The Colosseum (14 page)

There were other factors which would upset the neatness of the stratification of the Colosseum and other groups who found a place in its system, cutting across the official hierarchy. Fragments of inscriptions, for example, have been discovered which originally identified collective seating for
‘boys’ and probably also for their tutors (who, though usually slaves, would have presumably sat near their charges); another marks out space for ‘citizens of Cadiz’. It seems very probable that other groups such as official delegations, artisans or traders from big cities acquired the right to sit in particular places, whether by favour or purchase, quite separately from their formal place in the legal hierarchy. In the later empire, individual aristocrats had their names carved in marble to indicate their personal or family seating space. The Colosseum was not, as is sometimes implied, simply a place where the political collectivity of Rome was on view; it displayed individual variance, power and influence too.

And what proportion of that collectivity would be included in the audience anyway? Almost no one now believes the late Roman account which seems to suggest that there were 87,000 seats in the Colosseum; at best, it has been argued (though for no particularly strong reason), this really meant 87,000 feet of seating space, not individual seats. Modern estimates cluster around an estimated capacity of about 50,000. But Rome in the first century
AD
is thought to have had a population of one million, which suggests some 250,000 adult male citizens. On this reckoning, even when it was completely full, the Colosseum would have held only one fifth of those citizens, and even less in that some space was taken up by women, boys, slaves and outsiders. Our guess is that, even though the shows were free, the poor and the very poor were systematically under-represented (as they are in most social benefit systems in any place or at any period). If this is correct, the audience at the Colosseum was more of an elite of white toga-clad citizens than the rabble proletariat often imagined today.

THE EMPEROR – IN AND OUT OF THE BOX

The emperor was the sponsor of the most spectacular shows in the Colosseum, which he watched in the presence of his people from the imperial box in a prominent position at the centre of one of the long sides of the arena’s oval. Ancient writers devote so much attention to the emperor’s role at these Colosseum shows that it is now hard to recapture any image of the monument without the imperial presence or to recover any information on shows that were sponsored by ‘ordinary’ aristocrats. That is partly the point. For the Colosseum quickly became one of the key contexts (if not
the
key context) in which the emperor’s quality and worth were judged.

‘Good’ emperors were defined as such by their behaviour in the arena: they generously showered the audience with presents or tokens that could later be exchanged for yet more valuable objects; they offered lunch (or at least the ancient equivalent of a cheeseburger and Coke in their seats) to the onlookers; they never ever looked bored with what was going on, never used the privacy of their box to get on with some paperwork, but they did not take too much pleasure in the shows either (a difficult tightrope to tread, no doubt, between disdain and fanaticism). They also sprang witty surprises. It was presumably in the Colosseum that an emperor in the middle of the third century
AD
, Gallienus, played an ingenious trick on a man who had sold his wife glass jewels instead of real gems. He is supposed to have ordered the man to be taken off as if to be thrown to the lions, but when the cage was opened, a capon tottered out. The emperor had his herald proclaim to the astonished audience, ‘He practised deceit and had it practised on him.’

‘Bad’ emperors were just the opposite. Typically they were supposed to transgress the boundaries on which the logic of the shows rested, most obviously by turning themselves into gladiators and the audience into victims. The notorious emperor Caligula, in the mid first century
AD
, about fifty years before the Colosseum itself was built, is said to have been so short of criminals for execution that he had some of the spectators thrown to the beasts instead. Domitian, among others, had members of the Roman elite fighting as gladiators. But it was the emperor Commodus (as in the movie) who offers the most vivid case of the intersection of the emperor’s image with gladiatorial combat.

Commodus was assassinated in
AD
192, by a lethal consortium of his mistress, chief chamberlain and commander of the guard. They had supposedly discovered his plans to kill them all, which the emperor had carelessly left written on a wooden tablet, when he fell into a drunken sleep after lunch. Besides, Commodus was also said to have been planning on the very next day, 1 January 193, to murder the consuls and present himself as holder of this traditional office dressed not in a toga, but as a Roman gladiator, emerging to meet the people not from the palace but from the gladiatorial training camp where he had lodgings. True or not, it is the closest we ever come in Roman history to the image of the emperor being, as it were, completely re-branded as a gladiator. And it goes along with all kinds of other evidence for the promotion of the figure of ‘emperor-as-gladiator’ during Commodus’ reign. He is supposed to have fought hundreds of gladiatorial bouts himself (in private, it was said, these were fights to the death, or at least he clipped off a few of his opponents’ noses; in public it was display bouts only, with wooden
swords and no bloodshed). According to a late scandalmongering biographer, which may at least reflect rumour at the time, he had the great statue of the Colossus altered so that it bore his own features, and his titles inscribed at the base of the statue included two new imperial sobriquets: ‘Gladiator’ and ‘Cross-dresser’ (in Latin, ‘
Effeminatus
’). When he was assassinated, the gleeful acclamations of the senate apparently included the refrain ‘Cast the gladiator into the charnel house’.

The most extraordinary account of Commodus’ exploits in the arena comes from the historian and senator Dio, who was himself an eye-witness to many of them from his ringside seat in the Colosseum: ‘I was there myself and I saw and heard everything and took part in what was spoken; so I have thought it right to suppress no details, but to hand them down just as they happened, just like anything else of the greatest weight and importance.’ On one occasion, Commodus opened the extravaganza by killing a hundred bears with spears, throwing them from specially constructed walkways which divided up the arena. As Dio implies, this was more a demonstration of accuracy than courage – but even Edward Gibbon, whose tart denunciation of these antics in the Colosseum is a marvellous set-piece in
Decline and Fall
, was forced to concede that ‘some degree of applause was deservedly bestowed on the uncommon skill of the Imperial performer’. The next day he killed some relatively harmless domestic animals, some of which were in nets in any case (just to be on the safe side presumably), plus a tiger, hippo and elephant. That was a morning’s work. In the afternoon he fought a demonstration bout as a gladiator, armed with a shield and wooden sword, against an opponent armed
only with a wooden pole. Unsurprisingly, Commodus won, and then settled down to watch the real bouts – some of which he oversaw from a platform in the arena, dressed up as the god Mercury.

Dio insists that when the emperor was fighting, the senators and knights always attended. Only one principled character stayed away, who would rather have died (literally) than be forced to watch all this or join in the chanting that was required of the elite: ‘You are lord, and you are first, and the most blessed of all. Victor you are, and victor you will be …’ The common people, however, had more choice than their betters and were much more inclined to give the proceedings a miss, partly out of disgust, partly because they had heard a rumour that the emperor was planning to shoot some of the spectators, in the guise of Hercules shooting the Stymphalian birds. (This must have been one of those occasions when even an imperial blockbuster in the Colosseum was not playing to a full house.) Not that the senators were any less anxious. Dio in fact describes one particular unforgettable incident which panicked as much as it disgusted and amused the senators in the front rows. Commodus had just killed an ostrich in the arena and cut off its head. Approaching the senators in the audience he held up the ostrich head in his left hand and a bloody sword in his right and, without speaking, grinned at them – as if to say that he would or could do much the same to them. ‘And,’ to quote Dio’s exact words, ‘many of us would have died by the sword there and then, for laughing at him (for it was laughter not indignation that took hold of us), if I had not myself chewed on some laurel leaves which I picked from my garland, and persuaded the people sitting near me to do the same, so that
we might conceal the fact we were laughing by the steady movement of our jaws.’

In this story, the Colosseum is the setting for one of those very rare occasions when we can, almost physically, empathise with the Romans. We know exactly what that laugh of Dio’s – caused by a mix of hilarity and sheer terror – would have felt like. And most of us have vivid memories, from school if not later in life, of suppressing a giggle that would inevitably get us into trouble by biting our lips, a sweet paper, a ruler or whatever. But what on earth was going on in these extraordinary gladiatorial antics by the emperor? In part, as we suggested earlier, the arena and the gaze of the people sets up a competition for popular attention between emperor and performers. It is one of those awful ambivalences of Roman imperial power: the emperor sponsors the show, but always risks being upstaged by the
déclassé
stars of the fighting; yet he is bound to humiliate himself if he decides to direct the people’s gaze to himself by usurping the position of the fighter. The Colosseum was, in other words, a venue that is central to the emperor’s image as benefactor of his citizens, but one in which he found it hard to win. In part too, as Dio’s tale of the ostrich head waved in front of the senators must hint, the arena provided a context for the display not so much of the Roman collectivity, but of its conflicts and fissures. The bitter rivalry between aristocrats and emperors is a leitmotif of Roman history. And yet there they were, staring at each other across the Colosseum. It is hardly surprising that the two sorts of conflict (fighter versus beast; emperor versus senate) were repeatedly intertwined, that one infected the other, that one was used as a means of fighting the other. In
short, the Colosseum dramatised the emperor’s struggles with himself and with his rivals.

VIEWS AND COUNTER-VIEWS

What, finally, did the spectators think of what they saw in the arena? Modern accounts tend to divide ancient reactions into far too simple categories. Most Romans (bloodthirsty culture that Rome was) did not disapprove of the shows. A few oddballs, such as Seneca, expressed their revulsion. Christians, for obvious reasons, saw in them the cruelty of Roman paganism to which they were so strongly opposed. We have already seen several reasons to query this simple picture. Martial’s poetry hinted that the touchstone of approval/disapproval was not necessarily appropriate for understanding his response to the events in the arena. Despite all the Christian attacks on the institution, ‘sincere’ as many of these undoubtedly were, the rise of Christianity, as we have argued, was paradoxically tied to the violence of the amphitheatre. In the case of Seneca, he may have expressed his horror at the executions at midday, but he was nonetheless there in the arena (not) watching, and in his philosophical work he could use gladiatorial combat as a positive model in ethics.

The fact is that Romans (or at least the elite Romans whose words survive) were reflective about their own culture, the culture of the arena included. Their reactions to it were certainly different from our own, but there is no reason to suppose that they were any less complicated. Roman historians and anthropologists, for example, wondered about where the different elements of the shows – especially the gladiators
and the animal hunts – came from and what their original function had been. They claimed to know that, long before the regular arena performances, the first display of gladiators in Rome had happened in 264
BC
as part of the funeral celebrations of a leading aristocrat. This funerary connection was developed by Tertullian and other early Christian writers to suggest that this form of combat lay in human sacrifice to the spirits of the dead, thus damning its very origin with the worst religious crime of all, for Christians and pagans alike. (Despite the obviously ideological slant of this theory, modern scholars often repeat it as if it were known fact.) Other ancient writers were more interested in the geographic origins of the gladiators. A Greek historian in Rome under the emperor Augustus, puzzled by the Roman practice of sometimes bringing on gladiators at the end of a dinner party, linked it with customs in Etruria and claimed an Etruscan origin for gladiators as a whole. This has sent modern scholars scurrying off to the paintings in Etruscan tombs, where they claim (unconvincingly in our view) to have found traces of proto-gladiatorial combat. For others, both ancient and modern, Campania, south of Rome, seemed, or seems, the most likely home of the first gladiators – which fits conveniently, though not necessarily significantly, with the fact that the earliest surviving stone amphitheatres are in this part of Italy.

Romans also reflected on the ethics of the arena, with many of the doubts, ambivalences and contradictions we ought to expect. So, for example, Marcus Aurelius, Commodus’ father (unless we believe that story about Faustina’s gladiator lover), claimed in the sixth book of his philosophical ramblings, euphemistically known as the
Meditations
, to have found gladiatorial shows ‘boring’. And in 177, in his reign (along with his son Commodus as coruler) the legislation we used in our calculations of gladiator numbers was prefaced with one of the most striking criticisms of the cruelty of the shows that is recorded in Roman history. In abolishing the tax on the sale of gladiators, the authorities argued that the treasury ‘should not be stained with the splashing of human blood’ and that it was morally offensive to get money from what was ‘forbidden by all laws of gods and humans’. What Commodus’ attitude to this was we can only guess! But even with Marcus Aurelius himself there are odd contradictions; not least of which is the fact that in
AD
175 he himself had apparently put on a massive show at Rome with 2757 gladiatorial fights. Whether we are dealing with a change of heart, political expediency, vacillating moral purpose, or a combination of all three, is impossible to know. But it certainly suggests that it is harder to pin down ancient attitudes to gladiators than is often assumed.