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XLI. COLOSSEUM
Once the Roman justice system has finished with you, if you end up in the penal system, you become part of a unique evil, a horror, that is unparalleled in human history. There have been events, particularly in the Twentieth Century, called holocausts (from Gk holo, ‘whole’ + kaustos, ‘burnt’, referring to the burning whole of a sacrificial living form, whether fauna or flora), and in every instance the perpetrators made an all-out effort to cover up their actions. None of the epic genocides of your age manage to parallel the systematic slaughter of men, women, children, and animals for entertainment over a period of at least 500 years in arenas and circuses around the Roman Empire. The games began as funeral celebrations in Etruscan, and possibly prehistoric, times. They were adopted by the young Roman nation over the centuries during the early Republic. This was not the same as human sacrifice, which was practiced by many people including the Romans, though to a relatively small degree. The custom that the Romans copied and expanded from the Etruscans started out as something akin to Greek Olympic competitions, but held as part of funeral celebrations. That is what they were called: funeral games. At some point, they crossed the line from competition to deadly combat and then death sport. Most likely the line was crossed when condemned prisoners were offered in this manner to appease the gods, and a spectacular winner’s death sentence may have been commuted. At any rate, the games are a kind of political obligation of successful politicians in Rome by the time of the late Republic, whose end (44 B.C., when Julius Caesar becomes dictator for life) nearly coincides with the arrival of Jesus Christ about 40 years later. The first gladiatorial (from L gladius, ‘sword’) known to history date to 264 B.C. Three pairs of men fought to the death in the Forum Boarium (cattle market) at the funeral of a wealthy patrician named Marcus Junius Brutus. It is easy to infer that the justification, going forward, was a combination of prestige for the sponsoring noble (often a politician running for office and out to curry votes); as well as religious motives involving the highly ritual state religion. Rome also had a systemic mob problem, resulting from the fact that the small farmers of early times, who made up the agrarian and moral backbone of the Republic, were increasingly bought out during hard times. Their farms were combined into huge plantations (latifundia) owned by increasingly (fabulously) wealthy businessmen. (Coincidentally, the latifundia system survives into medieval times and becomes the feudal system that survives in France to the Revolution of the 1790s, and in Russia to the Revolution of 1917). The growth of Rome in the First and Second Centuries B.C. created this and a lot of other social turmoil, which resulted in the migration of both landless, unskilled farmers and rootless former soldiers to the city of Rome. The alternative was to stay on the land they had formerly owned, and become virtual serfs (in almost every medieval sense except the Christian overlay). Staying also meant working side by side with an increasing number of slaves brought to central Italy from Rome’s many victorious wars all over the known world. What the migrants to Rome found there was not so much work, but a free ride. The trick about being a Roman citizen was that the privilege was extended to freemen over most of Italy, in time, but they had to actually go to Rome to vote. The result for ruthless opportunists, among whom Julius Caesar was the final cat’s meow, was a ready pool of shiftless people whom only only had to feed and entertain in return for their votes. You see the picture (and some scary parallels in modern times, via what is known as human nature, which doesn’t change). These things were the principal forces in making the leap to the system of gladiatorial games. What makes these games unique is not only their scale (throughout the empire) and duration (over half a millennium) but the fact that the Romans were proud of them, advertised them, and used them both to entertain their own people and to intimidate foreigners. Think of the scale. In Trajan’s time (53-117 A.D.) one set of games ran 117 days and involved nearly 10,000 gladiators. It’s been estimated half a million to a million humans perished in the Colosseum alone--nobody will ever know the exact number, but this melancholy and haunting nightmare extended to every city in the empire (which had between 30 and 100 million people at various points in time). The numbers of the dead include not just professional fighters, who were on the one hand the supreme sex symbols of their age, but still despised in polite circles, but also countless criminals, and often the men, women, and children of certain conquered nations who were brought into slavery. In addition, an entire related industry existed for bringing animals of every description from around the known world to fight and die in the arena. The Romans drove the Barbary lion, for example, to the verge of extinction (its subspecies lingered until 1926, when the last known animal was shot). The Romans were expert at training and selectively starving the animals to optimally prepare them for their final hour of life in the arena. Every imaginable form of cruelty and depravity was invented to titillate an increasingly callous and bloodthirsty citizenry, including, some ancient sources suggest, staging sexual encounters between humans and animals, or training animals to rape women. If it was possible, we can well imagine it happened. To dwell on the games is for a modern person of even the slightest decency a stomach-wrenching experience. This, therefore, is the setting in which you find yourself--in the most famous artifact of Imperial Roman times, the Amphitheater of Flavius, known to the world as the Colosseum. The latter name comes, not because of the undeniably large size of the theater, but from the size of a huge 120-foot colossal statue the first mad emperor, Nero, built in honor of himself; it stood next to the Colosseum and was torn down by hateful mobs after the tyrant’s death.
What amazes you about the Colosseum is not its size (50,000 spectators, the size of a modest modern American baseball stadium) but its intimacy. It is tiny compared to the Circus Maximus. In the Colosseum, you could probably shout across the farthest two points in the ellipse and be understood, assuming thousands of other voices were not raised at the moment. Thus, if you are standing in the exact center of the arena (‘sand’), and someone with a mouthful of food shouted from the top tier for your death, you would hear him or her. You would understand what they said, and that must have added to what was already an experience terrifying beyond the mind’s ability to grasp.
Nobody can understand this in the way you now do. You stand on the sandy floor of the arena with several other prisoners. You are part of a group of untrained petty criminals whose artless demise is of so little interest that most of the audience all around is either paying no attention, being busy chatting, or having left to get some snacks or visit the public latrine outside. So you’re just filler in-between more interesting events. You are, one might say, elevator music. You are the Zamboni that rides out to smooth the ice at a hockey game. With you are about a dozen men, several women, and two or three children. The men range from burglars and pickpockets, repeat offenders all, to a few rage killers. The women are poisoners, who killed their husbands, and now have elected to take their children with them rather than leave them parentless in a callous world that has very little social net (aside from some charities run largely by wealthy polytheist show-offs, as well as Jews and Christians). By now, very little surprises you anymore, including the matter of fact way the innocent are put to death.
What does surprise you is your own reaction to your imminent death on the sand in this arena. You have faced danger and even death a number of times on this journey, but this is unlike any of the other situations. What particularly jars and oppresses you is the setting. It is early to midafternoon on a hot, muggy day. The sky is smoky and overcast, and the sun is like a huge red apple in a stew of wine and blood. As your knees knock together, and your breath comes in terrified little wheezes from your constricted chest, you noticed the smell of human feces. That is partly because several of the condemned have shat what rags they are wearing, and partly because when you slice people with swords, their intestines spill on the sand.
You have managed to maintain your dignity to some extent, but you have just urinated copiously and the hot liquid runs down your legs. People in the stands are laughing, perhaps at some joke, or perhaps at the spectacle of a trembling group of defenseless people awaiting a cruel but uninteresting death. You hear a murmur of appreciation, just a reflex in the crowd, as the wooden elevators rumble upward. You can feel the ground rattle, and grains of sand dancing on your wet toes. You hear the squeak of iron gears, then the massive throaty roar of half a dozen animals that arrive at your level. For a moment, time seems suspended. The animals are dazed at the light, and still as they try to assess what is happening to them. The children and several men cry out. The women wail and hold their children close. You were down in the infernal darkness until just a while ago, savoring the smell of oats, and the smells of both fresh and waste water, and aware of the huge animals in nearby stone corridors. You heard talk of men cutting their wrists to avoid the shame of dying before a laughing crowd. You heard talk of women strangling their children, or men strangling their families, and of course the lanistas and beast masters know all these tricks and keep people separated. All sorts of desperate and shady dealings go on down here, but the condemned generally have nothing to bargain with. Sometimes their families on the outside can offer money to gain a more painless death. Sometimes an offer of sexual gratification gains a decisive slash of a knife that looks like suicide. They’ve seen it all in here. If there is a hell on earth, it is not in the underworld, but in the world under the Colosseum.
Now you begin to see the game in this blood-red light that seems to match the pounding of red blood in the chambers of your terrified heart. You barely notice the catcalls and jeers of a few drunks in the high stands where plebeians, slaves, and unaccompanied women must sit. The season boxes of the wealthy look empty, and the emperor’s box is covered in gold-embroidered cloths because either he is away in his palace, or indulging in some private pleasures. No matter--with only minutes left to live, you can barely breathe, and lack curiosity. Your world is narrowed down to the fifty or so feet of sand between you and a half dozen cages waiting to open. For a few moments, a clown act finishes and the next few catcalls are directed at the bumpkins who race around in an undersized chariot pulled by dogs. Before disappearing into safe cages to be hauled away, they make a pass by you and throw buckets of blood all over you, to make you smell irresistible. Then your group is alone, and suddenly two wolves are loose on the sand. They are starving, and saliva drips from their white teeth as they close in on the smell of helpless humans. They have their tails between their legs, and would prefer to run around the edges of the sand looking for a way out, but their hunger is too great. They slink closer, growling, for the kill. Abruptly, two more cage doors open, and a golden tiger scrambles out from each. No wonder: each tiger has been bitten by a mass of snakes writhing from an upended basket in its cage. Nipped by vipers, the tigers roar and roll on the sand, before attacking anything they see. Already, several persons ahead of you have been taken, and their torn bodies lie bleeding in the sand. You hear cries and groans around you, screams of fear, and you aren’t sure if you too are screaming. You vaguely hear the taunting and yelling of drunks, and you hear dignified young society girls of the finest families standing on their feet yelling with throaty blood lust while waving their dainty fists. Even the maddened tigers do not show the same violent rage as these innocent children of senators. You wonder if all this is just a hideous dream, because it just doesn’t seem it could be real. But it is.
The tigers notice the wolves, who have decided to frantically look for a way out, sniffing along the edges of the oval, along the stone walls rising from the sand. While the tigers turn their attention to the running dogs, the last two cages open and out come a pair of African crocodiles. They have been kept moist and warm, and now they zigzag across the sand toward you. Somehow, the beast masters have fooled them into thinking there is river water to slide into, and along the way are a few snacks--you, and the other human victims.
As the crocodiles run toward you, people around you begin to scream and run. The sight of these fearsome reptiles is enough to overcome paralysis, fear, even the wish for suicide. At that moment, you notice a young man beside you, who has a rudimentary tattoo of a fish on one arm. He steps in front of two women and their children to take the crocodiles’ attack with his own body, to buy them a few more minutes of life. Also at that moment, to prolong the joke, the handlers in the walls throw a sword and a spear out, in the hope someone may hold back the animals and give the crowd an extra thrill. Instinctively, you reach down and grasp the spear. One of the tigers has outsprinted and killed one of the wolves. The other wolf tires the other tiger, which stops chasing him and comes back for easier game. The young man picks up the other weapon, the sword, and stands facing the tiger. You stand facing the crocodile with your spear. The crowd starts to roar at this great entertainment.
At that moment, a cloaked figure in a Petasus hat appears like a blur, moving between you and your surroundings. You are encased in darkness, and only vaguely aware of a shout as the young swordsman undergoes a similar fate. You are both lifted bodily out of this time and space, and spun through some intermediate state, away from the horror unfolding in the Colosseum.
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