, some of the things that John was talking about, where we can see sometimes the critical moment where the referee is waiting for the decision as to what is to happen to the defeated gladiator. And the musicians are there with their instruments poised, the water organ, the horn players and the trumpeters, and presumably they would play mood music to accompany the decision.

44:09Misha Glenny:Yes, I wonder if it would be upbeat if the gladiator lost or downbeat. It's hard to tell, really, isn't it? They certainly seem to enjoy the violence, these spectators. John, what about you? To follow up Kathleen's point, I would add, you know, as part of the expense, there's this whole infrastructure of support staff. So Kathleen's just talked about there are the musicians, there are also the referees, the attendants, the people who drag the bodies out, and so on. We know there are masseurs. Also, there are two kinds of doctor. There's the doctor in the Roman sense, who's the trainer. So each of our class of gladiators seems to have a specialised trainer, probably former gladiators who survived their experience, who are now earning a living doing that.

44:52Misha Glenny:But also the surgeons who are keeping the bodies of the gladiators together. So one of our most famous Roman medics, Galen, serves a period of time as a doctor in the gladiatorial school at Pergamon and learns part of his surgery trade from that experience. Does he describe it at all, Galen? Because, as Matthew said, we don't have that many descriptions. he doesn't describe the games themselves but in describing some of his experiences of learning how to treat certain kinds of injuries what you can stitch to what that you can stitch skin to skin but it's not good to stitch muscles to muscles apparently is what he tells us so he does it's one another of those frustrating things indirectly you see it but they're never telling us directly what's going on in front of them, why would they?

45:38Misha Glenny:their audience has all seen it and they all know it Matthew? Well, there are some wonderful inscriptions we could talk more about. We did mention epigraphic evidence in the programme. There's, for example, the tombstone of a disgruntled gladiator from Amesis in modern Turkey who says he died because the referee made a mistake and he resented this decision of the Sumerudist, the ref, in the arena. Also, some of the worst excesses of the gladiator-loving emperors. I described it, I think, as a kind of line they had to tread between showing interest in the games but not getting too into it, not losing control of themselves.

46:10Misha Glenny:Caligula did, Nero did, perhaps most notoriously, the late second century emperor Commodus went absolutely mad for gladiatorial posing. He fought hundreds of bouts. He cut the head off an ostrich and waggled it at the Senate. And they all had to chew their laurel trees to stop themselves from laughing, which would have been a fatal mistake. So emperors could really tip too far over into a love of this populist entertainment and forget themselves. So that was Commodus proving what a great guy he is, that he can fight with the best of them. Well, if we believe, yes, I think so. A sort of physical strength and fitness to rule, but taken to a ludicrous extreme.

46:47Misha Glenny:By that date, he'd also try to rename every month of the year after himself and carved the word gladiator on the bottom of a statue, and shortly after he was assassinated. So I think we see it as a reign in decay. But interesting that gladiatorial combat, if there's any truth in those stories, is so potent a tool of imperial self-presentation that emperors can lean disastrously too far into it. Kathleen, I just wanted to pick up on one thing that you've said, And that was, you know, you were pointing out that this was not like a capitalist business, as say the sports industry would be today. But nonetheless, as John was talking about, the masses, the doctors, all the backup staff, the musicians, singers, dancers, whatever it is.

47:26Misha Glenny:Presumably they're being paid for all this.

47:29unknown:Well, presumably they're mostly slaves. And so their payment would have been their board and lodging, so to speak, in the training school or in the premises of the person who supplied them to the arena. We even have people whose job it is to rake the sand in the arena. These must have been the lowest of the low in terms of the slave hierarchy. but one thing I wanted to point out that we really don't know about and that must be the religious aspect of this how was religion implicated in these spectacles we mentioned very briefly that the Vestal Virgins were present they were sitting in prime seating although there's a lot of argument about where exactly their seats were but they represented the permanence of the Roman state because they tended the fire of Vesta the goddess and the fire that must never go out.

48:28unknown:So to have them present, sitting very close to the emperor somewhere in those front stands, must suggest that there's a religious element here that is holding Rome together. And that is something that we know very little about.

48:44Misha Glenny:Matthew, you wanted to come in there. Yes, that's right. I mean, there were other priestly colleges there too. The Arval Brethren had allocated seats. Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, is sometimes associated with arena sport. I was going to come in on the question of money and business. I mean, it must have been, I'm sure Kathleen's quite right, that many of the employees were enslaved, but the business of feeding and arming and equipping tens of thousands of people and 10 ,000 wild beasts in some of these games must have been very considerable. There's an anecdote that Collegiate ran out of cattle to feed the beast or found it too expensive and started randomly throwing criminals to feed the beast instead, and people thought this was poor form.

49:20Misha Glenny:So just the logistics of keeping the thing running must have been extremely demanding. Well, it was Caligula after all. One final question I've got for all of you. If you were a gladiator and you were a slave, could you win your freedom by being a great fighter?

49:34unknown:Well, it does seem that you could ultimately retire from the arena, but whether you got that because you were very good or whether because you were very good you were kept in the household doing it is obviously an open question.

49:49Misha Glenny:The gladiators could certainly make money from the arena. we talked earlier of their tombs and you have to have a certain amount of money to leave a tomb. We hear about gladiators who owned and freed slaves so they could accumulate property and it seems if they got to the end of their career some of them could die old although the mean age of death on the tombstone is actually quite young so not many did make it. Well with that it's the end of the game and thank you very much to all three of you. Here comes the producer. Tea or coffee? Coffee would be lovely. Tea would be great, thank you. I'll have a cup of tea.

50:22Misha Glenny:Brilliant. Thank you very much.

50:24unknown:In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft turns out to be flawed? In 1999, four apartment buildings were blown up in Russia, hundreds killed. But 25 years on, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories.

50:53Misha Glenny:Because these bombs, they're part of the origin story of one of the most powerful men in the world. Vladimir Putin. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss first time round? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen first on BBC Sounds. This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show? From the BBC, this is The Interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world. This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech reviews. It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your everyday life.

51:45Misha Glenny:And all the bizarre ways people are using the internet. it.

51:48unknown:Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.