Gladiators: Deadly Arena Sports of Ancient Rome

For all of my family, friends, and colleagues who've provided encouragement and support for this project. Special thanks to Don Gill and his photographic expertise.

Copyright © 2016 by Christopher Epplett

First Skyhorse Publishing Edition 2017

First published as Gladiators and Beast Hunts in 2016 by Pen & Sword Military, an imprint of Pen and Sword Books Ltd

All rights to any and all materials in copyright owned by the publisher are strictly reserved by the publisher.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

Skyhorse® and Skyhorse Publishing® are registered trademarks of Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.®, a Delaware corporation.

Visit our website at www.skyhorsepublishing.com.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas [Dominic Allen]

Cover images: Author’s collection. Front cover details of the Zliten mosaic ©Gilles Mermet / Art Resource, NY

Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-510-0

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-876-7

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

List of Plates

Select Glossary

Introduction

Chapter 1     Origins of Roman Arena Sports

Chapter 2     Spectacles of the High Empire in Rome

Chapter 3     Munera Outside Rome

Photos

Chapter 4     Performer and Spectator in the Arena

Chapter 5     The Infrastructure of the Arena

Chapter 6     The Demise of the Roman Arena

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Plates

Plate 1.     Coin of Domitian depicting two-horned African rhinoceros.

Plate 2.     Bust of Commodus as Hercules.

Plate 3.     Amphitheatre riot in Pompeii.

Plate 4.     Portion of Zliten mosaic depicting gladiators and referee.

Plate 5.     Magerius mosaic from Smirat.

Plate 6.     Amphitheatre mosaic from El Djem.

Plate 7.     Tomb relief from Rome.

Plate 8.     Relief depicting combat between female gladiators.

Plate 9.     Figurine depicting combat between hoplomachus and ‘Thracian’.

Plate 10.   Mosaic depicting combat between two gladiators, with referee in background.

Plate 11.   Relief depicting combat between various animals and armoured venatores.

Plate 12.   Gladiator helmets discovered in Pompeii and environs.

Plate 13.   Detail of animal combat from Zliten mosaic.

Plate 14.   Model of Ludus Magnus in Rome.

Plate 15.   Scenes of animal capture and transport from ‘Great Hunt’ mosaic.

Plate 16.   Coins minted to celebrate Philip’s Secular Games.

Plate 17.   Diptych of Areobindus.

Select Glossary

Aedile (pl. aediles) – Roman official whose chief duties included supervision of public games, as well as the maintenance of streets and public buildings.

Censor (pl. censores) – Roman official whose chief responsibilities were to conduct a periodic census of the Roman population and to oversee the membership of the Senate.

Cochlea (pl. cochleae) – Apparatus consisting of panels fitted to a central rotating pole which was periodically used in animal spectacles, particularly during the later Empire.

Consul (pl. consules) – Chief magistrate of the Roman state during the Republic. Like other Republican magistracies, continued in existence under the Empire.

Damnatio ad Bestias – ‘Condemnation to the beasts’. Common form of capital punishment in Rome.

Damnatio ad Ludos – ‘Condemnation to the games’. Another form of punishment under Roman law. Unlike damnatio ad bestias, however, those condemned to fight as gladiators or venatores by this sentence at least had a fighting chance to earn their freedom someday.

Editor (pl. editores) – The official or private citizen who staged a given spectacle.

Familia (pl. familiae) – Group of arena performers overseen by a lanista which could be hired out for various spectacles. Prominent officials (including the emperor himself) or wealthy citizens commonly owned such groups for use in the events they staged.

Infamia – Loss of status and citizen rights suffered by gladiators and other arena performers.

Lanista (pl. lanistae) – Term commonly used for trainers of gladiators and/or managers of arena training schools.

Ludus (pl. ludi) – Term used, first of all, for the state festivals in Rome (e.g., Ludi Romani / the Roman Games). Term also used to denote arena training schools such as the Ludus Magnus, the chief gladiatorial training venue in the city of Rome.

Munus (pl. munera) – Common term used for an arena spectacle.

Noxius (pl. noxii) – Term commonly used for the condemned criminals forced to participate in arena spectacles.

Naumachia (pl. naumachiae) – A marine spectacle involving a staged naval combat.

Palus (pl. pali) – Term originally denoted the wooden stakes which gladiators commonly used when practicing their weapon strokes. By extension, also came to denote the different ranks of gladiators within a familia (e.g., the highest rank was known as primus palus (‘first stake’)).

Praetor (pl. praetores) – Second highest magistracy in the Roman state under the Republic, primarily concerned with legal affairs.

Summa/Secunda Rudis (‘first/ second stick’) – Term used respectively for the senior and junior referees in a given gladiatorial munus. Arose from the long sticks which these officials carried in order to separate or otherwise discipline combatants.

Tiro (pl. tirones) – Term commonly used to denote a novice gladiator.

Tribune – Magistrate whose chief responsibility was to protect the interests and rights of the common people in Rome.

Venatio (pl. venationes) – Common term for animal spectacles in Rome, including both combat between men and animals and combat between animals alone.

Vivarium (pl. vivaria) – Generic term used for the enclosures in which various animals were kept.

Introduction

Numerous works have been written upon the combat sports and spectacles of ancient Rome, events that are among the most famous manifestations of Roman culture. One might wonder, then, as to the need for another book on this topic. My intention is to write a survey of the Roman arena that I hope will be of interest to both a general and a scholarly audience. The two types of arena spectacles that will comprise the main focus of this book are gladiatorial events and staged beast hunts, commonly known as venationes. One very popular Roman sport which will not be discussed in any great detail is chariot racing, an event which, given its importance and popularity in Roman culture, merits its own detailed treatment. What sets my work on the Roman arena apart from those of many other scholars is, first of all, the attention I devote to the venationes. Many surveys of Roman arena spectacles focus primarily upon gladiatorial events and pay substantially less attention to the beast hunts, despite the fact that the latter spectacles were very popular in their own right, and were staged over a longer period. I will also discuss in some detail the all-important infrastructure behind the scenes that ensured the successful staging of untold numbers of both gladiatorial and animal spectacles throughout Roman territory over the course of centuries.

Fortunately, a wide variety of evidence is available to reconstruct the history of such events. First are the preserved writings of numerous Greek and Roman authors. Most such works do not take the spectacles as their focus of interest, but describe them in passing from time to time. The historians Livy and Tacitus, for example, who wrote annalistic histories of Republican and imperial Rome respectively, describe in the course of their works the noteworthy public events staged by various magistrates and emperors. Similarly, the voluminous correspondence of Cicero, one of the most important figures of the late Republic, occasionally touches upon contemporary spectacles in Rome or other topics pertaining to them.

One of our most important literary sources for the history of the Roman games is a small book of poems, De Spectaculis (‘On the Spectacles’) written by the poet Martial in the later first century AD. The subject of the poems is the dedication of the Colosseum, the most famous amphitheatre in the Roman Empire, in 79 AD, and the spectacles staged there by the emperors Titus and Domitian. Martial’s work not only provides information on specific events staged in the course of these events, be they gladiatorial combat, venationes, or criminal executions, but also provides a vivid glimpse of the spectator reaction to them. As such, De Spectaculis is one of our most prominent primary sources demonstrating the importance of the arena and its associated spectacles in Roman society.

Literary works must always be used with some degree of caution, however, primarily because of potential bias or inaccuracy on the part of the author. An instructive example of just such a work is the so-called Scriptores Historiae Augustae (or SHA), a collection of biographies of Roman emperors from the second and third centuries. Among issues surrounding this work are the fabricated documents and persons inserted in the text by the author, which necessitate a cautious separation of fact from fiction by scholars.

Fortunately, another type of written evidence, epigraphy, is not as prone to problems of bias or inaccuracy. Inscriptions such as funerary epitaphs, for example, are normally contemporary with the events or persons to which they refer, unlike historical works that are commonly written decades or even centuries after the events they describe. In addition, inscriptions, in describing specific events or the careers of individuals, often provide specific details on various aspects of Roman spectacles that are comparatively overlooked in broader literary accounts. We shall see that epigraphy, for example, is particularly useful in reconstructing the infrastructure of the Roman games, something which writers like Livy tend not to discuss in any detail.

Other major sources of evidence when it comes to Roman arena spectacles are the surviving art and archaeological remains from that period. Among the most impressive examples of such physical evidence are the ruins of amphitheatres scattered throughout the territory of the former Roman Empire. Such monuments, on a more general level, not only attest to the widespread popularity of Roman spectacles, but also, through their surviving architectural layouts, provide important evidence on more particular topics, such as the arrangement of spectator seating and the provisions for animal cages and other equipment in arena substructures.

The most important artistic evidence for the Roman spectacles comes to us from media such as relief sculpture and mosaics. In many cases, the events commemorated for posterity in such artwork are otherwise unattested, and these depictions therefore provide us with further important evidence of the spread and popularity of Roman spectacles. The inclusion of such visual details as the clothing and equipment of the performers is also of utmost importance in reconstructing the particulars of these events, providing us with information not found in written sources. Numerous hunting scenes from Roman mosaics also afford us a great deal of information on the infrastructure behind arena events, in particular the necessary capture and transport of wild animals prior to a given venatio. The most famous example is the massive ‘Great Hunt’ mosaic from a fourth century Roman villa in Sicily which depicts, albeit in a sometimes stylized fashion, the capture of animals from throughout Roman territory and their shipment to the port of Ostia.

Such are the many different types of evidence we can use to reconstruct the history and importance of arena spectacles in Roman society. A major part of my work will consist of tracing the development of gladiatorial events and venationes in Rome – from their inception during the Republic to their heyday in the high Empire. In the midst of this discussion, of course, a number of questions must be addressed. Why were the Roman games, which seem so reprehensible to many in the modern world, so popular among Roman spectators? Why did Roman magistrates and emperors go to the trouble of staging such expensive spectacles? What was in it for them? The social and propaganda roles of the Roman arena, as we shall see, were most important.

No account of Roman arena spectacles would be complete without a discussion of the veritable army of performers and specialists behind the scenes who ensured the successful production of countless spectacles over the course of centuries. Foremost among them, of course, are the trained gladiators and beastfighters who actually fought and died in the arena. As previously mentioned, however, such spectacles could not have been staged in the first place without the efforts of myriad support staff, ranging from the personnel of the training schools to the hunters who captured and shipped exotic animals from the frontiers of the Roman Empire.

My work concludes with an examination of the arena spectacles of the late Empire, and their gradual disappearance at a time when the state no longer had the requisite resources for such events. It is commonly claimed that the conversion of the Empire to Christianity in the fourth century spelled the end of gladiatorial contests, in particular, but as we shall see, the factors behind their disappearance, and that of the venationes, were not quite so straightforward as commonly assumed.

Chapter One

Origins of Roman Arena Sports

Although the two most stereotypical Roman spectacles, gladiatorial contests and beast hunts (venationes) ultimately came to be staged in close association with one another, they each originated under decidedly separate circumstances. Due to the lack of relevant evidence, certain proposed aspects of their early development must remain conjectural, but enough does remain to suggest strongly that gladiatorial combat had a pronounced influence upon the later development of Roman animal spectacles.

Gladiatorial combats, or more broadly, publicly staged combats between armed fighters, were not a Roman invention – they appear to have originated elsewhere in Italy. Unfortunately, the evidence we possess on this point is contradictory: some suggests that such events originated among the Etruscans, the dominant civilization in northern and central Italy prior to the rise of Rome, while other evidence suggests that they may have arisen further south, in Campania. Evidence suggesting an Etruscan origin includes the ancient testimony of writers such as Nicolaus of Damascus in the early first century AD. He specifically states that the Etruscans bestowed the practice of gladiatorial combat upon the Romans. Also the term lanista, used in Latin to denote a trainer of gladiators, was originally an Etruscan word, at least according to the seventh century Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville.¹ Definite archaeological evidence for such a practice among the Etruscans, however, is lacking.

By contrast, we do possess some archaeological evidence for the emergence of gladiatorial combat in Campania, most notably tomb paintings from the late fourth century BC which depict, among other events, bloody duels between men armed with shields and spears. The later writers Livy and Silius Italicus claim that such contests were staged as entertainment at the banquets of the Campanian elite during this period.² Given such evidence, the majority of modern scholars favour a Campanian, as opposed to an Etruscan, origin for gladiatorial combat, despite the explicitly contrary testimony of Nicolaus of Damascus. In reference to the latter source, we shall see when we turn our attention to the origin of the venationes that it was not at all uncommon for ancient writers, in describing events occurring centuries before their own time, to ascribe an erroneous origin to customs such as gladiatorial combat.

The depiction of gladiatorial combats in Campanian tombs suggests that such events were among those staged in a funerary context so as to honour the deceased, and this assumption appears to be borne out by the first recorded gladiatorial exhibition in Rome. In 264 BC, Marcus and Decimus Brutus staged a combat between three pairs of gladiators in the Forum Boarium to honour their recently deceased father, Decimus Junius Brutus Pera.³ The combatants honoured the deceased, in particular, through their display of courage and fighting skill, as well as the blood they spilled in his name. Significantly, the term used in Latin for such events was munus (munera in the plural) whose base meaning is ‘duty’ or ‘obligation’. We can see, therefore, in the very terminology used for gladiatorial events, the sense of obligation which underlay them, whether it involved filial duty to a deceased relative, as in the case of the first recorded event, or the expectation on the part of the Roman populace that aspiring magistrates would stage such events to earn their political support, as we shall see in the case of the munera staged in the later Republic.

Following the spectacle of 264 BC, gladiatorial combat became an accepted component of the funerals of the elite in Rome. In fact, over the next few centuries, the scale of such events grew steadily, along with their popularity. In 216 BC, for example, the sons of Marcus Aemilius Lepidus staged combats in his honour featuring twenty-two pairs of gladiators fighting over a three-day period. The larger venue of the Forum Romanum was chosen for this as well as many subsequent munera, so as to provide more room for combatants and spectators alike. This extra space was certainly necessary: even a small sampling of such events over the next few decades will show how dramatically gladiatorial contests continued to grow. In 200 BC, the funeral games of Marcus Valerius Laevinus featured twenty-five pairs of gladiators, while only seventeen years later, sixty pairs of gladiators were requisitioned for the funeral of Publius Licinius.⁴ Records of specific gladiatorial events for the subsequent century are not particularly abundant, in large part because of the loss of Livy’s history for the period in question, but there is no doubt that they continued to grow steadily in both scale and popularity. In the Hecyra, produced in 165 BC, the Roman playwright Terence complained that contemporary drama placed a poor second to gladiatorial spectacles in terms of popularity.⁵

The link between gladiatorial munera and the honouring of a deceased Roman noble became ever more tenuous as these events grew in scale and popularity. Ambitious members of the Roman aristocracy, seeing the widespread popularity of gladiatorial events among the Roman populace, realized that they could greatly further their own popularity, as well as their political prospects, by staging such events. The one hindrance to staging gladiatorial exhibitions as a means of personal advancement, at least initially, was having enough deceased relatives to provide a pretext for their production. Therefore, as time went on, gladiatorial events gradually became dissociated from their funereal origins, so that the editores (those staging the spectacles) would have much greater freedom to present them whenever they saw fit. Nonetheless, even in the late Republic, it was sometimes considered politically expedient to stage munera under the pretense of filial piety, rather than as a blatant attempt to garner personal popularity. The most famous example of this political calculation occurred in 65 BC when Julius Caesar, as aedile, staged funerary games in honour of his deceased father including 320 pairs of gladiators. Caesar’s father, it should be noted, had died over two decades previously, so it is certainly questionable whether any in the audience were taken in by this alleged show of filial piety. Given the popularity of gladiatorial munera by this time, however, it is doubtful whether many cared why Caesar had staged the event in question.⁶

The dramatic growth in scale of gladiatorial events in the final two centuries BC, as will be seen, had a significant impact upon contemporary venationes. The earliest animal displays in Rome, however, originally arose out of the widespread tradition of various rulers collecting, and often hunting, large numbers of beasts such as lions in order to demonstrate both their mastery over nature and their general worthiness to rule their respective states. In the Near East, this tradition can be traced back as early as the Bronze Age, in states such as Egypt, as well as the later Assyrian and Persian Empires. The large animal preserves, or paradeisoi, maintained by the Persian state made such an impression upon Alexander the Great and his army as they marched east in the fourth century BC that the Hellenistic states which arose in the wake of his conquests, such as Ptolemaic Egypt, came to develop their own animal preserves as a royal status symbol.⁷

It was these Hellenistic game parks, in turn, which prompted the development of Roman animal enclosures (vivaria) in the later Republic. As Rome began to encroach more and more upon the territories of the Hellenistic states in the second and first centuries BC, her troops encountered a number of these game parks in the course of their conquests. A number of the same members of the senatorial elite who led Rome’s armies during this period, impressed by the enclosures they came across, later used their wealth to establish similar vivaria on the grounds of their estates. The aristocrat Lucullus, for example, (famous for his eastern campaigns against king Mithridates VI of Pontus in the early first century BC), later used his vast wealth to establish lavish animal enclosures and fish ponds on the grounds of his estates.⁸ By this time, members of the elite like Lucullus had access to a relatively wide variety and number of animals with which to stock their game preserves, thanks to Roman conquests in areas like North Africa and Asia Minor.⁹

Like their game parks, the processions of exotic animals periodically staged by various Hellenistic monarchs, and in particular the Ptolemies, certainly had an influence upon Roman practice. The most famous such event was that staged by Ptolemy II in 275/74 BC, featuring hundreds of animals including antelopes, lions, cheetahs, Indian elephants, a rhinoceros, and a giraffe. Such was the size of this procession, in fact, that it was said to have taken an entire day to pass through the streets of Alexandria. One important aspect of this event, one that was not lost upon subsequent Roman editores, was that the animals included in a particular display could be carefully chosen so as to present propaganda claims to the assembled spectators. Ptolemy II advertised the extent of his domains to his subjects by including animals in his procession from different areas of his empire, as well as regions outside of it over which he wished, however tenuously, to claim ownership.¹⁰

The earliest recorded exotic animal displays in Rome took place in a somewhat different context from that of Ptolemy II: the elephants exhibited to the Roman populace in 275 and again in 250 BC had not been collected for a peacetime exhibition, but instead were spoils of war, captured from the forces of Pyrrhus and the Carthaginians respectively.¹¹ Nonetheless, like the beasts in Alexandria, they too advertised the power of the state that put them on display. The war elephants exhibited by the victorious Roman generals, Dentatus and Metellus, on these two occasions fit within the parameters of the parade of enemy prisoners which formed the centrepiece of the traditional Roman triumph.

In the decades following Metellus’ triumph in 250 BC, exotic animal displays, in venues such as the Circus Maximus, appear to have become ever more popular spectator events in Rome. The plays of Plautus (c. 254–184 BC) suggest, in particular, that exhibitions of ostriches and other African animals had become a relatively common sight by the late third