Opposition and Abolition

Roman gladiatorial games have evoked such revulsion on the part of western scholars since the nineteenth century that many of them have looked for evidence for opposition to them in antiquity itself. There are some interesting parallels here between the imperative to find evidence for ancient criticism of the games, and modern scholars’ treatment of the wider subject of slavery. For example, a humanitarian programme to counter the cruelty involved in both institutions has been seen in what was in fact the ever-increasing tendency for emperors to try to control the lives of their subjects through legislation. Alternatively, Greek philosophy (especially the Stoic principle that ‘man is sacred to man’, homo sacra res homini) and/or Christianity have been claimed by some to have been responsible for the decline of one and the disappearance of the other in late antiquity. ¹ Hostility to the Roman games was combined with the nineteenth-century preference for Greeks over Romans to produce the unsustainable idea that gladiatorial contests were rejected by the Greek half of the Roman empire. ‘Le génie propre de la race grecque lui inspira pour les combats de gladiateurs une répugnance qu’elle ne surmonta jamais complètement’. ² As late as 1940, when Louis Robert accumulated the wealth of archaeological and literary evidence for the popularity of gladiatorial games in the Greek world, he could not bring himself to accept the conclusion that by the second century ad, the Greek cities of the Roman empire were competing with one another to introduce gladiatorial contests as proof of their earnestness in adopting Roman culture. Scholars selectively interpreted what evidence there was in terms of their own predilections and presuppositions, and those presuppositions 129were often by no means as liberal as they appear. If Greeks appeared to be enjoying these contests, then these scholars assumed that they cannot have been true Greeks. Much of the eastern archaeological evidence originates from Asia Minor rather than from the old Greek territories (this is in fact only because these provinces had more wealth to spend on public institutions in the Roman period, and the literary sources make it clear that gladiators also appeared at Corinth, Athens or Rhodes). When Friedländer and Lafaye wrote, it was possible to explain away the popularity of the games amongst this ‘half-oriental racially mixed population’ (‘halborientalische Mischlingsbevölkerung’) as the result of insufficient superior Greek blood, ‘grâce aux instincts naturellement sanguinaires des populations orientales qui s’y trouvent en contact avec les Grecs’. ³