784. "As Seneca protested, Romans saw the turning of a man into a corpse as a ‘satisfying spectacle’ (satisque spectaculi: Ep. 95.33). In fact, the dedicatory inscription for the earliest known amphitheater, that at Pompeii of ca. 70 BC, calls the facility a spectacula. Away from the battlefield, Rome killed at home in sacrifices, festivals, munera, proscriptions, and executions. The famous spectacles of the arena were largely expanded, embellished versions of earlier forms of killing adapted for the comfort and entertainment of the spectators. The allure of violence and death was not unique to classical Rome, but Rome revelled in killing as in the thrills and the reassurance, the self-validation, of a love affair. The games taught the Romans who they were and how they were to behave. The arena was a marginal, liminal site where Romans confronted the limits of the human versus the natural world in beast combats, the limits of morality, law, and social order in executions, and the limits of human mortality in the gladiatorial munus. Wiedemann also emphasizes the role of bloody spectacles as fundamental to Rome’s cultural identity or Romanness (Romanitas) in the process of Rome’s unification of Italy and expansion overseas. For Plass ‘violence, or more generally, disorder falls under an axiom of anomaly, that is, an abnormal or disruptive factor formally institutionalized in one way or another to be internalized, in a process characteristic of any immune system’. As components of one social system, both arena sport and political suicide had a social purpose in dealing with problems of security and survival (i.e. either external danger or internal political conflict). As socially sanctioned violence and controlled disorder, both addressed social anomaly by incorporating disorder into order, restoring social routine, and (re)affirming security. Plass finds the arena’s excessive violence consistent with the antithetical logic of liminal institutions which incorporate potential dysfunction to assure proper function. Spectators gather in an amphitheater away from normal life, they vicariously participate in combat, and they then return to normalcy. In early Rome the fasces, each a bundle of rods with an axe, carried by the lictors, symbolized the political and sacral power of the highest officials to punish and execute. A citizen of status condemned to death, if his appeal to the assembly failed and he declined to go into exile, faced summary execution by the sword (gladio). Floggings in the ‘ancient fashion’ (more maiorum) and executions were often done in public in the center of town, the Forum. An expert on Sulla and proscriptions, François Hinard suggests that executions under the Republic were sacral ceremonies with set times and places, and set roles for executioners and attendants: the trial took place in the Forum, possibly involving the torture of slaves, the magistrate condemned the criminal and called a crowd together, a procession led to the place of execution, lictors, musicians, and heralds attended, the magistrate pronounced the sentence, the execution took place, and the body was mutilated and removed. Rituals of condemnation, execution, and sacrifice all existed at Rome before the introduction of gladiatorial games. At the earliest level sacrifice and punishment overlap in that both seek security for the community. Death spectacles were a way to punish criminals, to dispose of captives, to venerate the dead, and to demonstrate munificence. As Tertullian says, these ‘sacrifices’ and executions were ritualized into entertainments and performances; Rome turned the munus into a ‘pleasure’ and a ‘more cultured form of cruelty’. As well as punishments and sacrifices, munera became entertainments.In other words, politics turned damned victims into performers." [Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome]
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 09:52:46 +0000
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