There is a great gladiatorial show currently on tour around museums in the UK: organized by the British Museum in partnership with Colchester and Ipswich Museums, it is currently in Northampton and will land in Chester and Carlisle before April next year. It brings together some of the most important gladiatorial finds ever made in Britain. You can see, for example, the Hawkedon Helmet (the only certain piece of gladiator equipment discovered here) and the Colchester Vase (with its detailed images of arena combat – whether this was a kind of souvenir depicting real fights, as is often claimed, I am not so sure).
The exhibition is well worth catching. I speak with all the bias of a BM Trustee here, but it’s part of a whole programme of British Museum partnerships with other museums in the country that often remains unsung (or not “sung” as much as it ought to be).
Anyway, I am doing some travelling with the show, to give a talk on gladiators in Britain and in the empire more generally (Northampton this week, and I am hoping to be appearing in Carlisle in the spring). In some ways, gladiators are one of the easiest ancient subjects to present to a general audience. Everybody knows a bit about them and most people have seen a movie or two in which they feature, from Spartacus to Gladiator I and II. It’s always fun to explain what the movies get right (Gladiator I, for example, included some of the best reconstructions of arena combat I have seen). And it’s fun to explain what the movies pass by or choose not to look at. Every film I have ever seen makes the audience in the Colosseum look like a vast mixed rabble, full of Romans going wild on blood lust. In fact, the Colosseum audience (and, no doubt, that in some other amphitheatres across the empire) was rigorously ordered. People sat according to their political and social rank, senators on the front row, right up to women and slaves at the very back (you couldn’t pay extra for a better seat). And it was not a mixed audience at all (if you went with your wife, you said goodbye at the door), with all male citizens being required to wear their formal togas. One of my colleagues once aptly observed that it was more like the audience at the opera than at a football match.
But I find it increasingly hard to know the right tone to adopt in discussing these “shows”, and the appropriate moral stance. The exhibition website has it both ways. It claims to “tell the story of Britain’s entertainment venues and the people who died to the roar of the crowd … and to reveal the violence of the arena, and the importance of spectacle within Roman culture”. But it is very unclear what the relationship between the “entertainment” and the “violence” is.
For good academic and practical reasons, I tend to think that the bloodiest occasions were very rare indeed. Gladiators, after all, were very expensive commodities and the uncomfortable bottom line is that the gladiatorial impresario didn’t want to waste his valuable fighters. As for the “exotic” wild beasts, no one has ever convinced me that these could regularly have been put on display in large numbers. (If you want an idea of the difficulties, it’s worth looking at the problems of transporting a single hippopotamus to London in the mid-nineteenth century – then multiply.) But I half suspect that I am also keen to downplay the bloodiness of it all, to make these occasions easier to face.
In the end, the big question that no one has ever answered convincingly is what the audience of gladiatorial shows and beast hunts thought they were doing. Many Romans would have been more inured to violence than most of us are (they saw a lot more of it, for a start). But many of them also loved their pets and some were apparently moved to tears when they saw frightened elephants in the arena. How do we begin to explain what was going through their heads as they sat in the Colosseum?
For me that has become as tricky a historical problem as the reasons for the fall of the Roman empire. It’s not trivial at all but goes right to the heart of the ultimate historical question: how do we bridge the gap between us and them?
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