Gladiating

This is a topic that's been on my mind lately, but I'll readily admit that the odds of it interesting anyone else are slim, at best. It has to do with gladiators in ancient Rome, or more precisely the modern attitude toward gladiators in ancient Rome. When I read most modern historians, I sense that they are in some way kind of angry at the Romans. Modern historians seem to say "Gosh, you guys were so advanced in administration and engineering, such a military powerhouse, such a stabilizing and civilizing influence for nigh unto a thousand years, and you'd be so easy to admire if it wasn't for those blood-soaked gladiatorial games." It pisses the historians off that the Romans enjoyed gladiatorial contests because it somehow means that the historians can't openly admire the Romans.

Historians take several tacks when dealing with gladiators. The first method seems to be to mention the Games in a vaguely negative light, but then to ignore them henceforth and hope that everyone else ignores them too. The second method is even cheesier, which is to somehow blame the rowdy mob for the Games. They usually quote the "punch-line" of Juvenal's famous line about how the people demand only panum et circenses, "bread and circuses", served up by long-suffering aristocrats who themselves hated the Games but felt they had to keep the bloodthirsty mob happy. But when you real the rest of the quotation of Juvenal, you see that he wasn't refering to the plebs or the mob or anyone else; he said "we", meaning all Romans, and he was really talking about a loss of civic virtue in general and not the bread dole and the Games in specific.

I think what bothers most historians is that for all our protestations of being somehow better than the Romans, we're really no better. The Games live on and we just don't want to admit it, and we're not so far removed from the bloody spectacle that was Rome after all.

The Games can be divided into three general categories of atrocity: public executions of criminals, cruelty to animals (or sometimes cruelty BY animals) and armed combat.

As for public execution, we modern folk have no leg to stand on. Supposedly civilized countries like Iran and China maintain the practice of public execution even in the 21st Century, and the last public execution in the United States didn't take place all that long ago. Every now and then one reads letters to the editor in the local paper claiming that bringing back public executions would somehow deter crime better than private executions. Would they really? Or do you just want to watch?

When it comes to cruelty to animals, we differ from the Romans only in scale. Remember what Michael Vick was convicted of? 'Nuff said. Cock-fights remain popular throughout the Southwest. It's hard to find a medium-size town in Mexico or Spain that doesn't have a bull ring. And canned hunts where bloated losers blast caged leopards and cougars with high-powered rifles are actually worse than anything the Romans did with animals - at least the Romans expected you to man up and go fight the big cat with nothing but a spear, not a high-powered rifle and a steel cage (The Romans knew all about what it meant to man up or cowboy up, but they referred to it as virtus).

The only area where we can claim any kind of moral superiority at all is in the field of combat between armed gladiators, but we're getting there. As boxing gave way to ultimate cage-fighting and MMA, they will in turn give way to something more violent yet. The Internet already teems with videos of guys getting killed in various ways, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if underground fight clubs don't produce the occasional fatality. Will we have televised matches between sword-armed gladiators on TV? I don't know - but we're only a few steps from joining the happy Roman throng in its orgy of blood and violence.

But you know what? It might actually be a welcome diversion from the crawling horror that the Democratic Presidential primaries have turned into. Panum et circenses? Ita! Believe I'll have me some!