Gladiators and Beast Hunts by Christopher Epplett

Author:Christopher Epplett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2016-05-27T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The Infrastructure of the Arena

As alluded to periodically in our previous discussion, all munera, whether they were the massive imperial spectacles of Rome, or the countless, much more modest events staged every year throughout Roman territory, required a considerable degree of planning and organization beforehand. As we shall see, the preparation of a successful munus required a veritable army of officials and support personnel, whose responsibilities ranged from training gladiators and other performers to ensuring an adequate supply of healthy animals for a given venatio. One advantage possessed by the emperors in Rome was having the ready resources of the Roman army at hand to help pursue such objectives. Although such behindthe-scenes activities did not garner the attention of the spectacles themselves on the part of ancient writers, enough evidence remains to illustrate the tremendous investment in terms of both money and manpower which was necessary for the staging of munera across Roman territory over the course of several centuries.

One indispensable group in the preparation of an arena spectacle that we have already mentioned was the familia, a group of trained performers headed by a chief trainer/manager known as a lanista. Such groups, as we have seen, began to emerge in the later Republic as the gladiatorial munera became more and more popular. The tens of thousands of prisoners-of-war captured by Roman armies during the last two centuries of the Republic provided, of course, a more than ample pool of potential recruits for these familiae.

When an editor wished to stage a spectacle, he would normally procure the services of a lanista and his familia. The price the spectacle organizer had to pay, of course, depended upon a number of variables, most notably the number of performers he wished to include in his event. Another very important variable was the number of performers killed in the munus. Under ordinary circumstances, it appears, the editor was merely renting the services of a given familia, and the price charged by the lanista came with the nominal understanding that all of his performers would be returned unharmed after the spectacle (or at least not seriously injured). The spectacle organizer, then, had to pay extra compensation for any performers who were incapacitated or killed during his spectacle, an amount that might reach as much as fifty times what he had originally paid for the person in question!1

With the spread of munera across the Empire came the concomitant proliferation of private familiae. We have already noted that priests of the imperial cult in various cities and towns throughout Roman territory purchased a number of these groups to expedite the staging of their spectacles. To judge from the extant evidence, these familiae were not all of a single, uniform type, but could vary in composition. While some groups, like the previously discussed familia from Hierapolis, could include both gladiators and venatores, others included only one category of performer. An inscription from Corsica dating to the late first or early second century, for example, makes mention of a familia venatoria, a local group evidently involved solely with the production of beast hunts.

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