I found this
book at a yard sale, and the following passages, about the Romans reenacting
naval battles and scenes from their mythological past in their gladiatorial coliseums,
jumped out at me. “Daedalus does not reach his destination; as he flies over
the arena, his wings fail him. A bear awaits him on the ground.” Those people
were truly serious about authenticity! This gives rise to an interesting matter
for the reenactor community to resolve, however: if a man wears, say, farby Grecian
armor during the Salamis reenactment and is run through by a "Persian" wielding a spear and killed, is he still a farb? Or does the act of dying to educate the public redeem him? - Jonah
Roman Days: Reenacting in the Coliseum!
From Cruelty and Civilization – the Roman
Games by Roland Auguet
Mythological
reenacting [My
italics – Jonah]
The silvae
- which was what the Romans called this type of spectacle - were not
short-lived fantasies fashioned by the tortured mind of some ruler. The
monuments prove the contrary. It is perhaps not too much to say that among
other things they represented one of the manifestations of “a certain form of
Roman feeling for nature,” very well analyzed by Grimal. That nature should
have come to be appreciated only as the product of the culture and ingenuity of
man is in no way astonishing in an essentially urban culture for which the
flocks and shepherds of the ancient hills had long since become pastoral
characters in an increasingly artificial form of poetry. It is probable moreover
that these spectacles gratified a profound feeling quite on their own since
they were not usually coupled with the customary animal massacres.
This really
baroque taste for travesty found a more perverse, one can hardly say a more
developed, expression in another very special type of spectacle - which had
close associations with the silvae - the mythological dramas. To begin
with, their settings were, generally speaking, similar. They were, from a
commonsense point of view, theatrical mimes in which the actors really died on
the stage, suffering the punishment proper to the plot. These dramas, moreover,
had a somewhat complicated structure, since they were a hybrid of several
types. The existence, if not of a plot then at least of a fairly detailed
scenario that controlled their development, linked them to some extent with the
theatre. Some of them were, perhaps, no more than very loose and extremely
simplified adaptations of theatrical successes. But for the most part they
displayed on the stage the adventures of mythical or legendary characters. This
point is not unimportant: “Let high antiquity, O Caesar,” says Martial, “Lay
down its pride; all its fame the arena offers to your eyes.”
The marvels
of the Olympians were in this way brought within the reach of all: one saw
Orpheus charming the animals before perishing from the blow of a savage bear;
Ixion attached to his flaming wheel; Hercules, too, consumed by the flames; and
Dirce tied to the horns of the bull or perhaps, according to a fantastic
variant, on its crupper, her wrists tied behind her back, serving as the stake
in the struggle between the animal and a panther. Sometimes, indeed, remarkable
liberties were taken with the biographies of the heroes which were “revised” to
make them more spectacular and to provide a bloody end. In one of these dramas,
of which unfortunately, we do not possess the complete scenario, Daedalus does
not reach his destination; as he flies over the arena, his wings fail him. A
bear awaits him on the ground.
As can be
seen from their subjects, these spectacles were akin to the tragic pantomimes,
with which they should not be confounded. But certain of their elements were
also akin to the venatio, first of all their setting, similar to that of
the silvae; secondly when they were not consumed by the flames, as
Hercules on Mount Etna, or Croesus whose robe suddenly burst into fire, the
actors were devoured by the beasts, which brings this type of spectacle into
line with the executions previously described rather than with the venation,
properly speaking. The men who took part were also criminals condemned to death
and it is easy to recognize in the robe of Croesus the tunica molesta -the
inflammable tunic - which those sentenced to death usually wore. From this
point of view these dramas seem no more than executions painstakingly “romanticized”
with the aim of overcoming the monotony of the mass hecatombs.
The feelings
which they evoked were no less complex than their structure. The few
descriptions left us by classical authors will be convincing on this score; in
the middle of the arena, resting on an unstable scaffolding of planks, rose
Mount Etna. Everything, shrubs and rocks, looked the more contrived for the
care taken to give an exact reproduction. On the summit was chained a man,
half-naked, playing the “poetic” role of the celebrated brigand Selurus, the
terror of Sicily, perhaps also of Prometheus chained to his rock. But he was a
man of flesh and blood, and one could see from the rise and fall of his chest
that he was afraid to die.
Before the
crowd had finished feasting its eyes on the spectacle, the mountain had fallen
to pieces and the “bandit” had been precipitated still alive among the cages of
wild beasts, which had been fastened in such a way as to open at the slightest
touch. A bear seized him, crushed him and tore him to pieces, till all that
remained of his body was an unrecognizable pulp. Another day it was Orpheus who
held the stage. A magic forest, like the garden of the Hesperides, controlled
by stagehands, moved towards him. He advanced, surrounded by birds. As in the
legend, with his song, he charmed the lions and tigers which the best animal trainers
of Rome had trained to live at peace with a flock of sheep. Then a bear
appeared suddenly to put a horrible end to this scene and its deceptive
simplicity.
It is easy
to see how these cunningly contrived surprises, these contrasts between the
destitution of the criminal and the sumptuousness of the setting, between his
isolation and the communal jollity of the crowd, similar in sum to the
artifices sought by sensualists, gave death a zest which it no longer had in
the amphitheatres. No doubt latent eroticism had some part in the attractions
of this sort of spectacle; this powerful muscular man chained to a rock, that
Dirce, to all intents and purposes naked, offering her throat to the panther's
leap that she seeks to avoid, are sufficient proof of it. There was also
sometimes the obscenity, which was the attribute of the pantomime; under Nero
the dramas went so far as to portray the fable of Pasiphae, whose role was
played by a woman enclosed in a wooden heifer, which was covered by the bull.
Naval
battles
In the naumachias,
as at the midday games, criminals were set to fight one another, but the
combats took place on water. Small troupes appeared in them, as sometimes in
the munera, but there were real armies also; we read of 19,000 appearing in one
of them.
Historians
confirm that these naval battles sometimes took place in the amphitheatres
where, by a system of reservoirs and channels, the arena could be flooded or
drained at will. Martial pretends astonishment: “There was land until a moment
ago. Can you doubt it? Wait until the water, draining away, puts an end to the combats;
it will happen right away. Then you will say: the sea was there a moment ago.”
But this
method was exceptional and we very often think we recognize in provincial
amphitheatres a means of flooding where only drainage channels exist.
Furthermore, it was not possible to stage grandiose battles. Caesar, Augustus,
Domitian, therefore had special basins dug in Rome, known as naumachias,
the word serving both for the spectacles and for the places where they were
staged. That of Augustus necessitated the construction of an aqueduct 22,000
paces long to bring to Rome the water needed to fill a basin which measured 598
yards by 393, specially excavated in order to stage a combat in which between 2,000
and 3,000 men took part. It served subsequently, it is true, for the watering
of the gardens and furnished an additional source for the provision of water to
the city. Claudius did not want to rely on any of the usual solutions; he gave
a naumachia on the Fucino lake which, taking up once more a project
earlier conceived by Caesar, was linked to the Liris river by a series of
imposing construction works.
This sort of
spectacle, which first appeared in the times of Caesar, exuberantly displayed
the youth of an empire rich in resources. But it had a brief existence; naumachias
are no longer mentioned after the first century, nor were they ever staged with
the regularity of the munera. How could they have been, considering the
enormous expenses involved? It was not merely a question of finding the monies
needed to finance a complex organization, the construction and equipment of a
fleet and the destruction of a vast number of human lives, for in this slave
economy men also had their price; the very water intended to engulf these
riches cost a fortune, for the sea was too inconvenient and the bays too far
away to serve for such entertainments.
Naturally,
the naumachias were no mere imitations of a battle; blood was shed in
floods and it even happened that none of the combatants emerged from the melee
alive. Sometimes, however,
As after the
naumachias on the Fulcino lake, the survivors were granted mercy, which could
only have been a respite, for a criminal, at least by law, remained a criminal.
To compel these men to kill one another, stringent safety measures were taken
in case of need; Claudius, for example, had a circle of rafts placed all around
the Fucino lake on which the praetorians, ranged in maniples, closed every way
of escape.
To this
pitiless realism was added a search for picturesque and exotic travesties. It
was customary for the naumachia to represent some famous naval battle.
Greek history above all was ransacked for examples, either because of the vogue
for things Greek then current at Rome, or quite simply because it abounded in
picturesque episodes. Thus one saw, under Augustus and under Nero, the
Athenians twice defeat the Persians in the roads of Salamis, the Corcyreans
destroy the Corinthian fleet and kill all the captives, while, under Caesar the
snobbery of the time forced the criminals to die on triremes flying Egyptian
colours.
These fictions
naturally involved recourse to a more or less complex mise en scene: for
example, a fort was built on an island in the naumachia excavated by
Augustus so that the “Athenians,” victors over the Syracusians, could take it
by assault before the eyes of the spectators; on the Fulcino lake a triton rose
out of the waters and gave the signal for the combat to begin. The few
details reported by Tacitus lead one to think that the striving for exactitude
was pushed to the utmost. The combat had to follow the usual phases of a
naval battle and include displays of everything that might arouse interest: the
skill of the pilots, or the force of the rowers, the power of the various types
of vessel, or the play of the siege-engines mounted on breastworks which had
been erected at the ends of the rafts surrounding the lake.
