Gladiators and the military
A man who knows how to conquer in war is a man who knows how to arrange a banquet and put on a show.Rome was essentially a landowning military aristocracy. From the early days of the Republic, ten years of military service were a citizen's duty and a prerequisite for election to public office. Devotio (willingness to sacrifice one’s life to the greater good) was central to the Roman military ideal, and was the core of the Roman military oath. It applied from highest to lowest alike in the chain of command. As a soldier committed his life (voluntarily, at least in theory) to the greater cause of Rome's victory, he was not expected to survive defeat.
The Punic wars of the late 3rd century BCE – in particular the near-catastrophic defeat of Roman arms at Cannae – had long lasting effects on the Republic, its citizen armies, and the development of the gladiatorial munera. In the aftermath of Cannae, Scipio Africanus crucified Roman deserters and had non-Roman deserters thrown to the beasts. The Senate refused to ransom Hannibal's Roman captives: instead, they made drastic preparations:
In obedience to the Books of Destiny, some strange and unusual sacrifices were made, human sacrifices amongst them. A Gaulish man and a Gaulish woman and a Greek man and a Greek woman were buried alive under the Forum Boarium... They were lowered into a stone vault, which had on a previous occasion also been polluted by human victims, a practice most repulsive to Roman feelings. When the gods were believed to be duly propitiated... Armour, weapons, and other things of the kind were ordered to be in readiness, and the ancient spoils gathered from the enemy were taken down from the temples and colonnades. The dearth of freemen necessitated a new kind of enlistment; 8,000 sturdy youths from amongst the slaves were armed at the public cost, after they had each been asked whether they were willing to serve or no. These soldiers were preferred, as there would be an opportunity of ransoming them when taken prisoners at a lower price.By the devotio of a voluntary oath, a slave might achieve the quality of a Roman (Romanitas), become the embodiment of true virtus (manliness, or manly virtue), and paradoxically, be granted missio while remaining a slave. The account notes – uncomfortably – the proximity of recent human sacrifice. While the Senate mustered their willing slaves, Hannibal offered his dishonoured Roman captives a chance for honourable death, in what Livy describes as something very like the Roman munus. The munus was thus an essentially military, self-sacrificial ideal, taken to extreme fulfillment in the gladiator's oath. The gladiator as a specialist fighter, and the ethos and organization of the gladiator schools, would inform the development of the Roman military as the most effective force of its time. In 107 BCE the Marian Reform established the Roman army as a professional body. Two years later, following its defeat at Arausio:
...weapons training was given to soldiers by P. Rutilius, consul with C. Mallis. For he, following the example of no previous general, with teachers summoned from the gladiatorial training school of C. Aurelus Scaurus, implanted in the legions a more sophisticated method of avoiding and dealing a blow and mixed bravery with skill and skill back again with virtue so that skill became stronger by bravery's passion and passion became more wary with the knowledge of this art.The military were great aficionados of the games, and supervised the schools. Many schools and amphitheatres were sited at or near military barracks, and some provincial army units owned gladiator troupes. As the Republic wore on, the term of military service increased from ten to the sixteen years formalised by Augustus in the Principate. It would rise to twenty, and later, to twenty five years. Roman military discipline was ferocious; severe enough to provoke mutiny, despite the consequences. A career as a volunteer gladiator may have seemed an attractive option for some.
In the Year of the Four Emperors, Otho's troops at Bedriacum included 2000 gladiators. Opposite him on the field, Vitellius's army was swollen by levies of slaves, plebs and gladiators. In 167 CE, troop depletions by plague and desertion may have prompted Marcus Aurelius to draft gladiators at his own expense. Gladiators do not seem to have made good field soldiers – their enrollment should be seen as an act of desperation. During the Civil Wars that led to the Principate, Octavian (later Augustus) acquired the personal gladiator troop of his erstwhile opponent, Mark Antony. They had served their late master with exemplary loyalty but were quietly disposed of. They were, after all, infames.
Religion, ethics and sentiment
Roman writing as a whole demonstrates a deep ambivalence towards the gladiatoria munera. Even the most complex and sophisticated munera evoked the ancient, ancestral dii manes of the underworld and were framed by the protective, lawful rites of sacrificium. Their popularity made their co-option by the state inevitable; Cicero acknowledged their sponsorship as a political imperative. Despite the popular adulation of gladiators, they were set apart, despised; and despite Cicero's contempt for the mob, he shared their admiration: "Even when [gladiators] have been felled, let alone when they are standing and fighting, they never disgrace themselves. And suppose a gladiator has been brought to the ground, when do you ever see one twist his neck away after he has been ordered to extend it for the death blow?" His own death would later emulate this example. Yet Cicero could also refer to his popularist opponent Clodius, publicly and scathingly, as a bustuarius – literally, a "funeral-man", implying that Clodius has shown the moral temperament of the lower sort of gladiator. Such finer distinctions aside, "gladiator" could be (and was) used as an insult throughout the Roman period. For Silius Italicus, who wrote as the games approached their peak, the degenerate Campanians had devised the very worst of precedents, which now threatened the moral fabric of Rome: "It was their custom to enliven their banquets with bloodshed and to combine with their feasting the horrid sight of armed men fighting; often the combatants fell dead above the very cups of the revelers, and the tables were stained with streams of blood. Thus demoralised was Capua." Death might be rightly meted out as punishment, or met with equanimity in peace or war as a gift of fate, but death inflicted without moral purpose was ignoble, and might pollute and demean those who witnessed it.While the munus itself could be interpreted as pious necessity, the increasing luxuria of munera corroded Roman virtue by encouraging profligacy and the corruptions of self-indulgence: such foreign debaucheries whetted un-Roman appetites. Caesar's 46 BCE ludi were hardly justified as munus after a 20 year interval since his father's death, in which case they were mere entertainment for political gain. Dio claimed to represent the voices of the Roman street; Caesar's munus was a waste of lives – and of money, better doled out to needy army veterans. Yet for Seneca, and for Marcus Aurelius – both professed Stoics – the degradation of gladiators in the munus highlighted their Stoic virtues – their unconditional obedience to their master and to fate, and equanimity in the face of death. Having "neither hope nor illusions", the gladiator could transcend his own debased nature, and disempower death itself by meeting it face to face. Courage, dignity, altruism and loyalty were morally redemptive; Lucian idealised this principle in his story of Sisinnes, who voluntarily fought as a gladiator, earned 10,000 drachmas and used it to buy freedom for his friend, Toxaris. Seneca had a lower opinion of the mob's un-Stoical appetite for ludi meridiani: "Man [is]... now slaughtered for jest and sport; and those whom it used to be unholy to train for the purpose of inflicting and enduring wounds are thrust forth exposed and defenceless."
These accounts seek a higher moral meaning from the munus, but Ovid's very detailed (though satirical) instructions for seduction in the amphitheatre suggest that the spectacles could generate a potent and dangerously sexual atmosphere. Augustan seating prescriptions placed women – excepting the Vestals, who were legally inviolate – as far as possible from the action of the arena floor; or tried to. There remained the thrilling possibility of clandestine sexual transgression by high-caste spectators and their heroes of the arena. Such assignations were a source for gossip and satire but some became unforgivably public:
What was the youthful charm that so fired Eppia? What hooked her? What did she see in him to make her put up with being called "the gladiator's moll"? Her poppet, her Sergius, was no chicken, with a dud arm that prompted hope of early retirement. Besides his face looked a proper mess, helmet-scarred, a great wart on his nose, an unpleasant discharge always trickling from one eye. But he was a gladiator. That word makes the whole breed seem handsome, and made her prefer him to her children and country, her sister, her husband. Steel is what they fall in love with.Eppia – a senator's wife – and her Sergius eloped to Egypt, where he deserted her. Most gladiators would have aimed lower. Two wall graffiti in Pompeii describe Celadus the Thraex as "the sigh of the girls" and "the glory of the girls" – which may or may not have been Celadus' own wishful thinking.
In the later Imperial era, Servius Maurus Honoratus uses the same disparaging term as Cicero – bustuarius – for gladiators. Tertullian used it somewhat differently – all victims of the arena were sacrificial in his eyes – and expressed the paradox of the arenarii as a class, from a Christian viewpoint:
On the one and the same account they glorify them and they degrade and diminish them; yes, further, they openly condemn them to disgrace and civil degradation; they keep them religiously excluded from council chamber, rostrum, senate, knighthood, and every other kind of office and a good many distinctions. The perversity of it! They love whom they lower; they despise whom they approve; the art they glorify, the artist they disgrace.
Gladiators in Roman art and culture
In this new Play, I attempted to follow the old custom of mine, of making a fresh trial; I brought it on again. In the first Act I pleased; when in the mean time a rumor spread that gladiators were about to be exhibited; the populace flock together, make a tumult, clamor aloud, and fight for their places: meantime, I was unable to maintain my place.
Pliny the Elder gives vivid examples of the popularity of gladiator portraiture in Antium and an artistic treat laid on by an adoptive aristocrat for the solidly plebian citizens of the Roman Aventine:
When a freedman of Nero was giving a gladiatorial show at Antium, the public porticoes were covered with paintings, so we are told, containing life-like portraits of all the gladiators and assistants. This portraiture of gladiators has been the highest interest in art for many centuries now, but it was Gaius Terentius who began the practice of having pictures made of gladiatorial shows and exhibited in public; in honour of his grandfather who had adopted him he provided thirty pairs of Gladiators in the Forum for three consecutive days, and exhibited a picture of the matches in the Grove of Diana.
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