Chapter XXXVIII: Aspects of Civilisation of the First Two Centuries of (4)

In theory, at least, the men who were thus thrust forth to engage the wild beasts were condemned criminals; but it was often necessary to resort to the expedient of hiring volunteers to furnish the numbers required, and this seems to prove that the advantage was generally on the side of the human combatant. The gladiators, although their profession might be traced by antiquarians to the combats of armed slaves around the pyre of their master, ending in their mutual destruction in his honour, were devoted to no certain death. They were generally slaves purchased for the purpose, but not unfrequently free men hired with liberal wages; and they were in either case too costly articles to be thrown away with indifference. They were entitled to their discharge after a few years’ service, and their profession was regarded in many respects as a public service, conducted under fixed regulations. Under the emperors, indeed, express laws were required to moderate the ardour even of knights and senators to descend into the arena, where they delighted to exhibit their courage and address in the face of danger. Such was the ferocity engendered by the habitual use of arms, so soothing to the swordsman’s vanity the consciousness of skill and valour, so stimulating to his pride the thunders of applause from a hundred thousand admirers, that the practice of mortal combat, however unsophisticated nature may blench at its horrors, was actually the source perhaps of more pleasure than pain to the Roman prize-fighters. If the companions of Spartacus revolted and slew their trainers and masters, we may set against this instance of despair and hostility the signal devotion of the gladiators of Antonius, who cut their way through so many obstacles in a fruitless effort to succour him. But the effect of such exhibitions upon the spectators themselves was wholly evil; for while they utterly failed in supplying the bastard courage for which they were said to be designed, they destroyed the nerve of sympathy for suffering which distinguishes the human from the brute creation.[c]

SHEPPARD’S ESTIMATE OF THE GLADIATORIAL CONTEST

The gladiatorial combats were, above all things else, the distinctive characteristics of Rome. Rome, in her fallen days, without virtue, without faith, without trust in her gods or in herself, loved, believed in, deified one idol still--Homicide. The butcheries of the amphitheatre exerted a charm upon the minds of men, for which literature, art, philosophy, religion, and the simple enjoyments of domestic life were flung aside. Existence became a frightful phantasmagoria--an alternation of debauch and blood.

The practice itself can be traced back to one of the darkest superstitions of the human mind. It originated in the barbarous instinct of the savage to sacrifice his victim upon the tomb of the dead as a satisfaction, and perhaps as an attendant upon the departed spirit. The example, from whatever source derived, was first set to the Roman people by Marcus and Decimus Brutus, who matched together gladiators in the Forum Boarium, for the purpose of casting unprecedented éclat upon the obsequies of their father, 264 B.C. The seed fell upon fruitful ground, for it soon grew and ripened into a harvest more destructive than the dragon’s teeth of Grecian fable. The wealth and ingenuity of the Roman aristocracy were taxed to the uttermost to content the populace and provide food for the indiscriminate slaughter of the circus, where brute fought with brute and man with man, or where the skill and weapons of the latter were matched against the strength and ferocity of the first. In one day Pompey poured six hundred lions into the arena. Augustus delighted the multitude with the sight of four hundred and twenty panthers. Twenty elephants, Pliny tells us, contended against a band of six hundred Gætulian captives. The games given by Trajan lasted for more than one hundred and twenty days. Ten thousand gladiators descended to combat, and more than ten thousand beasts were slain. Titus, that “delight of the human race,” had upwards of five thousand animals slaughtered in a single day. Every corner of the earth was ransacked for some strange creature whose appearance was hailed with frantic applause by the spectators. We hear of camelopards, white elephants, and the rhinoceros. Scaurus produced upon the stage a hippopotamus and five crocodiles. Game of the nobler sorts became scarce. The Roman populace was as indignant with those who in any way damaged its supplies, as the country sportsman is with a poacher or with the unlucky culprit who has made away with a fox. In the time of Theodosius it was forbidden by law to destroy a Gætulian lion, even in self-defence.

But the death-agonies of the wild animals of the desert were too tame a spectacle to satisfy the Roman thirst for blood. It was when man strove with man, and when all that human strength and skill, increased by elaborate training and taxed to the uttermost, could do, was put forth before their unrelenting eyes, that the transport of their sanguinary enthusiasm was at its height. It is impossible to describe the aspect of the amphitheatre at such a time. The audience became frantic with excitement; they rose from their seats; they yelled; they shouted their applause, as one blow more ghastly than another was dealt by lance, or sword, or dagger, and the life-blood spouted forth. “Hoc habet”--“he has it, he has it!”--was the cry which burst from ten thousand throats, and was re-echoed, not only by a debased and brutalised populace, but by the lips of royalty, by purple-clad senators and knights, by noble matrons, and even by those consecrated maids whose presence elsewhere saved the criminal from his fate, but whose function here it was to consign the suppliant to his doom by reversing the thumb upon his appeal for mercy. His blood was soon licked up by the thirsty sand, or concealed beneath the sawdust sprinkled over it by the ready attendant; his body dragged hastily from the stage by an iron hook, and flung into a gory pit; his existence forgotten, and his place supplied by another and yet another victim, as the untiring work of death went on.

And we must remember that these things were not done casually, or under the influence of some strange fit of popular frenzy. They were done purposely, systematically, and calmly; they formed the staple amusement, I had almost said the normal employment, of a whole people, whose one audible cry was for “panem et circenses”--“bread and blood.” Neither were they fostered by the brutalised habits and associations which surround the cockpit or the prize-ring. When men were “butchered to make a Roman holiday,” it was among all the delicate appliances of the most refined sensualism. An awning, gorgeous with purple and gold, excluded the rays of the midday sun; sweet strains of music floated in the air, drowning the cries of death; the odour of Syrian perfumes overpowered the scent of blood; the eye was feasted by the most brilliant scenic decoration, and amused by elaborate machinery; and, as a crowning degradation to the whole, the Paphian chamber of the courtesan arose beside the bloody den into which were flung the mangled bodies of men and brutes.

Such things seem impossible to those who live beneath a civilisation which Christianity has influenced, however imperfectly, by its presence. And indeed it needs much--the concurrent testimony of poet, historian, and philosopher; the ruins of a hundred amphitheatres before our eyes; the frescoes of the Museo Borbonico; the very programmes of the performance, which something higher than accident has preserved; the incidental witness of an inspired apostle--it needs all this to convince us of the truth. But they are true, undisputed facts of history, and facts which carry with them no obscure intimation of the reasons which worked the fall of the imperial city. They prove that she deserved to fall, and by the hands of those in whose persons she had outraged humanity. It was not a poet remarkable for overstraining the religious sentiment of divine retribution, who wrote:

“Shall he expire,
And unavenged! Arise, ye Goths! and glut your ire.”

The gladiator, whether directly a captive or a refractory slave, was generally the child of those races who wreaked, in after times, a bloody vengeance upon the city of blood. And if her own degenerate sons, freedman, knight, or senator, nay, even her degraded daughters, descended into the arena and combated by his side, this could only bespeak her more entire debasement and unfitness to direct the destinies of the world.[i]

FOOTNOTES

[36] [It is well to bear in mind that a more optimistic view of the early empire has its supporters. As has already been pointed out, there are different estimates of such emperors as Tiberius. It is urged, also, that the cruelties and vices of the emperors affected but a limited circle; and that meantime the provinces might be well governed, healthful, and prosperous. It has been alleged, _e.g._, that Tiberius and Domitian ruled the provinces better than the Antonines.]

[37] The Appian way was the fashionable drive of the Roman nobility.

[38] The Romans rode in carriages on a journey, but rarely for amusement, and never within the city. Even beyond the wall it was considered disreputable to hold the reins one’s self, such being the occupation of the slave or hired driver. Juvenal ranks the consul, who creeps out at night to drive his own chariot, with the most degraded of characters: that he should venture to drive by daylight, while still in office, is an excess of turpitude transcending the imagination of the most sarcastic painter of manners as they were. And this was a hundred years later than the age of Augustus. See Juvenal, VIII, 145.

[39] The _leges Juliæ_ allowed two hundred sesterces for a repast on ordinary days, three hundred on holidays, one thousand for special occasions, such as a wedding, etc. Gellius[d] II, 24.

[40] The structor or carver was an important officer at the sideboard. Carving was even taught as an art, which, as the ancients had no forks (χειρονομᾶν, to manipulate, was the Greek term for it), must have required grace as well as dexterity. Moreau de Jonnès observes, with some reason, that the invention of the fork, apparently so simple, deserves to be considered difficult and recondite. The Chinese, with their ancient and elaborate civilisation, have failed to attain to it.