Was Rome a Brutal Place to Live In?
One of the issues with answering questions about Roman history is that ostensibly at least, some of the answers seem glaringly obvious at first. If someone asks whether Nero was a madman, then it might, at first, seem like an easy question to answer (and I tried in a previous post!), but like all things, the actual answer is far more nuanced than just 'yes' or 'no'.
So if I try to answer a question like 'Was Rome a brutal place to live in?', then I could just say 'yes', stop typing and go outside and see what the dogs are barking at.
Squirrels.
Or, I could do what makes writing about history fun and try to answer the question with the nuance and context that it deserves. If someone were to ask if Hadrian was 'gay', then it might seem, based on his obvious relationship with Antinous, that the answer would be 'yes', or at least that he was bisexual, given that he was also married. But the answer is far more complicated than that and requires jumping through all sorts of contextual hoops to come up with an answer. The problem with this approach is that I need volumes to fully explore all the avenues such a question might lead one down.
So, was Rome a brutal place to live in?
Yes.
The next thing we have to address is the age-old problem of whether we should be judging these things through modern eyes or not. To us, Rome was very obviously a brutally violent society, but did they think it was? The way we see ourselves is probably not how future generations are going to see us. We might, for example, think of 'modern' society as one that has problems with racist attitudes, but overall, we might not call ourselves a 'racist' society. But, ironically, if the Romans could look forward into the future and make the same value judgments, they might be shocked at how racist we are. To them, we would certainly be labelled as a racist society. By contrast, racism as we define it is almost unheard of in the Roman world, and I'm only throwing in the variable 'almost' just to cover my back. Rome was brutal, staggeringly patriarchal and could be guilty of cultural snobbery, but racism didn't exist. Skin colour was not a way in which people identified themselves culturally.
So is the answer to "Was Rome a brutal place to live in?", 'yes...but...'
Sort of, yes, but...
And here comes another thing to think about. I don't want to just answer the question 'yes' or 'no', obviously, but neither do I have a whole volume in which to metaphorically stretch my writing legs and fully explore every nuance. These articles are designed to be read in, say, 10 minutes and to provoke further questions and thought. If I can also provide some answers along the way, then all the better. But what I am acutely aware of, much like Suetonius, is that I have an audience and that audience is expecting certain things.
And like Suetonius, I will give them to you.
No discussion about the brutal violence of ancient Rome is complete without some examples of the brutal violence of ancient Rome, and for some readers, that's the juicy stuff you want me to get to, right? Because, like it or not, that brutal violence is a draw to the human psyche. We might not be quite as excited as the Romans to see it, but we certainly want to read about it!
In modern times, we find it hard to reconcile the positive aspects of Roman civilisation with the gladiators, the wild beasts and the savagery of Roman life. But these were fundamental to the culture of Rome and its social systems. Amphitheatres were central to urban settlements and with the exception of the circus, were the biggest buildings in the Empire. They were widespread throughout the East and the West and ranged in size from the 50,000-seat Flavian Arena (Colosseum) in Rome to the 20,000-seat well-preserved ones at Nimes and Arles, still used today for bullfighting, to tiny arenas hollowed out of hillsides besides military camps such as the one by the desolate Welsh camp at Tomen-y-Mur. The sheer resources put into building them, in materials, manpower and skill and the architectural sophistication in terms of crowd control, drainage, rigging of awnings to protect spectators, arrangements for the delivery of props and performers, lifts that could hoist beasts into the arena and a warren of service tunnels to make it all tick demonstrate how important they were to Roman society.
These buildings dominated the city like a medieval cathedral or like a cluster of skyscrapers in a modern city. Public slaughter was clearly a fundamental institution and a social, if not religious, ritual which needed to be properly housed and to which society was prepared to devote expensive resources.
The intellectual justification for gladiatorial shows was that they “Inspired a glory in wounds and a contempt of death, since the love of praise and desire for victory could be seen, even in the bodies of slaves and criminals” (Pliny, Panegyric 33). They may have started as funerary games where prisoners of war were executed so their blood may appease the gods on behalf of the dead. Tacitus and Seneca both complained about their popularity and deplored them, not for sympathy for the victims but for the effect they had on the spectators. They still attended them.
Even in the more ‘refined’ Eastern empire, such shows were popular. Polemo, the sophist. “Seeing a gladiator running with sweat and terrified of fighting for his life, said ‘You are suffering as much as if you were going to deliver a speech’” (Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 541). And he wasn’t joking. Libanius, the litmus test of Greek culture, enthused over gladiators whom he compares to the heroes of Thermopylae (Autobiography 5). What greater honour could a Greek bestow?
The gladiators themselves were slaves or criminals, but a few of them were free men who enlisted for set terms. Slaves would sometimes fight on after freedom, as they knew no other life. The person who put on the show would revel in the gore. A magistrate from Minturnae has the following on the basis of his statue: “Over four days he showed eleven pairs: from these eleven of the best gladiators in Campania were killed, with ten bears cruelly killed”
Bulls and bears were commonplace among the fauna on display. Pliny records tigers, crocodiles, giraffes, lynxes, rhinos, ostriches and hippos. Lions were the most common, with Pliny recording six hundred used in one single show (Natural History viii.53). Elephants were also used, and by Nero’s time were being bred in Italy. Commodus, a keen archer, killed five hippos in a single show. Hippos were not seen in Europe for another 1700 years. The sheer scale of the operation in capturing, transporting, feeding and delivering these beasts was enormous, and it’s hard to imagine any industry less productive than the one that provided wild animals for mass slaughter. That they went to such extremes demonstrates how central to Roman society the amphitheatre was and also how much of Rome’s wealth could be so unproductively squandered.
The amphitheatre is a common motif in Roman life, appearing on everyday household items and in graffiti. All classes met at the arena, albeit separated. When the Emperor attended a games, it might be the only time they ever manifested before the people and the people, safe in collective anonymity, sometimes demonstrated their wishes. When Caligula appeared at a games, the crowd called for tax cuts. Caligula sent in the soldiers. Dio records how, in 195, the crowd in the Circus followed the conventional cheer of ‘Immortal Rome!’ with ‘How long will we be at war?!’ (Roman History lxxv.4)
Rome had a developed and very theatrical sense of public ceremony. Josephus records the triumph of Vespasian and Titus and details the military pageantry mixed with bloodshed. He describes vividly the depictions of the horror of war and a halt in the proceedings whilst the chief prisoner is dragged with a noose around his neck and scourged by his escorts to the ‘place near the forum where Law requires that criminals should be executed’ (Jewish War vii.5). The task is completed and greeted with ‘shouts of universal approval’. And the parade resumes.
The amphitheatre was part of Rome’s theatre of terror, a lesson in pain and death, the uncertainty of life, the stratification of society and the arbitrary nature of power. Those who died in the arena did so to maintain the established social order. It was not just entertainment (although that was part of it – Juvenal’s ‘bread and circuses’ (Satires x.81), it was a terrifying demonstration of what could happen to those who failed to please their masters and to those who failed to conform to social norms. A spectator once made a joke at Domitian’s expense and was dragged from his seat and thrown to the dogs in the arena. (Suetonius, Domitian 10). Commodus walked towards the senatorial seating, holding the head of an ostrich he had just killed in one hand and the dagger he used in the other. The threat was blatant. Dio records how he had to chew on the laurel wreath from his head to stop himself from giggling in sheer terror (lxxii.21)
Roman order was based partly on consent, partly on precedent and partly on terror. There was a ruthless logic about it. When the Consul Sejanus was condemned by Tiberius, he was seized and executed immediately. Nobody moved to help him. His children were killed too, partly to add to the terror of the retribution and partly so they could not avenge him. One of them was a young girl. Custom forbade the execution of a virgin. So the executioner raped her before he strangled her.
Accounts of martyrdom reveal some of the torture and brutality suffered. Implements such as ‘the claws’ and ‘the iron seat’ are mentioned with no further explanation. They barely need it. At the trial of a woman named Perpetua, her aged father tried the magistrate’s patience by pleading too long for his daughter. He is knocked to the ground and beaten with a ‘fasces’ (a bundle of rods and the origin of the word ‘fascism’).
The price for security, culture, order and learning, paid for by the outcast, dispossessed or simply by those, like Christians, who followed a different set of values was institutionalised terror on a scale unsurpassed until modern technology made it possible for twentieth-century dictators to apply terror even more widely and even more efficiently.
So there you go. You wanted a bit of slaughter and in the great tradition of panem et circenses (Juv. Sat. x), I gave you some. Are you any different than they were?
Are you not entertained?
References and Further Reading
Dio Cassius. (1927). Roman History (E. Cary, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Juvenal. (1918). Satires (G. G. Ramsay, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Philostratus. (1922). Lives of the Sophists (W. C. Wright, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Pliny the Elder. (1855). Natural History (J. Bostock & H. T. Riley, Trans.). Henry G. Bohn.
Pliny the Younger. (1914). Panegyricus (B. Radice, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Suetonius. (1914). The Lives of the Caesars (J. C. Rolfe, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Tacitus. (1942). Annals (J. Jackson, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Josephus. (1737). The Jewish War (W. Whiston, Trans.). William Bowyer.
Wells, C (1984). The Roman Empire. Fontana
An interesting article, though perhaps a future article may be worth considering. No surprise it was brutal to watch or be the entertainment, but did that brutality carry over to the streets of Rome where people lived and worked, and level of violent crime and murder against average people?
I enjoyed this article. When I was a kid there was a tired joke about only having read Playboy magazine for the interviews. Thing was, Playboy actually offered really good long form interviews! So, I promise you, I only read this article for the interesting analysis, not for any prurient depictions of Roman beastliness. Honest.