The Day Commodus Killed a Rhino (Witness to Ancient History) by Jerry Toner

Author:Jerry Toner [Toner, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2014-12-03T21:00:00+00:00

Statuette of a type of gladiator known as a Samnite, after warriors from an area of Italy that the Romans conquered in the early republic

This reliance on specialist expertise was also reflected in the way that the fans became intensely knowledgeable about their heroes. Some spectators knew the gladiators’ records in detail. Galen describes how the partisans of the Blues and Greens even smelled the dung of their racehorses to satisfy themselves that they were being fed good quality fodder. This kind of knowledge helped to create a hierarchy within the crowd, identifying those who were the real experts. These were the people who would excel both in the crowd and in real life.

The strong competition between the fighters and the factions also reflected the vigorous competitiveness of normal life. People had to struggle hard to work their way up the status ladder. Surviving Roman graffiti is full of depictions of gladiators. It is possible to see this as a vicarious identification with the fighters who symbolized the ordinary people’s own struggle to make ends meet and even improve their situation a little. This gladiator graffiti tends to contain lots of information in the form of facts and figures. Boiling down a gladiator’s existence to a series of hard numbers reflected the focus on practical outcomes that the ordinary people had. What mattered were results. It also suggests that numeracy was far more important in their outlook than we might otherwise imagine. Literacy was a luxury that most could do without. The ability to count and calculate, to know how to price and evaluate were indispensable skills.

The spectators issued a constant stream of vocal commentary on how each competitor was performing. This reflected the vocal manner in which daily opinions and judgments were formed. In this Roman rat race, people had to work hard to maintain their reputations and coneal their weak points. The gladiator himself acted as a lesson in how to hide what he was really thinking. An old proverb said “the gladiator takes counsel in the sand.” He had to think on his feet and keep poker faced so that his opponent had no clue what move he intended to make next. Similarly, the charioteer had to be prepared to make brave maneuvers to force rivals into colliding and coming to grief. Like the gladiators, charioteers epitomized the attributes that people needed in their daily lives: technical expertise, resilience, strength, nous, the ability to jockey for position, and to cheat. The games therefore allowed the Romans to personify popular virtues in heroic terms.

We find a symbolic equivalence between typical lower-class characters and the different types of gladiator in ancient dream interpretation. The dream interpreter, Artemidorus, explains the significance of gladiatorial dreams. His analysis is that if a poor man dreamt that he was fighting as a gladiator that was good news because it meant that he would get married. He then explains how the dream will indicate what character of woman the man will marry because it

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