Roman Entertainment: Gladiators, Chariots, and Spectacle

The Roman poet Juvenal famously complained that the Roman people had come to care for only two things: panem et circenses — “bread and circuses.” The phrase has stuck for two thousand years, and it is a useful shorthand for the way the imperial government kept the capital fed and entertained. But it is also a caricature. The Roman world had a richer, more sophisticated, and more brutal popular culture than almost any society in the ancient world. For the social context, see Roman Society and Daily Life. For the politics of building the great entertainment venues, see Who Built the Colosseum?.

Roman entertainment was not just an escape from work. It was a form of politics, a redistribution of wealth, a public religious ritual, and a way of building civic identity. The games of the amphitheater, the races of the circus, the plays of the theater, and the triumphs of victorious generals were all part of the same world, and the skills, costumes, and chants of the games entered the language of Roman political life.

The Colosseum and the Amphitheater

The great amphitheater of Rome, the Flavian Amphitheater known as the Colosseum, was built by the emperors of the Flavian dynasty. Construction began under Vespasian in about 70 CE, on the site of the artificial lake that had been part of the emperor Nero’s Domus Aurea, the great golden house he had built after the fire of 64 CE. It was completed and inaugurated by his son Titus in 80 CE, and the final touches, including the hypogeum — the elaborate underground network of tunnels and animal cages beneath the arena floor — were added by Domitian.

The Colosseum was enormous. It measured 189 meters long by 156 meters wide, and it is estimated to have held between 50,000 and 80,000 spectators, although the highest reliable modern estimate is closer to 50,000. Its outer wall rose to 48 meters, with eighty entrances, the four principal ones reserved for the emperor, the Vestal Virgins, and the magistrates. The arena floor was made of wooden boards covered with sand — the Latin word for sand, harena, gives us our word “arena” — and could be flooded for mock naval battles. Beneath the floor was the hypogeum, a two-level underground labyrinth of passageways, animal cages, dressing rooms, and a complex system of elevators and pulleys that could lift gladiators and animals up to the arena floor. The Colosseum could be emptied of its 50,000 spectators in fifteen minutes, an evacuation system that modern stadiums have only recently matched.

For the engineering of the building, see Roman Engineering and Architecture. The Colosseum was the largest amphitheater ever built in the Roman world, but it was only one of many. Every important provincial city had an amphitheater of its own. The arena at Verona in northern Italy is still used for open-air opera. The great arena at El Djem in Tunisia is the best-preserved Roman amphitheater in North Africa. The arena at Pompeii, preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE, is one of the oldest in the empire.

Gladiators

Gladiatorial combat began as a funerary rite in the fourth or third century BCE, performed at the funeral of a wealthy Roman to honor the dead. By the first century CE it had become the central entertainment of the Roman world, and gladiators were professional athletes, trained in schools, paid for their performances, and celebrated by the Roman public in much the same way that modern fans celebrate football stars.

The training school was the ludus gladiatorius, and the most famous was the Ludus Magnus in Rome, a four-story complex of barracks and training yards just east of the Colosseum, connected to the great amphitheater by an underground passage. Other major training schools existed in Capua, where the gladiatorial revolt of Spartacus had broken out in 73 BCE, and in Ravenna, Verona, and Alexandria. For Spartacus’s story, see his biography.

Gladiators were slaves, condemned criminals, or free men who had voluntarily taken the sacramentum, the oath of the gladiator. Most fought only two or three times a year; the rest of the year they spent in training, learning the elaborate choreography of the arena. They were expensive to maintain, and a successful gladiator was a serious financial asset to his owner. Graffiti from Pompeii, where a large gladiatorial school has been excavated, records the names, win-loss records, and fan favorites of local gladiators. Successful gladiators could win their freedom — the wooden training sword, the rudis, presented to a victorious gladiator by the crowd, was a symbol of his manumission.

The four most important types of gladiators were:

The murmillo, named for the fish on his helmet. Heavily armored with a heavy shield, a sword, a visored helmet, and an arm-guard, he was the standard heavy infantry gladiator.
The thraex (Thracian), armed with a small round shield and a curved sword, a more lightly armed opponent with a distinctive visored helmet with a wide brim.
The retiarius (net-fighter), a lightly armed gladiator with a net, a trident, and a dagger, fighting unhelmeted and stripped to the waist. His traditional opponent was the secutor, who wore a smooth helmet to avoid being caught in the net.
The secutor, a heavily armored gladiator whose only concession to offense was a sword. He was the standard opponent of the retiarius.

Other types included the hoplomachus (heavily armed like a Greek hoplite), the dimachaerus (two swords), the eques (mounted), and the essedarius (fighting from a chariot). Many gladiators were paired by type, with carefully matched equipment and weight classes, in much the same way modern boxers are matched.

The crowd in the Colosseum was the final judge. A gladiator who had been defeated in combat but had fought well would appeal to the crowd: he would kneel and extend his hand in a gesture of submission, while the victor waited. The crowd would respond with thumbs — although whether the gesture was “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” remains a matter of scholarly debate. The emperor, if present, gave the final verdict. The phrase morituri te salutant — “those who are about to die salute you” — was, contrary to popular belief, not actually used in the arena.

Chariot Racing

Chariot racing was older than the Republic, and it was probably the most popular of all Roman entertainments. The great venue was the Circus Maximus in Rome, a vast U-shaped racing track in the valley between the Palatine and Aventine hills. The Circus Maximus, in its final form, was 621 meters long and 118 meters wide, with a central barrier, the spina, around which the chariots raced. The seats, of wood and later of marble, held an estimated 150,000 spectators, and additional tens of thousands could watch standing on the surrounding hills. The arena could be cleared, the seven laps completed, and the next race begun in fifteen minutes.

The races were run by four factions, the factiones, originally distinguished by the color of the jockey’s tunic. The four were the Reds, the Whites, the Blues, and the Greens. The Blues and the Greens dominated the later imperial period, and the support for one or the other was a passionate tribal allegiance that cut across social classes. The emperor was expected to be a partisan. The green faction of the Circus Maximus was famously the favorite of Caligula and Nero; the blue of Domitian. The blues, the greens, and the charioteers were later known to the Byzantine world as the demoi and were a serious political force in Constantinople until the sixth century CE.

A race was a seven-lap event, with sharp turns at each end of the spina. The chariots were light, two-wheeled, and drawn by teams of two, three, four, or even more horses. A biga was a two-horse chariot, a triga a three-horse, a quadriga a four-horse. A race typically involved twelve teams, and the day at the Circus Maximus would include twenty-four races. Crashes were common, and the fatalities among charioteers were a regular feature of the sport.

The most famous charioteer was Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who raced in the early second century CE. His career record, recorded on a marble monument at the Circus Maximus, shows that he won 1,462 of his 4,257 races, and that his career winnings totaled nearly 36 million sesterces. He retired at the age of forty-two with a fortune.

Naumachiae

The naumachiae were mock naval battles staged in artificial lakes, and occasionally in flooded amphitheaters. The earliest known naumachia was staged by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, when he had a basin dug in the Campus Martius and filled it with water to stage a battle between Egyptians and Phoenicians. Augustus staged a naumachia on a similar scale. In 80 CE, the emperor Titus flooded the Colosseum and staged a battle between Athenians and Syracusans, involving 3,000 combatants. The emperor Domitian staged a great battle on the artificial lake at the Alban villa of Domitian, with 6,000 combatants. The last recorded naumachia was staged in the late third century, after which the cost of staging one became too great.

Theater, Mime, and Pantomime

Roman theater was originally an adaptation of Greek tragedy and comedy, and many of the great plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Menander were performed in translation in Rome. By the imperial period, however, the more popular forms of stage entertainment were the Atellan farce (a kind of improvised low comedy from Campania), the mime (a short, often obscene sketch of urban life), and the pantomime (a wordless dance drama accompanied by music and song). The emperor Nero performed as a singer and actor, and his appearance on stage was the scandal of his reign.

The great comic actors of the early empire were freedmen and ex-slaves, and the leading actor of the pantomime was the most highly paid performer in the Roman world. The Roman crowd was as passionate about its actors and dancers as it was about its charioteers, and rivalries between pantomime troupes regularly spilled into riots in the streets.

The Politics of the Games

Roman entertainment was, in the end, politics by other means. The games were a way of transferring wealth from the rich to the public, and a public magistrate was expected to provide games as part of his duties. Aediles, the officials responsible for the games, were ambitious young politicians, and a successful games was a major step on the cursus honorum, the ladder of public honors. Under the empire, the games were increasingly funded by the emperor, and the imperial treasury paid for the Colosseum games, the regular games of the Circus Maximus, the public feasts, and the grain dole that fed the city.

The crowd at the games could make its opinions known. The emperor was watched in the imperial box, and the crowd’s response to his appearance was an early and important measure of his popularity. The acclamations of the games were carefully recorded, and an emperor who lost the support of the crowd in the Colosseum or the Circus had lost one of the most important elements of his political support. For the political context of the games, see Roman Emperors.

The games were also a form of religious ritual. The games began with a pompa, a procession in which the images of the gods were carried around the arena, and the games themselves were dedicated to a particular deity. The inaugural games of the Colosseum in 80 CE were dedicated to Jupiter, and the first games of the season at the Circus Maximus were sacred to Consus, the god of stored grain. The blasphemous remark of an actor could bring an emperor to his knees, and the Christian martyr Caecilia is supposed to have told her husband at their wedding to regard the music as a kind of sacred performance.

The End of the Games

The games did not end with the fall of Rome. The Colosseum remained in use until the sixth century CE, the last recorded games being held under the emperor Theodoric in the early sixth century. The Christian church staged its own spectacles in the ruins — the Pope used the Colosseum for a Passion play in the Middle Ages — and the Corpus Christi processions of the Renaissance are sometimes considered a direct continuation of the Roman triumph. The Colosseum, after centuries of being a quarry, a fortress, and a Christian shrine, has become the universal symbol of the city of Rome and, perhaps, of the great brutal and beautiful civilization that produced it.