- Good evening, everyone. My name is Patrice Rankine, and I'm professor of Classics
at the University of Chicago. I have the honor of welcoming
you to the third and final of this year's Randy L. and
Melvin R. Berlin Family Lectures sponsored by the Division of Humanities, which Professor Emerita Mary Beard at
the University of Cambridge will deliver momentarily. The series has been titled "What Can We Learn From the Classics?" If you're a classicist, you know Mary Beard's scholarship spanning al
most the past 40 years. This work includes the 1998
publication "Religions of Rome," books on the Parthenon and the Colosseum, the 2007 monograph "The Roman Triumph," and more recent books that strike at the heart of
who we are as individuals and as a culture such as "How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and
the Question of civilization" published in 2018. For those outside of the
professional field of Classics, let me give you a sense of
Mary Beard's reach and impact. Upon her request... Let m
e repeat that. Upon her request, so that you know the kind of scholar and teacher that Mary is... This is not a requirement
of the Berlin Lectures. Upon her request, Mary asked to visit some classes being taught in the Classics
department this term. My students and I reading
Herodotus in Greek had the privilege of
having Professor Beard in class on Monday, and Professor Michele
Lowrie had Mary in her class right after my class, in fact. Mary and I walked over
to Cobb Hall together and sat outsid
e of the classroom waiting for the preceding class to exit and for my students to arrive. As we sat and chatted and as the time came for
students to end their classes and walk to their next appointments, a young woman walked up to Mary and said, "Hello, Mary Beard. (audience laughing) I just wanted you to know how much I enjoyed your
documentary on Pompeii." Mary, of course, engaged this
young student generously and attentively. Last night you heard a similar
story from Professor Ando, multiplie
d by several women in
Italy studying Roman history looking to Mary Beard for guidance. I must note that our student in Cobb Hall, from what I understand from Mary, is not studying Classics and yet she knew and
recognized Mary Beard. So many up and coming professors boast of being or desiring
to be public intellectuals. Social media like Twitter and
Instagram augment our reach outside of these hallowed
halls of academia. But we all can take a
lesson from Mary Beard on being public scholars who so
mehow reach young people
and spark their interests through our ideas and
allow them to develop their own thoughts and find their own way. And what would those
thoughts and I ideas be? If you had the microphone,
what might you say? How might you influence your listeners? Professor Beard has answered
the questions of the what and the so what masterfully
in her past two lectures, offering us a masterclass both on Classics and on purposeful living,
thinking, and communicating. In her first lecture
t
itled "A Piece of Cake," Professor Beard gave us
the unforgettable image of little Mary at five years old visiting the British Museum and being in awe of a fossilized
piece of bread from Egypt of the 2nd millennium BCE. A curator let little Mary hold this bread, which only enhanced her marvel. Professor Beard centers the experience on the Greek word thauma to convey her sense of awe
and wonder at this artifact, arguing that thauma, awe, or wonder, is itself one of the things
we can learn from Cl
assics. She closed this first lecture with a cartoon by H. M. Bateman, the 20th century British humorist known for his series of
cartoons "The Man Who..." In contrast to little Mary
holding her Egyptian bread, thanks to the curator
who opened the glass, in Bateman's cartoon, we see the boy who breathed on the glass. This boy is arrested
by guards at the museum and spends his life in prison, not marveling nor able to
spark wonder in anyone. I was struck by this image of
the boy who breathes on gl
ass in part because we have a parallel a little closer to home from the Pulitzer
Prize-winning Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks' "Boy Breaking Glass," which is from the
collection "In the Mecca." Brooks published "In the Mecca" in 1968 as a meditation on the people living in the Bronzeville apartments built in 1891 for the World Fair and later inhabited by
marginalized Black residents. While Bateman's boy
merely breathes on glass, Brooks' boy breaks glass as what he calls a cry of art. He says, "I
shall create! If not a note, a hole." As much as contemporary classicists argue about what the Classics should be and what kinds of people should
be admitted to its study, Professor Beard conveys the
simple truth that a word, idea, or relationship can change a life and perhaps even prevent the shattered pieces of broken glass. The boy in Brooks' poem
whose name we threw away could have been Mary Beard. I bring up these images of wayward boys and add to them the villain Killmonger from "Black Pan
ther." Perhaps in addition, so maybe the students know that reference, who also relates to
artifacts from the past. In a key museum scene early in the movie, in this case Bobo Ashanti and Edo relics from present-day Ghana in Berlin, which grounds the film's fictive world in a greater set of
complexities and contradictions. As we consider these silly
boys, as Homer might put it, we also ask the question of: What past, whose past,
and whose artifacts? Professor Beard has shown
us that she is not s
hy about these complexities. In that first lecture, she paints a picture of herself
sitting at the kitchen table reading her Greek and Latin, the exact same place where I
studied my Greek and Latin, perhaps many of you also
studied your lessons there; in her case, with a poster of Angela
Davis hanging above. These are perhaps contradictory
impressions to our mind, but Mary models the examined life and encourages us that
living with contradiction is quite a good idea. She's a complex and agile th
inker. From the Classics, Professor Beard argues or proffers that we at least for the moment believe we see ourselves in the mirror, but she also warns us of what she calls, in an astonishing phrase, the fragility of the enticing familiarity, the fragility of the enticing familiarity. What we learn from Classics is in part the fragility of
heritage, lineage, or legacy. Every seemingly familiar phrase, artifact, or personality from the past
turns out to be strange, different, and perhaps unfamili
ar. Clearly the we that Mary names, to which I also have been
referring, is fragile, tenuous, and in need of constant
renewal and redefinition. The present is under
construction, as it were; and for this reason,
too, we turn to the past. We are all very much looking forward to this third Berlin Family Lecture titled "Fear and Loathing" in which Professor Beard
promises to take us through some of the darker
developments of Classics, as she puts it, it's conscription
to the causes of fascism, dict
atorship, and far-right politics. I am certain that in her customary fashion she will leave us with as
much hope and food for thought as fear and loathing. (audience laughing) Please join me in welcoming
Professor Mary Beard. (audience applauding) - Thank you very much, Patrice. I'm hugely flattered. Before I start, because I
haven't done this before, I do want to pay tribute to the columns, (audience laughing) in case anybody thinks
I haven't noticed them. I think they're absolutely wonderful.
And if they'd go in hand luggage, I would be taking them back with me. But I think they're safe here. Okay? Okay. This lecture starts in May 1938 when Hitler and his
entourage visited Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy. As is well known, Mussolini was one of those dictators who invested heavily
in the classical past, explicitly creating his own image in the likeness of the
rulers of ancient Rome while excavating and recreating
the monuments of the city, especially the monuments of
the firs
t emperor, Augustus. He reassembled Augustus's Altar of Peace in its own new pavilion. And just nearby, to celebrate the 2,000th
anniversary of the emperor's birth, he liberated Augustus's mausoleum from the more recent buildings
that had obscured it. Part, only part, part of the point of Hitler's visit was from Mussolini to show all this off, and several days of sightseeing
were included in the trip. The role of tour guide was given to, or probably demanded of, the young classical archeologist
Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli who at the time was teaching in Pisa and living in Florence on the fringes, and I really mean the very fringes, of left-wing politics and activism. He went on, after World War II, to become the leading
archeologist in Italy and extremely influential teacher of the next generation of
Marxist Italian archeologists. Why he was plucked out for the task of Hitler's guide
in 1938 is not 100% clear, but the main reason is most likely that he knew about the
antiquities and, c
rucially, he could speak fluent German. Now, Bianchi Bandinelli
himself kept a diary of these few days with Hitler and later published a version of it, which has sadly never been
translated into English. It's a mixture of all kinds
of different registers. There's plenty of soul
searching and self-accusation. Why did he do it? Why did he agree to do this? Should he have tried to wriggle out of it or would that have made no difference? Should he have tried
to use the opportunity to kill both of th
em? He had their itinerary,
he was right up close, he could have taken out Hitler
and Mussolini at a stroke. But what would've happened
to his family, he says, if he'd done that? And it might even then not actually have altered
the course of history. Yes, he insists he was
an anti-fascist, but, and here speaks the academic, a theoretical anti-fascist. But there's also some
dark humor in this diary. Classicists will be amused to
know that he gives the pair, Mussolini and Hitler, nicknames, Marius
for Mussolini and
Sulla for Hitler, right? For those that don't
know those characters, they're two of the most blood-thirsty, nasty pieces of work of the late 2nd and early 1st century BC. There are also some ironic glimpses of what he terms the
terrible disorganization of the Italian fascists, from the awful, lumpy German with awful howlers in it in the official program for the events, which he found himself correcting, to the last-minute dash to get him out in the military uniform you see him
wearing in the photo, because everybody assumed he'd already got a military uniform, but he didn't have one. And throughout his account, he lets us eavesdrop on the
conversations within this group. There's quite a lot of
talk on classical art. When they're going round one museum, Hitler gives a awful tirade against an innocent early
Christian sarcophagus, which he said he would've
banned as forbidden art if it had been in Germany. For the Christians, he said the early Christians
were the first
Bolsheviks. On another occasion, Bianchi Bandinelli has to
mediate between Mussolini who claimed that ancient
architects were all anonymous, and Hitler who knew better, citing Vitruvius amongst others. And this is all against a background of the kind of domestic banalities that always make autocracy
seem even more chilling. Every now and then the conversation
just seems so ordinary, but of course it isn't. The one I remember in particular is the page-long description
of Goebbels teasing Goring,
and they were both on the trip, about Goring's passion for
marron glace or candied chestnuts. And it all looks so sort
of trivial and domestic, and then you think, "This is Goebbels and Goring," you know. It is an extraordinary
read for those reasons. It's quite discomforting. It's a winning account but also an uncomfortable
mix of confessional, of sharp observation
about what's going on, flashes of humor, and excuses for himself, right. And I'll be coming back
to it toward the end. What I'm foc
using on this evening is morality and moral judgments, both in relation to the modern
and to the ancient world. What do we do about, how do we object to, or accommodate, those who even now appropriate and weaponize the classical
past for, let's say, far-right politics? But for most of the time
I'm going to be thinking about the cruelty, the violence, and the sheer nastiness of
the ancient world itself. In my first lecture, I squirmed a bit about my reluctance to admire the achievements
of the Gr
eeks and Romans, but I'm turning that on
its head this afternoon to ask perhaps a more
obvious question, which is: How do we approach the truly
dreadful sides of antiquity? I'll be putting into the spotlight in particular the gladiatorial games. And that's what they're
traditionally called, translating the Latin word ludi, but it makes them look a bit
kind of cozy, I think: games. I'll be looking at the gladiatorial games and the mass slaughter of
human beings and animals apparently for the
plea
sure of the audience that those games involved. This will take me back, from a slightly different perspective, to some of the themes I touched on earlier because I'm interested not
only in what kind of judgment we should make on that cruelty; and I guess the answer
is pretty obvious one, an unfavorable judgment; but also, again, how we start to begin to understand it. How far can we ever
bridge the gap between us and the men and women, some women, sitting and watching other human beings being li
terally pulled apart, bleeding, and dying in front of them. And my other question is: Are we quite as clean in this respect as we might like to think? OK, first, the modern world. On the screen, as appeared
very briefly last time, is a couple of examples
of how the ancient world has been adopted for causes that are in some cases about
as vile as Mussolini's, using here the marble whiteness of classical and classicizing sculpture as an underpinning of white supremacy. And I've added, for good mea
sure, the Roman praetorian guard being used as the logo
of a far-right militia. One question is: How do classicists, people who are professionally engaged in the study of antiquity, how do we respond to this kind of thing? In practice, what we do is
deplore it amongst ourselves or on dedicated specialist
classical websites, and that makes us feel quite a lot better but it doesn't change a thing. I suspect that if the people
behind these unsavory posters actually knew how many
student dissertatio
ns had been written on the use
and abuse of classical imagery, even just counting the
ones I know in Cambridge, by people like them or how many papers on them had been given at classical conferences, they would, I'm afraid,
feel very flattered. But I'm sure they don't know any of that. I don't think they know that
they're part of our terrain, and so on it goes. So what do we do? Now, in a roundabout way, the example of Mussolini is,
I think, instructive here. We've just seen Bianchi Bandinelli d
eploring the fascist classical project but not actually doing
anything to counter it or even to present himself partly on the grounds that he would've made no
difference whatsoever. And in a way you can see the point, it probably would have made no difference. After all, what was shown off
to Hitler still determines, in large part, how we
now see ancient Rome. Over almost a century long
after Mussolini's overthrow, his vision of Rome still remains and has proved basically ineradicable. It is his
archaeologists'
version of the Altar of Peace that we still visit on the left, even if it now has a brand new pavilion, but it's in the same
place, the same layout. And on the right, it's his version of the
mausoleum of the Emperor Augustus that has just been restored
again along his lines. Now, you can chip away at
this kind of appropriation, but you can't easily get rid
of it once it's fixed in place. I'm going give you one nice,
but ultimately rather sad, example of how you
might chip away a
t this. And that example is found
in the Latin inscription which I've pointed out
with a blue arrow here. That was a major triumph
of Beard in PowerPoint, I tell you. You know, now I've
discovered how to do that, I'm unstoppable, right. I shall never have a pointer again. In a Latin inscription that was put up in the piazza that
Mussolini had constructed around his restored mausoleum
to celebrate his work. The text is here. You don't need to go through it. It's basically saying that Mussolini ha
d brought back greatness into the ancient city and
had enhanced the modern city. But it's his name that I
put a bit larger and in bold that I want you to concentrate on because this is what happened to it after Mussolini's fall. Now, it's a bit difficult to make out in these old photographs, but I hope that you can see
that the lini in Mussolini wasn't actually chipped away but it was plastered
over to leave just Musso. Musso in Italian is slang for an ass, the animal sort of ass. And it was hap
pening soon
after Mussolini's fall, a nice little mini-subversion
of the fascist order in the place where Mussolini's most dramatic classical
interventions were made. Sadly it didn't last all that long. The plaster concealing
lini began to fall off, and here he is back again and all fully carefully restored in 2001, right. So Mussolini has been
reinserted into his piazza within the last couple of decades. Now, there are obviously
big questions there that I'm not going to stop on, but which are r
elevant to
us in all kinds of ways, about the eradication of the past and the memorials and
the names of the past. But that kind of issue
is one that we face too. I was very surprised to
discover that it was in 2001 that it was fully restored. Now, of course the new far-right
groups that I was trailing don't have the state
apparatus to write themselves and their appropriations
into history in the same way, you know, in the end you can
just burn their placards. But it's still hard to think
what k
ind of intervention is appropriate here and what a legitimate
response to all this would be. I rather worry that the desire among some professional classicists to find a way to put a stop to this: "They shouldn't be doing
this, this is not right," is an odd way actually
reintroducing gatekeeping by the back door. If we insist that antiquity
isn't owned by anybody, then it's not up to us as
professional classicists to act as the policeman and say what anyone can or cannot do with the Greeks and R
omans. It's open to everybody
actually to do what they want, even if we deplore it. All we can try in the face of
this, I think, is persuasion. Not, I must confess, that I have had much success
taking the persuasion route in this area. A few years ago now, I politely intervened when
this cartoon made by the BBC to introduce Roman Britain
to middle school kids was attacked by a far-right journalist. It had actually been going
quite a while after it... It had been going quite a while, it had appea
red long before, but he only caught up with it later. "This," he said rightly, "was meant to be a high-
ranking Roman official and his family in Roman Britain. How on earth could they not be white?" "This was..." You can imagine how it went: "This was wokery gone
mad," et cetera, et cetera. Now, in response to this, I politely pointed out on social media that what we would call,
they wouldn't have, what we might call a person of color could have been in this position, that the Roman elite were
a
ctually much more diverse than we have often chosen to imagine. And I even identified a
Roman governor of Britain who'd come from Algeria
as a possible candidate for the man in the picture. Meanwhile, I considerately linked it to the website of my department, which had kindly put online
some scientific papers on skeletal remains from Roman Britain showing clear evidence
of ethnic diversity. What's not to like? A completely exemplary, exemplary case of a calm
communication of the facts to people
who've got it wrong, persuasion, I feel, at its best. So what happened? Well, in short, the biggest social media pile-in that I've ever had in my life, and I've had quite a few big ones, with, at the very mildest end of the spectrum, those that can actually be shown, stuff like this. These guys who were doing this must have spent ages in
their attics at night doing Photoshop, I
think it was, (chuckles) because there was a whole
series of these, you know, "Mary Beard's King Henry
VIII," et cetera
, et cetera. Now, it's hard, I suppose now, to tell what effect my
intervention really had, whether anybody's mind got changed. It might have had an impact, I think, on the big silent majority on social media who we often forget, those people who read but don't intervene. But as far as the
protagonists were concerned, none of them appeared to budge a bit. Even the desperate line
that I only use very rarely, which is words to the effect of, you know, "Excuse me, who's the
professor of ancient his
tory around this debate?" had zero effect. Now, I really don't know what you do. I suppose you keep on
trying to communicate, you can try to keep the cases open. Perhaps you use, as here, a bit of satire, the kind of equivalent of
the Musso joke on the left. Or maybe you just wait until the rhetoric and the pseudo parallels simply implode as they did with Steve Bannon's extreme-right political training school, his so-called Gladiator Academy, which collapsed almost as
soon as it had been launche
d. And these are some newspaper headlines. And a picture of the Bannon
monastery at the bottom which is once again open to the public, I'm please to know. But those Bannon gladiators
give me a neat segue to the central part of
the lecture tonight, which turns to the nasty side
of the ancient world itself and how we engage with that ethically. Now, this of course is a perennial dilemma in any history writing; it's the old presentist problem. How do you understand the past in its own terms while a
t the same time not losing sight of your own moral compass
and your obligation, I think, to evaluate the past as
well as to describe it? I mean, it's another case
of the stereoscopic vision. How can you speak as you but also try to wonder
what their view was? Now, I've been struggling
with this quite a lot recently in writing a history of the
role of the Roman emperor, treading a really awkward
tightrope, actually, between, on the one hand, giving these frightful rulers a sort of free pardon sim
ply because they lived so long ago and so cannot be judged on our terms and, on the other, finding them guilty of the crime of simply not being like us, simply being in the past. Now, that happens, I think,
to anybody writing history. I think it comes in more extreme form when it's very long ago sort of history. And I think it's almost impossible to know when you get it right. You know that you do get
constantly criticized, again, on social media for, you know, bringing in your own
moral views,
you know, "You should just be
telling the past straight." And you say, "Really?" You know? "Do we really want have no
judgment about these people?" And it's very, very hard. But in this context, rather
less difficult, I think, than emperors is the case of
the gladiatorial games at Rome. I think that can be a helpful
moral magnifying lens. And it's through that lens I'm going to be thinking
a bit about our morality as engaged with this as
well as those of the Romans. Because after all, despite ou
r modern
disapproval at one level, we too are still invested
in the culture of gladiators and in a version of the
glamour of gladiators. I think somewhere deep down there's a bit of Steve Bannon
in most of us, I'm afraid. And I'm also going to be
facing the big question that historians far too
often just try to shelve, which is: How on earth could they have done this? Now, that sounds like
a very naive question, but it's a question
the more I think about, the more I want to know. How could these
people have sat there looking at that deathly sport? How could they have? So at the back of my mind today there's always going to
be the ordinary bloke dressed up in his best toga, as you had to be in the Colosseum, sitting somewhere in the
middle of the ordinary seats watching the awful slaughter
in the arena beneath him. Can we ever get anywhere near to what he thinks he's doing? And how can we do that? Now, I should make a
confession at this point. About 20 years ago, Patrice
nicely mentione
d it, I wrote a book with Keith
Hopkins about the Colosseum and what happened there. I still think it's got some
quite good points to make, but it contained most, if not all, of the blind spots that
I am about to expose. So, in part, what I'm going to say is
a way of putting right what I got wrong 20 years ago or what I didn't see
how I could handle then. It was in fact roughly at the time that book was published
that I had the encounter, a bit belatedly, that kick started some of the reflection
s I'm going to share with you now. I was in Rome in the Colosseum for a day doing some other work, but I had a couple of hours to doddle with nothing much to do. So I ended up spending the time surreptitiously eavesdropping. You might have got the
impression I do this quite a lot on ancient sites and I do. It's absolutely revelatory. I was eavesdropping on
the high school parties from different countries that were being shown around the building either by their own
teacher or by a tour guide bec
ause I was curious to know
what they were being told when they went to the Colosseum. I soon discovered that
whatever nationality they were, one part of the script in every tour was almost identical. The teacher or the guide would say, "What used to happen here?" And almost immediately
some kid, usually a boy, stuck up their hand and said, "It's where the Romans used to
kill people for entertainment and throw them to the wild beasts," right. The teacher would then say,
"Would we do that now?" An
d the answer was of course a loud chorus from the whole class: "Oh, no, miss, we wouldn't do that now." And a kind of self-satisfied glow of kind of confidence in human progress as a sanctimonious fog
of self-righteousness descended on a whole lot of them, and on they went. Now, if I saw that happening today, I'd be very tempted to
interrupt and go over and say, "Hang on, is there nowhere we
see violence for entertainment in our own cultures? And anyway, who's still getting a thrill out of gladi
atorial combat? Why have you come here?" Right? "And which of you has just bought a souvenir gladiator model or have their picture taken for a ripoff price with one of the scam gladiators outside?" I think the scam gladiators
have now been banned, but 20 years ago they were big business and a permanent fixture at the Colosseum, and you can see some of them. And I'd have said, "Who's queued up to see
the movie 'Gladiator'?" which was then recently out. Now, it would have been a
bit rude and a bit
unfair because in a way the young people's answer was sort of right. But what bothered me was they never seemed to get beyond that
apparently unreflective sense of moral superiority. So there are several
issues intertwined here, from the historian's dilemma
about how to understand through sense of moral revulsion, which I hope we haven't lost, to the continuing popularity or at least high-profile, or even glamour, of the gladiatorial games
in our cultural imagination. Now let me take a step
bac
k for a few minutes and just look very quickly at what we know or don't know about these shows before I move on to my
more particular questions. In a way, most of us know quite a lot. Gladiatorial games are one thing, I think, in Roman culture that most people have some kind of picture of, like the students in the Colosseum. And most of us could give
a very rough description, if challenged, I think, of what went on in them. We would talk about the gladiators,
who were usually slaves, captives, t
hink Spartacus, or condemned criminals, plus a few desperate volunteers, and they were pitted in
fights against each other that sometimes went to the death. So we'd talk about them. We would say something
about the other fighters and the other condemned criminals, most famously but not only the Christians, being effectively executed by wild beasts in full public view; thrown to the lions, as the familiar phrase goes. It's also, I suppose, quite common knowledge that
gladiatorial combat like this
was a kind of 'usp' of Romanness. And I've been talking about
the Colosseum only so far, the vast amphitheater in the
center of the city of Rome. But an amphitheater on a smaller scale built primarily for gladiatorial shows is one of the things you would expect in almost to any reasonably
sized smallish Roman town, whether that's Pompeii on the left or the amphitheater in
Roman London on the right. You'll see that the
amphitheater in Roman London needs a lot of lights to help it look like an am
phitheater, but it's broadly correct. It can sometimes look like this fashion, these games, didn't actually spread very much to the eastern part of the
Roman Empire, the Greek part, but that's only because in the East they didn't usually
build new amphitheaters with the seats going all the way around, which is what amphitheater means. They tended to convert their slightly differently
designed theaters, sort of U-shape, or even their race tracks to
host gladiators and beasts. You needed barriers
to keep
the animals off the spectators, but that was all. And you can still often, if you look when you're going
around theaters in Greece and particularly Turkey, you can see the fixings
where those barriers were actually put in place. So the fact that you
haven't got amphitheaters in the Greek world doesn't
mean the Greeks were nicer, even though that is a common
misapprehension, right. They were just as keen
on gladiators as anybody. And all over the Roman world gladiators featured in mosaic
pavements like you see here. On the right, I think I'll come back
to this very briefly, one of the most kitsch representations of gladiators that you can possibly imagine, you know: little Cupids on a floor in a villa in Roman Britain pretending to be gladiators, right. And they occur in trinkets and in graffiti, you name it. The basic rule is that Romans and murderous games went together. And that I think is, that's common knowledge
for very many people. I've added a little bit in, but none of
that's surprising, I think. If you dig a bit deeper
than what I've just said, it actually seems all a bit worse and a bit weirder than the
common knowledge suggests. There is some evidence for slaughter on a really massive scale. One Roman writer records, for example, that in the vast games
held by the Emperor Trajan in the early 2nd century CE, 10,000 gladiators fought
over several weeks and 11,000 animals were killed. Now, that may an exaggeration, and it's not clear he did the counting; but e
ven if you halve it, it's still pretty terrifying. And the methods of killing human victims could be ingeniously horrid. Condemned criminals were
put to death in the arena in quite exquisitely awful ways. In a book of poetry written to celebrate the opening
of the Colosseum in 80 CE, the poet, Martial, describes how some executions of condemned criminals were staged to mimic
the deaths or torments of mythical characters. One man, for example, was made to play the part of Prometheus who in the my
th was chained to a rock and had his liver torn out by an eagle. The same happened, it was
said, in the Colosseum, though a Scottish bear was
substituted for the bird, right. Whether that makes it better or worse, I have no clue, right. There are, of course, many puzzles too. We don't know how this
gladiator culture started. Romans often speculated that it came from their
northern neighbors, the Etruscans, but that was a claim they often made when they didn't know what the origin of something in
their culture was, nor do we know how and why it ended. That's almost certainly connected somehow with the growth of Christianity, but exactly how is not so clear. There's no sign of any
outright blanket Christian ban. I don't think here we need to
think of the first Christians as humanitarians. Perhaps more surprising is we
don't really have any overview of what a whole day's
performance at these games would be like. We have plenty of snapshots
like this grafitto, which I've now displayed on i
ts own because it's worth looking at it again. This apparently records gladiators, probably real gladiator fights, commemorated on a wall
in the city of Pompeii. It's not wholly easy
to decode it in detail, but it shows certainly one
pair of gladiators there fighting each other and the other people
appear to be musicians. So they are fighting, apparently, with a rather raucous musical background. And their names... And the Latin isn't, again,
terribly easy to decode. Their names and their past
f
orm, a bit like a racehorse, are scrolled next to them. The Vs and Ms that you see as letters occurring in the writing stand for Vicit, he won, and Missus, he was reprieved, that is he lost but he wasn't killed. But we have no idea, really, or not much of an idea of how
any of this fitted together, what a day at the games would be like; we haven't got a program. Modern accounts say things like, "The shows usually
started around 10 o'clock with fights between gladiators and the bloodiest spectacl
es
involving condemned criminals took place over lunchtime," et cetera. Those are, let me warn you, somewhere on the spectrum
between sheer fantasy and willful overgeneralization. Equally mysterious is how on earth they acquired the animals
for the really lavish shows. In the 19th century, it took the British a
whole squadron of soldiers, a 2,000-liter water tank, and enormous time and trouble to get this poor hippopotamus to London. How on earth the Emperor
Commodus acquired five of them plus t
wo elephants, a rhino, and a giraffe at the end of
the 2nd century is, I think, anybody's guess. Those puzzles apart, though, the reason why most of us
are familiar with the games is because for several
modern centuries in the West, they've also, as I said, taken a prominent cultural
place in "our culture." Our culture in inverted commas, whether that's in paintings
like this by Gerome, which is said to have inspired
Ridley Scott's recreation in the "Gladiator" movie, to Simeon Solomon's focus o
n the women, a rather nasty picture of
the women in the audience. Here one's got her thumb down as if to demand the death
of a defeated fighter. Or in more modernist style, George de Chirico's gladiators practicing. And there are loads of many
more popular versions too. And my childhood favorite was always "Asterix the
Gladiator," all right. Here seen in a wonderfully, wonderfully anachronistic setting because we are clearly in the Colosseum, but it hadn't actually been built by the time of Juli
us Caesar, which is when the story is set. And in one of the other
myths of gladiator culture, which is quite wrong, they're
saying the famous phrase, "Hail Caesar! Those about to die salute you." So far as we know, that was never used in the amphitheater. We have one reference
to that when Claudius, the Emperor Claudius, is staging another dastardly naval battle, but not in the amphitheater. And there's plenty of gladiator jokes. This is one of my favorite,
but cheesy, it says, "I'm a gladiator
, but that's
just to put food on the table. What I really want to
do is teach right now." All right. Now, I suppose what drives
this cultural strand is a strange mixture of prurience, the pleasures of revulsion, while also being able to enjoy it from a safe position of moral superiority, or, in the case of the cartoons,
familiar domestication. And I suppose that it's
something like that that must account for the
enormous numbers of visitors to the Colosseum itself. The brutal truth about
the rem
ains of it now is that the exterior is unforgettable, the interior is a waste of time, right. If there are any people here going to Rome and they haven't visited the Colosseum and they're thinking about
it, don't bother, right. Just look at the outside, there's plenty more
interesting things to see. All the seats have gone apart from some unimpressive
reconstructions, there's no floor, you can't see what happened where. And although it was once marble faced, it's now just a load of bare brick wa
ll. However, with over 7
million visitors a year, it is the most visited site in Italy. It tops the Vatican, and it is roughly three times the footfall of Pompeii, right. It is Italy's biggie. And it's one of the most
visited tourist attractions in the world. It's beaten by the Louvre, it's beaten by the Great Wall of China, but it's up there in the top 5 or 10. Why on earth is it? Well, I suppose you might say that most visitors before they visit it don't know that it's a waste of time, so they
pay up expecting
it's going to be good and then you see them wandering
around thinking, you know, "What do we do?" and go out. And the kids don't, kids certainly don't think much of it, which is why the teachers have to be damn hands on, you know, to explain all this. There are a few others, I think, for whom it is still a sight
of Christian pilgrimage in reflection of the Christians
killed in the Colosseum, but I don't think that's very many. There's still a cross there and the Pope still goes
there
at Easter to commemorate that, but I don't think it's
the big driver of tourism. And I have to suspect that
there's something here of a sort of dark tourism and the kind of vicarious
thrill of violence that you get, but even so, it doesn't act that out very well for you. And for those of you who
heard my first lecture, and I suppose I'd say if there's a stepping stone side to this, I don't know whose feet we
are treading in actually. And you don't see, interestingly... If you... You know,
you can tell more snooping. You don't see good photo
ops in the Colosseum. There isn't a good place where people are getting photographed because there isn't really
anything to see, right. Now, I think that we all,
absolutely all of us, ought to ask ourselves much
more insistently than we ever do why we are all, and to some extent no
one's off the hook here, why we're all so intrigued by gladiators. But that is only part of
the way that I want to go because there's the further question against
that background of
how historians decide to write about this phenomenon. How do they, how do we package it? Well, I'll tell you what
the standard tactic is because I've done it. And I'm as guilty as this as anybody. The standard tactic is to start your
discussion of the Colosseum with a few sentences saying
how ghastly it all was and almost past our comprehension, and then, that done, to proceed to find ways
of evading the issue and avoiding the horror
and not mentioning it or trying to find it
a bit more manageable. You kind of park the nasty
bit and say it's awful and we really, you know, moderns will just not be able to imagine what it could possibly be like, and then off you go as
if nothing had happened. If classicists in the
audience want to know which books I think avoid
doing that more than most, I think the old book by
Carlin Barton probably does and also Garrett Fagan, but they still don't
go quite the direction that I'd like them to go. Okay, so what are the ways
of evading
this issue? Once you've said, "This was all absolutely terrible," and, "We can't possibly imagine," you know, "It's unimaginable,"
in Louis MacNeice words, well, what are the ways
of evading the issue? Well, one way is to
say, and I've done this, that leaving aside one or two grand headline spectaculars
in the Colosseum presented by emperors where there really was
a lot of blood spilt and no expenses spared on the animals, most shows across the Roman
world, in places like London, were much lower
key. The animals would be
what you could round up in the countryside nearby, and they'd be more wild
boars than wild elephants, and the death rate among
gladiators was much lower than we might fear. Now, this is a bigger section here of the wall on which the
gladiator graffiti from Pompeii was found. If you look down the right hand side where there's all the losing characters on the right hand side, you'll see an M next to every single one of these. In each case, that's to say the loser,
you kn
ow, was down and out, he could have been killed
but he wasn't, right, he was reprieved. And those reprieves, though
we can't calculate it exactly, look as if they were very
common, even if not the norm. So why? Well, more than anything else,
it's grim economic reasons. In Roman terms, gladiators
are expensive commodities, expensive to buy in the first
place if they were enslaved, and to feed and train
whether they were enslaved or free volunteers, or even criminals. You actually can't
afford to
kill too many. And pushing that a little further, as I have been tempted to do, it has even been suggested
that a lot of the time, not necessarily in the Colosseum, but in the... You know, I can't do
American football leagues. But I would say, you know, not in the Premiership
but in the Championship, I would say in the U.K., if you go down a grade, it might have been that all this fighting was a bit closer to professional wrestling than it was to boxing, you know, that it was more of a
parade of
sham fighting and an awful lot of grunting than the sharp edge of the sword, right. That's one way; it's not all like that. And I think up to a point that's true. Another common way around the problem, and I go to plead guilty
to this one as well, is to try to look past or through the murderousness of it all to concentrate instead on
the second-order functions of these gladiatorial occasions. The audience at the Colosseum, 50,000 plus of them if it was full, wasn't just a random mix of those wh
o happened to get tickets. It was a microcosm of the Roman
political structure itself. Attendance, we think, in
Rome was probably free, but you couldn't sit anywhere and you couldn't buy
yourself the best seat. People sat in segregated groups according to their
formal political status. Senators were in the front row in rather wide kind of
business-class seats with more space, the next rank of Roman
society, the knights, were immediately behind, then the rest of the free male population. This rec
onstruction here, with a load of women and,
we think, it looks like, it's a modern reconstruction, slaves, is probably trying to
imagine what's happening at the very, I think it is, the very, very highest levels at the back, for women and the enslaved
went right at the back, (apart from the venerable vestal virgins, who got a ringside seat, and the emperor's female relatives). He, the emperor, sat with them in the imperial box, facing his people.It no longer survives, but
Gerome has a good go at
it, facing his people, all ranked and all in
their formal outfits. So under the empire, at least, what the gladiatorial games amounted to was a dramatic staged encounter between the ruler and his
ordered ranked subjects. It was a chance to imagine in microcosm what the Roman political
order was and looked like. So it's often argued what
we should be seeing here is political theater as
much as bodily cruelty, and that's one of the reasons why they're all made to wear their togas in order to go;
true. Perhaps even more commonly low after due expressions of horror, the historian's tendency has
been to translate the games into some more comprehensible
modern equivalent. In talking about gladiators in particular, rather than animal hunts, it's very hard to avoid the language of modern spectator sports as I didn't avoid it just now when I both smuggled
in that wrestling and boxing analogy and also the football leagues, right. It's partly irresistible because it appears to offer
us some kind
of terminology when we haven't got any
other terminology to hand and partly because some gladiators, despite their low status, do seem to have gained
a degree of celebrity and a reputation as sort
of erotic idols or pinups that look a bit like modern celebrities, sportsmen, movie stars, or whatever. One Roman satirist, for example, pilloried upper class Roman
ladies who left their husbands to run off with gladiators,
you know, the rough trade. And something like this is what is going on almost
in this 19th century painting. I think this looks as if it's been a private gladiator show at a Roman rich house. And some poor bloke is just
about to be carried out on the floor. The victorious gladiator
is standing up all tall, being simpered over by
the house's ladies, right. And I think that Netti is picking up something of that sense, that these are hot stuff
for the Roman elite lady. That case is easily,
let me say, overstated. It always used to be said, for example, that the remains of a
heavily jeweled lady found in the gladiator barracks at Pompeii were evidenced of her final
tryst, before the ashes fell, with her gladiator lover. That looked quite plausible. But what the people who wanted to play that
story didn't tell you was that there were 18 other victims found in the same room as
the lady and the gladiator. So either it was more
than just a one-to-one as the ashes came down or something else was going on, and much more likely is
that this bejeweled lady had been trying t
o escape from town when the going got too bad and rushed into the gladiator barracks with a load of other people. But leaving that on one side, though, there was clearly some kind
of celebrity, come erotic, charge to gladiator performance, which may help explain why emperors didn't always sit in their imperial box, but notoriously, like Commodus and others, leapt into the arena and acted
as gladiators themselves. It was about who was going to
be the real star of the show. And the emperor, it
loo
ks like from stories, the emperor was always
in danger being upstaged, so would want to get down
there to be the star himself. Now, all those arguments seem
to me fine up to a point. Indeed I've made all of them, so I don't think they're stupid, but what they do is evade the issue. They simply don't face the big question that we all shy away from, which is: How could the Romans do this? You don't actually get round that problem by saying it wasn't as
deadly as we painted because some of it was d
eadly. You can, you know, decrease the number of
casualties, but you don't, it's... You know, this is not a
kind of nice sport, right. Or to go back to my ordinary
bloke watching the shows, whatever you think about the sort of subject
Clifford Geertzean's idea of political theater in the amphitheater, we don't really think that my bloke spent the time in the amphitheater reflecting on his own position
in the Roman social order, however important that image was, right. So what are our options? If
those are all yes, but, what are our options? One logical position is
to claim that the Romans, or many Romans, were simply crueler than we are, and so they enjoyed
watching this kind of thing. Or rather, because no
historical society I know of actually prides itself in its own cruelty, plenty of Romans decried
vehemently saevitia, as they called it. Perhaps their definition of cruelty was just very different from ours and they were probably
anyway much more used to seeing wounds, death, and de
ad bodies. Now, there may be something in
there, something, but, again, not everything. And interestingly, one writer in the late 2nd century CE makes an inadvertently, I think, relevant observation here. He's criticizing the
spectators at the games. He said he was shocked and surprised that people who recoiled in
horror at the sight of a corpse that had died a natural death were happy to look at
men getting torn apart in the amphitheater, which tends to go against the idea that all Romans were
just
laid back about corpses. And if we return to ancient
representations of gladiators, most, like these awful cupids, really cutesy enough, are as sanitized or more sanitized than our own representations
of gladiators, they aren't a celebration
of blood and guts. I think then we have to
approach this quite differently, and I'm going to give
you two ways to do that before I finish. I think we can't massage
the troubling bits away. But I think that what you can do is ask much more fundamentally:
How was what happened on the arena floor, how was that defined? What was going on? Now, I'm flying a bit of a kite here, but I've got two particular questions, both of which in some way overlap with our own cultural debates. I want to ask: How far did Roman spectators see the people fighting
in the arena as human? And how far did they think
what was happening was real? And we're gonna have Commodus as a background to my
answers to those questions. To begin to open this up, I want to go back to
ancient criticisms of gladiatorial shows, and there were many more
criticisms than you might think, but mostly not raising
the issues you'd expect. Almost none, even including
some Christian criticism, are concerned with what we
would call humanitarian aspects. They're not concerned with
the cruelty to the fighters or the cruelty to the animals, they focus entirely on the audience. So Roman critiques of gladiatorial display focuses on the audience. Some of those critiques are
predictably snobbis
h critiques of popular culture, you know, the kind of posh guy who says, "The ordinary people don't have the same sophisticated approach to this kind of spectacle
that I do," right. But many others are concerned with the effect of the shows
on those who watch them; irrational passions are
aroused, reason is clouded. This is what the Roman
billionaire philosopher Seneca had to say: "Nothing is so damaging to good character than the habit of wasting
time at the games, for then it is that vice stea
ls secretly upon you through the avenue of pleasure. I come home more greedy, more ambitious, more excessive, more cruel, and more inhuman because I have been among human beings." Now that's puzzling, I think,
when you hear it first. But for me, the key is that Seneca stresses
the humanity of the audience with the implied contrast,
I'm going to suggest, of the non-humanity of
what they're watching. Now, that might seem to be pushing it, but it chimes interestingly
with some other comments made i
n the 1st century BC, before the rule of the emperors, about a set of games in which
there was little enjoyment and in which the spectators
for once did show compassion for a poor group of slaughtered elephants. "Why?" asks the writer. Because there was a feeling
that they were almost human. Now, the contrast here, I think, is not between a human
and an animal victim. The point is that those elephants somehow broke through the assumption that everything on the wrong
side of the arena barrier was
inhuman, right. It's a boundary between
humanity and non-humanity. Now, we know that that
is a contested boundary that in many ways we also debate. No society in history has not debated who it is who's going to count
as fully human and who isn't often in the process of
justifying exploitation. John C. Calhoun, for example, questioned the humanity of
Alexander Crummell when, as I mentioned yesterday, he questioned Crummell's
ability to learn Greek. But for my ordinary Roman bloke, I reckon that
the
watchability of the games, the fact that he could do it, in part depended on the shared illusion that the human spectators
were watching a glorious, edge-of-your-seat spectacle, but they were not watching the murder of their fellow human beings. It also depended, I suspect, on an assumption, some kind of assumption
that what was happening wasn't really real but was a constructed
spectacle with actors. You get a hint of that in the poems celebrating the
opening of the Colosseum. In describing
the whole series of mythic executions in the arena, of which the Prometheus
charade was only one, the poet Martial celebrates particularly the artifice and the theatricality of the reconstruction of a mythic death. It is as if the boundary between our real world and fantasy is set at the edge of
the performance space. Now, that, I would say, is not unlike, in some ways, some of our own boundaries that make watching the
impossible possible. Why do millions of people now
watch footage of shooting
s or of executions on their screens? The answer is not that they,
or certainly not all of them, are unusually blood thirsty, it is that the screen of the
smartphone or the laptop marks, like the arena edge, the boundary between unwatchable reality and watchable representation. So one tentative answer
to how could they do it is that the social and
cultural contract of the arena was that the performers were not human and the performance of the
slaughter was not real. But I want to finish by
return
ing to Cassius Dio and to Bianchi Bandinelli. We met Dio in lecture one in the Colosseum over a few days in 192 CE, no doubt in many ways engaged in the same kind of experience
of looking and watching as my ordinary bloke
watching the non-human in a world of non-reality. But Dio was different. He was a member of the political elite sitting on the front row, eyeball to eyeball with
the Emperor Commodus, trying not to laugh as Commodus whom he regarded as a murderous tyrant swung an ostrich head a
t them. And Dio was also an
academic and a historian, and he included in his longer history the diary notes he took
of that occasion in 192. From that, it's clear that he
didn't much want to be there, but he showed up anyway. He admired those who were
brave enough to stay away, but he thought he ought to
think about the consequences if he did. He enjoyed sneering a little at how ridiculous and
disorganized the games all were, that's the point of telling
us about the giggle. Dio was clearly anti-
tyranny, but he was anti-tyranny
in a theoretical sense. You will have seen from the
language I've chosen to use that I'm suggesting here
a parallel between Dio and Bianchi Bandinelli, the first time anybody
has made that comparison. I'm a great fan of Bianchi Bandinelli, but as I was preparing this lecture, I was repeatedly struck by how similar his rhetorical responses to tyranny in the form of Hitler
and Mussolini were, too, those of the senator on the
front row of the Colosseum, at least in
their written accounts. Bianchi Bandinelli was
also slightly mocking, a bit self-justifying, while reluctantly going along with it all, cooperating with tyranny,
if not collaborating; as he said, he was a
theoretical anti-fascist. So I guess that I'm closing
this lecture and the series with one final, perhaps bleaker, thought not really about the
arena or gladiators at all, it's, I suppose, the idea
that responses to tyranny and the practices of collaboration, of muddling along under vicious reg
imes, might also be some of the things that the ancient world
helps us think about. It might be some of the things that we share with the ancients and maybe have even in
part inherited from them. My point is that academics, like Dio, like Bianchi Bandinelli, like me, and I think like quite a lot of you, need to think where we stand in all this and how much of a theoretical and quiet life, not putting our heads above the parapets, we really deserve. Thank you. (audience applauding) - That was ter
rific; not only hopeful, but
perhaps a bit prophetic. I think we have time for some questions. And as we have done on previous nights, we'll start with a
question from the audience. And there are actually questions from what I understand
are hundreds of guests watching virtually in
each of the three nights. There's a question in the back. - Yesterday you had mentioned that a way forward for classic programs would be to include Africa
and East Asia as a focus. I wondered if you could tell
us abou
t any sort of texts that are from those regions
that maybe have been suppressed or are not so well known that would be included in
those kind of syllabuses. - I don't think I suggested
it as a way forward. I said that I was laid back about changing
disciplinary boundaries, but I didn't see them. I didn't... And I said I thought you gain some things and you lost others
from doing that change. I didn't think that was the right solution to the ideas of diversifying the Classics. Now, it depends whe
re you go. I mean, I think that, just to give an obvious example, though I think becoming
less clearly obvious, one of the boundaries that
has shifted, not hugely, but shifted significantly
since I was a student, is the boundary between
the classical world and Egypt, right. And when I was an undergraduate, you didn't really look at
the evidence from papyri. It was absolutely amazing. I mean, it was the biggest
chunk of evidence that you have about Roman provincial
administration comes from Egypt
, but we didn't see it or
we weren't directed to it apart from in very, very small chunks. So I think wherever you go, you find hidden texts
because texts are hidden by virtue of nobody
saying, "Go read that." And, you know, do we think
it's interesting, do I want to read "Epic of Gilgamesh"? You know, if we are thinking
about early epic, you know, should we actually be thinking about other early epics from, you know, the Mediterranean and its peripheries? That's still making it sound like the M
editerranean heartland, I was trying not to do that. But, you know, you know what I mean. Let me off. (Patrice Rankine laughing) You know, yes, I do think
that that's a good idea. And I think that... I don't think that there
are texts that are hidden. I think that there are texts
that we choose not to use and that when we teach our students we don't put that on the bibliography, we don't make the subject of lectures. Your lectures are different if you put a different load of texts on. And I don'
t think it's better, but I think that you
can change perspectives. And I think changing
perspectives is a good idea. - There's a question here. The microphone, I should have said, the microphones are on either side. And so we'll wait till the microphone makes its way up to this side. (Mary whispers) - Can I get back to the shock? When I was teaching in
a Classics department, one of my colleagues went
on a walking tour in Nepal and showed the department
slides of sacrifices at a local temple and
one saw prominent members of the U.S. Classics fraternity shocked at the realization that
this was what happened every weekday, as it
were, in the Roman world. Has sacrifice a place in
the story you are telling us? - Yes. And I think it's got a very
interesting place in the story, partly for the reason that you say, but also part... I mean, why I've been interested in it.... And you will rightly say, "That's just showing how
unwilling you are to be shocked." I've always been very
struck by the w
ay that, in official civic Roman sacrifice, the elite always distanced from the blood. Now, the one thing that the elite don't, they don't get spattered with blood. It says the elite, you know,
Mr. Consul, or whoever, did a sacrifice, that does not mean he took his knife out and put it into the bull's hide. There were clear hierarchies
of who got dirty. And it is absolutely clear
that it was enslaved attendance who did the killing; and the higher in Roman status you were, the further you were fr
om the blood. And that's one of the reasons that some of the alternative cults, religions, sorry; another misuse of word, cult; the alternative religions
in the Roman world were so shocking, and particularly the supposed taurobolium, because what was it actually
to be bloodied by sacrifice? You know, what was it
to stand under a bull and get showered in its blood? So I think my answer to you is yes, but I think there were Roman critics who were asking themselves
just the kind of questions that y
ou and your colleagues were, right. How shocking is this? - Someone online was curious about whether there were female gladiators or were they all just men? - There's one or two
representations and inscriptions which appear to record female gladiators. So there are... If the answer is: "Were there
ever any female gladiators?" the answer is yes. How many there were, I'm... you know, it's not clear how far this
is a subversion of the system. And what they are is they
are turning the system over or
somebody is turning the system over by having women. I mean, women actually at the arena is quite interesting because there was, apart from the vestal virgins
and the emperor's women, they have to be relegated
right to the very back, so it's women and the enslaved. Well, in terms of elite women, that means saying no
elite women, you know? The wife of the consul doesn't fetch up and walk up to the top of the arena to sit down with her slaves. So the idea that there were
many women, even as watch
ers, I think is, there's a question mark. - Okay. And then since we took two
in person and one online, I'll do one more, a quick one from online. Someone's asking if you think that there is something inherently Roman about gladiatorial combat or
the gladiator role per se. And they use a parallel of,
let's say, a fish monger, right. So every society has them. Is there something inherently
Roman about the gladiator? - There is something inherently Roman in which the figure of the gladiator marks R
oman culture throughout. You know, is it a gladiator society? In a certain way, Rome
is a gladiator society. And you see that because it's not just that
there's a lot of it about and some form of combat,
that sort of combat, in most towns, but you see it infiltrating into ways of thinking, philosophical argument, the idea of the gladiator as
actually facing death bravely, the idea of the philosopher
in the mold of the gladiator. So, I mean, I think when you kind of get, when you get a sense of s
omething which is more embedded in the culture than just being a frequent
show on a Saturday afternoon, it's when you can see it as
part of the metaphoric language, ways of thinking, the
symbolism of the culture. And if you say that about the gladiators, that is just like in
England football, you know, where the metaphors of football, the offside rule and that kind of thing, is part of ways of talking
about other things. It is baffling because, you know, we don't know how it started. The first a
ttested gladiatorial show is at a funeral in 264, I think, BCE, and they're thought to be, Romans say they connect
them with funerary ritual. But at that point they're fantasizing, I think as much as we are, about what the hell it's doing. And, you know, you
don't find it elsewhere. - [Patrice Rankine] Great. I
like that answer. There's a question up front. Oh, okay, yeah. - Thank you. So do you think that current NFL players are really gladiators, and instead of death they have
brain damage for
whole life, but in principle it's the same? And, by the way, there is no females playing NFL in comparison to gladiators. - [Mary] What? I didn't quite catch- - Yeah, so the comparison between the gladiator and the modern American football player with CTE brain damage and that there's not a parallel there for women playing football. - I mean, my problem is that I think, and I'm as guilty of this as anybody, we instantly resort to
the analogy of sport because it's actually very
hard to find a la
nguage to talk about gladiators in. So we start to talk
about winners and losers: "He lost the fight. He's a celebrity," and we're very, very soon into a rather domesticated view of prize fighters, football
stars, and whatever. Gladiators have a shorter life expectancy the most professional footballers in any football regime. One thing we do know is that some do survive and retire, but of course... And we have tombstones of
those that survive and retire. The difficulty is that
those who survive
and retire are overrepresented in the tombstones because those who get knocked
out in their first fight and skewered in the Colosseum
do not get a nice tombstone put up by loving wife and kids, right. So the physical and epigraphic inscriptional remains tend to privilege those
who came out the other end. And so it makes it very hard to know what percentage of these people are actually getting killed. - Thanks. We have one last question. And I don't know where
the microphones are, but I saw a han
d. OK. - Was there a distinctly
Christian critique of the games? I mean apart from the games'
utility in generating martyrs. But was there sort of a moral or theological sort of take on spectacles of cruelty, which, again, could have been complicated
with the role of crucifixion? - I will answer that as best I can. And for further information, I'm going to direct you to Professor Ando. What I think for me is very interesting is that you would imagine, you know, the neat thing to think would be t
hat the Christians
come along and say, "That is totally cruel and awful, and you've gotta stop this." Now, that does not happen. And Christian writers certainly were talking
about the metaphorization of gladiatorial combat; Christian writers use that language that's imbued with that language too. For me, what's always been
more interesting, really, but it's a version of what you say, is that, in a sense, the martyrdom in the arena, for me, eventually has the effect
of blowing the logic of the ga
mes to pieces; that if you say one of the logics of the gladiatorial arena, I don't think it's only
one, it doesn't explain it, is that it is imperial power seeing his people ranked in rank order on display as a polity on the seats and in the center are the
abomination other, right, who's ultimately, at least in the logic, are going to not survive, right. And I think they're the abomination other, the subhuman abominated
other would be my view. Now, what happens within
martyrdom, I think, and th
e retelling of the
stories of martyrdom, is that that logic gets overturned because the victors turn out to be on the floor of the arena. Now, once that has happened, there is a sense in which the logic of the gladiatorial shows,
the political logic, has been spiked. That's what I say. (laughs) - [Patrice Rankine] Good answer. - But I'm sure there will be other people who have different views from me. You know, as soon as
some Perpetua incarnate is the heroine by virtue
of being martyred, then t
he logic of the show
doesn't work any longer. - Well, this has been just a
wonderful three-lecture series. And we should not only, say two things, thank Professor Beard one last time for these three wonderful lectures, (audience applauding) but, please, before you go, also mark your calendars for next year's Berlin Lecture Series thanks to the Berlin family. Yiyun Li, the poet, will be the Berlin lecturer for next year. So thank you again. Thank you again, Professor Beard. - Thank you. Thank you
for coming.
- And good night, everyone. (audience applauding)
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