Medieval Lives (2004) s01e09 Episode Script

This arena was built 1,800 years ago by the ancient Romans for gladiators to fight in.
It is still being used today.
This is Nimes in the south of France.
0n the great Whitsun festival, the Feria of Nimes, something like a million people come to witness a combat that has gone on here since the arena was first built.
This was always a place for blood.
A place where the Roman crowd watched animals and humans put to death.
And the central figures in that drama were a group of men whose profession was to murder and to die for the delight of the crowd.
Men who dominated the imaginations of the Romans for more than 700 years.
The gladiators.
Gladiators fought in hundreds of specially constructed arenas all over the Roman world.
This is Capua, and the home of the most famous of all gladiators.
Spartacus fought and killed in this very arena for the crowd's delight.
In fact, that's when he led his revolt.
Spartacus's gladiators were trying to put a stop to these games.
But why did they happen at all? How can anyone come to terms with the extraordinary brutality of the events that went on in here? Should we admire ancient Roman civilization? or do we really owe a vote of thanks to the people who destroyed it? The so-called barbarians.
The physical remains of Roman civilization are astonishing.
We look at them and see a life of elegance, high culture and sophistication.
But that does not mean that they shared our values.
This is a street in Pompeii.
It's a Roman city that's been frozen in time.
In the year 79 AD, to be precise, when it was blasted with volcanic ash and gas by the eruption of Vesuvius.
Pompeii allows us to peer back through the ages and glimpse life as it was lived in ancient Roman times.
Life and death.
These images of horrific death, the victims caught by the eruption, evoke our pity and compassion.
But this, perhaps, is where we and the Romans part company.
pity and compassion were not emotions any self-respecting Roman would admit to.
In 80 AD the emperor Trajan constructed a vast theater of death in the center of Rome.
It has been known since the Middle Ages as the coliseum.
Named because of a colossal statue of Nero that stood outside, and was melted down long ago.
The name stuck because the building itself is colossal.
60,000 spectators came free of charge to watch spectacles of killing.
The scale is enormous.
Trajan, when he celebrated his victory over, effectively, Romania, had four months of celebration, day after day, in which 9,000 gladiators were occupied and 11,OOO animals killed.
So there was a lot of meat, a lot of carcass to be disposed of.
What did they do with them? The humans were presumably flushed out into the Tiber.
It was a demonstration to the population of, ''This is what we do with people whom we don't like.
'' people were put in the arena to kill and be killed by animals and by each other.
The bullfight is the last trace of what used to happen in arenas like Nimes.
The crowd don't see this as cruel.
For them, this is a spectacle of grace and courage and the closeness of death.
This is as close as we can get to the events here 2,000 years ago.
But don't be misled.
Bullfighting may be the great-great-great-grandson of the gladiator fights of ancient Rome, but the things the gladiators were doing within these walls were fundamentally very different.
Roman gladiators put on a public spectacle of human murder for entertainment.
The killing of animals was just an introduction, though even that was on a much grander scale than any modern-day bullfight.
one Roman general brings 140 elephants.
Just think of the amazing logistics of organizing hunts for elephants or 40 tigers, leopards, crocodiles, even.
It was natural history meets showbiz.
Animals were paraded for the crowd to admire, to wonder at, to fear and finally to dominate as they watched them die.
The amphitheater was a large killing machine, and like the best machines, the mechanism was secret.
What we see now exposed here at capua are those very secrets that so surprised and excited the ancient audiences.
We're going down into the underground stages of Capua.
This is where the animals and prisoners were kept and where the stage machinery was stored.
It's a sort of combination of scene dock, prison and zoo.
And you can see the great drains here where they could wash away the filth and the blood after the shows.
The whole place required a vast army of stagehands.
And it's said that the emperor Claudius once thought they hadn't done their job properly, so he had the stagehands sent up into the arena to fight in place of the gladiators.
So, never be a stagehand in ancient Rome.
Elaborate scenery rose up, recreating landscapes - hills, jungles, savannah - of the savage world where these beasts roamed free.
The animals themselves were kept in cages, sometimes hundreds of them, under the amphitheater floor and hoisted in lifts to appear through trap doors onto the sand.
To provide enough animals for these shows, the Romans hunted so intensively that they eventually wiped out the large animals of Europe and the Middle East.
Mark you, the danger wasn't all one way.
This relief shows a ship caught in a storm.
The sail is being hurriedly taken in and the lighthouse shows they're being driven into danger.
And on board is a cargo of lions.
0h, dearI No one doubted that killing wild animals was a thoroughly civilized thing to do, but it was just the warmup.
The Roman crowds didn't just come to see ostriches and ibexes killed, they were waiting for the gladiators.
But there was a whole program to get through first.
In the middle of the day, public executions.
Some people think it was rather boring and perhaps the rich people go out or pretend to go out, and not to be seen to be watching something quite so vulgar and disgusting.
some prisoners were killed by wild animals.
some were forced to kill each other.
But the real killer was Rome itself.
And the audience was Rome.
predators are going after prey.
And the predator could be the Roman state, going after an inappropriately behaving member of that state, or an enemy, or it could be just a natural predator, like a human against a weaker animal, or a ferocious beast against an unferocious beast.
Rome saw itself as an embattled island of civilization surrounded by a savage world.
The arena turned this world view inside out.
Here, the savage world was surrounded and contained by the civilized.
It was a living demonstration of the power of Rome.
And people who challenged that power were thrown into the savage space beyond the frontiers.
That savage space was down there on the sand.
criminals, including christians who refused to acknowledge the emperor as divine, had to be shown to be powerless in the face of the savagery that only Rome could tame.
(Wallace-Hadrill) Many of these animals must have been half-dead themselves by the time they reached the arena.
There's an account of one martyr who actually has to seize the animal and pull it towards him to make him go for the kill.
otherwise you can spend hours out there being horribly mauled but never killed, never finished off, and indeed for the audience, that was that was part of the fun of it.
The games that go on in Nimes are in some ways an echo of the Roman delight in variety.
They too liked to watch unusual watersports.
In the year 52 AD, for example, the emperor Claudius held a little public spectacle on a lake outside Rome.
He put 19,ooo captured soldiers onto boats, surrounding them with artillery, and told them to get on and fight.
2,000 years ago, sensation-seeking Roman audiences demanded more than sack races in a paddling pool with a bull.
After the lunchtime executions, the day would move to its climax.
In the afternoon, six hours, 1:3o to 7:3o, gladiatorial fights.
Quite slowly paced.
Gladiators are expensive.
Uh, of course, an occasional emperor will put 3,ooo men in a day, but even 5,ooo animals in a day, but that's quite exceptional.
Your normal gladiatorial contest is 2o, 25 fights, 25 fights in an afternoon.
This mosaic, found in a Roman villa, shows games put on by the man that owned the place.
The mosaic was expensive - well, the games cost a fortune, they were important.
They are celebrations of courage, endurance, resistance to pain, bravery, steadfastness and then, finally, the willingness to die if you're conquered and the victory, the glorious triumph of the winner.
That sign, the Greek letter theta, stands for ''thanatos'' - dead.
Their names are there too.
Rodan was killed for entertainment at a public show.
(Shelby ) The names are usually one-word names which are slave names or pet names almost.
They are given to animals and to gladiators alike.
If you just look at pompeii casually, you see what you want to see - a civilized and peaceful way of life, really rather enviable.
But look more closely at the beautiful walls and something rather different emerges.
This alleyway leads to the cheapest seats in the theater.
probably got a pretty rough crowd hanging out here.
And not surprisingly, the walls are covered with graffiti.
This bit shows us what was on the minds of the young men of ancient pompeii.
Whoever drew this stuff may have been outside the theater, but his mind was inside the amphitheater on the other side of town.
Even in private houses, we find graffiti of gladiators.
In this case there's actual portraits of them, with their names and with their scores.
This one here is oceanus, he's got 13 victories, Aracintus, Severus, and here's Albanus, sold, he's sold, he's a freedman, and he's got 19 victories.
Top man! These are the ghostly traces of sports heroes with short lives but a passionate following.
We're in the gladiators' barracks in pompeii, and all round here are the dressing rooms of the stars.
Well, the gladiators certainly saw themselves as heartthrobs.
According to the archaeological record, in one of them, there used to be a bit of graffiti calling one of the gladiators ''Suspirium puellarum'' - ''Makes young girls pant!'' Certainly, sex and the arena have always gone, well, to say hand in hand is probably a bit of a euphemism.
For example, in the cells over there, which were reserved for the more mature gladiators, in the ashes they discovered the body of a woman in expensive jewelry.
She was surrounded by no less than 18 gladiators.
perhaps she'd gone in collecting autographs? or perhaps she'd just gone in for a chat.
We'll probably never know, but we do know that gladiators packed plenty of sex appeal.
For example, their sweat was collected and used as an aphrodisiac by the fashionable women of Rome.
And a spear dipped in gladiator's blood was used in weddings to part the bride's hair.
(Hopkins) Gladiators represent virility.
They are an enhanced image of the Roman citizen at work.
so when you went to someone's house, there was a picture, an image of a gladiator that you pulled on, the bells made up of gladiators fighting against wild animals which come out of their erect penises.
But although gladiators were glamorous, sexy and popular, oddly enough, they had no social standing.
As far as the elite of Rome were concerned, they were scum.
probably because most of them were slaves or captives of war.
And even if you weren't already, any recruit to the gladiators became a prisoner the moment he stepped into this place.
He had to take an oath surrendering all hope of survival, saying he was prepared to be burnt, to be bound, to be slain by the sword.
And he would live in one of those cells over there, bound in chains to begin with and he would be taught to fight in this very courtyard.
And yet, despite these conditions and despite the lack of status and the appalling chances of survival, nevertheless, many young men actually volunteered to become gladiators.
There must have been some perks to the job.
(Crowd cheering) 0f course, there was the lure of fame.
I mean, look at the sheer size of the amphitheaters.
pompeii had seats for 20,000 people - 4,000 more than the whole population in the city.
And there was, it seems, also an illusion of security for them.
(shelby ) They belonged to a group, a family of gladiators that took care of them, that buried them if they died, and they were very close to their troop members.
If you had no skills and you were a trained fighter, then to go back into this fairly safe environment, even though it involved putting your life on the line all the time, it makes a certain amount of sense.
And gladiators didn't necessarily expect to have to kill each other.
In fact, a fight to the death was relatively rare, not because it was thought to be cruel but because deliberately killing off trained stock was expensive.
But we do know that in one list of 20 dead gladiators, only three had survived to their 12th fight.
Well, it's all very well talking about gladiators, but what was it like to be one? Well, there's only one way to find out.
Mike Loades is a theatrical fight arranger and knows as much as anyone about what gladiators actually did.
0f course, he teaches people how to fight for show, but, after all, that's what gladiators were expected to do.
In order to be the sports superstars of the day which they were, they would have to fight with a degree of style, they would have to have the panache, they would be able to move in big shapes and make the thing look dramatically exciting.
But that is not phony, that is fighting well.
Teach me to be a gladiator.
Well, the first thing we need to do is build you up a bit, - and the practice - I was afraid you might say that! The training is over here at the pell.
oK, guys.
- Have a go with that.
- oK.
- Blimey, it is heavy, isn't it? - It is a little.
Couple of hours of that, though, and you'll feel fine.
Now, I think we should just have the glasses off, however.
oK, so And I'm gonna go aaargh! Blimey, I see what you mean.
I keep hitting it with the wrong bit of the sword! oK, keep it going, intention in those blows.
There were many different kinds of gladiators, each with his own special armor and weapons.
They were all supposed to be different enemies of Rome, from history or from fantasy.
But, as Mike showed me, the first thing they all had to learn was to fight with no kit at all.
The first gladiators just had swords, but they were soon pitted against men with other weapons.
Like a spear.
obviously, it's a throwing weapon, but it could also be used for the thrust, and the sharp blades of the head could be used for wide swinging cuts, the whole could be used as a staff weapon.
They also used it for throwing at each other.
The trouble with throwing weapons is it's a terrible way to disarm yourself.
one option is to try and catch the weapon, turn it and throw it back again.
They liked to set different styles of warrior against each other.
The classic combination was the net man, the retiarius, with his trident against the murmillo, with bits of scaly armor and a fish-tailed helmet.
These were fantasy warriors.
Neptune the fisherman versus the sea monster.
But how could a man with a sword be beaten by a man using a net? (Mike ) The properties of the net are it obviously has a dramatic function for the final entrapment of the murmillo, the perimeter rope was weighted, it had lead weights all around the perimeter rope, therefore the net itself can be used as a strike weapon in its own right, rather like a chain.
The net is quite slow in flight.
The murmillo would simply move out of the way.
Mark you, it doesn't seem much of a weapon, really, does it? I mean, I don't feel exactly trapped by this net.
I have to say.
If I was a fish, maybe I would.
You're quite right, in order for the net to be effective, it's not actually thrown, it's still held by the retiarius, and what happens, he needs to draw the murmillo into close range.
And then he can use it to hook him down.
Now generally the retiarius would not kill with the trident.
He would use the dagger and if the plea for mercy came, and it was denied, then the death blow would usually come with the dagger.
Aaaargh! The actual day of the games was a long one.
(Hopkins) I suppose the lower classes come in first and when everyone's there, sitting in their serried ranks, all senators together, all citizens together, women at the top, no slaves, then the emperor appears.
First of all soldiers, musicians and emperor.
It's a solemn state occasion, it's an inauguration.
swagger, dress, trumpets, but it's religion as well.
So there's a sacrifice first, there's music, it's something that's celebrating gods, virtue, the Roman state.
It's not just a game, here we're celebrating the triumph of Rome.
The triumph of Rome over nature, the triumph of Rome over conquered barbarians.
Rome is at the center of the universe.
Roman citizens were in control.
Gladiators had to stop and ask permission before the kill, but the thumbs-down signal we associate with that may never have existed.
When they first started making films of the Roman amphitheater, they had to work out what gesture was it that the man in charge of the games used.
And they read their ancient sources, and it says, ''With pressed thumb you indicate.
'' What did ''with pressed thumb'' mean? Did it mean pressing like that or that? And they made it, the filmmakers made a decision that that would mean you live, and that would mean you die.
We don't actually know that they were genuine Roman gestures, but they've entered into common usage.
The decision depended on the crowd.
0nce the Republic had become the Empire, this was the only assembly where the voices of Roman citizens were heard by their masters and obeyed.
A cowardly fighter would be likely to get the death sign.
In fact, the reaction in the bullfight is very similar.
This is a particularly brave bull and not a particularly brave matador.
(Crowd jeering) The bullfight goes horribly wrong, the kill is a disaster, and the animal has to be dispatched with a knife.
Matador slinks away.
Fortunately there's no longer a thumbs down, but his reputation destroyed, nevertheless.
The crowd's praise goes to the dead bull.
These are the emotions of the amphitheater, just as they always were.
Every town throughout the empire was made Roman by having its amphitheater, no matter how small.
Killing people as a spectator sport was the mark of Romanness.
There's a very interesting case of a king of Syria, Antiochus of Syria, who wanted to be a good Roman, and he was trying to put on gladiatorial games in his home town.
And when he did it for the first time, the local people protested, and they said, ''This is simply awful.
What are you doing?'' And, interesting, he then perseveres and he tries it the next time, with bloodshed but no deaths and they take it.
And then little by little he accustoms them to the spectacle, until they get full-blown gladiatorial games.
And I think that must it must have been very strange if you're on the edge of the Roman world that isn't yet used to this way of life.
But the Romans were used to it, and each show had to have some novelty about it to keep the spectators happy.
Gladiator armor became spectacular.
0ne year it was a sensation to see them clad in silver, the next, that was old hat.
There's always the search for a new thrill.
In Nimes today it takes the form of a bull run through the streets.
The bulls are penned in by riders on magnificent camargue horses, and young men run in and try to wrestle the bulls to a standstill.
This too contains echoes of the past.
The Romans demanded more and more extravagant forms of violence.
The coliseum began to upstage the theaters by putting on plays, but when the script here called for a death, the actor really died.
At least one occasion, dramas in which female prisoners were forced to have sex with animals, before finally being killed.
This is snuff theater performed in front of emperors and tens of thousands of spectators.
How on earth did such a state of affairs come about? Well, it all seems to have started as a form of human sacrifice at funerals.
2,300 years ago, a wealthy Roman would buy some slaves and have them fight to the death as part of the funeral rites.
(Hopkins) Roman religion was a religion of sacrifice, so blood is central to the Roman experience, and people died.
Half those ever born are dead by the age of five, a third of people survived to the age of 20.
Death isdeath and disease is prevalent, and there's probably an insensitivity to the pain of the lower classes on the part of the upper classes.
This painting, now being carefully restored, is on the inside of the tomb of a young magistrate of pompeii.
His father had to show his social position, so there's the family silver and there's the gladiatorial show he put on for his son's funeral.
It showed the family's place in society, by making a human blood offering to go with the burial.
It gradually became a very popular event and when Rome was still a republic, families who wanted to win votes in elections would put on a good slaughter when they were given the chance.
It was called a duty, and that would still be the name of the game when Rome was ruled by emperors.
It was the opinion of the poor that the rich had a duty to keep them entertained.
About a million people lived in Rome's crowded apartments and many had no work and no income.
They survived off free handouts of grain from the state, and to spread the work around, every other day was a public holiday.
It's said that bread and circuses were the only things that prevented these narrow streets from exploding.
But the way that Roman rulers amused the population was truly monstrous.
I mean, to us, it seems absolutely incomprehensible that, you know, thousands of people and the emperor could come here and watch, you know, a woman being raped by animals and then being killed.
How can they possibly say they're humane? We can't say they're humane, but they felt themselves to be humane because they worry about different things.
They're not worrying about the lives of criminals or people like Christians, who they feel are subverting the order.
Um To them, it'sit's good that evil people should suffer.
0f course, it wasn't just good, it was fun.
There are even references to death shows at private dinner parties.
(Reader) ''When they have finished dining and are filled with drink, ''they call in the gladiators.
''As soon as one has his throat cut, ''the diners applaud with delight.
'' It certainly seems to have been quite normal to decorate houses with expensive pictures of deaths that the householder had paid for.
If the owner of the house put an image in his house that was something he had paid for, then it tended to show the kinds of scenes that had been enacted in the arena for which he had paid a lot of money and deserved a lot of public credit as far as he was concerned, and he wanted his guests to enjoy it.
The fact that it's used as decoration enhances the fact that there's a viewer, who is a winner and a viewed object with people in it who are losers in society and who are not part of society.
And there's an enjoyment in punishing them and watching it.
Today we have a mixed attitude to violence as entertainment, but we know that it's a crowd puller.
(Man ) Battlecade Extreme Fighting.
Whatever it takes to win.
Live on pay per view, April 26.
Maybe the nearest sport today is extreme fighting, a sport that takes mortal combat out of the video arcade and back into the ring.
Joe, Joe, Joe.
put the hooks in, put the hooks in it, that's it! It has huge audiences and no rules.
(Man ) No rules, we take all the rules out and put like two men to fight, with no rules.
Like, you can, you can kick in the face, you can punch him in the face with no gloves, that's what extreme fighting is all about.
How do you know when the fight has ended? When there's one give up, or he passed out.
That's that's pretty easy to define.
I think everyone's intrigued by, you know, two guys going in mortal combat in front of a thousand people.
There's something intriguing about that, definitely.
There's plenty of violence in our entertainment.
In fact, it's a big draw.
In fact, it may be the reason why you switched on this program.
Well, it may be a reason why we're making it.
But at least we're all worried about it.
0ur worries aren't simply ethical.
We're told that violent entertainment creates criminals and so puts us in danger.
An entire county of children were studied in upstate New York, and they were followed over 3o years, and the results of that study, done by Huesmann and Eron, showed that the amount of violence viewed at age eight predicted, not correlated with, but predicted criminality at age 3o.
American violence is incredibly unclear as to how to live your life, who the good guys are, who deserves punishment, what kind of retribution is valid, if ever, and what isn't.
So American violence, I think, makes all the values of the culture fuzzy.
It seems odd that the Romans weren't worried at all about the effects of their entertainment.
(Levine ) I think, actually, that the Romans would have as hard a time understanding our forms of violence as we have understanding theirs.
I think, to the Romans, violence was lessons in how to live, how to die, how to bring glory to Rome, they were community events, half the days in Rome were were for spectacles and holidays and things like that.
Um, they served a whole bunch of of functions in terms of reinforcing community values.
Roman attitudes to violence were clearly different from ours.
This ostentatious fresco records, without apology, a riot at pompeii between local supporters and gladiator fans from another town.
There were a few, a very few Romans who spoke out against the games, but they did so for rather surprising reasons.
For example, Julius Caesar once put on a particularly extravagant show.
The great orator Cicero went to watch and gave it a bad review.
(Reader) ''What pleasure can there be for a civilized man ''when either some powerless man is ripped to shreds by a powerful beast ''or some magnificent animal is transfixed by a spear? ''But if this kind of show must be viewed, ''we saw nothing new.
'' Well, they certainly saw something new on the last day, a battle between 5oo soldiers and 5oo elephants.
And everyone felt very sorry for the elephants.
''The common crowd found much to admire in this event ''but did not really enjoy it.
''0n the contrary, a certain pity was aroused in them ''and they came to the opinion that this beast ''shared a certain affinity with the human race.
'' Which is odd, really - they didn't show the slightest compassion for human beings.
When Spartacus rebelled with his gladiators and slaves against Rome, and after a long battle the Roman legions won, the Romans tried to wipe out the prospect of any further slave rebellion by lining the road from Naples to Rome with 6,ooo crucified gladiators and rebels.
Rome was a violent society.
We think of the Romans as a civilization of high culture.
We accept the picture of them as elegant and delightful people surrounded by savage barbarians.
But at the very heart of Roman civilization was brutality, slaughter, state-sponsored murder, done for the delight of the population.
Ruthlessness was not something to be ashamed of in ancient Rome.
When emperor Marcus Aurelius set up a column in Rome to celebrate his victories over the barbarians, it did not show the barbarians as violent - it's the Roman army that takes on that role, decapitating old men, seizing women and children and burning civilians' homes.
It started off as a very militaristic society.
They conquered the whole of the Mediterranean basin, they were soldiers.
So fighting wars was central to the Roman experience.
Fighting wars in which you stuck swords into other people, for real.
When we see images like these on the news they're meant to make us horrified - this is how we're told to imagine serbian soldiers in the Balkans and consider them war criminals.
For the Romans, these were moments to be proud of and stick on your column.
In fact, they reminded the Romans that they were meant to be a ruthless people.
But for most Roman soldiers, the arena was the closest they ever got to seeing someone killed.
The Empire itself was mostly at peace, and it's been reckoned that the odds of a Roman soldier dying on the battlefield were about one in a thousand.
Life had become peaceful and elegant and not really Roman enough.
(Wallace-Hadrill) They were very nervous that the sort of things that they took to might make them enfeebled.
Now, the arena is, in a sense, it'sit's an antidote to the decadence, not an aspect of decadence.
The Romans don't think that they are decadent.
They fear that they might be and the amphitheater helps them not to be.
In a sense, the arena was Rome, and the spectators were participating in a a demonstration of Rome's visible and total power over the world, but it could backfire.
on one occasion a spectator shouted out a joke against the emperor Domitian.
So he had a placard hung round the fellow's neck, had him paraded around the arena and then savage dogs were set on him.
on another occasion, during one of Caligula's little extravaganzas, they ran out of prisoners to throw to the wild beasts, so Caligula, who's a real showman at heart, had a section of the audience seized and thrown into the arena to be killed instead.
''The show must go on!'' The idea that a man should show himself proud, bold, courageous, is not specific to Rome.
But to the Romans, it was cowardly to fight against your fate.
There's one extraordinary anecdote under Caligula, that I think sums up, in a sense, how odd the Roman expectations were.
That a group of net men, retiarii, are being chased, and the retiarii have made an accord in advance and they've decided ''We're going to surrender ''and get out of this one easily, because statistically ''our chances of getting off are quite good,'' and they all lie down simultaneously and surrender, and they expect to be let off, and the emperor gives them the thumbs down, whereupon one of the retiarii jumps up, turns his trident against the chasers and proceeds to kill them all.
And Caligula is so furious, he says, ''I have never seen such a cruel sight.
'' Roman morality often turns our own on its head.
For example, the Romans regarded compassion as a moral defect.
It was one thing for a ruler to show clemency, because clemency was produced by reason and political necessity, but compassion was produced by the emotions.
Therefore, according to Seneca, belonging to the worst kind of people, to old women and silly females.
seneca despised Junius Brutus for pleading for his life when he was ordered to bare his neck to the ax.
This behavior was regarded as ''turpissima'', most shameful.
When a Roman was disgusted by death in the arena, he probably wasn't watching gladiators.
The gladiators usually fought in the afternoon.
If you arrived early, as Seneca once did, you were treated to the sight of prisoners being forced to fight unprotected until they were all dead.
(Reader) ''It's pure unadulterated murder.
''There's no helmet, no shield to repel the blade.
''Why bother with skill? All that just delays death.
''As soon as a man kills, they shout for him to kill another ''or be killed.
'' He's specifically disgusted because the excuse for the bloodshed has been removed.
If the excuse is that it promotes manliness to have the spectacle of people dying bravely, there's nothing manly about the spectacle of someone just being chopped up, a defenseless person being attacked.
seneca had no objection to gladiators being killed - they were manly fighters whose deaths were educational.
cicero, pliny, they all said the same.
(Reader) 'Just look at the gladiators ''and look at the wounds they endure.
''If they have given satisfaction to their masters, ''they are happy to die.
'' (second reader) ''Not spineless, not flabby, ''but an inspiring spectacle ''demonstrating the love of praise and desire for victory.
'' Did it work? Well, Cicero was lucky enough to be able to test it for himself.
He was condemned to death by the state.
When the executioners overtook him, he was being carried in his litter, and faced with death, I'm glad to say that Cicero proved he'd learnt his lesson from the gladiators.
He thrust his head forward and accepted the death blow as he'd been shown in the amphitheater.
The Roman Empire and its gladiators did eventually disappear, but not because it was conquered and destroyed - there's no day when Rome actually fell - but because it changed.
0ne change was that early in the 4th century, christianity became an official religion.
suddenly compassion for the weak and mercy to the defeated were supposed to be respectable emotions, and what's more, some christians even opposed the games.
(Reader) ''They not only allow people who plead for mercy ''to be killed, but even demand it.
''Why, they even order people who have been struck down ''and are sprawled in the sand ''to have their bodies torn apart, ''in case anyone fools them by pretending to be dead.
'' (second reader) ''This cruel and bloodthirsty sport, ''the wickedness of the fighting.
'' But though some christians denounced the games as wicked, there were others who, as good Romans, were determined to keep them going, they just stopped killing fellow christians.
Christians in power continued an awful lot of the same kinds of public, quite violent, bloody punishments that the Romans had condoned in the arena before them.
But the Roman world was not only being emasculated by christianity.
As the new religion grew, vast numbers of non-Romans forced their way into the western empire, the so-called barbarians.
And whenever they took control of a city, the gladiatorial games seem to have stopped.
The very word ''vandal'' means a mindless destroyer, but in fact the vandals and the Goths and the visigoths were admired by disaffected Romans, and for good reason.
A 5th-century writer, salvian, explained that the barbarians might not have washed very often, but they had more moral sense than the Romans.
(Reader) ''We Romans oppress each other.
''A man cannot be safe unless he is wicked.
''so, many people, well-educated and from good families, ''flee to our enemies.
'' ''They would rather endure a foreign civilization ''among the barbarians, ''than cruel injustice among the Romans.
'' The Romans would enjoy the paradox, wouldn't they? That it was the barbarians who They're trying desperately to show their superiority over the barbarians with these games, and the moment that the barbarians move in, the games cease to matter.
The presence of the barbarians is is the biggest factor that transforms their world.
This is a barbarian king shown with symbols of a Roman triumph.
The newcomers were happy to be seen as Romans, but they didn't see any need to stage public executions or imitations of fighting for entertainment.
The frontiers collapsed and the Romans were no longer able to sit around this sand like gods, deciding who lived and who died.
The world of the savages had taken over, as far as the Romans were concerned.
The visigoths turned this arena into what historians have called a fortified encampment.
Well, actually they lived in it.
It was a sort of housing estate.
The Roman amphitheater was an ideological statement - ''Here is what Rome stands for and has always stood for.
'' The architecture was simply a huge and complex stage set for Romans to be taught lessons of brutality and to despise weakness.
It's no accident that Roman architecture has been so copied by modern states.
It expresses power and authority.
This is the Roman temple at Nimes, 2,000 years old, and this is the us Treasury .
.
and the British Museum.
Architecture means something, and this is the favored architecture of Western power.
The Roman museum, dedicated to displays of ancient Rome, was created by Mussolini to connect his fascist rule with that of the emperors, and with the message of the gladiatorial games - compassion is weakness, ruthlessness is power.
I think one reason we talk about Roman games is that we're conscious of the seeds of the cruel of the same cruelty in ourselves, and we kind of want to understand, could we be there? We need to be careful when we find ourselves being impressed by Roman civilization.
And even more careful when we assume that such things can't happen again.