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> that both celebrated and embodied the grandeur of Rome. So what exactly put an end to these inhumane shows? Did the arena become destroyed in a fire or was s

> that both celebrated and embodied the grandeur of Rome. So what exactly put an end to these inhumane shows? Did the arena become destroyed in a fire or was sacked and plundered, or did the populace lose its taste for gore and grow a conscience or something in that direction? Or was it that these shows went on for the full life of the Roman Empire and yet no following generation and municipality picked it up again and or didn't know how to operate the thing when the empire fell.

Kelamir 6y ago
> So what exactly put an end to these inhumane shows? You might want to check out the Hardcore History podcast by Dan Carlin, episode "Painfotainment". It has some ideas as to why that happened.
rendall 6y ago
Christianity, essentially
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  > St. Ignatius, the first Christian who died in the Colosseum, chose to die for his religion in front of tens of thousands of people rather than escape persecution or die in a less public place. About 3000 Christian martyrs in all died in the Colosseum.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- ghaff 6y ago
  per Wikipedia: Honorius issued a decree during his reign, prohibiting men from wearing trousers in Rome. The last known gladiatoral games took place during the reign of Honorius, who banned the practice in 399 and again in 404, reportedly due to the martyrdom of a Christian monk named Telemachus while he was protesting a gladiator fight. (Which was pretty much at the end of the Roman Empire and the city was sacked a few years later.)
  - hertzrat 6y ago
    Why would they ban trousers?
    - rsynnott 6y ago
      In the scheme of things that late Roman emperors did, banning trousers seems very normal. More seriously, possibly early culture wars, trousers being an un-Roman, foreign innovation.
    - ArikBe 6y ago
      From https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trousers-pants-roman-history-banned-trajan https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trousers-pants-roman-h... Like with GPS and the internet, innovations from the military sector slowly spread to civil society. By 397, trousers, in all their odiousness, were becoming so common that brother-emperors Honorius and Arcadius (of the Western and Eastern empires, respectively) issued an official trouser ban. The ban is cited in a code named for their father, Theodosianus, which read: “Within the venerable City no person should be allowed to appropriate to himself the use of boots or trousers. But if any man should attempt to contravene this sanction, We command that in accordance with the sentence of the Illustrious Prefect, the offender shall be stripped of all his resources and delivered into perpetual exile.” “What the ban basically does is that it bans civilians from wearing a military outfit in the capital,” says Elm, “so one could see it as an indirect way to make it easy to distinguish civilians from military men at a time where tension was high.” Four years prior, Emperor Valens had been killed in battle within Roman borders, and a third of the army had been wiped out. So banning trousers could have been a way to make sure that the capital was easier to police, and that fighters were kept out. The ban could also be read as the desperate attempt of late-period emperors to cling to a sense of Roman identity at a time where the empire had become a melting pot of traditions, after hundreds of years of expansion and cultural appropriation. Long hair and flashy jewels soon joined boots and pants as forbidden fashion. “Barbarian influence on fashion was something that emperors wanted to control, but then their own bodyguards, which presumably they trusted, were barbarians,” says Elm. “So rather than anti-barbarian, they were mostly anti-barbarian-identity.” Restoring concepts such as “purity” and “identity” is not uncommon in fading empires—authoritarian ways to make rulers feel in control at home in the face of external weakness.
bboreham 6y ago
There was no “following municipality” for about 1000 years. Not one rich enough to fund that size of show.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  Practically speaking, after the deposition of the last Western Emperor, Italy was still nominally part of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantine Empire did actually reconquer most of Italy from the Ostrogoths, but they didn't hold onto it for long, and much was reconquered by the Lombards, except for the Exarchate of Ravenna. The collapse of Byzantine rule in Italy led the pope to ask the Carolingians for protection from the Lombards, and the pope got control of (most of) the ex-Exarchate of Ravenna in return, renamed the Papal States. The Republic of Venice gained independence from the Byzantine Empire at roughly the same time, and grew into one of the most dominant powers of the Middle Ages, eventually managing to conquer the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade. Other parts of Northern Italy also developed large, powerful merchant republic city-states throughout the Middle Ages: Amalfi, Genoa, Pisa, Ancona, Gaeta, Ragusa (although that was actually on what is now Croatian coastline). I will point out that, throughout the Middle Ages, the largest, richest, and most powerful cities in Western Europe would have been these Italian city-states. They absolutely would have been able to fund that size of show--after all, these are the cities that patronized the arts and eventually the Italian Renaissance.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    And Rome itself remained unable to rebuild itself into a strong city because it's bishops somehow managed to reestablish something like the imperial Roman bureaucratic control on the religious side, establishing Catholicism as a centralistic "church empire" reaching farther out than the secular empire ever did (well, secular except for the occasional deification..). This influence of the city's bishop (aka pope, still elected in an utterly informal process by the citizenry for much of the middle ages) reliably prevented the development of stable power structures in the city, because papal succession was so important outside that whenever an imbalance between roman "families of power" was developing the weaker sides were immediately supported by outsiders (the stronger side would not be open to outside influence). Outsiders like the seemingly endless succession of German kings that went to Rome with an army hoping to get emperor status in exchange for helping the next pope into his job, but also by many others (e.g. Normans in what is now southern Italy). Imagine what the District of Columbia would be like if elections routinely involved violence, war between US states wasn't unheard of and (kind of like the inverse of the US Senate) nobody outside of DC had a vote for the presidency.
frostburg 6y ago
The visible damage to the structure is mostly due to the building materials having been reused in other structures in the following centuries.
retrac 6y ago
In the received history, Emperor Honorius banned them in 399 AD. Rome would be sacked by barbarians a decade later and never recovered. Some games would continue after that into the 5th century, anyway. Still, it was on the way out before the Empire fell in the West. The origins of gladiatorial combat are disputed, but it's tied to the military and religious rites of the Roman people specifically, and long predated the imperial era. It probably ties back into the human sacrifice themes common to the Indo-European religions. It was a practice alien to most of the peoples in the empire, and was used as a means of asserting imperial authority. In the 3rd/4th century, we have the empire under strain economically which gives real-world pressure to curtail the games. Demographics are shifting and there are a lot of culturally non-Roman citizens in the empire, including emperors. At the same time, Christianity was on the rise. It erased the ancient religious justifications, and created new religious objections. Once Christianity becomes cemented as the state religion it was pretty much done -- Christian martyrs being thrown to the lions in the Colosseum was an old meme even then.
- MereInterest 6y ago
  What does "received history" mean in this context? A quick google search found use of the phrase when discussing history, but I didn't find any definitions.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - PoachedSausage 6y ago
    Another way of saying received wisdom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_wisdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_wisdom
  - coldtea 6y ago
    Depending on context, it's used to mean either (a) "history as generally accepted" (positively) or (b) "history as generally accepted" (but negatively, when implying that the generally accepted version doesn't tell the real story).
TheCoelacanth 6y ago
With the fall of the western empire, Rome's population collapsed from over a million to only tens of thousands. It wouldn't cross 100,000 again until the 18th century. It just didn't have the wealth or population necessary to hold such shows.
- monkeybutton 6y ago
  I can't imagine what it would be like living in a city that was once so large and then so sparsely populated. Like a medieval apocalypse. Was the remaining population densely located in few spots amongst ruins?
  - kgabis 6y ago
    You can visit Detroit if you want to experience something like that.
  - iguy 6y ago
    Mostly outside the ruins. IIRC the main churches were built around the edge (because the center was full) in late Roman times, and these locations became the new centers in medieval times.
    - ricw 6y ago
      It is also one of the main reasons so many buildings, both ruined and standing, still are around and accessible. Had the population not collapsed, they probably would have been built over or repurposed over the years. This way, they just remained fallow until Italy was conceived again in the 1800s as a nation (from its individual king and dukedoms) and Rome was chosen as its capitol.
      - usrusr 6y ago
        Many of the landmarks that still exist (and of those that don't, e.g. the Septizodium), except for those saved by being directly converted into a church (the Pantheon), saw heavy repurposing as fortifications in the endless and often violent power struggles between patrician families. The Circus Maximus was a Frangipani stronghold. Others (and the Circus Maximus before it was taken over by the Frangipani) were simply saved from getting used as a quarry by getting incorporated in-place as structural elements for new, well, shacks, as documented by the many, many square holes hewn into the formerly flat stone surfaces. Square holes for holding wooden beams I suppose. The (still in use!) appartment on top of the Theatre of Marcellus give an idea of how that went. In this case, they are the outcome of a slow fortress->palace->middle class residential transition.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Kelamir 6y ago

> So what exactly put an end to these inhumane shows? You might want to check out the Hardcore History podcast by Dan Carlin, episode "Painfotainment". It has some ideas as to why that happened.

rendall 6y ago

Christianity, essentially

cblconfederate 6y ago
> St. Ignatius, the first Christian who died in the Colosseum, chose to die for his religion in front of tens of thousands of people rather than escape persecution or die in a less public place. About 3000 Christian martyrs in all died in the Colosseum.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
ghaff 6y ago
per Wikipedia: Honorius issued a decree during his reign, prohibiting men from wearing trousers in Rome. The last known gladiatoral games took place during the reign of Honorius, who banned the practice in 399 and again in 404, reportedly due to the martyrdom of a Christian monk named Telemachus while he was protesting a gladiator fight. (Which was pretty much at the end of the Roman Empire and the city was sacked a few years later.)
- hertzrat 6y ago
  Why would they ban trousers?
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    In the scheme of things that late Roman emperors did, banning trousers seems very normal. More seriously, possibly early culture wars, trousers being an un-Roman, foreign innovation.
  - ArikBe 6y ago
    From https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trousers-pants-roman-history-banned-trajan https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trousers-pants-roman-h... Like with GPS and the internet, innovations from the military sector slowly spread to civil society. By 397, trousers, in all their odiousness, were becoming so common that brother-emperors Honorius and Arcadius (of the Western and Eastern empires, respectively) issued an official trouser ban. The ban is cited in a code named for their father, Theodosianus, which read: “Within the venerable City no person should be allowed to appropriate to himself the use of boots or trousers. But if any man should attempt to contravene this sanction, We command that in accordance with the sentence of the Illustrious Prefect, the offender shall be stripped of all his resources and delivered into perpetual exile.” “What the ban basically does is that it bans civilians from wearing a military outfit in the capital,” says Elm, “so one could see it as an indirect way to make it easy to distinguish civilians from military men at a time where tension was high.” Four years prior, Emperor Valens had been killed in battle within Roman borders, and a third of the army had been wiped out. So banning trousers could have been a way to make sure that the capital was easier to police, and that fighters were kept out. The ban could also be read as the desperate attempt of late-period emperors to cling to a sense of Roman identity at a time where the empire had become a melting pot of traditions, after hundreds of years of expansion and cultural appropriation. Long hair and flashy jewels soon joined boots and pants as forbidden fashion. “Barbarian influence on fashion was something that emperors wanted to control, but then their own bodyguards, which presumably they trusted, were barbarians,” says Elm. “So rather than anti-barbarian, they were mostly anti-barbarian-identity.” Restoring concepts such as “purity” and “identity” is not uncommon in fading empires—authoritarian ways to make rulers feel in control at home in the face of external weakness.

bboreham 6y ago

There was no “following municipality” for about 1000 years. Not one rich enough to fund that size of show.

jcranmer 6y ago
Practically speaking, after the deposition of the last Western Emperor, Italy was still nominally part of the Eastern Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire/Byzantine Empire did actually reconquer most of Italy from the Ostrogoths, but they didn't hold onto it for long, and much was reconquered by the Lombards, except for the Exarchate of Ravenna. The collapse of Byzantine rule in Italy led the pope to ask the Carolingians for protection from the Lombards, and the pope got control of (most of) the ex-Exarchate of Ravenna in return, renamed the Papal States. The Republic of Venice gained independence from the Byzantine Empire at roughly the same time, and grew into one of the most dominant powers of the Middle Ages, eventually managing to conquer the Byzantine Empire in the Fourth Crusade. Other parts of Northern Italy also developed large, powerful merchant republic city-states throughout the Middle Ages: Amalfi, Genoa, Pisa, Ancona, Gaeta, Ragusa (although that was actually on what is now Croatian coastline). I will point out that, throughout the Middle Ages, the largest, richest, and most powerful cities in Western Europe would have been these Italian city-states. They absolutely would have been able to fund that size of show--after all, these are the cities that patronized the arts and eventually the Italian Renaissance.
- usrusr 6y ago
  And Rome itself remained unable to rebuild itself into a strong city because it's bishops somehow managed to reestablish something like the imperial Roman bureaucratic control on the religious side, establishing Catholicism as a centralistic "church empire" reaching farther out than the secular empire ever did (well, secular except for the occasional deification..). This influence of the city's bishop (aka pope, still elected in an utterly informal process by the citizenry for much of the middle ages) reliably prevented the development of stable power structures in the city, because papal succession was so important outside that whenever an imbalance between roman "families of power" was developing the weaker sides were immediately supported by outsiders (the stronger side would not be open to outside influence). Outsiders like the seemingly endless succession of German kings that went to Rome with an army hoping to get emperor status in exchange for helping the next pope into his job, but also by many others (e.g. Normans in what is now southern Italy). Imagine what the District of Columbia would be like if elections routinely involved violence, war between US states wasn't unheard of and (kind of like the inverse of the US Senate) nobody outside of DC had a vote for the presidency.

frostburg 6y ago

The visible damage to the structure is mostly due to the building materials having been reused in other structures in the following centuries.

retrac 6y ago

In the received history, Emperor Honorius banned them in 399 AD. Rome would be sacked by barbarians a decade later and never recovered. Some games would continue after that into the 5th century, anyway. Still, it was on the way out before the Empire fell in the West. The origins of gladiatorial combat are disputed, but it's tied to the military and religious rites of the Roman people specifically, and long predated the imperial era. It probably ties back into the human sacrifice themes common to the Indo-European religions. It was a practice alien to most of the peoples in the empire, and was used as a means of asserting imperial authority. In the 3rd/4th century, we have the empire under strain economically which gives real-world pressure to curtail the games. Demographics are shifting and there are a lot of culturally non-Roman citizens in the empire, including emperors. At the same time, Christianity was on the rise. It erased the ancient religious justifications, and created new religious objections. Once Christianity becomes cemented as the state religion it was pretty much done -- Christian martyrs being thrown to the lions in the Colosseum was an old meme even then.

MereInterest 6y ago
What does "received history" mean in this context? A quick google search found use of the phrase when discussing history, but I didn't find any definitions.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- PoachedSausage 6y ago
  Another way of saying received wisdom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_wisdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_wisdom
- coldtea 6y ago
  Depending on context, it's used to mean either (a) "history as generally accepted" (positively) or (b) "history as generally accepted" (but negatively, when implying that the generally accepted version doesn't tell the real story).

TheCoelacanth 6y ago

With the fall of the western empire, Rome's population collapsed from over a million to only tens of thousands. It wouldn't cross 100,000 again until the 18th century. It just didn't have the wealth or population necessary to hold such shows.

monkeybutton 6y ago
I can't imagine what it would be like living in a city that was once so large and then so sparsely populated. Like a medieval apocalypse. Was the remaining population densely located in few spots amongst ruins?
- kgabis 6y ago
  You can visit Detroit if you want to experience something like that.
- iguy 6y ago
  Mostly outside the ruins. IIRC the main churches were built around the edge (because the center was full) in late Roman times, and these locations became the new centers in medieval times.
  - ricw 6y ago
    It is also one of the main reasons so many buildings, both ruined and standing, still are around and accessible. Had the population not collapsed, they probably would have been built over or repurposed over the years. This way, they just remained fallow until Italy was conceived again in the 1800s as a nation (from its individual king and dukedoms) and Rome was chosen as its capitol.
    - usrusr 6y ago
      Many of the landmarks that still exist (and of those that don't, e.g. the Septizodium), except for those saved by being directly converted into a church (the Pantheon), saw heavy repurposing as fortifications in the endless and often violent power struggles between patrician families. The Circus Maximus was a Frangipani stronghold. Others (and the Circus Maximus before it was taken over by the Frangipani) were simply saved from getting used as a quarry by getting incorporated in-place as structural elements for new, well, shacks, as documented by the many, many square holes hewn into the formerly flat stone surfaces. Square holes for holding wooden beams I suppose. The (still in use!) appartment on top of the Theatre of Marcellus give an idea of how that went. In this case, they are the outcome of a slow fortress->palace->middle class residential transition.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]