Popular Culture in Ancient Rome by J. P. Toner

Author:J. P. Toner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-01-13T05:00:00+00:00

Even the counters used to play were abusive, with particular scores having names such as ‘adulterer’, ‘fucker’, ‘tart’, ‘cunt-licker’.96 Part of the fun of this came from subverting the phrases found on polite tables. But most of the enjoyment came from going head-to-head with a social rival in a heated contest, where status could be won. This was an unofficial status, unrecognized by any others than those in the gambling group, but its importance is reflected in the camaraderie that the historian Ammianus noted:

It must be admitted that, even though all friendships at Rome are rather cool, only those which are forged by gambling are close and intimate, as if they had been formed during glorious struggles, and were firmly grounded in great affection; some of this group of gamblers live in such harmony together that you would think they were brothers. You sometimes, therefore, see a low-born man, who knows all the secrets of the dice, put on a solemn and serious face because someone important has been preferred to him at a grand entertainment or assembly.97

By the late republic, the traditional Roman political system was breaking down in the face of its inability to cope with the influx of power, wealth and people into the city of Rome. Tensions between the people and the elite were exacerbated by the fact that the urban non-elite acquired new ways of enjoying themselves outside elite control, ways that brought the rough, boisterousness of carnival into everyday life on the streets. It was clear that new institutions and rituals were needed to reintegrate the people more fully into Roman society. Corbeill has suggested that populist aristocrats, the populares, adopted non-elite gestures to distance themselves from the more elitist optimates and align themselves politically with the urban plebs.98 I want to suggest that the games developed as a way of incorporating carnival into government. Bakhtin argued that carnival was incapable of full assimilation by the dominant culture because it was inherently opposed to anything official. The spirit of carnival would not be able to stop itself from mocking. But in Roman public entertainments, a cultural form was created that drew on many of the principles of popular entertainment to help lure the people into a new relationship with the official culture. As a result, the official culture itself was changed. This shows that the popular culture did have upward influence in Roman society, and was not just the beneficiary of cultural crumbs falling from the elite table.

That the games were successful in gaining the allegiance of the people seems clear: as Cameron says, ‘The man in the Roman street positively lived for the thrill of circus and theatre.’99 It is true that the disproportionate access to the Colosseum reflected society’s power structure and made these contests an occasional treat for most, unlike the circus races which were easily available to nearly all. But the important point was that all were symbolically included, albeit in a way that also spelled out to them their social inferiority.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.