The Roman Arena

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Ian Glen, and this is Real Vikings. Remote Scottish monasteries overrun with pagan warriors, long boats cutting through Canada's icy waters, nor straiters in the desert sands of North Africa. The Vikings terrified the medieval world, yet they beguilers today. Who were they really? Real Vikings. From the Noiser podcast network. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description, wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. For over 500 years, Roman arenas staged gladiatorial combat, drawing the biggest crowds both in the Republic and under the emperors. These events delighted the masses. No matter how low their place in society, it was a great comfort to ordinary people that they were much better off than the gladiators about to fight, or the beasts being slaughtered. But some members of the elite were disgusted. They saw this essential Roman entertainment as morally corrupting and un-Roman. Those among them wealthy enough to stage the shows could, however, win great prestige, as long as the mob enjoyed themselves. With me to discuss the Roman arena, a Kathleen Coleman, James Loeb, Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, John Pierce, Reader in Archaeology at King's College London, and Matthew Nichols, fellow in senior tutor at St John's College Oxford. Matthew, what can you tell us about how these arena games began? Yes, the Romans themselves reflected on this, and they were glad that they could see an Italian origin in this very military and hardy combat, not like money at their endotainments, they borrowed from the Greeks. And they thought maybe it came from a truer or more probably from suddenly from Campania, where it began as a sort of ritual combat at the funerals of aristocrats, borrowed by the Romans and incorporated into their own funeral ceremonies from about the middle of the third century BC, as Rome expanded and grew more powerful. These games themselves grew bigger. We hear first of three pairs of gladiators and 16, then 22, then 60, so they keep getting bigger and bigger. And they begin to take on a life of their own, independent from the funeral and the honouring of the dead. They start to attract a large audience, and because they're given by aristocrats, they attract a sort of political power, because you're now pleasing the mob who are your electorate. So they get attached to state games or ludi, they get put on by prominent magistrates at Rome seeking election or re-election or just carrying popular favour. And by the first century BC, that linked to funerals is really getting stretched. Julius Caesar puts on a set of games in honour of his deceased father, who'd actually been dead for 20 years at that point. So I don't think anyone really believed him, but it was a convenient fig leaf. Eventually that linked to funerals drops away and they just become games in their own right. Now we know them, of course, because we can still see the ruins of the Colosseum, and there are other great stone arenas, like those in Arlenheim in the south of France. But that wasn't how it started, was it? No, that's right. Originally as funeral combats, perhaps they happened near tombs or funeral pies and campania, we think they're sometimes attached to banquets, but in Rome, almost as soon as Roman magnates start putting these things on, they look for big areas of empty space to do it in, where lots of people can see. So as early as 264 we have combat in the Forum, Boharium, a cattle market, actually, which is a convenient city centre open space. By 216 BC it's in the Forum itself, so the heart of Rome, which is significant, I think. And that's the sort of rectangle or trapezoidal space, surrounded by big buildings on whose rooftops and balconies you can stand and watch. Then wooden stands were put up, maybe some subterranean structures added to the Forum to facilitate the games, it's a bit hard to tell, but always a temporary and contingent arena put up a set of games and taken away again. And the Romans quite like these being temporary arenas, that they had a moral suspicion of entertainment, so they didn't want anything permanent, disfiguring the city. They worried a bit about the seditious nature of large crowds, so better a temporary arena than something where large crowds could keep gathering. And perhaps most importantly, Republican Rome had annually electric magistrates. So if you were trying to bribe the electorate, it's better to spend all your money on gladiators and silver armor and dancing girls, and a rickety wooden stage to show it all. And you take that down and it's done. You don't really have an invested interest in creating an expensive permanent arena. Kathleen Coleman, despite those misgivings that Matthew alluded to about the mob and the potential sedition, these became incredibly popular. Why did they spread so fast? Well, the games themselves become a way for local magnets to show their generosity to their community. And interestingly, in terms of the stone buildings, the earliest ones we know of were actually outside Rome. And we have evidence from the campaigner, the most famous one, obviously, is the amphitheatre at Pompeii, which dates to the 70s BC, and there were others in cities of that area. And these seem to have been associated with the spread of Roman influence. The one in Pompeii, for example, was built on the site of an old Sam Knight section of the city, leaning into the city wall. And it was built for the colonists, making a very powerful statement to the local inhabitants of Pompeii. But the earliest arenas were, as we've heard, made of wood. They were sort of portable structures, almost pop up venues, as it were. What was the shift to the permanent stone ones? That must have been a shift in the politics of the games as well. Well, I think because the earliest stone ones we know of from outside Rome, it's very much the Romans putting their stamp, a sort of permanent stamp, on the local population. You can't miss the amphitheatre at Pompeii, even today, the largest structure in the city. And interestingly, apart from what seems to have been a very small structure put up in the dying years of the Republic near the typer, we don't actually have a permanent amphitheatre until the construction of the Colosseum in Rome. Even the large thing that Neuro put up was a wooden amphitheatre. So it's much later on that we see the Stonerina's being built? In the city of Rome itself, yes, but outside Rome, they date back to the first century BC. John Pierce, talking about the content of the games, you've been studying, I understand, a third century male skeleton in York, whose pelvis appears to be bitten by a lion or a leopard around the time of the man's death. What were the lines doing in York in the third century? Were they roaming free on the dales of Yorkshire? I don't think we need to see this as part of Roman climate change that sort of saw lions transplanted to live out their lives in the Yorkshire dales. I think this is testimony to the spread of games across the Roman Empire, that wherever you are in the Roman world, especially in an urban setting, you're going to find gladiatorial combat and the associated spectacles, which include the use of animals as agents of execution and animals as part of those staged confrontations where humans fight animals, animals are pitted against other examples. So finding this at York, I think the main surprise is that we imagine that games of these kinds spread everywhere. We see the amphitheatre as across the Roman world, obviously not all as splendid as the Colosseum or Arlo Neem, sometimes simpler structures, but there ubiquitous or other kinds of spaces are adapted. But the idea that you would be able to transplant what we might have thought of as an element of Mediterranean spectacles, city of Rome, other Italian cities perhaps. Finding that in York speaks to a complex logistical structure that takes animals from North Africa across the Mediterranean, across Europe, by road and river, and then to Britain. The challenge is knowing how frequent that was, was that the one time this happened in Britain or was it a part of the recurring spectacle culture of which we see a glimpse here? That's difficult to answer. Presumably it was a pretty punishing experience from the animals being transported from Africa to all over Europe. Yes, I mean the best comparative light we have shed on that is the sort of 19th-century zoological expeditions, where you look at the cargo manifest in Mombasa, what's being shipped out of East Africa, and you see what turns up in Hamburg or London or New York, and usually 90% of the animals have died by that time. So we'd have to imagine, with the Roman world, a similar, likely attritional rate. You know, we have let a letter from Pliny that says, "Shame about your exhibition in Verona. Luckily the gladiators were there. Unfortunately the Panthers didn't turn up, and you can imagine the potential obstacles that got in the way of those Panthers being there." One of the best testimonies to how this worked is a book written in the first half of the 20th century from a classicist who was also zookeeper in Manchester and talks about the different kinds of caging you need as you move an animal from the wild to its ultimate destination. Where you have to keep adjusting how you house it for it to adjust to the experience of the logistical implications, you know, keeping it fed, keeping it appropriately housed, or rather mind-blowing, really, for how that works in the Roman world. Just to get this straight, I think you've written that the animals tended to appear in the morning. There was a whole day's show going on. What was the order of services it were for one of these games? So we don't have very much evidence for how that works, but we have Seneka telling us indirectly mid-first century AD that you might expect. The animal games take place in the morning, executions at lunchtime, and then the gladiators as the culmination in the afternoon where you get the skilled fighters who did against one another. Who's being executed at lunchtime? The poor people who've been condemned, you know, the Roman term Dan Nartio ad Bestia. So a criminal conviction means that you're condemned to be executed using the animal as the agent of execution. Seen very vividly on mosaics in North Africa, for example. Kathleen Coleman, I want to go on to the gladiators themselves. I'd like you to tell us who these people were, but before you do, can you tell us what the word gladiator means? Well that's somebody who uses a gladius, which is a particular type of sword, and these people were either slaves or assimilated to the status of a slave. In other words, what I mean by that is that these would have been free persons who voluntarily took up the gladiatorial oaths and basically sold themselves. We believe on a temporary basis to an owner trainer and could after a certain number of years have earned their freedom. I think that the majority were probably slaves. I don't know how common it was for people to voluntarily take up the role of a gladiator. But I think it's absolutely critical to realize that for the people, the free persons in the stands, there was a gulf between them and these performers in the arena. These people who really had no status. They were object, they were possessions. That's what a slave was. It was a human possession. And I think that explains why people could watch these things with a certain degree of equanimity and a feeling of a distance. Of course, in slave persons, we believe were also present in the audience, probably, feeling grateful that they weren't in the arena itself. But the paradox is that these persons were highly trained. They had a special diet, they had special accommodation. You need to be pretty fit to fight in public like that. And so we see in occasional sources this kind of grudging admiration for the bravery and simply the skill of these performers who trained extensively for as far as we know, quite rare appearances. And were they all men? No, there were female gladiators. The best piece of evidence is actually sitting in the British Museum. It's a little stone plaque that shows two female combatants in fighting stance and their names are inscribed under them and those are speaking names. They must have been their professional names. One is Amazon, which is obviously very appropriate for a female fighter, given the mythology of the Amazon's. And the other one is Achilles, so the female version of the name Achilles, who was the most famous Greek warrior in the Trojan War. And above their heads is inscribed in Greek, they were granted a reprieve. And that I think explains why they're both in fighting stance they fought to a draw. Matthew, I want to go to the most famous arena of all the Colosseum we've mentioned it before, but tell me who built it and why. The Colosseum was built by the Flavian dynasty of Emperes and Colosseum actually is a nickname for it, a later nickname after a giant statue or colossus that stood nearby. They probably referred to it as the new amphitheatre or just the amphitheatre. It was built by the Spazian and his two sons Titus and then Demission, who succeeded him as Emperor between the years of 69 and 96 AD. And it was built, I think, to understand why and where it was built, we need to think about the context by which that dynasty came to power. They came in after a civil war. They swept away and replaced a heated reign of Nero, who had been in love with high culture and the Greek world and chariot racing and had garnered a lot of a proverbial by gobbling up large trunks of city centre real estate to build his palace, the Golden House. And when he was swept from power and forced to suicide in 1868, there was then a period of civil war and also culture wars around the legacy of the emperor and the best way to be an emperor. And it was won by this gruff grizzled military veteran, Vespasium, who demolished Nero's luxury palace and took the garden and the boating lake from that palace, drained it and used it to build the Colosseum. So it was right in the city centre, it's in the private grounds of this heated despot and it's a conspicuous gift to the people of Rome for tough martial vigorous Italian combat. And the loyalist poet Martially writes a rather sickerfantic book of poetry celebrating the opening games of the Colosseum says what a wonderful thing this is sees are the private grounds of a heated autocrat have been given to the people and it's it achieves its aim of being a conspicuous gesture. So it's very much a political monument, it's right in the middle of the city so it puts into the heart of Rome this concept of entertainment as an imperial prerogative and gesture. And it's architecturally rather elegant, it's a huge building, it goes up pretty quickly for its size. It's lovely elegant classical architectural treatment on the façade that kind of speaks of permanence and stability and acceptability. And it seems to have achieved instant classic status it gets put on the coins. Rather brilliantly we have the tomb of a Roman contract in builder called Quinter Satirius Ticacus who probably worked on it because he puts a little picture of the Colosseum on his tomb alongside his building train to celebrate his involvement in this monument of the age. So it achieves that that propaganda stick aim of the emperor as he set out to build it. And the Colosseum is it true that they filled it with water and had maritime battles or is that an urban myth? Oh it's difficult to say I'm afraid. The source is naturally contradictory so Dio writing rather later says Titus brilliantly filled your reading with water and reenacted a famous naval battle there. But Srotonia, Susa, century closer in time to those actual events, doesn't say that. And looking at the architecture of the Colosseum it's a little bit hard to see how it could have been done. If you've seen a picture of it it's now where the arena floor used to be. You now look down to this maze of corridors and lifts and hoists which are mostly later. So if at the time there's a much simpler substructure or no substructure then maybe at the opening games it could have been flooded. There's plenty of water nearby there are aqueducts it's in a kind of a valley of a culverted stream. It could have been filled it could have been drained but it's hard to see how it could have been done that more than once after its opening games. John Pierce this seems to mean like big business the the games the arenas and so on. What was the day-to-day system because I mean they weren't performing in the arenas every day were they? No so there's a very substantial infrastructure behind gladiatorial combat. There are two key roles in this. There's the person who pays for the games who pays for the show, the sponsor or the Roman one of the Roman terms is the editor and then there's the person responsible for the organisation for making sure that gladiators are housed, trained, looked after and so on. Sometimes that's the same person so in when we begin to get better evidence for how gladiators work as it were in the late Republic it seems it's quite commonplace for Roman aristocrats involved in that political competition to have their own gladiatorial training school. It's quite often in campaigning in southern Italy which seems to be the possible area in which the games begin sometimes in Rome. With the Imperial period there's an Imperial takeover of that because the Emperor partly is interested in making sure that the show happens so needs a lot of gladiators for the spectacle he puts on to be appropriate to the scale of the building we've just heard about. There's also a potential political danger with gladiators that if you've got a band of armed men trained killers who depend on you for their housing, their feeding and so on then they're also at your disposal as it were in political violence and we see them used sometimes in the Roman Republic for that. So the Emperor takes over much of that infrastructure then under him or under our Republican sponsor we have a manager the Lannister the figure that we kind of made familiar by Oliver Reed in the first gladiator film the person who seems to be responsible if you want to put on a show he'll hire the gladiators to you he'll arrange the price. I'm Ian Glenn and this is Real Vikings. Remote Scottish monasteries overrun with pagan warriors, long boats cutting through Canada's icy waters, North traders and the desert sands of North Africa. The Vikings terrified the medieval world yet they beguilers today. Real Vikings from the Noiser podcast network. Listen wherever you get your podcast. So what we're really looking at is sort of big business like sport today. You have your performers and it was interesting what Kathleen was saying about the names of the the female gladiators presumably the male gladiators all had their their names. There would be stars. People would flock to this thing, adverts and things like that. Yes there seems to be a lot of anticipation of games and that's partly natural you know it's the city at rest or the city at play. People look forward to their day off but that's partly managed so Pompey provides us the best evidence for that kind of anticipatory build up. We see the proclamations, the addicted painted on the walls that say on this day for the majesty of so and so, or for the health of the emperor, these games will take place. It'll get, they'll tell you the date. At Pompeii, they're also advertising games in neighboring cities too, not just at Pompeii. And it will also say there will be an animal show. There will be awnings, you'll be in the shade when you're watching, and there will be a certain number of pairs of gladiators. So ten gladiators will, ten pairs will fight, twenty pairs will fight. So as that, there are probably announcements in the immediate buildup, there's, there are indications of how this work. It may be that there's, as it were, a public dinner the night before, where you can go and see the stars, as it were, enjoying the sort of equivalent of the condemned man's last meal. On the day itself, a procession, which will be a mixture of the circuses coming to town, plus the Lordmez show, because the sponsor needs to be very clearly identifiable in that he's paid for it after all. But Kathleen, if I can bring you in on this issue, we always get the impression that these were fights to the death, but that's not actually the case. These people, the gladiators, were incredibly important assets to the people who opened them. So the last thing they wanted to presume is for them to be, to be slaughtered at the end of the game. Yes, absolutely. We have a wonderful legal text from the second century, where a jurist is trying to explain the difference between hire and purchase. And he says, think of a gladiator. You rent a gladiator, you send him back to barracks after his show in pretty okay shape. You pay 20 denari for him. But if he's either killed or severely maimed, then you pay a thousand denari, you've basically bought him. So, you know, there was a huge markup there. And for the people renting the gladiators, there was obviously a strong incentive to stop the fights before a fatality. And some of the emperors even put a ban on fights with sharp weapons, whatever precisely that means. But yes, we think that probably about 5% of fights might have ended with a very serious injury or even a death. But then the people, that's what calculated, of course, we're basically relying on tombstones because gladiators, many, many, well, we don't know how many of them, but some of the gladiators are actually commemorated on tombstones. And they say proudly, or their tombstones says proudly, what style of gladiator they were. There's no attempt to hide the fact that they were gladiators. They're proud of it. Sometimes, especially in the Greek East, you have a little relief of them standing proudly there next to their shield with their helmets standing on top of the shield. And all the wreaths that they've won, their distinctions carved around them. Thanks for that, Kathleen. And Matthew, I'd like to pick up something that John mentioned. And that's about how the games and the imperial project of Rome. So, we've had the republic and then after Caesar we get Augustus becoming the first emperor. And things start to change in the relationship between the state and the games. What's all that about? The emperor start to monopolise the production of games at Rome. It's too powerful and too spectacular the gift of the people to be allowed into other hands. So Augustus and his successor, Zempera, gradually acquire the sole prerogative of giving games. And by the reign of Demission about a century into the imperial period, only the emperor can give games at Rome. Augustus does it three times in his own name, five times in the names of his sons, 26, I think, Beast Hunts. So, an escalating diet of violent spectacle, because it's so very popular, it's something the emperor needs to do and has done really since the inception of the imperial project, even Julius Caesar, Augustus' predecessor, didn't really like the games. Apparently he used to sit at the back of his box doing his correspondence and got rather bad reputation as being a luth and standoffish. The emperor's not only had to do this. They have to go and they have to be seen to be enjoying it, but not too much. Some emperors get too fond of it and they attract criticism for that as well. So they need to be in among the crowns but restraining themselves. But Julius Caesar organised a lot of these games. I mean he may not have enjoyed them, but he seemed to think that they were important. Oh he absolutely did. I mean he put on a famous games with 320 pairs of gladiators and he would have done more if the senate hadn't stopped him because as John says, people were concerned about the potential for violence and this is a kind of private army in the city of Rome. So Caesar was very well aware of the importance of games. Among many other sorts of benefactions, it has to be said, chariot racing, beast hunts, banquets later on public bathing. All of these are things that the emperor gives to the people in this culture of Britain's circuses. And just out of interest, is the the idea of the thumbs down or the thumbs up to the end of the life of a gladiator? Is that nonsense or is it based in truth? It is not quite nonsense. There is one source, juvenile sersatire that says the guy used to play the trumpet in these arenas and aggives gamers himself and the mob bit him with a turned thumb, polycaver, so to spare the life of the gladiator. But we don't know if that means thumbs up or thumbs down. It's only one source, it's echoed later by prudentious. We don't know how common it was, we don't exactly what it means. It's not nothing but it's not as firm as we think it might be. John? Well it seems quite clear, as Matthew said, we don't know which way it, which way it goes, but it seems to be almost the pivotal moment of the show. It's very often shown in Roman art when a gladiator surrendered, holds up his finger, there's a recognizable gesture, and that seems to be the image that's created to bring back the memory. Do you remember you were there? We were in the seats when we saw this, because then you're waiting for that decision. Which way will that gesture go? Either the sponsor or the sponsor extends the opportunity to the crowd to decide. So though maybe not many gladiators die as a proportion, nonetheless this is a really high-risk moment, and so it's a very dramatic gesture, lots depends on it. It's a moment of communication between the emperor or the gear of the games and the crowd, and that compact between them is part of what the serena display is. It's a chance for the emperor to show himself to the people, for the people in some sense to communicate with the emperor. It's a very political moment, a communal moment. Sounds a little bit like waiting for a VAR result in the premier league. John, another myth-busting thing here. I was brought up, being told that Christians were thrown to the lions. Were they? Certainly Christians do feature among the victims of these arena executions. There's an extraordinarily vivid account from the early third century AD, a martyrdom of a Christian woman perpetua, and that describes the various ordeal she goes through in prison beforehand, and in the games at the end, where a combination of animals and human executioners are used to try and kill her, often to little avail. The first evidence for Christians being killed in the arena is under Nero, in one of those temporary arenas, but not by lions, dogs are involved, but also Christians are set to light. There aren't that many martyrdom stories that have ancient authority. The instance of perpetua in North Africa is one. There's another vivid story from Leon in the '81s '70s of another, but there are many other individuals who seem to be put to death in this way, criminals, prisoners of war quite likely as well. Kathleen Coleman, I want to drill down a little bit more on the business. Who made money out of this? By the sounds of it, the gladiators themselves didn't make money, but presumably they got something out of it if they weren't killed. We assume for the gladiators that being slaves or equivalent thereof, they would have got like a little piggy bank, as it were, for when they might ultimately be retired from the spectacle, just as ordinary domestic slaves would have got a little peculiar, some kind of nest egg for afterwards. But I think our modern concept is you want to make money out of everything. Whereas the games are very much about the acquisition of status. So for the emprasario actually putting on a spectacle, this was an opportunity for him to illustrate his generosity to his community. And so far we've been talking mainly about the games in Rome itself, but we have masses and masses and masses of evidence about games in little tin park towns around the fringe of the empire when the local emprasario, the local squire puts on a set of games very small scale. You know, they're boasting about having four beasts or whatever it is. And this is cultural capital. They get recognition from their community because they could have spent their money on a donation of oil to the bars, which is equivalent of ancient soap, or they could have had a banquet every year if they're really rich or maybe every four years to celebrate the birthday of their child or something like that. Or they can put on games and that's a big, big deal. Must have cost them a lot of money. The people who would have imported the animals, we have fascinating evidence from North Africa for these companies, these sodalettartes, who imported animals and sent them abroad to the arenas. One of them in particular was diversified and it also exported olive oil and things like that. So this must have been a money-making operation for them, but for the ultimate consumer in the in the form of the emprasario, it was a money-losing operation. But you are demonstrating your free status. The root of our word "liberality" is the Latin for free. As a free person, you can own property and therefore you can dispense it with it. You can give it away. And that is so antithetical to the modern idea of capitalism where we make more more and more and more money all the time for ourselves, but that's not the point in antiquity. In terms of evidence, Matthew, how confident are we that the written evidence gives an accurate picture of the games and the business behind the games? Well, as we often say as ancient historians, our literary evidence is actually rather patchy and partial. It doesn't contain a single clear description of exactly what happened in the arena, because most of our surviving authors aren't really directly interested in it. The biographers want to talk about how it illuminates imperial character. The historians want to talk about how it affects politics in the city of Rome. There are flattering poets like Marshall or Stasius or Calpernia Sikkulas, who give us pictures and anecdotes, but not a clear description. As we've already seen, you did some myth-busting earlier. Things that we think we know like the Tharmach turn out to rest on rather thin ice, similarly the famous Hale Caesar we who are about to die salute you. There's only a tested once, and then it's not in Rome at all. It's a naval combat on a lake outside Rome, and it all goes wrong because they say that and the emperor makes a kind of feeble joke and says, "Oh, maybe not." They've been pardoned and refused to fight. So all of these things that we think we're sure about, actually we're not. And then our Roman writers mostly are elite male aristocrats, moralists, they're rather sniffy about populist entertainment. They don't really want to describe too much what goes on in the arena. Tassatist is famously distainful about it and says, "These things belong in the daily gazette, they don't belong in my histories." So we don't have a very clear, repicture. We have anecdotes and snippet. We have moralizing, like the famous bit of Senica, where he says the famous German gladiator, who is so terrified of the arena, he shakes himself to death on the design of Spungium, the kind of sponge on a stick they use in the latrine to escape his fate in the arena. And this is a noble end. So we get those little anecdotes and tales, but not a clear, repicture. We have to piece it together, then we have to go to archaeology and material evidence too. So obviously these days would probably be pretty horrified by some of the things going on in the games, although, of course, hundreds of millions of people around the world watch boxing and wrestling. And that sort of thing, although there was this disgust expressed by some of the writers and the moralizers and so on, clearly these were immensely popular. I mean, the crowds coming into the arenas were absolutely, absolutely huge. So were these writers running against the tide as it were of social morais? Well, we don't have an absolute moral condemnation of violence. The whole game is a fad on violence and we tend not to get authors until the Christian period saying this is simply wrong in itself. You rather get moral critique of the wrong kind of violence, or the emperor is being capricious or mean or executing the wrong kind of people or forcing citizens into the arena. So that's the sort of moral objection that writers make. When they talk about the games, they also show us what the appeal might have been. And there are elements of any society that likes to witness violence as an entertainment as a kind of exploration of the limits of human character. People in our society play violent video games or watch violent movies. It's the same kind of impulse. But actually, it wasn't just endless slaughter. It was also a sport with rules and maybe a referee and special costumes and kind of conventions and sportism or universal and perhaps happier point of comparison. And it was also just a great big spectacle. And Rome as a society founded on spectacle and intensely visual culture. There are processions and banquets and imperial relief archers, the emperor moving among his people. And the arena brings that to life. The emperor is there, the senators are there, the astral virgins, the people kind of sort of arrayed and social order in the stands. And it's a microcosm of the Roman world looking at itself and feeling part of the crowd. I like it a modern sporting stadium must have been part of the appeal to people. John Matthews told us about the written evidence. What about the pictorial evidence? So the pictorial evidence is again, there are the problems of the patchiness. Patchiness over time, patchiness in space and so on. There are lots of mosaics from North Africa, showing the games very few from Britain. The pictorial evidence tends to concentrate in the mid-imperial period. We don't have very much from the republic. So as always, it's the ancient world. There's that issue of gaps. One thing, for example, I think we would not really understand from the tree sources but get a very clear understanding from visual evidence is from the different forms that gladiators take. These are rather specialized styles of fighting. They come with their particular name, the "thracian", the "murmulo", they have a very particular set of arms and armour. The animal hunters often have very sparkly costumes as it were. So we wouldn't get a sense really of how does it work in practice, where it not for the visual evidence. Experimental archaeologists have built on that. If you're using these kind of arms, if you're wearing this kind of armour, how does it work in practice? They've shown that, for example, you can't fight for very long, wearing a lot of styles of gladiatorial armour. Because with these face masks very tight on your face, you can't breathe deeply, you quickly run out of oxygen. So it's very short-sharp burst of violence, then the waiting for your moment. So the show gets kind of lengthened because of that. The visual evidence is also really important, I think, for telling us about, as Kathleen said, there are those multiple cities across the empire where it's really important to show up as the big generous donor. And you have your moment in the sun, you're there receiving the acclamation from the crowd. Next year someone else will do it. How do you make your games remembered? You create a mosaic for your reception room. On your tomb you show the games that were shown. So it's not just what happened, but it's also the sort of the memory culture around games, the visual evidence is crucial for. Kathleen, talking about visual evidence, I think many people get most of their knowledge about gladiatorial combat from the movies. And I feel I should point out here that you were a consultant on Ridley Scott's gladiator, and indeed Matthew, in the studio, was a consultant on gladiator 2. So we really have great expertise here. Kathleen, how much did, how much do the movies, does Hollywood get right about the games and what does it get wrong? Well, I think there are two things that really struck me as very successful with the first gladiator movie. And one was the sheer range, geographical range of the empire, all the way from that forest in Germany in the opening scene, which is actually a forest in Hampshire. All the way down to the deserts of North Africa. And I thought that was great, actually, that they showed that the Roman Empire really extended over a huge area and was cemented, if you like, by this sort of militant gladiatorial culture. But the other thing that I thought they did really well was the camaraderie in the gladiatorial training school. And it is fascinating to think about what it must have been like to live in one of those barracks. The most famous is the Ludus Magnus. You can see a quarter of it's been excavated just next door to the Colosseum. Has it the training arena? It's got cells all the way around. There would have been maybe a couple of thousand people living in there. And when gladiators were rented, they seemed to have been rented from a single training school. So you might end up fighting in the arena with someone you knew really well and that you're trained with. So that sense of both camaraderie and rivalry, that I think is sometimes captured really well by Hollywood. Maybe because it's something familiar to us from the locker rooms of sports events and so on. In terms of what they get wrong, well, we've covered a lot of that already, that it's out of fight to the death. In fact, you're trying to void having people killed. The notion of a reprieve, that's when you're actually being technically defeated. But you may be missus. You may be reprieved to go back. You fought well enough. You reprieved and sent back to gladiatorial barracks to practice for next time. The idea that a gladiator might fight a man and then turn and fight an animal is completely erroneous. As far as we know, gladiatorial combat was very, very specialized as it just been explained with all those different forms of armor and fighting technique and so on. The beasts were similarly in combat with people who knew how to handle them. It's really interesting that in the later public, potentate in North Africa, supplies beasts for the arena in Rome and he supplies the fighters. Because if you were thrown into the arena in front of a lion, you wouldn't know what to do. But if you assume, maybe you would. But if you're trained, hunter who spends his time hunting lions in the forests of wherever, then you know how to do it. And we see in some of these reliefs and wonderful things that John Matthew has been talking about, we see all these amazing structures put into the arena to try and fool the animals so that you could have a little swivel that you stood behind. That, you know, that's really, it requires a lot of technique. And as far as we are aware, the gladiators were one category of person and the beast-hIGH-T-Fighters were another category of person, possibly even lower in status, but also very skilled and experienced. Matthew, what was your experience doing Gladiator 2? I have to say I started watching it quite recently and I was quite shocked to see the first battle between gladiators and what looked like a hybrid between a baboon and a dog. Yes, it's a striking moment, isn't it? Well, like Kathleen says, they get many things right and other things they take some artistic liberties. in the making of a movie later on there are sharks and the Colosseum, for example. But what I think they do focus on, I think, successfully as the idea of the Colosseum is an arena where the emperor comes face to face with his people. And we've all been talking about that all the way through the program in different ways, of course, in the film it's fictionalized. But the idea that this is an arena where the emperor has to be on spectacle because the people demand it. And as it's been said, holding the Roman people is like holding a wolf by the ears. You've got to dare and let it go. You've got to keep feeding it or entertaining it. So that broader perspective, I think, is an interesting one. I think we've got time for about one more question. And I'm going to ask John Pierce, why did the games die out? It's probably the main factor is one we've been talking about quite a lot, which is to do with money. The gladiators are very expensive. We've talked about the investment that you need to put in to create a trained fighter who will give you a good show. Kathleen, I think, alluded to the edict from the '81 '70s where there's an attempt to put a price cap on the rental for gladiators because people responsible for putting on shows have been complaining that it's bankrupting them. So those urban elites seem always to be under pressure. And it's likely that by the fourth century AD, that pressure has become too much for many of them. That's the time when the cities of many of their own provinces are shrinking. They're becoming less significant as places of ceremony, places of political theatre. People seem leather spending their money. They're spending it on their rural villas. So the combination of cost, possibly availability of performers is shrinking. Those territorial wars on the margins of empire are cutting off the supply of animals, sometimes perhaps from North Africa or captives who are being fed into the arena. So performer availability goes down. Elite incentive to invest because they're no longer so engaged with urban political process. So that probably has a sort of a gradual effect on reducing arena culture. It tends to then focus on places that are closely connected to the emperor, who's still invested, or his nearby kind of political associates who remain invested in doing that. So Rome continues to see them, places like Trier, these regional capitals continue to see them. There is also ideological opposition to some degree. Christians are concerned, but they're much more concerned about the effect on the viewer than they're concerned for the effect on the people in the arena. Because the Christians who write about the games tend to be the same kinds of people like this is a rose, and the test says they come from that elite class. They're more worried about what it does to you if you show up as a spectator. You lose your mind. You kind of you're overtaken by the spirit of the crowd, by bloodlust. You stop rationalizing. It's not good for you to go to the games. So you have kind of that opposition, and then intermittent emperors who are Christians closing off the supply, too, by saying 83 to 5, for example, Constantine says it's no longer a penalty to send someone to the arena. They go to the mines instead if you want to severely punish a criminal. Well, my thanks to John Pierce, Kathleen Coleman, and Matthew Nichols. Next week, it's full staff, Hotspur, and Howl. How Shakespeare explored succession crises through Henry the Fourth Part I. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now, with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. Is there anything else you feel we'd missed here that should be mentioned? I'd love to mention that the games were accompanied by music. The main evidence for that comes from some mosaics in North Africa, some of the things that John was talking about, where we can see sometimes the critical moment where the referee is waiting for the decision as to what is to happen to the defeated gladiator. And the musicians are there with their instruments poised, the water organ, the horned players and the trumpeters. And presumably, they would play mood music to accompany the decision. Yes, I wonder if it would be upbeat if the gladiator lost all downbeat. It's hard to tell, really, isn't it? They certainly seem to enjoy the violence these spectators. John, what about you? To follow up Kathleen's point, I would add, you know, as part of the expense, there's this whole infrastructure of support. Staff, so Kathleen's just talked about, there are the musicians. There are also the referees, the attendants, the people who drag the bodies out. And so on, you know, there are masses. Also, there are two kinds of doctor. There's the doctor in the Roman sense, who's the trainer. And so each of our class of gladiators seems to have a specialised trainer, probably former gladiators, who survived their experience who are now earning a living doing that. But also the surgeons who are keeping the bodies of the gladiators together. So one of our most famous Roman medics, Galen, serves a period of time as a doctor in the gladiatorial school at Pergamon and learns part of his surgery trade from that. Does he describe it at all, Galen? Because as Matthew said, we don't have that many descriptions. He doesn't describe the games themselves, but in describing some of his experiences of learning how to treat certain kinds of injuries. What you can stitch to what? That you can stitch skin to skin. But it's not good to stitch muscles to muscles, apparently, as what he tells us. So he does it. And it's one another of those frustrating things. Indirectly, you see it. But they're never telling us directly what's going on in front of them. Why would they? Their audience has all seen it and they all know it. Matthew? Well, there are some wonderful inscriptions we could talk more about. We did mention epigraphic evidence in the program. There's, for example, a tombstone of a disgruntled gladiator from a measus in modern Turkey who says he died because the referee made a mistake. And he resented this decision of the sumerudist, the ref in the arena. Also, some of the worst excesses of the gladiated loving emperors, I described it, I think, as a kind of line they had to tread between showing interest in the games, but not getting too into it, not losing control of themselves. Colligated, a dear, nearer, did perhaps most notoriously the late second century emperor, Commodus, went absolutely mad for gladiatorial posing. He fought hundreds of bouts. He cut the head off an ostrich and waggled it at the Senate. And they were true. They were all released to stop themselves from laughing, which we've been at a fatal mistake. So Empress could really tip too far over into another of this populist entertainment and forget themselves. So that was Commodus proving what a great guy here is that he can fight with the best of them. Well, if we believe, yes, I think so, sort of physical strength and fitness to rule, but taken to a ludicrous extramar by that day, he'd also try to rename every month of the year after himself and carve the word gladiator on the bottom of a statu and shortly after he was assassinated. So I think we see it as a rain in decay. But interesting that gladiatorial combat, if there's any truth in their stories, is so potent a tool of imperial self-presentation that Empress can lean disastrously too far into it. Kathleen, I just wanted to pick up on one thing that you've said and that was you, you know, you were pointing out that this was not like a capitalist business as say the sports industry would be today. But nonetheless, as John was talking about the masses, the doctors, all the backup staff, the musicians, singers, dancers, whatever it is, presumably they're being paid for all this. Well, presumably they're mostly slaves. And so they're, yes, so their payment would have been, you know, their board and lodging, so to speak, in the training school or in the premises of the person who supplied them to the arena. We even have people whose job it is to rake the sand in the arena. These must have been the lowest of the low, in terms of the slave hierarchy. But one thing I wanted to point out that we really don't know about, and that must be the religious aspect of this. How was religion implicated in these spectacles? We mentioned very briefly that the vessel virgins were present. They were sitting in prime seating, although there's a lot of argument about where exactly their seats were. But they represented the permanence of the Roman state, because they tended the far of vesta, the goddess, and the far that must never go out. So to have them present sitting very close to the emperor somewhere in those front stands, must suggest that there's a religious element here that is holding Rome together. And that is something that we know very little about. Matthew, you wanted to come in there? Yes, that's right. There were other priestly colleges there to the Arville brethren had allocated seats, nemesis, the goddess of revenge, or sometimes associated with the rena sport. I was going to come in on the question of money and business. I mean, it must have been, I'm sure Catherine's quite right, that many of the employees were enslaved. But the business of feeding and arming and equipping tens of thousands of people and 10,000 wild beasts in some of these games must have been very considerable. There's an anecdote that Colligua had ran out of cattle to feed the beast, or find it too expensive, and started randomly throwing criminals to feed the beast instead, and people thought this was poor form. So just the logistics of keeping the thing running must have been extremely demanding. Well, it was colligular, after all. One final question I've got for all of you. If you were a gladiator and you were a slave, could you win your freedom by being a great fighter? Well, it does seem that you could ultimately retire from the arena, but whether you got that because you were very good, or whether because you were very good, you were kept in the household doing it, is obviously an open question. The gladiators could certainly make money from the arena. We talked earlier at their tombs, and you have to have a certain amount of money to leave a tomb. We hear about gladiators who owned and freed slaves, so they could accumulate property. and. It seems if they got to the end of their career, some of them could die old, although the mean age of death on the two senses is actually quite young, so not many did make it. Well, with that it's the end of the game and thank you very much to all three of you. Here comes the producer. It's in your own teal coffee. Teal coffee? Coffee would be like a tea. Coffee tea would be great. Thank you. I'll have a cup of tea. Really? Thank you very much. In our time with Misha Gleini is produced by Simon Tilletson and it's a BBC Studios production. In the world. Vladimir Putin. I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss first time around? The history bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen first on BBC Sounds. Remote Scottish monasteries overrun with pagan warriors. Long boats cutting through Canada's icy waters. North traders and the desert sands of North Africa. The Vikings terrified the medieval world. Yet they beguilers today. Real Vikings. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.