Prof Dame Mary Beard - Introduction: Murderous games

let me extend to you all a very warm welcome to this series of Gifford lecture at the University of Edinburgh for the session 2018 to 2019 my name is Stuart brown I'm professor of ecclesiastical history and the deputy convener of the Gifford lectures ships committee allow me to say a few words about the Gifford lectures before I introduce our lecture the Gifford lectures were established in 1885 by a gift from Adam Lord Gifford a justice of the Scottish Court of Session and a man of broad learning compassion and cultivation he endowed series of public lectures to be offered at each of the four older Scottish universities Admiral st. Andrews Glasgow and Aberdeen for promoting advancing teaching and diffusing the study of natural theology with natural theology defined as the knowledge of God and the foundation of ethics or morals the first series of Gifford lectures was delivered in 1888 and at the University of Edinburgh our past Gifford lectures have included such luminaries as William James onra Baron James G Fraser Albert Schweitzer Reinhold Niebuhr Iris Murdoch Charles Taylor and Rowan Williams our Gifford lecture for the session 2018 to 19 is the distinguished historian classicist and public intellectual professor Mary beard professor of classics and fellow of Newnham College at the University of Cambridge Mary beard was educated at the University of Cambridge earning her doctorate in 1982 with a thesis on Roman state religion she taught at King's College London before returning to Cambridge in 1984 as a fellow of known 'm and lecture in classics and she became professor of classics at Cambridge in 2004 a highly gifted scholar teacher she has been generous in sharing with us her scholarly expertise and also her wider insights on life and culture she is a superb ancient historian and scholar of classical literature she's the author of over a dozen books on ancient civilizations including Pompeii the life of a Roman town awarded the Wolfson History Prize in 2008 and more recently the critically acclaimed SPQR a history of ancient Rome in 2015 her historical writings are characterized by impressive learning compelling analysis and I for just the right historical illustration a lively readable style a gentle sense of humor and an abiding humanity and above all she has the confidence to make her writings accessible to a wide readership she makes effective use of television with such a claim series as meet the Romans and ultimate Rome Empire without limit enriching classical studies for a still wider public her thought-provoking add-ons life has a vast following one of Britain's best-known and best loved public intellectuals she's promoted compassion for refugees and a commitment to assisting those in need across the globe there have been numerous honours to mention just a few she was elected fellow with British Academy in 2010 she was awarded the OBE in 2013 the bodily medal from the University of Oxford in 2016 and in 2018 she was made a dame for her services to the study of classical civilizations for her series of differed lectures professor beard has defined the theme the ancient world and us from fear and loathing to enlightenment and ethics highly appropriate for a Gifford series her six lectures will explore the foundations of ethics including why the classical world continues to matter and how an understanding of antiquity can challenge the moral certainties of modernity please note that the lecture and questions this evening are being recorded and the video will shortly be available online on the University of Edinburgh Gifford lectures web page professor beard could I now invite you to give the first of your Gifford lectures on the topic of murderous games exploring how we can view ancient cultures as standing both for the pinnacle of civilizations and for the nadir of corruption and cruelty just gonna switch myself on ya it's worked um thank you very much today and let me start more generally by thanking all the organizers of these Gifford lectures for the invitation to be here today I feel hugely honored to be in a list of speakers stretching back more than a century and including so many of my own heroes and heroines to pick out just three I learnt an awful lot of my Roman religious history from William Ward Fowler's religious experience of the Roman people which were the Gifford lectures here in 1909 I've always wanted to sort of tread in the footsteps of Hannah Arendt who was the first female different lecture Aberdeen in 1972 and I recently much enjoyed watching Judith Butler's 2017 Series in Glasgow on equality and violent non-violence when he was about violence too but fully recommended and I still feel a little bit anxious about what lore difference reaction to my own series might be I mean I'm pleased to say that I fit some of the prescriptions he laid down in his will fine I shall not be talking about miracles which was the topic he was explicitly against I do fancy myself as a bit of a free thinker and that was a category of lecturer he explicitly welcomed and I should be talking in various ways about morality and ethics as I reflect on our own ethical engagement with the ancient Greeks and Romans whose practices habits and morals were I'm sure there's no need to point out sometimes disconcertingly different from own but if Lord Gifford wherever he is has his ear open what I'm about to say I hope that he will listen with his usual generous and capacious definition of what natural theology is right so if he's there I hope you enjoy it but can I also thank all of you for being here today and also the staff of the University for taking the trouble to change the location of these lectures so that more people could come along as I've discovered their predecessors in the 1880s were far less flexible and they didn't make any changes at all when a mini rau broke out in the Glasgow Herald in 1888 because max Mueller's lectures had been timed for three o'clock in the afternoon which the letter writer said one letter writer said was fine for quotes students and clergymen because they were assumed not to have anything to do at three o'clock in the afternoon but not and I'm quoting for businessmen and clocks and had to say it wasn't just Glasgow it was even worse the next year in Edinburgh when the lectures were timed for midday and the same rare broke out and the admins stock doggedly to their time it was I have to say a start to the whole series there was just a little bit at variance with the intentions of Lord Gifford who was committed to the idea of the lectures being public and popular and open to the whole community and as I can see that certainly an aspiration that is very much top of the agenda now in the spirit I guess a bit of another great phrase I found in the will of Lord Gifford which I read very carefully he said nothing but good can result from free discussion so I hope that exactly what we're going to have over the next few weeks but to my topic the ancient world and us know the theme of these lectures as a whole Springs from some casual encounters I had almost twenty years ago now in the Colosseum in Rome we're in the middle of some other work I was dawdling with nothing much to do for a couple of hours and I ended spending most of the time eavesdropping rather wickedly on the school parties from different countries who were being shown around the Colosseum by teachers and tour guides it was fascinating whatever the nationality whatever the language they were being talked to in the script was almost always the same and the reaction of the kids was almost always the same go something like this the teacher would say what used to happen here almost immediately some child it was usually a boy would stick his hand up and say something like well it's aware the Romans used to kill people for entertainment and throw them to the wild beasts miss Wright the teacher were then saying would we do that now and they would all say no miss in pretty much unison and then you watch this horrible self-satisfied blow of the confidence in human progress a sanctimonious fog of self-righteousness descending on the whole bloody group right now if I witnessed that today I think I'd interrupt I'd go over I'd say no I mean hang on he's been nowhere we see violence for entertainment in our own culture and anyway who's still getting a thrill out of gladiatorial combat which of you has just brought I would get really school mistress so which of you has just bought a gladiator model right or had their picture taken those dreadful ripoffs scanned radiators outside the Coliseum movie it's just then out I think it really was today in 2019 and I think if the kids are bit older I think I would have added how do you compare what went on here with the fact that we know that millions of people have recently watched footage of a real life mass murder on their smartphones and that at least one mainstream British newspaper has posted footage on their website of real dead murder victims let's think a minute back then I wasn't remotely brave enough to do anything of the sort but word has stuck with me and it's raised some of the bigger questions that I want to explore in this series of lectures you don't have to worry I won't actually be defending gladiatorial games as sort of harmless sport and in a way of course the children's reactions with absolutely spot-on but I do want to question some of our own ethical engagements ethical dimensions of our engagement with the Greeks and Romans and in particular that kind of unreflective sense of moral superiority the we often adopt when we confront the ancient past I can't think for example how many times students have said to me when we've been studying ancient slavery that we don't have slaves anymore and I have to take a big breath and now I am braver and say Joe are you absolutely certain and you can imagine how the conversation goes now this isn't meant to be at all a roundabout way of saying that the ancient history classical history has something direct to teach us I'm going to put my cards anslee straight on the table I don't actually think that ancient history or classical culture is relevant in any kind of straightforward way or in the way that the media tries to draw superficially easy but misleading parallels between then and now what you've got on the screen obviously afraid it's a bit of a cheating composite by me between the Washington Post and the Daily Mail you know tendentious Lee claiming that it was immigration that finished off the Roman Empire just like dot dot and you then fill that in so I don't think there's a simple equivalence between ancient circumstances and our own but I do think that looking harder at Greeks and Romans helps us to look harder at ourselves if there's a dialog between now and antiquity oh I guess actually between now and any period of the past but I hope I convinced you that antiquity is a particularly rich one yeah if there's a dialogue it must impact on now - not just on how we think about then but on how we think of that's the that's the kind of the underpinnings of these lectures and that at the same time raises further issues about how we study the ancient world particularly those parts of it that we find pretty repellant not just those that we think we don't how do we deal with some of the horrors from the sadism of what the ancients got up to and what bits of the ancient world do we admire Fenian democracy has come to later in this series would I think be one example but why did we admire it and what blind spots do we have to have in place in order to admire those bits of the ancient world that we do more generally to what extent should a historian judge deplore or a proof as much as study what is the role of the role of a historians ethical engagement in their subject study to bring this down to just one concrete example which in a sense sets the scene for tonight how do we begin to understand what went through the mind of let's say an ordinary Roman bloke as he sat through a full day's slaughter in the Coliseum now the bottom line of course is that we can't possibly understand that but I think that doesn't prevent us and shouldn't prevent us having a go understanding it or at least thinking what the options are were the Romans simply crueler than we are or were the coordinates of how they thought about the world so different but what we think of as cruel didn't appear the same to then and enter moral relativism with a big coach and horses at that point now in saying this I don't also want to give the impression that these lectures are all going to be about doom and gloom and horrible things that the ancients got up to and terrible soul-searching they won't be up I hope also that we'll have some fun exploring some of the most intriguing bits of the classical world some of the most vivid and surprising evidence for what went on there whether that's today gladiators painted statues next time from Julius Caesar to the hero Achilles and from very high level history to humble tombstones but through that I'm always going to be keeping in mind a range of quick questions slightly different I think each time that shine some of the spotlight of that inquiry back onto us that's why it's about the ancient world and us know the rest of this evening I should be sticking to the murderous games of the Roman amphitheatre games I hasten to say being a conventional literal but perhaps misleading translation of the Latin term Ludi in case you were thinking it sounded fairly jolly these games are almost as much I think a part of our own culture now as they were of the ancient world in 2018 almost seven and a half million of us visited the Colosseum which was the prime location most famous and largest location of these games that's a lot more than ever visited it in the Roman world for whatever purpose more than twice as visited Pompeii in the same year and it makes it's the world the world's third most visited tourist or heritage attraction it's beaten only by the move 10 million and the National Museum of China at 8 million and here is the key to get in they have slightly improved things with a rather ferocious online booting scheme now but still pretty much a queue so enormous numbers of people go to the very heart of gladiatorial murderous display every year but it's not only that it's not just a question of mass tourism riddled through Western culture Oh famous representations of gladiatorial combat particularly over the last couple of centuries in European art from Jerome's famous painting of the amphitheater which is said to have inspired Ridley Scott's reconstructions in the movie there's Simeon Solomon's focus on the women in the audience here demanding the death of the fighter you can see the thumbs-down or even in modernist style George de kere eCos gladiators practicing and that's just high art and there's plenty more if you go to more popular versions this is my favorite actually he's ripped the scene off actually from Jerome in the amphitheater Asterix the gladiator and you can find any number of cheesy jokes about gladiator I'm a gladiator but that's just to put food on the table what I really want to do is to teach now to be sure part of this interest over the centuries has been intensified by the way Christians came to tell the story of Roman persecution the fact that the punishment sometimes faced by early members of the faith was to be thrown to the Lions in the amphitheatre gave these spectacle in retrospect at least a powerful and pious extra resonance and the Colosseum itself still forms one setting of the Pope's Easter rituals yeah it's hard not also to sense in the general modern popularity of gladiatorial combat a particular form of dark tourism you know apart from pious pilgrims why do we and by we I include me why do we flock to visit a place of mass slaughter you've got kind of dark tourism here combined I think with a slightly unsettling prurience about what went on there and to go back from the Pope's Asterix a certain kind of comic banner ization you know actually gladiators have become one of the jokes of the ancient world but what's he all based on now the fact is we know both a lot and in some respects frustratingly little about these games and by games aren't including their under that rubric a whole spectrum of contests and spectacles which include fights between gladiators fights of men and wild beasts right up to what was effectively as with the Christians the execution of criminals by throwing them to the wild beasts all of which are things that you might have seen in there in the arena it's not just gladiators as I said we know a lot on a little and I'm gonna start with some of the things that we basically know about gladiators number one there's no real doubt that these shows that were put on in amphitheaters sometimes involve slaughter on a massive scale one roman writer for example said that in the vast games held by the emperor trajan in the early second century AD ten thousand gladiators fought over several weeks and eleven thousand animals were killed that may be an exaggeration and he doesn't actually tell us how many of the 10,000 gladiators themselves were killed and it's certainly not clear who's counting but even if you were to half it that is still pretty terrifying so nasty no doubt in our turns nasty there is also no doubt that gladiatorial combat became a defining feature of the culture of the Roman Empire there were MP theaters such as you see on the top left on the same basic model found all over the western Mediterranean and in the east theaters like this one which were designed for drama and the difference between an amphitheatre which is designed for gladiatorial combat is that the walls go all the way around and the seats in the theater you've got a stage here the semicircle in the east theaters like this were regularly converted in the Roman Empire to host Roman style games you're going to have beasts you actually had to keep the animals off the spectators and if you go around you look you'll see in places like the little holes where the metal rails were put up to keep the whatever it was off the people on the front row and certainly don't believe anybody who tells you as they are sometimes tempted to do that those lovely intellectual Greeks didn't go in for the kind of nasty stuff that the Romans did under the Roman Empire the Greeks were just as keen on gladiators as Romans though they did it slightly different buildings they're not going to be let off the hook so we've got them nasty ubiquitous and also is clear there's an awful lot of cultural meaning and significance of heavily weighted culturally these games and their participants because just like in the modern world you find hundreds and hundreds of images of gladiators and wild beasts right across the Roman Empire there on those ax there in paintings there on lamps this one's particularly not example because there's actually a lamp in the shape of a gladiator I assume you put the oil in the wick in there but not quite certain how it works I think it's probably might be a little rude right and you know if I I said you know modern images of gladiators can be kind of made pretty banal so too could ancient one this is a mosaic from an english roman villa with some actually appallingly cutesy Cupid's and you can see dressed up as gladiators fighting and training it's really afraid if we want to say that Romans in Britain had a palling taste I think exhibit one would be this right but more than that even though gladiators in the in real life were what we would call the socially excluded often enslaved or condemned criminals they were in our old anthropological saying good to think with gladiators were good to think with for the Romans and they were repeatedly used in Roman literature and philosophy as a model of human conduct the commitment of the wise man to virtue for example was said to be like that of a gladiator to his fight and the games in the Coliseum itself came to stand as a metaphor for the very nature of Roman Imperial power in a short book of poetry written by the poet Marshal to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum in 80 AD the audience at the first games, the very first games put on there is treated by the poet as if they were the Roman Empire in microcosm people who all over the world were there and emperors themselves were repeatedly judged by how they behaved when they were sitting in the Imperial box in the Colosseum the transgressions a really awful Emperor's were often summed up by their transgression at the games and the classic example and you can see quite how transgressing it is it's very very bad Emperor's used to arrange for example for arrows to be fired into and at the audience so turning those people who are supposed to be spectators of death into victims of it there's quite a lot of stories about how there was some Emperor's you felt slightly less keen on going to the Colosseum under than others and that was firing arrows at the audience was only one of their tricks see some others later so there's lots and lots of rich material but there's really big unanswered questions about all this we don't know for example how this gladiator culture started it's ubiquitous but where does it come from the Romans themselves Roman writers sometimes speculated that it came originally from their northern neighbors the Etruscans but that was a claim that they often made when they didn't have the foggiest clue right comes from the Etruscans there's a story that the very first gladiatorial display in Rome took place in connection with a funeral in 264 BC but if so we can only speculate on the funerary meaning some people of thought maybe it was a human sacrifice to the dead but that's only guesswork and we're not much better informed about the end of gladiatorial displays references to gladiators in Roman literature fade away in the mid-fifties entry AD, wild beast hunts go on longer but gladiatorial combat we don't get reference to after the mid 400s the end of that combat must I think have been connected somehow with the growth of Christianity but exactly how it was connected with that it's not clear there's no sign of an outright ban on gladiators imposed by any Christian Emperor and many all but many early Christian writers seem to be as invested in the culture the metaphors and the symbolism of gladiatorial combat as their pagan in inverted commas counterparts there's absolutely no reason to think of the first Christians as humanitarians in this respect perhaps more strikingly though is that we really don't know much about what went on at these games across the Empire or even in Rome I mean it's true we have a whole load of very very vivid snapshots of the kind of combat that was involved I mentioned Marshalls poetry written to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum and that includes some verses which describe some truly exquisitely awful ways that condemned were put to death in the Coliseum they were made to mimic the death or torment of mythical characters so one condemned man for example in 80 AD was made to play the part of the Greek hero Prometheus who in the myth was chained to a rock and had his liver torn out by an eagle marshal says that at these games in 80 they'd been a slight variant and they've got a Scottish bear who attacked, how they got it heaven knows, a Scottish bear came and attacked the guy who was playing Prometheus and there are more ordinary kind of momentary glimpses of the action and the fighters this is a graffito from Pompeii which is bit difficult to decode in detail it shows a fight between between two gladiators here - a musical accompaniment these are horn players needs a pipe players and their names and form is written next to there was an extra gladiator name here it's hard to know what it refers to but you can tell from the shorthand this is Hilarius and he may he be kicked he won a missus crooner and he this gives the number of fights he had he was missus he was defeated but reprieved and there's quite a lot of that kind of popular stuff and there also a number of tombstones of gladiators who seem to have died after the end of their gladiatorial service this is a guy who came to Rome from Alexandrian Egypt to fight in some games that celebrated some Roman victories some Roman massacres in the early second century AD and there are plenty more wonderful details like that the problem is you get all those snapshots but it's really unclear how it all fitted together and the modern accounts that you quite often read would say things like the shows usually started at 10 o'clock in the morning with fights between gladiators the bloodiest spectacles I'm sort of quoting here the bloodiest spectacles involving condemned criminals took place over lunch time and so on all those a fantasy little sort of fantasy or they're terribly terribly willfully overgeneralizing even something like the famous phrase that almost everybody knows Hail Caesar those about to die salute you our way Kaiser morituri te salutant which gladiators are always supposed to have said as most textbook tell us to the Emperor at the beginning of a fight that phrase is attested in ancient literature only once and it's not connected to the gladiator gladiatorial games at all it was actually a part of what some mock sailors said as they were performing in another Roman favorite which was a mock sea battle on a lake outside Rome it's become Asterix is quite right that's what we know think but that phrase has there's no reason to suppose it's got anything to do with gladiators so we have new overview of what happens we just get little glimpses and we have no idea either really about much of the infrastructure and how an earth they transported the exotic animals we read about is a complete mystery it took the British in the 19th century a whole squadron of soldiers 2,000 liter water tank and enormous time in trouble to get this poor old hippopotamus to London Zoo how on earth did the Emperor Commodus get five of them to his games plus two elephants a rhino and a giraffe at the end of the second century AD now okay Italy is a bit nearer to where you might find hippopotamuses but you know but still the basic kind of practical problems remain and they have not been solved so question is how do modern historians approach this problem well the standard tactic is we can we go to write our chapter on the murderous gangs and I'm as guilty of this as anyone I'm not just pointing a finger I've done this myself the standard tactic is to start the discussion with a few sentences saying how ghastly or was an almost beyond our comprehension and then when you got rid of that to proceed to find ways to evade the issue and avoid the horror or if you like to play it down to convert it into something that is all quite a lot more manageable for us there's any classicists here I'd say that the books that are best not doing that still not quite good enough and those by Colin Barton and Garrett Fagan but still what I've said is the standard tactic so they do that they park their deploring of it and then they say something like look okay what where do we go now how do we make this manageable well one way is to say look everybody leaving aside one or two grand spectacles in the Colosseum those that were sponsored at enormous expense by the Emperor and we're almost certainly there really was a lot of blood spilt and no expense is spared on the animals leaving those aside most shows especially the local ones were much more low-key the animals certainly wouldn't have come it wouldn't have been hippopotamuses they would have been what you could round up in the countryside nearby and there be a awful lot more wild boars than wild elephants in the arena and the death rate among gladiators people say just get real it was much much lower than you think'll fear now but we've already seen this man up here being reprieved missus interesting that on the graffiti on the same wall in Pompeii all the defeated men Oh laughs they're all missus probably won arguments go on it's an argument I'd certainly make myself probably sucks reprieves were if not the norm at least very common these guys were not it was not uniformed slaughter why well again the bottom line says more than anything else gladiators are extremely expensive expensive commodities to buy if they were slaves and even if they were volunteers and there were a few they're expensive to feed and train you couldn't afford to kill too many pushing that a bit further it's even being suggested including by me but a lot of the time in the local ordinary everyday gladiatorial displays what you saw was a lot more close to professional wrestling than to boxing that there was a parade of sham fighting an awful lot of grunts but he was all a bit of a sham right no I wouldn't disavow that but I think it's more complicated another way run the problem is a sense to look through the murderous Ness of it all and to concentrate on its kind of second order functions now I've already touched on the politics of the Colosseum as a microcosm of empire and the role of the emperor within it that good rulers shower the crowd with presents and bad rulers tried to kill him but there's not to it even than that the audience if we go to the Colosseum itself was big there's more than fifty thousand people could fit into the Colosseum and it was not just a microcosm of Empire it was a microcosm of the Roman political structure itself we think that we think that it was normally free to attend but if you went in you couldn't just sit anywhere people sat in segregated groups according to their formal political status the Senators sit on the front row and they had the kind of business class seats with a lot more space the next rank of Roman society is just behind them in a premium economy the Knights and the rest of the free population of Rome then behind that with some special places marked out for visiting dignitaries etc this reconstruction here must be the women and slaves because they are relegated to the highest levels right at the back apart from the venerable Vestal Virgins who got a ringside seat and the Empress female relatives who sit with him in the Imperial box he with then faces the people and in a sense what you see here is a kind of dramatic staged encounter between the ruler and he's ordered and ranked subjects it was a chance to image what Roman politics and political order was it was political theater as much as cruelty I suppose they're the most common way of handling this after all these new expressions of horror is to kind of massage these games into a sort of manageable modern equivalent and in talking about gladiators in particular historians find it very hard to avoid the language of modern spectator sport winners and losers and they find it very hard to avoid really kind of blurring the boundary between this kind of stuff and our modern arena sports and in a way I did that just now in smuggling in my wrestling versus boxing analogy now it's partly an irresistible tactic because it gives us some kind of language with which to describe what's going on here it's partly also because gladiators never mind their low status do you seem to have gained a degree of celebrity and reputation is kind of erotic idols or pinups look a bit like what happens to modern high achieving celebrity sportsmen or indeed movie stars or whatever one Roman satirist for example pilloried upper-class Roman ladies who left their upper-class upstanding husbands to run off with the gladiators right that is clearly what this Italian painter has in mind he's recapturing here a kind of domestic gladiatorial display here's the poor dead guy being taken out and all the ladies of the house a simpering around this kind of brute here wearing his gladiatorial kit there is an element of truth in this I think but we probably shouldn't overstate the case the remains of a very apparently richly bejeweled lady found in the gladiator barracks at Pompeii or not as used to be thought brilliant and rare evidence of her last date with her Rough Trade fighter lover you know there they were as they develop volcanic Deb Felda if it was her last date it was the very private one as it's recently been pointed out there were 18 other victims were found in the same room well it was an orgy or it wasn't that at all a lot more likely this was just a lady who was taking shelter in the gladiatorial barracks as she was unsuccessfully trying to get out of town and anyone who thinks that the erotic of the amphitheater is simple need only look at this weird object which is a set of wind chimes which appears to be in the shape of a wild beast hunter to judge from the costume who is in the process with this knife in his hand here he's in the process of battling his own penis which has turned into an animal now it doesn't take much I've got no idea how you explain it but it doesn't take much to see that there is a sign of certain anxiety here but leaving that on one side there clearly was some kind of celebrity come over take charge to cata toriel performance which may explain why summon president always just sit in their box but notoriously like Commodus in the movie lept into the arena and acted as gladiators themselves they wanted to be the real star of the show now all those arguments about how you kind of deal with this seems to me fine up to a point but they simply don't face the question that stares at you which still is for me how could they do it you don't actually evade the problem by saying that it wasn't as deadly as we painted I think overall I'm sure overall that's true but sometimes it was all if you go back to my ordinary bloke sitting in watching the shows all day in the Coliseum we don't really think that he was somehow sitting there in order to reflect on his own position in the Roman social order however important that might be as a second-order political reading of the games so how do you understand how they did it now one logical position it's a claim that the Romans or many almost Romans because there were no more homogeneous as a group than we are it's the claim that the Romans were simply crueler than us and as such enjoyed watching that kind of thing because no historical society I know takes pride in its own cruelty and plenty of Romans vehemently deplored five ITTIA as they called it or it must be that their definition of cruelty was different from ours their culture the argument might go was so much more inured to seeing wounds and death etc now okay there may be something in that but I think you always need to be careful about that kind of argument about the past the idea for example that people in history didn't get upset about the death of their young children because it happened so often it's an argument that has been roundly not on its head and in the case of gladiators and massacres of wild beasts I think I should point out that the Romans in general so far as we can tell did not simply think that animals were disposable from Romans as we know were a soppy as we are about their pets so it wasn't simply that animals didn't count and interestingly the Christian hardliner Tertullian probably writing in the late 2nd century ad made inadvertently a relevant observation he criticized the spectator at the games and he expressed his shock at people who quotes recoiled in horror at the sight of a corpse that had died a natural death but were happy to look at men getting torn apart in the amphitheater from which you conclude that not all Romans were laid-back about seeing corpses but maybe even more striking really for me are the visual representations of gladiatorial combat which are about as sanitized as our own are we can go back to this one or the naff Cupid's and the worst you get is something like yes mosaic and it really isn't all blood and guts they're also very sanitized in their treatment so what I want to do to finish with this say can we approach the question differently or can we give a different set of answers and I think that maybe what we have to do is is to think bigger about how what was going on in there in the arena of the amphitheatre was defined for people what did what did people think they were seeing now here some of the ancient objections to the games can point us in the right direction because there are indeed plenty of objections often in the very same text that use all these metaphors and symbols and illustrations from gladiatorial combat but then not the kind of objections we might expect almost none and this is generally true of Christian criticisms - almost none are concerned with the humanitarian aspects or the cruelty to fighters and animals they focus predominantly on the spectators now some of those are predicted predictably kind of snobbish critiques of popular culture you know there's a bread and circuses argument and you know the ordinary people who watch this don't have the same sophisticated view of it that I do kind of argument right posh arguments but many others are actually concerned with the effect of the shows on the audience what happened well if you get the gladiatorial games irrational passions get aroused your reason gets clouded try the remarks of the Roman billionaire philosopher billionaire lots of the Seneca what he says nothing is so damaging to good character than the habit, was very packed this, habit of wasting time at the games for then it is that vice still secretly upon you through the avenue of pleasure I come home after the games more greedy more ambitious more excessive more cruel and more inhuman because I have been among human beings now that's a very puzzling comment I have to say but remember the stress on humaneness because I'm going to come back to that what do I think is going on well in general there's something going on here with that awkward division between reality and representation don't we still struggle with to oversimplify a bit I think that reading these discussions of the games you see that for the author's the reality of the games lay in the spectators and the focus of interest of the critics was on the spectators and on the effect on them of the representation and constructed spectacle that they watched it's almost to say and about this supplement that what was going on in the arena of the amphitheatre wasn't really real now you get a hint of that in the theme stressed in Marshall's poetry on the Coliseum the emphasis is always on spectacle which conjures up a world outside the it is for example the world of mists reenacted as in the mock-up of the torture of the mythic Prometheus same is also true the the way that these fighters are dressed up we now tend to take gladiatorial costume as if it's ordinary Roman armor it's a no Roman soldier went out to battle dressed anything like a gladiator with kind of gauze over his face in other words what you're seeing there is a weird fantasy image of what fighting might be like so I think that what these real spectators looked at was a world of fantasy a representation and a sort of second-order reality of me you went to see Miss half-made real gladiators were in that sense actors whether they were celebrities or not it seems to me to draw a modern analogy the boundary of the of the arena the separation of the spectators and what they saw in the arena operated a bit like the screen on our smartphones that's to say one reason that millions of people can watch mass slaughter streamed into their hands is it the screen in their hands turns what they are seeing from reality Interactive representation it makes it watchable you wouldn't be able to watch people in front of us we can watch it on our phones and I think something of that sort is going on in the amphitheater but I think there's more to it and there are themes I just want to broach very quickly here because they'll come up later in this series I think part of what is at stake in gladiatorial spectacle wild beasts and everything is the definition of what it is to be human now all cultures debate what it is to be human and don't mean that they debate what homos ian's is but they do constantly debate who exactly is to count as a human being in the sense of a person with rights and agency attached to that status it seems to me obvious that our own debates on abortion involve those questions as someone who supports a woman's right to choose I have to recognize uncomfortable as it is for me but I am making a claim about the lack of humanity in its fullest sense of the unborn child and that other people can differ about that are we see similar if less radical issues in the rights of prisoners all the rights of those sectioned under the Mental Health Act why is it that we get so worked up about whether prisoners should be allowed to vote it's because something bigger is at stake and I think that what's bigger is the humanity of the prisoner but it's often I think easier to approach those fault lines in our own way of seeing the people the homo the hominid serpientes around us by looking at the contested and different and difficult boundaries in other cultures which may be quite quite different from our own the case of ancient Rome for example humanity in the sense that I'm talking about did not legally start now emotionally is another matter did not legally start in the uterus nor did it start at birth it started a baby became human only a few days after birth when the father would recognize the baby as a family member before that legally the baby could be disposed of and what we mean is killed with impunity what enabled in other words and how this worked in terms of the emotional economy I think it's not the matter what enabled what was in Rome I suspect mass slaughter of newborns was that they were not people no I suspect that we're dealing with some of those different boundaries but I think if we think about it we have to we have very difficult decisions about where humanity starts we're dealing with some of those different boundaries in the games in one sense those on the floor of the amphitheater the slave gladiators the condemned criminals the free volunteers who've given up that status by becoming gladiators could be could be seen as just different saying were not could be seen as not human in the way that the audience was now it seems to me that if something along those lines that explained Senecas weird stress when he's talking about the audience in terms of the humaneness of the spectators and the challenges to their humanist he's not talking though it's often translated like this he's not talking about humane in the humanitarian sense he's talking about the idea that what is it is to be human is at stake in gladiatorial combat no of course it's never simplest hurt yeah as we know the boundaries between those we designate human and non-human a contested and difficult and fragile and it's interesting that Cicero in the first century BC can write of a set of games which the spectators did show compassion for the elephants in the show they took no enjoyment and seen the Elam elephants slaughtered why asked Cicero he thinks about this he says because there was a and you can't explain it the feeling that those elephants were almost human so what you've got is this something here about uh where we are about where we're going to draw the line on what enables us to watch this is the non humanity it partly depends the watch ability of the games partly depends on the shared illusion but the human spectators are watching a spectacle with his glorious representational edge-of-your-seat but they're not watching the murder of fellow human beings now at that point I think what I'm wanting to point to because it won't come back to this in later lectures is that that's kind of why they the kids answer you know we wouldn't do that now would we no we wouldn't is missing the point because what you've got and these are parent little puzzling problems that we have with Roman history it's not an issue about whether we would do that or whether you know whether the Romans were crueler what it's taking us into is both a world which is fundamentally different from our own but it's a world that can make us ask different questions about our own now where do we watch this do we have difficult batteries between the human and the nonhuman now that would be a such a gloomy place to end that I'm going to finish instead with a simple story and a fun story from the Colosseum that takes up in a different sense our own ability to feel that we're fellow humans with the Romans because that's another question it's an eyewitness account I'm talking about an eyewitness account of some games in the Coliseum in 192 aid given by our old favourite here Commodus the eye waitlists obvious games is a senator and a historian by the name of Dyer Casius who sitting in the front row because he's a senator Commodus has done what bad Empress like to do he has stolen the limelight and transgressed and social and natural and human order by performing in the arena himself that's on the movie and according to die oh he had just decapitated an ostrich having done this will forget we're going to be sorry for the ostrich having done this Commodus comes over to the senatorial seats like you guys on the front row and he waves the ostrich head and he's got a sword in the other hand and he says grins as if dive says to say o us next you know if he can decapitate an ostrich what was it good to do next um so how did the Senators react to this well daya says it was a combination of fear and the feeling that air about to get a fit of the giggles and horrible awareness but if they were caught laughing they really might be for the chop so what they're going to do it was Dyer himself he boasts awful boasting passages who had a bright idea they were all wearing laurel wreaths so he took a laurel wreath leaf from the wreath he was wearing and he saw stir in his mouth and he chewed on it really hard and he nudged his neighbor's to do the same and they all managed to stop laughing by trying on a laurel wreath leaves now it's a nice story but I think it's one place it's one of the very few places where any of us who ever has at school remember biking on a ruler or biting on a rubber that to suppress the laughter that would have been totally totally dreadful if the teacher had spotted not quite the chop but bad enough it's one of those few places where we can know bodily exactly what the Romans felt thank you well thank you professor beard for a superb first gifford lecture I think the applause of the audience has expressed more eloquently than I can how much we valued the lecture and there's not only forming it was thought-provoking and it was good fun we look forward very much to the next lecture in the series which will be tomorrow evening at 5:30 on the title of whiteness a couple of announcements we are holding an online discussion throughout the fortnight of the series or the first one the first week of the month on the last week of the month on our Gifford lectures blog which is led by mr. Andrew Johnson to follow and contribute to the blog discussion visit the address at the back of the leaflet and also on our Gifford lectures web pages could I also say that everyone is warmly invited to attend the Gifford seminar co-hosted by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh to be held on Wednesday the 29th of May from 2:30 to 3:45 p.m. in the G 3 lecture theatre 50 George Square the seminar will be chaired by Professor John Richardson professor emeritus of classics at the University of Edinburgh and professor beard will be joined on a panel by Professor Douglas Cairns professor of classics and dr. Lucy Gregg senior lecturer in classics here at Edinburgh they'll be discussing questions from the audience arising from the Gifford series as a whole further information and tickets are available on our University Gifford webpage and tickets are free but will be subject to availability now normally I would say we have a 2-3 minute break to allow those who have to leave to slip away but I think that's already happened so we now have some time for questions a few questions from the audience if you have a question could you please raise your hand and wait for the cordless microphone to reach you before you speak and we have a couple of microphones roving somebody must have a question there's somebody at the back there yes there was a hand which was yeah there's one there so you mentioned the ability of people nowadays to watch horrible things because there's that kind of divide creation by the smartphone screen and in some way it blocks a sense so I mean you can't touch what's going on you can't smell what's going on for instance is there in some sense what the barrier around the Coliseum could do there's there's nothing like that although there's there's missus we don't quite know how it worked down there there's necessarily a barrier because you don't want to get caught by the animals so there is I think a distance I once did walk up to where the women and slaves sit and I'd always I went there on the assumption that I was going to say well they got a lousy few didn't they you know actually it was it was like looking at an image you know it's there's there's something about the distance between you and it that really makes a different than not for the Senators because they're close and I don't I don't think that my explanation as I put it is the be-all and end-all I mean I think there are other I mean I think the other thing that we do in order to enable ourselves to watch violence is to say it isn't real so we talk about acting or as I did a little energy about this with Martha Connie on the radio and she said but it's news so it's news you can watch it and I think that's very kind of modern alibi where we're allowed to watch really awful things but we still have to find a way of making we have to have any and I think just some extent our excuses are analogous they're not the same but I think the what what in some way going on is a kind of it's a presentation of something that is mythical not real a kind of fantasy world in which these people are play acting in a sort of way that's very few people in the neck people get very very kind of nerdy about gladiate gladiatorial armor because it's slightly different sorts of gladiatorial armor there's the man with the net and there's a different forms of helmet etc they rarely stop to say look these are weird you know this is like kind of watching sort of spacemen in Roman terms there's something there's a distancing here between us and the fighting and one of the explanations for why there's why the gladiatorial arena is so popular is is the Romans are a warrior race and when they don't have any real battles to fight any longer well so they all go win when the average guys not serving in the army he goes along to the Coliseum or his local amphitheater but what he sees that he's nothing like Roman military activity as I say no Roman ever looked like that on the battlefield it's weirdo stuff so but yes I mean I Zia bout it but I think that's that's the way I'm going to push it I wondered two things is Rome and the Roman world really unique as far as we know in the scale of games that were held and secondly if we got much access other than the instances you quoted to people's Diaries and so on where we might get some insight to what people actually felt about them people talk about bullfighting as a compa random and there's a lot of it's a lot of desire in fact to prove a kind of genealogical connection between the bullfight the gladiatorial games it then it becomes what you mean by games and spectacle and I think that if you're going to look at the Britain you would talk about public execution I suppose which well what hugely attended I think also there with with the sense of the criminal has become non human by virtue of the crime so people are watching not because everybody in the 18th century was horrible and bloodthirsty but because they were watching something was not about the shedding of human blood someone has counted themself out of that so I think you can find similar things but not it's hard to find anything which is a direct analog and I think in terms of the other evidence I think I've given you a reasonable conspire of the kind that kind of immediate evidence that we have there is there is some evidence that I haven't covered about the economic infrastructure of particularly local gladiatorial festivals of and it's clear that in the second century AD the the sort of apparent compulsion for the local magistrates to put on shows like this in their own in their own communities got to be overwhelming in terms of the outlay of cash when I said gladiators were expensive I'm sort of drawing on that and Marcus Aurelius the philosopher emperors also one of the most bloodthirsty he puts a cap and it's apparently a very welcome cap on the expenditure so the bits I've the kind of quality of the evidence that I've missed out is on that of the gladiatorial infrastructure how the local troops are organized which is as you would imagine outside Rome itself is mostly private enterprise then hired and it's a bit like you know you know modern contracting our services really the local magistrate has got to put on a gladiatorial show so they take ten you know so they put you out to tender and then hope they get a decent you know I hope the lowest bidder comes in with a good show and so there is that range there is an economic history economic social history element that I didn't talk about but otherwise you've got the sort of things it's a two parter question professor we know that the the Romans were extremely practical people to what extent was this a way of actually dealing with whether it's your conquered armies conquered people conquered whatever it was an extremely horribly practical way of actually dealing with people who were essentially under the the the the room and the the Roman thumb that's the that the the first part the second one is that over time is it possible that the gladiatorial experience evolved from a practical way of dealing with a conquered people into something else that then became more of an entertainment you'd find some historians she might make similar arguments to that well I would resist a bit the the idea the practicality and we would like to think the Romans are practical because they kind of tried to convince us that they were I think gladiatorial combat is a very impractical way actually I'm dealing with people who don't want you know it's enormous expensive it requires vast plant huge organization when actually at other cultures have found much more sort of cost-effective ways of getting rid of prisoners like killing them in so I don't I wouldn't buy that I would say there's an enormous I mean I still got a big black hole what I also think is fall no but there is an enormous amount of effort going into this now one almost everybody I think would suggest that would would agree with your second point though that somehow you know this did not whenever it started let's suppose 264 BC was you know the first little gladiatorial display at her in some funeral and then you're going on the fifth you've got 700 years um there's going to be changes but it's very hard to delineate what certainly I think the one thing you would say is that it it becomes more cordoned off but the Coliseum isn't built till the end of the first century AD so where were the gladiatorial displays before then well actually in the first century BC they were in the forum and as some, you know, a the lads came and they put on some barriers and the gladiators and beasts for in the Roman Forum now that is a kind of embeddedness of the spectacle in the public space which must have resonated differently from by the time you get to our iconic monument their iconic monument the Colosseum you know you've got a wall round it and it is for that I mean we have no clue what happened to the Colosseum on the other days of the year and it was not being used for gladiatorial displays I mean was it locked up you know was it a sort of Street Market you know car boot as it were we simply do not know we have a few stories but they're totally predictable about you know a few prostitutes around the edge of it but that's all so there must be there is a change but haven't oh you know but I can't go further than that perhaps one more question I think hi professor similar to a question far already but a little different and I wonder could you shed some light on other ancient traditions and spectacles contemporary to the ancient rooms and how they viewed them and was there may be a sense of hypocrisy of their look and other cultures or maybe lesser than them or barbarians was there similar traditions and cultures or sorry spectacles like that within the ordinary ambit of what the Romans would know about then it's very hard to point to on that scale now you know thing is that the Romans wrote about it and they left purpose-built monuments so that we know about it so I'm not kind of I wouldn't like to say that those sort of things didn't happen elsewhere but the Romans don't talk about it don't say oh we're doing just like for what the ex do or no can we easily certainly in in Middle Eastern North African cultures it's very hard to show that I think that what you ought to bear in mind and I in a sense conceals rather is that in some ways and I'm not going back on this being the iconic bit of how Roman see themselves in spectacular terms but so the Colosseum holds about 50,000 it does a bit depend on how to squash they are really you know some people put it up to 75 the Circus Maximus where there is chariot racing holds calls for million so actually if you were to say and and there is quite a lot of of charioteer culture in Rome - it's rather outplayed by gladiatorial culture in the surviving traces and you can't go and visit the Circus Maximus in anything like the way you can visit the Colosseum that's partly because it was excavated by Mussolini nothing survives and what looks like as if it's where you sit it's just Mussolini's archaeologists spoil heaps the Circus Maximus isn't there to be seen but a reasonable critique of what I said would be to say that me and popular culture and you know Jerome and you know everybody else apart from Ben Hur has a slightly elevated this kind of spectacle raw than the chariot races which were had a Romans got a population of a million quarter of a million getting the Circus Maximus that's a very high proportion of people going and maybe we ought to be thinking about this not on its own you know I've kind of I've extracted it as this iconic Roman spectacle with problems because although people you know it's a bit like watching the Grand National you know people get really badly hurt and that chariot races but they're not sitting out to get hurt because this is so so different for us I have put too much symbolic light other people you know too much symbolic weight on it as against the races which were not much bigger deal I think we're going to need to draw things to a close we've had a tremendous first Gifford lecture the lecture has has defined the terms some of the themes that are going to be explored in the series and she's beautifully it'll introduce some of the ethical questions that she'll be coming back to I'm sure I'm sure there could be many more questions we're all sort of filled with analogies and thoughts as a result of a lecture and pleased to hold them there there will be an opportunity at this coming seminar could I thank the audience too for your committed attention your your questions and your obvious interest now everyone is warmly invited to a reception to celebrate the opening of this series so there will be a drinks reception immediately after you certainly do and it will be in the business school atrium which is just next door but I think we you may have to go down and up from the back of the business school but please do please do come to the reception please do come to the lecture tomorrow afternoon and could we thank our speaker once again

Channel: The University of Edinburgh

Views: 47,772

Rating: 4.8313255 out of 5

Keywords: Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh University, Mary Beard, 2019, University of Cambridge, Mary Beard Lecture, University of Edinburgh, Classics, Newnham college, Dame Mary Beard, Edinburgh, University, lecture, The Ancient World and us, enlightenment, ethics, professor, students, learning

Id: goRP7PtHx5U

Length: 88min 53sec (5333 seconds)

Published: Tue May 07 2019