Death at the games

Nothing has quite as damaging an effect on Rome's humanitarian image as the blood sports, the lethal combats at the games to which the populace was addicted with nearly as much fervour as modern football fans.

Seneca would launch a scathing attack on some features of the games, and the question is whether Cicero anticipated him. The evidence is equivocal. Sometimes he expresses unqualified approval: �The games were magnificent and well received' (Att. 4.15.5). At other times he approves of their political efficacy; Milo's consular campaign �won the support of the common man by the magnificence of his games' (Fam. 2.6.3). At still other times he has practical reservations. He rejects Scribonius Curio's plan to hold games to mark the death of his father. Cicero believes that Curio's pursuit of office will be better served by natural talent and fortune than by public spectacles; the latter merely testify to wealth, not merit, and in any case everyone is sick and tired of them (Fam. 2.3.10).

Cicero comes somewhat closer to a moral issue in a late work:

A gladiatorial show seems cruel and inhuman to some. That may be so, given the way that it is now structured. In the days when criminals crossed swords in death struggles there was no better training; their highest aim was to give satisfaction to their owners or to the people. When they fell they died without disgracing themselves.

(Tusc. Disp. 2.41)

Cicero's complaint is that free persons of unblemished reputation have started coming forward as gladiators.⁶⁹ It is this, not the brutality of the sport, that troubles a conscience that was perfectly comfortable as long as the players were slaves or condemned criminals.

Cicero did however share the view of his correspondent Asinius Pollio, who wrote to him about an atrocity in Spain, when Caesar's lieutenant Balbus burnt the Pompeian Fadius alive for refusing to fight at Balbus' games (Fam. 10.32.3). Cicero also protested against his brother Quintus' threat (apparently meant as a joke) to burn T.Catienus and his father alive (Ad Q.fr. 1.2.6). Something of a comic tradition was attached to burning people alive. Valerius Maximus solemnly records that in 468 BC a tribune of the plebs, P.Mucius Scaevola, burnt his nine colleagues for conspiring with Sp. Cassius, the putative author of the first agrarian law (6.3.2). This is a parody of the events of 133 BC, when P.Mucius Scaevola orchestrated the removal from office of the tribune M. Octavius, who was blocking Ti.Gracchus' agrarian bill in the interests of the great landowners. And one can hardly believe that the author of a late fourth-century law was serious when he stipulated that men who played a woman's part in intercourse were to expiate the crime �in avenging flames in the sight of the people' (CTh 9-7.6). In a pastiche of this and similar laws, the Augustan History credited Macrinus (early third century) with always fastening the bodies of co-adulterers together and burning them alive (SHA Macr. 12.10).

Equivocation continued in the Principate. Seneca attacked the games, but he was more concerned with the behaviour of the spectators than with the immorality of the whole institution:

Nothing is so morally degrading as the spectators at the games. As if armed combats are not bad enough, the midday intermission, when criminals have to fight without helmet or armour, are sheer murder. Many spectators prefer this to the regular programme. In the morning they throw men to the lions, at midday they throw them to the spectators.⁷⁰

Seneca was attacking the emperor Claudius who had exiled him. Claudius was said to have been particularly interested in the net- fighters (retiarii), ordering their throats to be cut even when they fell by accident, so that he could watch their faces as they died.

Nero, having thrown off Seneca's influence, staged his bizarre punishment of the Christians—crucifixion followed by burning alive—as a special entertainment; some may have condemned it as a travesty of utilitas publica, but society as a whole accepted it. Domitian made the great Flavian stadium, the Colosseum, the headquarters of a virtual league competition between teams of gladiators, including one sponsored by the emperor. A spectator who was rash enough to allege bias against the other teams was thrown into the arena, where he was either burnt alive or killed by the beasts.⁷¹ And as already observed, Trajan held a mass trial of informers in the arena, although they were exiled instead of being put to death.⁷²

The second century throws up an episode that Marcus Aurelius would have preferred to forget. In 177, at Lyons and Vienne, Christians were subjected to �pagan inhumanity', being led into the arena and thrown to the beasts. When one of them, Attalus, claimed to be a citizen he was returned to prison, to be held with others pending the receipt of instructions from the emperor. Marcus replied that they should be tortured to death, but those who recanted should be freed. The governor, carefully keeping to the letter of the law, beheaded those who were citizens and consigned the rest to the beasts (Eusebius Eccles. Hist. 5.1).

The dismal litany need not be prolonged. Constantine made some changes in the interests of Christian morality,⁷³ but the fundamentals remained in place. Gladiatorial contests continued to be staged in the Colosseum until the reign of Honorius (fifth century), and victims were still being thrown to the beasts after the fall of the Western Empire. By the irony of fate it took a barbarian, the Ostrogoth king Theoderic, to dismantle the whole institution.⁷⁴ The wheel had come full circle. Those who lacked the essentials of civilised behaviour were the ultimate bulwark of humanitas.