Presented by Terry Jones
Produced, directed and written by Alan Ereira
for BBC2 and TLC
| Gladiatorial combats are arguably the most extraordinary features
of Roman civilisation. These combats were licensed murder - paid for by leading
citizens or the Emperor himself, and staged as publicly as possible. The object
was for Roman citizens to watch human beings being publicly killed as
entertainment. The idea seems depraved, and perhaps we tend to associate it with the decadence of an Empire that had lost its moral core. But in this programme, Terry Jones demonstrates that the Romans themselves did not see it that way at all. On the contrary, the State used these entertainments as a way of reinforcing what it saw as traditional Roman values. Gladiatorial killings were absolutely central to the Roman idea of Romanness - they were, in a sense, the homage paid by a decadent Empire to the old virtues of the Roman Republic. That is why Rome introduced them to each area it conquered. That is why they lasted as long as the Empire itself, and changed very little over the centuries. It has been said that these terrible "games" were ended by the conversion of the Empire to Christianity, but that is not really true. Christian Romans attended the games and even put on games themselves, and one of the early Popes hired gladiators for his bodyguard. The contests ended when the "barbarians" took over. They closed down the amphitheatres, and often converted them into areas of housing. Gladiatorial contests were based on a belief that people’s lives ought to be at the disposal of their masters, and that compassion was a weakness which could fatally undermine Roman control of the world. Rich men would enthusiastically decorate their homes and family tombs with pictures of the contests they had presented, including the figures of people and animals slaughtered in the entertainment. In a similar way, the victory column erected by Marcus Aurelius in Rome was decorated with all kinds of barbarities carried out by the Roman Army against unarmed "barbarians" (burning their homes, snatching babies from their mothers, killing old men). Romans were meant to be proud of their ruthlessness. Terry argues that this celebration of brutality lay at the very heart of ancient Rome, and that the enthusiastic adoption of Roman motifs and architecture by modern states carries an undertone of ruthless authoritarianism which we should regard with deep suspicion. He shows that the values of twentieth-century fascism were very similar to those of Classical Rome. In accepting the Romans as "civilised", and accepting the Roman description of the Goths and Vandals as "barbarians", we are in danger of allowing ourselves to be duped. Those "barbarians" brought an end to four centuries of state-sponsored savagery, a theatre of death whose object was to suppress compassion and encourage contempt for weakness. |