The emperor motioned to the archers to kill the beasts for the shows ran on a strict time schedule. Carpophorus refused to see his precious bears killed. He plunged into the knee-deep water, and tried to drive out the bears with his flail. Hampered by the water, he could not avoid the animals' angry rushes. So he died, as did most of his profession, under the teeth and claws of his savage wards. The Romans never realized that they held in their hands the clue to the discovery of a great new world.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
You may wonder where the Romans got all the animals they used in the games. You'll wonder more after reading a few statistics. Trajan gave one set of games that lasted 122 days during which eleven thousand people and ten thousand animals were killed. Titus had five thousand wild animals and four thousand domestic animals killed during the one hundred-day show to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum. In 249 a.d., Philip celebrated the one thousandth anniversary of the founding of Rome by giving games in which the following were killed: one thousand pairs of gladiators, thirty-two elephants, ten tigers, sixty lions, thirty leopards, ten hyenas, ten giraffes, twenty wild asses, forty wild horses, ten zebras, six hippos and one rhino(Rome and the Romans,by Showerman).
Statistics in themselves don't mean too much so let's take some specific examples. The Emperor Commodus killed five hippopotami himself one day in the arena, shooting arrows from the royal box. Hippos were fairly common in the arena as this and other accounts show. After the Roman Empire fell, the next hippo to reach Europe was in 1850. A whole army division had to be used to capture the animal. Getting the hippo from the White Nile to Cairo took five months. The hippo spent the winter in Cairo and then went on to England in a tank containing four hundred gallons of water to keep it cool. Yet the Romans imported hippos wholesale for their games; in fact they actually exterminated the hippos in the Egyptian Nile. The Romans imported both the African and the Indian rhinoceros, and even the most ignorant members of the crowd could distinguish between the two beasts readily. Mosaics showing the capture of an Indian rhino have recently been uncovered in Sicily. The next Indian rhino to reach Europe was in 1515. Today, there are only six of them in captivity.
Whole territories were denuded of wild animals to supply the arena. The early Christian fathers could only find one good thing to say about the bloody spectacles—the demand for animals cleared entire districts of dangerous predators and opened them to farming. Several species were either exterminated or so reduced in numbers that they later became extinct: the European lion, the aurochs, the Libyian elephant and possibly the African bear. There are no bears in Africa
today and most scientists believe that there never were any, but the Romans did get a "bear" from East Africa and Nubia. What was it?
We don't know, but curiously in Kenya today there is a persistent legend of a "Nandi bear,'' supposedly a very large and ferocious bear which lives in the Aberdare Mountains. It occasionally attacks natives and has been seen by a few white people although no specimen had ever been brought in. Recently, the site of a Roman "trapping station" has been found in this locality. Perhaps the Romans' "African bear" still exists.
Collecting and shipping these thousands of animals was an enormous industry. Wild animals were the most valuable gift a barbarian monarch could make to his Roman overlords, and even Roman governors had to collect animals. There is an interesting and amusing series of letters between Cicero, a newly appointed governor of a province in Asia Minor, and Cselius Rufus, who was running for the office of aedile in Rome. Rufus wanted leopards for the games he was giving. Cicero was busy trying to administer his province and wasn't interested in catching leopards. Even before poor Cicero got to his province, he got a letter from Rufus: "Dear Cicero: please try to get me some good leopards . . . ten will do for a start. Tell your natives to hurry." When no leopards arrived, Rufus wrote: "My dear friend Cicero: In nearly all my letters I've mentioned the subject of leopards to you. It would be a terrible disgrace if, after Patiscus (a local Roman businessman in the same area) has sent me ten, you can't send me any more. I have those ten and ten more from Africa. If I don't hear from you, I'll have to make arrangements elsewhere." Later: "If I hadn't got some African animals from Curio, I wouldn't be able to put on a show at all. If you don't send me some leopards, don't expect any patronage from me."
Cicero wrote to a friend: "Another letter from Rufus . . . all he talks about is leopards." Then Rufus gave his games and got elected to the aedileship. Right away Cicero wrote him: "Dear, dear Rufus: I can't tell you how sorry I am about the leopards. I've put all the professional hunters to work, but there seems to be the most remarkable scarcity of wild beasts at this time of the year. But don't worry, I have everyone working on it and anything we get will be for you and no one else "
Rufus had a right to be annoyed. Sulla, who became dictator, freely admitted that the people had originally voted him into office only because he had a tie-in with Bocchus, an African monarch, and could get plenty of animals for the games. In search of animals, the Roman trappers went to Norway, where they brought back moose and elk; to Burma, for rhino, cobra and elephants; and to Lake Victoria in the heart of Africa. As today, Africa was the great trapping ground for wild animals. The Romans even exhibited African porcupines in the arena; naked boys had to catch them with their bare hands. Plautus, a Roman humorist, wrote: "By the gods, next they'll be giving exhibitions of trained African mice."
From various sources, let's create the character Fulcinius, a professional animal trapper whose territory was Africa. We can suppose that Fulcinius was a half-caste, the son of a Roman legionnaire stationed in Algeria, by a Negro mother. As today, half-castes were not popular with either race, and Fulcinius grew up a lonely boy, considering himself superior to his mother's people but knowing that he would never be accepted by Romans. Roman writers describe such a man as a "savage among savages, a shy, sullen man who hated society and was only happy in the jungle."
Fom his mother's people, Fulcinius learned the tricks of animal catching, which have remained unchanged to the present day. He learned how to dig a pit, surround it with a high wooden fence, and tether a young calf in the pit. When a lion heard the kid bleating, he would jump over the fence, fall into the pit and be caught. He learned how to direct natives to drive heards of antelope into rivers where they could be lassoed by men in boats, or herded down ravines covered with slippery rawhides so the animals would lose their footing and could be hogtied by waiting men. He organized hundreds of beaters to move in from all sides through a stretch of jungle, driving the animals into a smaller and smaller space. At last, Numidian spearmen with their great oval shields formed a wall around the captives and held them long enough so men with lassos and nets could complete the capture. Apparendy even lions were caught in this manner. There's a picture of it in the Roman villa at Bona, Algeria.
The recently uncovered villa near the village of Armerina, Sicily, contains frescos—some of them sixty-six yards long— showing in great detail how animals were captured and crated for shipment. The villa is thought to have been the summer home of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maximianus who ruled about 300 a.d. That the emperor should have devoted so much space to pictures of capturing animals shows how vital this profession was to the Romans.
In one mosaic, mounted men are shown driving stags into a circle of nets, one stag having already been caught by his antlers. Another shows men loading elephants onto a galley while others drag an unwilling rhino calf toward the gangplank as trained dogs snap at the animal from the rear. Still others show a Roman animal catcher with a huge shield pointing to a lion who is eating an oryx he has just killed. The animal catcher is directing his Moorish assistants how to surround and net the animal. One mosaic shows a cart pulled by oxen with native drivers and on the cart is a big wooden shipping crate containing a lion or a leopard. An animal catcher walks beside the crate, steadying it with his hand. On top of the crate is a funnel-like arrangement which is often shown in these pictures. Unless it was used for pouring water into the cage, I can't imagine its purpose. A mural shows men carrying cranes onto a ship and two men are wrestling a hartebeest onboard. Others are carrying up the gangplank wild boars wrapped in nets and suspended from poles.
Fulcinius must have done all these things and many more too. He must have caught elephants by driving them into box canyons and, as he probably didn't have enough trained elephants to take them out, starved them into submission by giving them only enough barley water to keep them alive. He also hired Numidians to crawl among a herd and hamstring the mothers with their spears so the young could be captured. He caught chimpanzees and baboons by putting out bowls of wine and then picking up the animals after they were drunk. To catch pythons, he prepared a long bag made of rushes which he put near the snake. The snake was then driven toward the bag and dunking it a hole, would crawl inside. Then the cords closing the mouth of the bag were closed. When a "bear" (whatever the African bear was) was found in its den, nets were hung on the outside and the bear driven out with trumpet peals and yells. Nooses were set in game trails and animals driven into them. Along the sides of the trails, coloured streamers were hung from lines so that the animals, alarmed by the strange objects, would stay on the trails and not bolt off into the bush.
Organizing these hunts must have been a tremendous undertaking. The catchers could demand that legionnaires stationed in their area help with the drives and the commanders had to co-operate, for getting the animals was crucial to the politicians in Rome. The whole civilian population could be drafted for this work and, as some of Cicero's angry letters show, this often crippled the local economy for many of these drives lasted for weeks.
As with all animal collectors, Fulcinius' main trouble was not in getting the animals but in shipping them. The animals had to be taken by ox cart to the coast or floated down rivers on rafts. This journey could take months. Fulcinius established way stations along the route where the animals could be released in large enclosures for periods of rest and exercise. According to Roman law, the villagers were forced to provide food for the animals, but collecting the food often proved so difficult that Fulcinius had to appeal to the local Roman garrison for help. If there was no garrison, he used his native mercenary spearmen who travelled with the animal caravans. These men were merciless. On one occasion they dug up corpses in a local cemetery and fed them to the animals. Fulcinius got frequent complaints from Rome but probably his invariable answer was: "Do you want the animals or don't you?" However, the situation got so bad that an imperial order had to be passed prohibiting animals being kept more than a week in any one resting station.
Even after the animals had been loaded on ships, the voyage to Ostia, the port of Rome, was a long and dangerous affair. "The sailors were afraid of their own cargo," wrote Claudian. The trip up the Red Sea was particularly treacherous because of the reefs and shoals. To make matters worse, the voyage had to be made at night and the ships tied up during the day to spare the animals from the heat of the sun.
As far as Fulcinius was concerned, a human life meant nothing compared to the successful shipment of the animals. Once when he was unloading cages on the docks at Ostia, a famous sculptor named Pasiteles set up his table on the dock and began making models of the lions. Fulcinius told the man to get out but Pasiteles refused. A few minutes later, a cage containing a leopard was smashed during the unloading and the animal nearly killed the sculptor. Fulcinius' only reaction was a blind fury at the sculptor for getting in the way. (This incident did happen although I don't know the name of the animal collector.)
It's rather interesting that some two thousand years later another animal collector made a great reputation for himself by capturing and importing animals under much the same conditions as did Fulcinius, supposedly for zoos, but actually so fights could be staged between the animals in corrals and pits for Hollywood motion picture cameras. The pictures of these fights were so popular that they are still appearing in re-run theatres and on TV. If you want to know what the Roman arena must have been like, tune in on one of these programmes. I saw one showing a fight between an African lion and an Indian water buffalo supposedly taken "in the heart of the Dark Continent" Of course, nobody cares whether the pictures are faked or not. Like the Romans, all they want to see is the fight. I've also seen pictures of "native spearmen fighting man-eating lions" which were staged by order of a local governor in Africa as a tourist attraction. The lions arrived in crates and the natives got their spears and shields through a European supply house. I've heard that three men died as a result of the fight. A good, average, arena spectacle.
How did a man like Fulcinius die? Probably of blackwater or malaria fever. Or perhaps he was one of the men who died in the mud-walled Roman fort some 250 miles north of Mombasa, the remains of which still stand. Mombasa was then the main port of East Africa and galleys waited there to be loaded with rice, sesame oil, ivory and wild animals for Italy.
The fort may well have been put there as a way station for the animal collectors. If so, the local tribes would have long learned to avoid the place; otherwise they might at any time be pressed into service to haul the cages, or their fields stripped to feed the wild cargo. So the fort would have been isolated and the sentinels have no warning of an attack.
Perhaps at dawn, a Masai war party suddenly rushed the walls, giving their terrible yodelling cries as they hurled their spears and then drew their simis (long daggers) for the close work. The fort covers some five acres and the garrison was not strong enough to hold all the walls. Fulcinius would have fought to the end, side by side with his native troops and his big Molossian hounds which he used to drive animals aboard ship and to bring quarry to bay. Probably his trappers fought with their hunting spears, while the legionnaires used their swords and shields. At the end, they were overrun. Now only a few coins, some from the time of Nero, some of the time of Antonius Pius, and one from the time of Trajan remain to show their fate. The victorious Masai left the coins on the ground, but took the valuable weapons and armour from the dead men.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Up until the second century a.d., there still remained some sense of fair play in the games. A gladiator had a chance to leave the arena alive. He could even insist that the lanista put a price on him and if he could raise the sum he was free. An animal generally had a good chance to kill his human opponent, so the contest was often fairer than a modern bullfight. There was at least a pretence that the games were still contests—bloody, brutal and cruel, but still retaining some idea of giving the contestants a sporting chance unless they were condemned criminals.
Gradually the games began to degenerate into spectacles of pointless massacre. People develop an immunity to scenes of cruelty and bloodshed and demand more and more ingenious methods to titivate their jaded interest. A favourite trick was to pit an armed man against an unarmed man. Naturally, the armed man always won. Then he was disarmed and another armed man sent out to kill him. This routine would go on all day.
Seneca, the famous philosopher, said of these exhibitions: "All previous games have been merciful, these are pure murder. The men have no defence, their bodies are open to every blow and every attack is bound to be successful. Most spectators prefer this to the regular duels of skill. They would! Protection and training only postpone death, which is what the crowd have come to see."
Exhibitions like this began to take the place of the regular gladiatorial combats. Actually, a fight between two trained and evenly matched swordsmen is about as interesting as a chess tournament. It can go on for an hour or more and there's comparatively little action until the final thrust, each man conserving his strength and feeling out his opponent with light jabs and thrusts. The early Romans were all swordsmen themselves and could appreciate the fine points of combat, but the mob wanted something faster and bloodier, much as modern sports fans want to see plenty of action in a wrestling bout whereas honest wrestling is a slow business and a man may take twenty minutes to break a difficult hold.
Also, the shows had constantly to be "bigger and better than ever." Every emperor had to outdo his predecessors. Barnum and Bailey's went through a similar period. I remember a time when there were seven rings all going at once and no one had the slightest idea what was happening. By the end of the third century, there were a dozen amphitheatres in Rome, most of them in almost continuous operation. Some of the best known were the Circus Maxentius on the Via Appia, the Circus Flaminus near the Circus Maximus, the Circus of Caligula-and-Nero where St. Peter's now stands, the Circus of Hadrian, the Circus Castrense (for the Praetorian Guard) and the Circus of Sallust. There was also, of course, the Flavian Amphitheatre or Colosseum. Emperors stamped their coins with the heads of famous gladiators rather than their own images, and politicians had the number of games they gave engraved on their tombs.
What did these things cost? They finally got so expensive that the government and the aspiring politician had to share expenses to pay for a big spectacle. We only know what the government contributed toward these big games as we have only the governmental records. But it is almost impossible to translate the sums into modern currency. Today, labour costs are the principal factor in any enterprise, while in Rome all labour was done by slaves. Then, too, trying to compute the sums in modern purchasing power is very difficult. For example, King Herod of Judea gave a series of games that cost him five-hundred gold talents. Thomas H. Dyer inPompeii(written in 1871) computes this sum as being equal roughly to Ј200,000. But Dyer wasn't thinking of modern purchasing power. Even computing Herod's five-hundred talents as being worth Ј400,000, the actual purchasing power of the money at the time was far more. This doesn't take into consideration slave labour, gifts of gladiators and animals from subject kings, and contributions from private citizens who needed to stay in with the administration.
Simply to name some figures as a rough estimate, Titus' one hundred days of games which opened the Colosseum cost nearly three million pounds, and the six days of Domitian's games described here cost about Ј12,000 a day. In 521 a.d., Justinian spent over Ј300,000 on the games to celebrate his rise to power. Yet in 51 a.d. the total cost of all games for a year had been only Ј15,000. We know that the cost became a crushing one for any politician to carry. A magistrate named Milo exclaimed: "It's cost me three inheritances to stop the mouth of the people." But the shows continued. Although originally only the emperor or some great noble was permitted the honour of presenting the shows, by the second century any rich man could present them to advance himself socially—just as fifty years ago many a rich man in Great Britain discovered that public philanthropy was helpful in obtaining a title. Some games were put on by rich cobblers and wealthy tailors. Still, they continued to grow in magnificence. After the triumph of the Emperor Aurelian over Zeno-bia, the warrior queen of Palmyra, in 272 a.d., Aurelian entered the arena in a chariot drawn by four stags, with Zenobia chained to the wheels by golden chains. He had a guard of twenty trained elephants, and two hundred other tamed animals walked in the procession. There was a "great host" of captives, each group led by a man with a placard around his neck giving the name of the tribe. The loot was carried in ox-carts heaped high with gold and jewels or on litters borne by slaves. In the games that followed, eight hundred pairs of gladiators fought as well as ten "Amazons," women fighters from some Middle Eastern tribe.
In 281 a.d., the Emperor Probus had "large trees torn up by the roots and fixed to beams in the arena. Sand was then spread over the beams so the whole circus resembled a forest. Into the arena were sent a thousand ostriches, a thousand stags, a thousand boars, one hundred lions, a hundred lionesses, a hundred leopards, three hundred bears and numerous other animals. These were all killed in a great hunt" (Vopiscus). Later, antelope were released and members of the crowd could amuse themselves trying to catch the animals. Sometimes naked girls were turned loose and any member of the crowd could keep anything he caught. Other emperors used silk imported from China for the awning instead of wool, had the nets employed to keep the animals off the podium woven of gold cords, plated the marble colonnades with gold and put mosaics of precious stones on the tier walls.
Sadism, instead of being incidental to the games, became the order of the day. Claudius used to order a wounded gladiator's helmet removed so he could watch the expression on the man's face while his throat was being cut. Girls were raped by men wearing the skins of wild beasts. Men were tied to rotting corpses and left to die. Children were suspended by their legs from the top of high poles for hyenas to pull down. So many victims were tied to stakes and then cut open that doctors used to attend the games in order to study anatomy.
Wholesale crucifixions in the arena became a major attraction, and the crowd would lay bets on who would be the first to die. As with every betting sport, a lot of time and trouble was devoted to fixing the business. By bribing an attendant, you could arrange to have a certain victim die almost immediately, last an hour, or live all day. If the spikes were driven in so as to cut an artery, the man would die in a few minutes. If driven so as to break the bones only, the man would live several hours. Occasionally, though, a victim would cross you up. He might deliberately pull at the spikes to make himself bleed to death or even beat his brains out against the upright. You could never be sure.
As far as being exhibitions of skill or courage, the games became a farce. Of course, there had always been scandals. Back in 60 a.d., a young charioteer had gone flying out of the chariot when his team made their usual jackrabbit start from the stalls. He was still given first prize. Still, the fact that he was the Emperor Nero might have had something to do with it. There was also the time when the Emperor Caligula had decided to auction off his victorious gladiators to a group of nobles. One man fell asleep and Caligula insisted on taking his nods for bids. When the man woke up, he found that he owned thirteen gladiators costing him nine million sesterces. However, generally people frowned on that sort of thing. Yet in 265 a.d., the Emperor Gallienus presented a wreath to a bullfighter who had missed the bull ten times. When the mob protested, the emperor explained via heralds, "It's not easy to miss as big an animal as a bull ten times running." Augustus had had to pass laws forbidding knights and senators from becoming gladiators, so eager were these men to show their valour in the arena. By the third century, no such laws were necessary. No one, patrician or plebeian, had any desire to climb into that arena.
For fifteen hundred years historians and, lately, psychologists have wondered why these games, which not only corrupted but bankrupted the greatest empire of all time, were such an obsession with the Roman mob. Orgies of death and suffering are forbidden today, but we know they exert a strong fascination for most of us. Crowds gather around an automobile accident, go to bullfights, and block traffic if there's someone on a high ledge threatening to commit suicide. Even the early Christians, who were themselves often sufferers in the arena, felt this intoxication with torture. St. Augustine tells of a young boy, Alypius, who was studying to be a monk. Some friends dragged him off to the arena against his will. Alypius sat with eyes closed and his fingers in his ears until an especially loud shout made him look. Two minutes later, he was out on his feet yelling, "Give him the sword! Cut his guts out!" He became an habituй of the games and gave up all thoughts of joining the church. St. Hilarion was such a devotee of the games that he could not stay away from them. He finally had to flee to the African desert where there were no circuses. Even so, in his dreams charioteers used to drive him like a horse and gladiators fight duels at the foot of his bed.
There is a definite connection between cruelty and sex, especially among weak, ineffectual people. Ovid remarked humorously, "Girls, if you can get a man to play with you while watching the games, he's yours." As the mob gradually lost all interest in finding work, serving in the legions or taking any civic responsibility, the games became increasingly more brutal and lewd. Finally they were simply excuses for sadistic debauches.
The more intelligent Romans were perfectly conscious of this deadly trend but they were helpless to prevent it. Augustus tried to limit the games to two a year. He found it impossible. Marcus Aurelius, who defined the games as an "expensive bore," passed a law that the gladiators had to fight with blunted weapons. The popular opposition was such that he not only had to rescind the order but even ended by increasing the number of games from 87 to 230 a year. His annual bill for gladiators alone was about a million pounds. Vespasian, who was famous for being a tightwad and swore that he was going to put an end to this game nonsense, finished by building the Colosseum.
Curiously, the Roman philosophers were almost unanimous in their endorsement of the games. Cicero said, "It does the people good to see that even slaves can fight bravely. If a mere slave can show such courage, what then can a Roman do? Besides, the games harden a warrior people to sights of carnage and prepares them for battle." Tacitus couldn't understand why Tiberius didn't like the fights and quotes the emperor's habit of turning away from scenes of slaughter as a sign of weakness in his character. Pliny speaks of the games approvingly and so do many other serious thinkers.
Almost the only Roman philosopher who came out openly against the games was Seneca, who lived at the time of Nero. He records a conversation he had with a spectator at a show.
"But," my neighbour says to me, "that man whom you pity was a highway robber."
"Very well, then hang him, but why nail him to a cross and set wild beasts on him?"
"But he killed a man."
"Let him be condemned to death in his turn. He deserves it. But you, what have you done that you should be condemned to watch such a spectacle?"
Seneca was cordially disliked and finally committed suicide by order of Nero.
Originally only a few Criminals of the worst type were killed in the arena, but when it became obvious that the mob regarded these killings as the main attraction, holocausts of victims were arranged. Finding enough prisoners for these spectacles became increasingly difficult. Probably the persecution of the Christians eventually became only another way of getting fresh fodder for the arena.
The first of the Christian persecutions were under Nero. According to Roman historians, Nero dreamed of turning Rome from a rabbit warren of twisting streets and wooden slums into a city of marble. He also wanted to clear away a large section in the centre of the city where he could build a palace worthy of him—"The Golden House." Later, the Colosseum was built on the site of the Golden House as an apology to the people. Nero's agents fired the city, but popular resentment forced the emperor to find a scapegoat. He settled on the despised and suspected sect called Christians.
Tacitus tells us: "Nero had all admitted Christians seized. These informed on others who were also arrested, not so much for setting fire to the city as for their hatred of mankind.
Everything was done to make their deaths humiliating. They were dressed in animal skins and torn to pieces by dogs, crucified, or covered with pitch and used as torches to light the arena after dark. Although as Christians they deserved punishment, still people felt that they were being punished to satisfy the emperor's love of cruelty and not for the good of the nation."