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The roots of ancient Rome's gladiator fights
- mcbishop 3y agoI wonder if there were combat-training camps for at least some of the slaves (and political dissidents).
- brabel 3y ago> Julius Caesar, wishing to further his political career in 65 B.C., staged a munus for his father (who had been dead for 20 years), during which 640 gladiators fought wearing armor made of solid silver. How can people be so blood-thirsty that it's ok to sacrifice over 600 men for nothing more than a "spectacle"? It's really difficult to understand how a highly civilized society for the time could have almost no respect for human life.
- detourdog 3y agoI can think of moments in my life where I feel a highly civilized society would not be acting this way and sacrificing so many people.
- rm_-rf_slash 3y agoThe fiction writer Brian Aldiss was quoted as saying “Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.” We are Neolithic animals with miraculous technology and far too little time to evolve at the same pace. Homo homini lupus.
- graemep 3y agoIt is hardly the only way the Romans lacked respect for human life. They were very willing to kill for many reasons. They were a slave society and were particularly harsh on slaves, and particularly rebellious slaves. The cruelty of a society where crucifixion (scaleable, low labour cost, torturing to death) was a standard punishment is mind boggling. Then there was all the rape (of slaves, it was fine, even children) and other cruelties. Civilized does not necessarily mean nice.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoNot just slaves: From Tacitus: It was subsequently decided that Sejanus’ remaining children should be executed, though the mass anger had abated and the majority had been placated by the previous deaths. They were therefore carried off to prison, the boy (Capito Aelianus) aware of his fate, the girl (Junilla) so innocent that she kept asking what she had done wrong and where they were taking her, that she would not do it again and surely could be punished with a trivial beating. Historians of the time say that as it was thought to be unheard-of for capital punishment to be inflicted on a virgin, she was violated by the executioner, the noose beside her; both children were then strangled and their young bodies thrown down the Gemonian Stairs.
- kazinator 3y agoFor someone named Tacitus, that dude sure made everything explicit.
- tnecniv 3y agoMy memory in the naming traditions was also that men got their own names but daughters were just given the family name with a nickname to distinguish, which is incredibly dehumanizing.
- graemep 3y agoRaping virgins before execution was common. It had not occurred to me they did it to children too, although as I did know they did execute children along with their parents I should have deduced it. The rape by executioners was a uniquely Roman twist AFAIK, but executing children to punish parents was not. For example, it was done to a traitor's family in 19th century Sri Lanka (repugnance at this helped the British overthrow the last remaining independent kingdom on the island). Probably many other places did the same.
- djur 3y agoHistorically, one of the defining characteristics of "civilized" peoples has been their capacity for spectacular mass bloodshed. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be any meaningful correlation between the ability to create great art, poetry, architecture, etc. and respect for human life.
- rawgabbit 3y agoRome was not civilized by modern standards. They celebrated wars of conquest. They enslaved those who could not pay their capricious taxes. They were in Nietzsche’s phrasing acting out their will to power. A euphemism for doing whatever they can get away with.
- majoe 3y agoCivilized is such an overloaded term. What you and other commenters are lamenting is a lack of human rights, not a lack of civilization. We often take human rights for granted, but in antiquity (less so in the Middle ages) the only rights, that you could possess, were by virtue of your citizenship.
- wolverine876 3y agoI think that's the scary question for a lot of people. Many ignore it, some like to embrace violence like they've discovered something new (instead of old), and to show how edgy and dangerous they are. We all have good and bad in us, we are biologically the same as those Romans, and as all the people who do good things. We can choose, and we can bring out the good (or bad) in each other. Look at the society we've built, where such things are unthinkable.
- Y_Y 3y agoIt's "not ok" by your cultural values, they had very different cultural values and thought it was cool.
- hnu123 3y ago> How can people be so blood-thirsty that it's ok to sacrifice over 600 men for nothing more than a "spectacle"? Is sacrificing 100,000 innocent civilians in hiroshima for spectacle any better? > It's really difficult to understand how a highly civilized society for the time could have almost no respect for human life. Ever read the Iliad? Or the hebrew bible? Besides, you become 'highly civilized' by killing everyone who disagrees with you and proclaiming yourself 'highly civilized'. It's always been this way. Rome wasn't civilized. It was genocidal and brutal. The most genocidal and brutal of its time. And if you think caesar was bad, augustus was far more brutal. But his savagery saved the 'civilized' roman empire.
- maximus-decimus 3y agoI think there's a big different between killing people to end a war and killing people for entertainment.
- hnu123 3y agoWhat did Hiroshima have to do with ending a war? By the time of hiroshima, the japanese army, navy, military was nonexistent and had been for nearly a year. It was just a military test of a barbaric weapon on innocent civilians. It literally was the biggest human experiment of ww2. Hiroshima both in scale and barbarity is orders of magnitude worse than what the romans did. But then again, we model ourselves after the romans... Your comment and the downvote proves my point. Though we think we are civilized today, we are just as evil and barbaric as ever. We rationalize our barbarity just like the romans and everyone else does. No civilized person or people would even dream of rationalizing something as evil as nuking innocent and defenseless civilians.
- Alupis 3y agoYou are encouraged to read deeper about the end of WWII. If anyone sacrificed the people of Hiroshima, it was the Japanese Imperialist Government that refused to surrender despite the obvious obliteration of their conventional forces. To make it brief, every single landmass occupied by Japanese forces and civilians offered fierce resistance/guerilla warfare to invading/liberating forces. Additionally, as another commenter has noted, the Japanese military had significantly increased their numbers to a staggering 6 million troops towards the end. The death toll projections, based on the above, for a mass land invasion of Japan were many factors greater than the life cost of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined - many, many factors greater. The Japanese government did not just refuse to surrender, but continued to wage war. This meant either a land invasion, or some alternative were necessary to compel the government into surrender. Dropping the second nuclear bomb accomplished this goal - particularly when accompanied by the (empty) threat of dropping many more until surrender. It also should be noted both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were central to the Japanese war economy/machine and were not simply civilian population centers. Regardless, the loss of life directly from the bombings and indirectly from the aftermath is still calculated to have been significantly less than the loss of life had a ground invasion been waged.
- primitivesuave 3y agoGladiatorial combat was just a drop in the bucket. A single Roman mining operation in Spain [1] had tens of thousands of slaves working to death. Even the famous slave revolt of Spartacus ended with the spectacle of 6000 slaves crucified along the Appian Way [2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_M%C3%A9dulas 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appian_Way#The_crucifixion_of_Spartacus'_army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appian_Way#The_crucifixion_of_...
- loco5niner 3y agoBecause it was not a highly civilized society.
- lotsoweiners 3y agoI think highly civilized is probably relative.
- jghn 3y agoActual trained gladiators, as opposed to convicts & such, generally did not fight to the death.They were expensive investments, so it was a big deal for an owner to throw that away.
- maximus-decimus 3y agoDecimation was the Roman practice of enforcing discipline of soldier by grouping them in group of 10, making them play the "draw the short straw" game and have the 9 winners kill the loser with stones. If that's how they treated their own soldiers, imagine slaves.
- jmyeet 3y agoDecimation was a punishment usually reserved for open rebellion and similar capital crimes. So if soldiers took up arms against Rome they’re not really their own soldiers anymore. Not an excuse but decimation wasn’t a light punishment. EDIT: the cases subcomments mention fall under the banner of "desertion" and/or refusal to follow orders (essentially rebellion), which, even in modern armies, carries a stiff penalty. Not quite decimation but its a serious crime.
- cariaso 3y agoI was under the impression that cowardice in battle was sufficient.
- HEmanZ 3y agoDecimation was very very rare as far as we can tell. It was the kind of thing that would happen like, once every century or more. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4v1ftx/how_widespread_was_the_use_of_the_punishment_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4v1ftx/how_w...
- maximus-decimus 3y agoIn one of the sub-comments, there's mention of it being used when "the army of the consul Appius Claudius refused to fight the Volscians." While it's open rebellion, that's not at all the same as them attacking Rome. To me, it sounds more in line with Muhammad Ali refusing to fight the Vietnam war.
- scheme271 3y ago
- paxys 3y agoIt's a combination of: 1. Slaves were thought to be sub-human, and people largely didn't care about a handful of them dying. You don't have to go back all the way to ancient Rome to find that attitude among the general public. Many highly civilized societies as recently as 1800-1900 felt the same way. 2. A lot of gladiators were willing professionals, and had chosen the career with the risks in mind.
- jmyeet 3y agoThe morals of the ancient world would probably seem alien to anyone from the modern era. I can't remember the specifics but Roman literature reflected rather permissive attitudes to non-consensual sexual relations and relations with minors (eg a marriage age of 12). It's a hard thing to Google for without ending up on a watch list however. > How can people be so blood-thirsty that it's ok to sacrifice over 600 men for nothing more than a "spectacle"? Isn't the world today largely standing by and watching the mass slaughter of tens of thousands of mostly women and children? That has not valid military purpose.. It's just retribution, ethnic displacement and genocide. Example: the Sderot night cinema [1]. No matter your position on the conflict, these are people who are treating the mass bomardment and death of civilians as popcorn-worthy entertainment. Genetic heritage of the survivors of the transatlantic slave trade show a dark history of mass rape of enslaved women [2]. The occupation of Germany at the end of WW2 came with rape on a massive scale [3]. My point is that we, as people, stand by and let atrocities happen routinely so how are Roman atrocities really that different? Oh, and 600 gladiators is really nothing. When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, of the ~!3 million people, ~1 million were killed and another ~1 million were enslaved. The former province of Dacia ceased to exist. It is now modern day Romania. "Rome" is the root word there. The Dacians were literally wiped out. [1]: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/13/israel-sderot-gaza_n_5582032.html https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/07/13/israel-sderot-ga... [2]: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/26/us/dna-transatlantic-slave-trade-study-scn-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/26/us/dna-transatlantic-slave-tr... [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_...
- scheme271 3y ago> The morals of the ancient world would probably seem alien to anyone from the > modern era. I can't remember the specifics but Roman literature reflected > rather permissive attitudes to non-consensual sexual relations and relations > with minors (eg a marriage age of 12). It's a hard thing to Google for without > ending up on a watch list however. I think that it can be a bit difficult to differentiate pro-forma traditions from what actually occurred. E.g. roman mores were quite different from ours but I'm not sure that marriage at 12 was much aside from an engagement. For exampl with later european marriages might have happened at similar ages but weren't actually consummated until the spouses where in their late teens or older. From a practical standpoint, if you marry someone to cement an alliance, it isn't a good look if you get them pregnant at 12 and they die in childbirth because they are too young to successfully deliver a baby. Even terminology can be misleading as Naomi Wolfe famously found out when writing about homosexuality in Victorian Britain. She wrote about homosexuals being given the death penalty but was embarassed when an interviewer pointed out that one of the men she wrote about was tried and apparently given the death penalty multiple times over several years. Turns out when someone was tried and an entry of "death recorded" was made, it actually meant that their sentence was commuted to jail time or they were pardoned.
- soperj 3y agoRoman's were vicious. The war with the Gauls was basically a genocide.
- mistrial9 3y agotribal genocide was accepted in England in the 1200s ; actions against Australian native people and others, in the 1800s iir
- yongjik 3y agoWhen Bush invaded Iraq, I remember a scene when the US military showed an areal video of some Iraqi vehicle to reporters: the vehicle got hit, boom it goes, and everybody cheered. It wasn't even some kind of "We have to do this because this is war," it was pure joy at the destruction and death of someone they've never met. And I guess it's unfair to pick on the US for that - that kind of trait is pretty much universal. All you have to do is to see the other side as less than human.
- ldargin 3y agoI wasn't there; I was in college at that time, but I remember the attitude from military magazines, radio, etc. Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait were seen as universally guilty of "raping" Kuwait, and any who died deserved his punishment.
- nitwit005 3y agoIt was an empire. Empires come into existence through violent conquest. That violence was tolerated, or encouraged, should not be a surprise. That said, it was 320 pairs of gladiators, so you'd assume 320 deaths or fewer, rather than "over 600".
- Ekaros 3y ago600 seems high, but in actually fight to death with actual weapons I would expect more than half to die eventually. That is being inflicted with wounds that result death soon after the other person or then just infections. Trauma medicine and medicine in general was non-existent compared to today. So any open cuts or large amount of bleeding can easily kill person.
- nitwit005 3y agoDespite how the article makes it appear, gladiatorial battles were typically not to the death. So while yes, people might die of infection, we don't expect a base rate of half of them dying.
- HEmanZ 3y agoGladiators rarely fought to the death: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wkk22n/did_gladiators_really_fight_to_the_death_in_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wkk22n/did_g... This was more like a fancy UFC fight. They could end in death and the Romans held public executions in the stadium, but people weren’t THAT bloodthirsty.
- Ekaros 3y agoThey were well trained professionals. And training time and feeding them is pretty expensive. Also building a brand and name recognition is hard if you keep losing your people. If people want to see randos fighting they might as well go outside tavern or bar after closing time...
- WalterBright 3y agoYou might want to read "Defeat In The East" by Juergen Thorwald https://www.amazon.com/Defeat-East-Juergen-Thorwald/dp/0553134698/ https://www.amazon.com/Defeat-East-Juergen-Thorwald/dp/05531... People are still the same. We're called "murder apes" for a reason.
- toberoni 3y agoI can see why recommend this book as an example of human cruelty, but I think you should be aware of the author’s past when you recommend his work. Jürgen Thorwald was a real former Nazi propagandist. The German version of Defeat in the East was written only 10 years after another of his books has been published with a foreword of Hermann Göring in it. It is interesting as a contemporary document and Thorwald changed his public attitude after the defeat of the Reich - but it is by no means a reliable account of the war. A modern work like Timothy Snyder‘s Bloodlands shows human cruelty in the same impactful way while being far more accurate. Again, my intention is not to put any agenda in your mouth but to give some (in my opinion very important) context regarding your recommendation.
- WalterBright 3y agoThank you, I did not know that. There are other books that cover more or less the same topic. Such as: The Wild Frontier, by William Osborn Gruesome Harvest, by Ralph Keeling Andersonville, by Makinlay Kantor I did not get very far reading them. I don't want those images in my mind. I'll look into the book you suggested.
- FredPret 3y agoOld Julius once had one of his regiments decimated. As in, soldiers draw lots, one in ten get the short straw, and the ”lucky” nine-tenths beat the unlucky one-tenth of the regiment to death by hand. Not a great time in our history.
- tnecniv 3y agoI don’t know about fights like that but gladiators often didn’t fight to the death. It’s shockingly like major sports today — they sold commemorative cups and other art at the stadium for popular gladiators. Contestants dying was bad business.
- kazinator 3y agoI immediately switched to the Wikipedia "Gladiator" article and found it to be much more readable, informative and concise.