Those About to Die

by Daniel Pratt Mannix

  For these individual fights, unless they were between a Retiarius and a Secutor, a referee drew a line in the sand with his staff to mark the point where the two warriors were to meet. The two gladiators stood on either side of the mark while the referee gave the men their final instructions and slaves held their helmets and shields. The gladiators not fighting lounged under the statues of Victory which lined the podium walls.

  The signal for the fight was given by a trumpeter, using a curved instrument like a French horn. The two men came together slowly, their faces obscured by their visored helmets, almost completely covered by their huge curved shields. Huck­sters selling souvenir glasses and small trays with the pictures of the gladiators painted on them moved through the stands. The crowd stopped breathing as the arena was filled with the clash of steel for many of the spectators had wagered all they owned and possibly their liberty on the outcome of the fight.

  One man staggered. He recovered himself but blood was staining the golden armour. From fifty thousand throats came the shout, "Habet!" (He's wounded!) Some shouted the word gleefully, some in despair, depending on how they had placed their bets.

  The wounded man fell to his knees. His opponent pressed in on him, using his shield and the full weight of his body to force the injured man down. The gladiator fell and made the sign for mercy as a great shout went up from the stands. Few people bothered to give either a thumbs-up or thumbs-down decision; they were too busy either paying off or collecting their bets.

  Another pair entered the arena and still another. As the fights went on the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, howled with rage, clapped with delight or flung miracles of insults at the fighters. There were constant cries of "Good! Aim for breast! What's the matter with you, you filth-gorged privy maggot! Let him have it! Give it to him!" When one man went down and the victor turned to face the stands, the crowd went into a frenzy of delight, especially if they had been betting on him. Women especially broke into hysterical spasms, and not only the common women in the upper tiers. The noble ladies on the podium often lost their heads. When one hand­some young Myrmillo, only a few weeks before a simple farmboy living on the slopes of Apennine, paraded before the podium with his bloody sword upraised a great lady screamed uncontrollably and flung her brooch and necklace into the arena. Then she stripped off her rings, tossed them onto the sand, and finally ripped off her undergarments and threw them also. When the young Myrmillo came on the crumpled gar­ments, he thought that the lady had simply thrown him her scarf or cloak. As he picked up the clothing to toss it back, the underwear unfolded. The simple boy stood gazing horrified at what he was holding. Then he dropped the garments and fled from the arena "more terrified of a woman's underwear than he had been of his enemy's sword" The crowd thought this was killingly funny and nearly died laughing. The patrician lady's husband was not so amused.

  At that, he was more fortunate than the husband of Hippia, a noble lady who left her husband and children and fled to Egypt with a gladiator named Sergius. Juvenal says bitterly, "Sergius was maimed, getting old, had a battered face, his forehead was covered with welts from his helmet, his nose was broken and his eyes were bloodshot. But he was a swords­man!" Whether Juvenal intended any pun, I don't know. Many great ladies enjoyed the company of famous gladiators in their private apartments, but few ever ran off with their lovers.

  Retiarii and Secutores were fighting now. One of the Reti-arii was wearing a visored helmet which concealed his face; a very unusual uniform for a net-man. The Secutor was a steady old fighter while the helmeted Retiarius was a clumsy, nervous young man obviously unsure of himself. Suddenly the Secutor took a quick step under the circling net, knocked the trident out of his oponent's hand, and threw him down. The angry crowd contemptuously gave the death signal, which the editor instandy duplicated. The despairing Retiarius tore off his helmet and stretched out both hands in supplication to the crowd. A horrified gasp went up. Everyone recognized the young man as Gracchus, a descendant of one of the noblest of the great patrician families. A drunkard and spendthrift, the young patrician had been abandoned by his family, and sinking lower and lower had finally ended in the arena as a professional gladiator.

  Unflinchingly, the Emperor gave the death sign, but the Secutor shrank from killing one "so noble and so vile." Amid a dead silence, the young man slunk from the arena.

  The fights continued to rage. Slaves pushing two-wheeled carts collected the wounded, for these men were too valuable to be burned by hot irons or knocked on the head by a hammer.

  The referees had trouble in saving the wounded even when the verdict of the crowd was for them, for the victorious gladiator, mad with the excitement of battle, would often dispatch his defeated adversary on the spot. A mural in Herculaneum shows a referee trying to stop a Myrmillo from killing his helpless Samnite opponent.

  When the crowd tired of the individual combats, companies of gladiators engaged. A platoon of Gauls fought a platoon of Thracians. Domitian was always a strong supporter of the Thracian gladiators; people became fanatical fans of certain types of gladiators just as they backed the Reds or the Blues in the chariot races. One excited man in the stands leaped up during the fight to shout, "Smear 'em Gauls! Those Thra­cians may be the Emperor's pet but they can't stand up against you boys!" The furious Domitian had the offender dragged from his seat and thrown in the arena. Then he ordered Carpophorus to turn his Hyrcanian hounds loose on him.

  After the gladiators had finished there were jousts between Equestres—mounted men on horseback in full armour with lances. The armour these men wore was not plate armour like the Mediaeval knight's but breastplates, visored helmets, and greaves on their legs. However, the Romans did know how to make jointed armour, that is, armour that can slide in and out like an armadillo's plates as a man moves. The Secutores wore such armour on their right arms. Possibly the Equestres were similarly equipped and may even have worn chainmail. Their lances were probably light like the lances used by the Light Brigade at Balaclava. I can't understand why the Romans didn't make more use of the Equestres in warfare. An armoured man on horseback can handle almost any number of footmen as the Mediaeval knights demonstrated. After all, King Arthur lived only a couple of hundred years after the time of Domi­tian, and may even have been a British governor trained by the Romans. He certainly used knights to good effect. But apparently the Romans always put their faith in the legions manoeuvring on foot. It was a great mistake.

  By the time the Equestres had finished their jousting, it was dark, but the games still continued. The catapults flung figs, dates, nuts, cakes and plums to the crowd. Free wine was distributed. Torches sprinkled with incense were lighted. The incense was of different kinds so the torches burned red, yellow, blue and green. Silver stars were hung from the awning. In the arena, cavalry fought against chariots and heavily armoured Hoplomachi fought equally well-armed Provocatores, the varicoloured lights dancing on the sword blades and shields. At the end, the arena was flooded again for a fight between African natives in war canoes, while barges full of beautiful nude girls floated around the podium wall, chanting songs and throwing favours into the stands.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor and philosopher, remarked: "I wouldn't mind the games being brutal and degrading if only they weren't so damned monotonous."

  Although the Romans devoted an enormous amount of ingenuity to ringing the variations, there is no doubt that Marcus was right. But the mob had developed a morbid taste for the spectacles which had to be gratified. Nietzsche believes that the great driving power which had made the Romans masters of the world had to be given a vent. With no worlds left to conquer, their force was dissipated in watching these holocausts.

  So I'll only touch on some of the high points of the re­maining four days of the games. A walled city was constructed overnight in the arena and besieged the next morning by legionnaires with battering rams, catapults and burning arrows. The city was defended by Persian troops
. The Romans advanced under cover of their interlocked shields, while the Persians threw down boulders, boiling oil and beams on the "testudo", or tortoise, as the formation was called. Under shelter of the testudo, other legionnaires rushed the wall with a battering ram, its head a carved ram's head made of bronze. Movable towers were brought up on rollers, and drawbridges dropped from their tops over which the troops attacked. From other levels of the towers, catapults threw stones and clusters of javelins against the defenders. The legionnaires captured the city, but only after heavy losses.

  Afterwards, there were fights with single-stick and quarter-staffs, the Paegniarii fought with their bullwhips, protecting themselves with their wooden shields, and the Postulati fought with darts. To keep the crowd amused during the noon hour, women were tied to bulls and dragged to death and little boys assaulted by men dressed as satyrs. A confessed Christian named Antipas was put in a bronze figure of a bull and a fire lighted under the image. The man's screams came out of the bull's open mouth as though the animal were bel­lowing. Chimpanzees were made drunk on wine and then encouraged to rape girls tied to stakes. When these mansized apes were first discovered in Africa, the Romans believed that they were genuine satyrs, the mythological beings who were half man and half goat. There were also man-sized apes called tityrus with round faces, reddish colour and whiskers. Pictures of them appear on vases, and they were apparently orang-outangs, imported from Indonesia. As far as I know, the Romans never exhibited gorillas, although these biggest of all apes were known to the Phoenicians, who gave them their present name which means "hairy savage."

  There were also amusing touches, or what the Romans considered amusing. A jeweller who had sold some fake stones was sentenced to the arena. The wretched man was driven into the arena and a lion's cage rolled out before him. While the jeweller fell on his knees and prayed for mercy, the door of the cage was pulled back—and out walked a chicken. The jeweller fainted from shock while the emperor had the heralds announce: "As the man practised deceit, he has now had it practised on him." The jeweller was allowed to leave the arena alive. (This actually happened during the reign of the Emperor Gallienus in 250 a.d.)

  The Romans had a robust sense of humour. At the time of Caligula, a gladiator had his right arm cut off so he was helpless. The crowd considered this uproariously funny. Another gladiator, named Bassus, strolled around the arena defending himself with a golden chamber-pot. But at least one trick played by Caligula would seem to us today, if not funny, at least a grim form of poetic justice.

  There was a group of people who used to wait under the stands by the passageway along which condemned prisoners were led to the arena. These people were degenerates of the most revolting type. They would follow the prisoners, pawing spitting and mauling them while recounting the tortures they would soon face. The sight of the cringing wretches acted as a sexual stimulant to them. (Ilsa Koch, the wife of the German supervisor at Buchenwald, was a pervert of this same sort. She used to fondle the condemned prisoners being taken to the gas chamber as they were led past her.)

  These perverts were a great nuisance to the guards in charge of the prisoners, and strict orders were given to keep them away from under the stands, but somehow they always managed to bribe or force their way in. In their efforts to enjoy the suffering of the prisoners to the last moment, they crowded into the passageways that led to the podium and sometimes even onto the podium itself. On one occasion, Caligula gave orders for the guards not to drive them away. Delighted, the sadists flung themselves on a batch of prisoners headed to the arena, kicking and punching them as the cap­tives struggled along. These degenerates became so absorbed in their sport that they didn't notice where they were going. Suddenly they heard a gate slammed behind them and found themselves in the arena with the condemned prisoners! The perverts ran wildly up and down before the podium wall, screaming that they were Roman citizens and that a terrible mistake had been made. After enjoying their antics for a while, Caligula ordered the wild beasts to be loosed and the perverts died with the others.

  Not all the acts put on dealt with blood and sex, although unquestionably these became the main attractions. The Roman shows went through somewhat the same evolution as did burlesque in America. Originally, burlesque shows were a rough-and-ready sort of vaudeville featuring dancers, novelty routines, comedians and, of course, plenty of pretty girls although the girls were only a background to the feature acts. As the tastes of the audiences grew more crude, the girls became strippers and the whole show revolved around them. Burlesque, which had produced such great comedians as W. C. Fields, Fanny Brice, and Bert Lahr, finally featured comedians who did nothing but tell dirty jokes and only came on to give the girls a chance to change their G-strings. How­ever, to break up the steady series of strip routines, there always had to be an occasional singer, an occasional vaudeville turn, a few dance teams, and so on.

  In much the same way, the Roman mob had to be given some kind of break between the gladiatorial combats and the wholesale slaughter of animals by the venatores. These "fill-ins" might be ballet dancing, litde skits like our "black-outs," or exhibitions of trained animals. Apuleius describes one of the dances:

  "A number of beautiful girls and boys in costume gave a Greek Pyrrhic dance. Lines of dancers wove in and out of circles, sometimes all joining hands and dancing sideways and then separating into four wedge-shaped groups with the base of the triangles making a hollow square. Then the boys and girls would suddenly separate and dance opposite each other."

  The skits given in the arena were typical bedroom farces which have remained unchanged for two thousand years. A man and a woman would be in bed. There's a loud knocking. "By gracious Vesta, it's my husband!" the woman screams. The man dives under the bed but the new arrival is only another of the woman's lovers. They get in bed and there's another knock. That man also dives under the bed and so on until the husband really does arrive. Then after some byplay, one of the lovers crowns him with a chamber-pot and everyone runs out of the arena.

  The trained animal acts must have been very remarkable. The Romans had an unlimited number of animals available for the games, and the bestiarii could select only those indi­vidual animals which showed promise—a long cry from today when a lion tamer, for example, has to take virtually any animal he can buy, borrow or beg. Also, the Romans had unlimited time and plenty of cheap labour for cageboys, train­er's helpers, and so on. They taught elephants to walk a tightrope, horses to dance on their hind legs and bears to pull chariots while another bear acted as driver. They also had trained ducks and geese as well as performing monkeys. The Thessalians had "bulls as well trained as chariot horses" which would lie down, ride in chariots or right each other on command. All these feats modern trainers can duplicate, but the Romans also taught lions to retrieve hares and bring them to their master's feet uninjured, after first having them kill bulls to prove their ferocity. They also staged special hunts: trained cheetahs (the African hunting leopard) coursing ante­lope, and caracals (African lynx) catching rabbits and par­tridges.

  The Romans also exhibited unicorns. These animals were really oryx antelopes from Africa but the bestiarii would take a young oryx and bind his horns together as though grafting twigs. The soft young horns would grow together, producing

  one straight horn which was a far better weapon against other animals in the arena. The legend of the unicorn probably originated from this custom although some students believs that the original unicorn was the one-horned rhinoceros of India.

  Individual fights were often staged between animals, and some of the animals became as well known as the famouj gladiators. Statius wrote a beautiful ode to a lion who was killed by a younger opponent in the arena at the time of Domitian:

  "Poor fellow, what good has it done you to learn to obey a master weaker than yourself, to learn to leave and re-enter your cage on command, to retrieve your quarry for him and even let him put his hand between your jaws? Once you were the terror of the arena and a
ll the other lions shrank back when you marched past. You died fighting, as bravely as any soldier, and even when you knew that you'd received your death wound, you waited with open jaws for the enemy to finish you off.

  "Yet know that the people and the senate mourn for you as though you were a famous gladiator and among thousands of other beasts gathered from Scythia to the banks of the Rhine, Cesar's face only fell when you died although it was nothing but another lion lost"

  There are accounts of trained lions being used to pull chariots for the editor of the games, and also several cases when trained lions saved their bestiarii masters from wild animals. Then, of course, there's the famous story of Androcles and the lion. Androcles was a Greek slave who escaped from his master and while wandering around the desert, met a lion with a thorn in his foot. Androcles pulled out the thorn and the lion never forgot the kind deed. Later, the lion was captured and shipped to the arena and so was Androcles. The starved lion was turned loose in the arena to devour the escaped slave but the lion refused to harm the man who had befriended him. A leopard was turned loose to do the job and the lion killed the leopard to defend his pal. The crowd demanded that both Androcles and the lion be freed. Afterwards, Androcles made a living by exhibiting the lion in taverns. Gellius and Aelian both swear to the truth of this story (it happened during the reign of Claudius) so I'll believe it. Ordinarily, I'd have my doubts. Anyhow, it's one of the best authenticated legends in history.

  What happened to Carpophorus? I don't know so I'll invent an ending suitable for this strange man.

  A wealthy noblewoman asked Carpophorus to bring one of his trained jackasses to her room at night, promising him a fabulous sum of money. Carpophorus naturally complied. The lady had made elaborate preparations for the event; four eunuchs had placed a feather bed on the floor, covered with Tyrian purple cloth embroidered in gold, and had arranged soft pillows at one end. The lady instructed Carpophorus to lead the jackass to the bed, get him to lie down, and then with her own hands rubbed him with oil of balsam. When the preparations were complete, Carpophorus was ordered to leave the room and return the next morning. This perfor­mance is described in great detail by Apuleius in "The Golden Ass."