The Classical World (68 page)

The displays of wild beasts against criminals had a further resonance: they were public executions. Their human victims were even given a last little honour. On the night before their deaths, they were allowed a ‘last supper’ when the morrow’s audience might come along and stare at them.
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On the day, they might even be dressed up in purple and gold for their brief moment of ‘glory’. At the sight of them, spectators might waver, albeit briefly. Sometimes, we are told, the bravery of condemned Christians made an impression on a pagan public and once, when they included naked women fresh from childbirth with ‘their breasts still dripping milk’ a crowd in Carthage showed its horror, and so they were taken away and dressed more decently.
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However, the spectators were mentallydistanced from the human suffering. They were watching the deaths of victims who were being ‘justly’ punished. These rotters (they assumed) deserved what they got, and socially they were beyond the pale.

The distance between viewers and victims was accentuated when such punishments began to be staged in imperial Rome in mythical or fantasy styles. Augustus himself had a noted Sicilian bandit executed in the Roman Forum on a replica of Mount Etna which ‘erupted’ and deposited the wretch among caged wild animals below. The possibilities are horribly clear in a series of epigrams by the poet Martial which celebrate the Emperor Titus’ great triumph in ad 80 after the capture of Jerusalem: they describe the re-enactment of mythological ‘charades’ with human victims in the Roman arena. Sex and violence could be most excitingly combined. Terracotta lamps found near the arena in Roman Athens show women having sex with animals, and so it was a small step at Rome to stage the myth of Pasiphae who squatted inside a wooden cow and had sex with her infatuation, a bull. ‘What legend sings, the arena shows…’: ‘virtual
myth’ became reality.
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The mythical dimension imported elements familiar from the mime, the pantomime and theatre. The usual programme of a day’s ‘sport’ would put the beast-hunts first in the morning, followed by the slaughter of criminals at lunchtime. A mythical staging mixed high and low culture together and livened up a repetitive midday of pure killing. It enhanced display and luxury and it distanced the viewers even further from the reality. There was nothing ‘religious’ about such staging, nor was it an honour for dead ancestors.

To us, the gladiators are more mysterious than the animal sports. However, most of the gladiators began as war-captives or criminals and had the status of slaves. A career in the arena gave these ‘dregs’ a sudden chance to win glory. Like the hunts, gladiatorial shows had never been part of the fixed calendar of games at Rome. They, too, had begun as private displays at funerals, but they then became the gift, or ‘promise’, of prominent men who were celebrating triumphs or bidding for yet more honours (like the young Julius Caesar, as aedile in 65). Here, the keyis that many on lookers identified with the military values of the armed duels. Custom-built amphitheatres first appear in colonies of Roman veteran soldiers in Italy and the sport was then spread widely by Roman army-camps abroad. It was even said to be good for spectators to see such social inferiors being ‘soldierly’ and enduring wounds. Deaths did indeed occur, but they were not the essence of the show. Sometimes fighters were released with an honourable ‘draw’; at other times the wounded one surrendered and the fight was stopped. We hear of prize-fighters who survived thirty fights, including a few combats which they lost. The Emperor Claudius, however, was known to be fond of a bloody finish.

Potentially, there was good money and a good career to be made here, and for the slaves or criminals there could be freedom too. In the crowds, fans went wild for particular ‘stars’: at Pompeii, graffiti applaud them as ‘darling of the girls’ or ‘netter of chicks by night’.
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For women too, ‘heavy metal’ and muscle could be horribly sexy: Augustus ruled that at gladiatorial shows women must sit only in the highest seats at the back. A glamour grew up around these fights, which drew free competitors into the arena too. Children played games of ‘being gladiators’ and there were female gladiators from
time to time: at Ostia, a benefactor boasts in his inscription of being the ‘first of all since Rome was founded to make women fight’.
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Minorities, too, found a new public esteem in the arena. In 57, for a visiting Oriental prince, Nero staged the ‘all-blacks’, a show of north African contestants only, including women and children. It was left to Domitian to show women fighting dwarves.
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For Augustus and his successors, this intensified culture of the spectacle was a valuable public card. Unlike the big names of the Republic, the emperors now monopolized triumphs: they had far the greatest resources; they could show supreme ‘liberality’ and magnificence in shows for the plebs which nobody else could rival. Soon, the emperors had a special school for gladiators (probably beginning with Augustus). They owned gladiatorial troupes and increasingly came to predominate in staging the combats; theyalso dominated the chariot racing. But as ‘First Citizens’, they were expected to attend the shows in person. They were approved if, like Augustus or Hadrian, they took a keen interest in the events, whereas Julius Caesar, by contrast, had unwisely read his letters during the contests. Emperors were well advised to be keen, because audiences of several thousand in the theatre or 150,000 or more in the Circus Maximus would use the occasion to shout specific complaints or praises at their ruler and his family. Contemporaries did see these shows as an alternative to politics, but they were also something else. They were a dialogue between a ruler and his people whose demands were hardly very radical. The crowds usuallyshouted specific items of a limited, sometimes comic, scope. The occasion was one for frank speech and ‘licence’ in a non-political setting rather than a substitute for absent democracy. But it was also a potent reminder to foreign visitors and senatorial spectators that ‘Caesar’ enjoyed a relationship with the plebs which they could never possibly replicate.

The problem, for Augustus, was not so much the crowd as some of the young members of his esteemed upper orders. From the 40s
BC
onwards members of high society at Rome had shown a ‘disgraceful’ wish to appear on stage in person or even to fight in the arena. It did not help the promotion of ancestral values when Augustus’ own nephew, Marcellus, allowed a Roman knight and some respectable Roman matrons to appear in the public show which he gave as a
junior magistrate. Senators, knights and their families were banned from appearing as actors or gladiators, but the ban eventuallyproved futile. In ad 11 Augustus had to lift the ban on knights appearing as gladiators: he himself, in his old age, then sat and watched them doing it. It was still forbidden for free-born women to participate, but only if they were under twenty. Chariot racing, however, seems to have remained unregulated.

Austere Tiberius soon had the ban reinstated, but it did not last. It was so much more thrilling for young bloods to compete with a net, a sword or a trident in the arena than to uphold ancient morality in a heavy white toga. In due course, there were emperors who agreed. Caligula liked playing the gladiator, while Nero appeared on stage and drove a chariot at the races. In the 180s the ultimate shock was Commodus. Once, after fighting ostriches in the arena, he cut off their necks and advanced on the senators in their special seats, brandishing a sword in one hand and the bloodied head of a bird in the other. He gesticulated at the Senate as if their necks might be the next ones for his attention. And yet when he died there were senators who bought up his gladiatorial equipment.
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The Roman Army

Strength report of the First Cohort of Tungrians on 18 May (probably in the early 90s
AD
) at Vindolanda in north Britain (
Tabulae Vindolandenses
1.154)

For nearly sixty years Augustus’ most important relationship was not with theatre crowds: it was with the army. The soldiers had lived through profound changes during the fall of the Republic which were crucial to the real ‘Roman revolution’. Since the days of Sulla, there were so many more of them under arms. After Julius Caesar’s murder there had been more than forty legions (each legion numbered about 5,000); the settlement of veterans remained a massive operation, inside and outside Italy. Under Augustus, the legions reduced at first to twenty-six, but in ad 23, when we are given clear figures, there were still reckoned to be 150,000 citizen-soldiers in the legions (now numbering twenty-five) and another 150,000 auxiliarysoldiers in the
important supporting units, almost all of whom were non-Romans and would receive citizenship only on discharge. As the Empire’s frontiers moved forward, these troops were being stationed ever further afield, but the sum total was still enormous.

Service, also, had been greatly increased. The age of ‘triumvirs’ had been characterized by long periods under arms, but after Actium those periods became official. Legionaries now had to serve for sixteen years (increased in AD 5 to twenty years) and in 13
BC
a further four years ‘under the standards’ were added for men who had served their span. During this extra time, they were supposed to be called on only for combat with an enemy. In fact, service could drag on for up to thirty years without full discharge; in the Republic, the maximum length had been six years. Under Augustus, therefore, there was a real standing army. It was quite different from the citizen-armies which had been briefly called up in the Greek city-states, and it was far bigger than the core armies of Hellenistic kings, which were enlarged in wartime by hiring mercenaries and calling up military colonists from land-settlements. There were even localized fleets in naval bases, forming a small standing navy.

Like every emperor, Hadrian recognized the importance of this army, especially as he had to preside over its withdrawal from his predecessor’s disastrous ventures in the East. Not a fighting emperor, he became a touring emperor. He gave off a militaryaura byaddressing the troops in each province, and even sharing their diet of bread and cheese. By then (
c
. 120) their numbers were still bigger, as the auxiliaries and fleets had increased: up to 500,000 people were under arms, perhaps one in every 120 inhabitants of the Empire. Not until the seventeenth century, in France, would such proportions be matched again in a kingdom.

Since Augustus, each emperor was the acknowledged Commander (
Imperator
). Statues, therefore, often show emperors in militarydress, and defeat of the barbarians was a major part of their image in art and poetry. They wore a wreath of laurel (signifying Victory) and at festivals, the special robe of a ‘triumphing’ commander. We can well see whyAugustus’ poor track record in combat was such a weakness. For as emperor, it was he who dealt with the army in general. It was he who fixed the pay-scales, allowances and lengths of service for each
rank.
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Until ad 6 he paid their rewards on discharge and gave the ‘diplomas’ for each retiring auxiliary. It was on his authority only that colonies were settled for veterans: the details of each colony’s ‘map’ and property rights would be deposited, dulysigned, in the emperor’s own record office.
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If the land for the colony was bought (sometimes it was not), it was Augustus who paid for it, a point which he emphasizes in his record of his achievements, because nobodyhad ever paid for so much land before. Most of the legions were in provinces which were the emperor’s, not the ‘public ones’, and in them, his agents saw to the troops’ pay.
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In them, he alone gave out military decorations, but all veterans every where were ‘his’. When he disbanded veterans after Actium, he gave them the full rights of Roman citizenship, the right to vote at Rome in whatever tribe they chose, exemption from all civic obligations in their local towns if they so wished, and a valuable immunity from tribute. However, veterans who settled in a colony in Spain would hardly bother about voting in Rome, while their local townsmen could no doubt make them hold local office with offers which they could not refuse. The privileges had to be asserted by their recipients, but they were not curtailed until the late second century (when they dropped to four years) and were not abolished until the third century.

Looking up to their emperor as Commander, the troops observed a calendar of Roman religious festivals and sacrifices. Probably, its form went back to Augustus’ reign, although we only encounter evidence for it later, when the number of sacrifices to deified emperors and empresses had expanded. In the centre of a legionary camp, a shrine contained the legion’s standards and images of the emperor and the Roman divinities (the soldiers’ savings were also deposited here). Roman rituals of purification and of omen-taking were practised: we have the calendar of an auxiliaryunit, of non-citizens, which included vows on 3 January for the well-being of the emperor, the eternity of the Roman Empire and sacrifices to the three great gods of the Roman Capitol.
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Under the Republic, refusal to serve when called had been punished by the death penalty. In the new age that sanction receded. Hencefor-ward, service in the legions was almost always voluntary and forcible conscription was exceptional. At two moments of ‘crisis’, in AD 5 and
9, Augustus did resort to it; in the 60s, however, the Emperor Nero found that he could not even hold a forcible levy when he wished.
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When levies are attested locally in the Empire, they are either levies of volunteers or levies for the non-citizen auxiliaryunits. Even so, the recruiting officers who conducted them were the emperor’s men. About 6,000 recruits are the army’s estimated yearly need, after the usual deaths and retirements, in order to maintain the legions at full strength each year. Surviving figures for the Roman census suggest that the rising citizen-population could have met that need very comfortably. It would therefore take a sudden very heavy demand for troops to make forcible enlistment a necessity. Otherwise, the emperor and his men simplysaw to it. Already in ad 23 it was quite exceptional that the Emperor Tiberius discussed army recruitment in the Senate.
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Even the appointments to quite minor commands came to be submitted outside the public eye to the emperor’s judgement. Quite by chance, we discover (through a poem in the 80s) that one of the emperor’s secretaries had to receive letters about cavalry commanders, military tribunes and other subordinate officers, either so as to approve their appointments or to assist the emperor if he wished to appoint them himself from on high.
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