The Historians' History of the World 06 [The Early Roman Empire]

The arena was adapted for chariot racing by a partition, a dwarf wall, surmounted with various emblematic devices, which ran along the middle and terminated at either end in goals or ornamented pillars, round which the contending cars were driven a stated number of times. The eye of the spectator, from his position aloft, was carried over this spinal ridge, and he obtained a complete view of the contest, which thus passed and repassed, amidst clouds of dust and roars of sympathising excitement, before his feet. The Romans had from the first an intense delight in these races; and many of the most graphic passages of their poets describe the ardour of the horses, the emulation of their drivers, and the tumultuous enthusiasm of the spectators.

These contests maintained their interest from the cradle to the very grave of the Roman people. The circus of Constantinople, under the Greek designation of Hippodrome, was copied from the pattern of the Roman; and the factions, which divided the favour of the tribes almost from the beginning of the empire, continued to agitate the city of Theodosius and Justinian. The citizens were never satiated with this spectacle, and could sit without flagging through a hundred heats, which the liberality of the exhibiter sometimes provided for them. But the races were more commonly varied with contests of other kinds. All the varieties of the Greek pancratium, such as boxing, wrestling, and running, were exhibited in the circus; gladiators fought one another with naked swords, sometimes in single combat, sometimes in opposing bands.

The immense size of the arena, unfavourable for the exhibition of the duel, was turned to advantage for the display of vast multitudes of wild animals, which were let loose in it to be transfixed with spears and arrows. This practice seems to date from the sixth century, when victorious generals first returned to Rome from the far regions of the teeming East, to ingratiate themselves with the populace by showing them the strange monsters of unknown continents, lions and elephants, giraffes and hippopotami. As in other things, the rivalry of the nobles soon displayed itself in the number of these creatures they produced for massacre; and the favour of the citizens appears to have followed with constancy the champion who treated it with the largest effusion of blood. The circus was too spacious for the eye to gloat upon the expression of conflicting passions, and watch the last ebbings of life; but the amphitheatre brought the greatest possible number of spectators within easy distance of the dead and dying, and fostered the passion for the sight of blood, which continued for centuries to vie in interest with the harmless excitement of the race.

The idea of the theatre is representation and illusion, and the stage is, as it were, magic ground, over which the imagination may glance without restraint and wander at will from Thebes to Athens, from the present to the past or future. But in the amphitheatre all is reality. The citizen, seated face to face with his fellow-citizens, could not for a moment forget either his country or his times. The spectacles here presented to him made no appeal to the discursive faculties; they brought before his senses, in all the hardness of actuality, the consummation of those efforts of strength, skill, and dexterity in the use of arms to which much of his own time and thoughts were necessarily directed.

The exhibition of gladiatorial combats, which generally preceded the departure of a general upon a foreign campaign, was part of the soldier’s training (and every citizen was regarded as a soldier), from which he received the last finish of his education, and was taught to regard wounds and death as the natural incidents of his calling. These were probably the most ancient of the military spectacles. The combats of wild beasts, and of men with beasts, were a corruption of the noble science of war which the gladiatorial contests were supposed to teach; they were a concession to the prurient appetite for excitement, engendered by an indulgence which, however natural in a rude and barbarous age, was actually hardening and degrading. The interest these exercises at first naturally excited degenerated into a mere passion for the sight of death; and as the imagination can never be wholly inactive in the face of the barest realities, the Romans learned to feast their thoughts on the deepest mystery of humanity, and to pry with insatiate curiosity into the secrets of the last moments of existence. In proportion as they lost their faith in a future life, they became more restlessly inquisitive into the conditions of the present.

The eagerness with which the great mass of the citizens crowded to witness these bloody shows, on every occasion of their exhibition, became one of the most striking features of Roman society, and none of their customs has, accordingly, attracted more of the notice of the ancient writers who profess to describe the manners of their times. By them they are often represented as an idle and frivolous recreation, unworthy of the great nation of kings; nor do we find the excuse officially offered for the combats of gladiators, as a means of cherishing courage and fostering the ruder virtues of antiquity, generally put forward as their apology by private moralists. Men of reflection, who were far themselves from sharing the vulgar delight in these horrid spectacles (and it should be noticed that no Roman author speaks of them with favour, or gloats with interest on their abominations), acquiesced without an effort in the belief that it was necessary to amuse the multitude, and was better to gratify them with any indulgence they craved for than to risk the more fearful consequences of thwarting and controlling them. The blood thus shed on the arena was the price they calculated on paying for the safety and tranquillity of the realm.