Gladiatorial shows were not an aberration. Gladiators were right at the centre of Roman civilisation. Brutal murders, put on in public arenas at public expense, were not seen as decadent - on the contrary, they were staged as an antidote to decadence.
The Romans believed that it was beneficial to watch people being killed. Not just good entertainment, but morally valuable. It made people into better Romans.
We think that compassion is one of the noblest human virtues - that, in fact, you can measure the quality of a civilised society by its level of compassion for the weak, the poor, for those who suffer. By that standard, Rome may not deserve to be called civilised at all, because in the ancient city compassion was regarded as a moral defect. Seneca, the stern voice of Roman republican virtue, said it was an emotion that "belonged to the worst sort of people - old women and silly females".
Gladiators were to be watched and admired because they went to their deaths without flinching. A day in the arena was "one amazing day", a day for the audience to see the power of Rome being exercised over nature and human life. It began in the morning with the animal shows. Entire landscapes would rise from the underground scenery docks, and then in would come the exotic beasts - lions, tigers, leopards, crocodiles, elephants. It was a sort of cross between a zoo and a snuff movie.
Lunch was the time for the execution of prisoners. They could be slaughtered by the animals or made to kill each other. Then came the gladiators, demonstrating in bloody fact the correct way for a man to die. Individual gladiators had followings like any sports star of the modern world.
It used to be said that the Christians stopped these events. After all, they were supposed to show compassion. But the sad truth is that the Christians of Rome became good Romans and staged gladiatorial combats themselves. It was not unknown for a pope to hire gladiators as his bodyguard.
It was the barbarian invaders who finally put an end to the gladiators. The Goths and Vandals had no taste for such things. In fact, they quite often turned the amphitheatres into housing estates.
In the end, the whole question of what we call civilisation and our notion of what is or is not civilised may turn more on these so-called barbarians than on anything we find in the classical world of Rome that had, as its focal point, the public exhibition of death and the brutal cult of the gladiators.
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Carl
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