Cicero - Anthony Everitt [97]
Aware that his public image needed burnishing but sensing the public would not welcome any more self-praise from his own pen, Cicero tried to interest a respected historian, Lucius Lucceius, in writing a history of his Consulship, exile and return, the main purpose of which would be to expose the “perfidy, artifice and betrayal of which many were guilty towards me.” He was candid about his expectations and asked Lucceius to write more enthusiastically than perhaps he felt. “Waive the laws of history for once. Do not scorn personal bias, if it urge you strongly in favor.” Lucceius agreed, although for some reason the book seems never to have appeared.
A high point of the year 55 was the grand opening of Pompey’s splendid new theater on the Field of Mars. Construction had started in 59 and the project was designed to show off its founder’s wealth and power. It was a statement in stone and mortar that he was Rome’s leading citizen.
The program included spectacular plays and shows. Cicero was unamused, writing to a friend: “What pleasure is there in having a Clytemnestra with six hundred mules or a Trojan Horse with three thousand mixing bowls?”
There were also lavish gladiatorial displays. These contests in which criminals were thrown to wild animals were among the most notorious features of Roman culture. By Cicero’s day they were becoming an exotic and sadistic entertainment, but as so often with Roman customs they originated in a profound sense of tradition. For centuries, contests of hired fighters were held in honor of the glorious dead; blood flowed to slake the thirst of ancestors. It was no accident that they were usually staged in that sacred space, the Forum, with its magical fissures and chasms opening into the underworld. It was symbolically apt that gladiators waited in the subterranean tunnels beneath the pavement before coming up to fight. An ancient historian claimed that “the first gladiatorial show was given in Rome in the cattle market in the Consulship of Appius Claudius and Marcus Fulvius. It was given by Marcus and Decimus Brutus to honor their father’s ashes at the funeral ceremony.” For their descendants, today’s Appius Claudius and Marcus Brutus, the violent deaths of armed men in the city’s heart, its central square, in some vestigial but still resonant way, opened a lane to the land of the dead.
Some gladiators were slaves hired for the purpose (like the troupe trained by Atticus), others were condemned criminals. Many men enrolled as gladiators to buy themselves out of poverty. They were lodged in special barracks (one has been excavated in Pompeii). Life was tough, with whips, red-hot branding irons and iron fetters used to keep discipline.
However, successful gladiators were celebrities, like today’s boxers and football stars. The gladiatorial ethos was so ingrained in the culture that in the following decade two allies, a Roman general and an African king, entered into a gladiatorial suicide pact after a lost battle. They fought a duel and when the Roman had killed his opponent he arranged for a slave to cut him down. We are told that children played gladiator games and young people discussed the form of leading fighters. Some were popular sex symbols: graffiti from the first century AD have been found on walls in Pompeii—one Thracian gladiator was “the maiden’s prayer and delight” and “the doctor to cure girls.” Their images appeared on pots and dishes.
Public displays attracted large crowds. A temporary stadium would be erected in the Forum. The gladiators fought with a variety of weapons and armor (some cruelly bizarre, such as the andabatae, whose helmets were blindfolds) and were never matched in their duels. So a naked retiarius was given a helmet, a net and trident and chased after a mirmillo, decked out in a coat of mail. Sometimes condemned criminals fought each other without armor