ABSTRACT
In the early centuries CE, martyrdom was institutionalised violence. Roman law allowed the condemnation of low-class or especially appalling criminals to ‘exaggerated penalties’, typically crematio, burning alive, or ad bestias, exposure to wild animals. These penalties were inflicted in public, as part of the spectacle offered at games in honour of the gods. They took place in purpose-built amphitheatres, which were also used for fights to the death between wild animals, or wild animals and humans, or humans and humans. Fantasias were performed upon the basic themes: convicted persons were sometimes made helpless and sometimes allowed to fight, and at times their deaths became part of a drama, enacting a scene from mythology or from their own career of crime.4 Classical scholars have rightly asked questions about the extraordinary willingness of the Romans to make extremes of pain a public spectacle. The people who watched and yelled are all too familiar, but how can we explain a society which legitimised such violence inflicted on those it saw as criminals, caused its officials to finance gladiator fights as a popular entertainment, and built amphitheatres to display, with no danger to the spectators, the slaughter of humans and animals?5
