Bring Back The Coliseum
By: Charz
Tags: Blood Sport, Bread and circuses, Brutal Gardener, Cicero, Circus Maximus, Cobra, Coliseum, Collective Violence, Colonel Gaddafi, Colosseum, Cyrenaica, Dignity, Gaddafi, Gladiator Spirit, Juvenal, Leptis Magna, Libya, Munera, Original Purity, Panem et Circenses, Primordial Forms of Nature, Roman Empire, Roman Spirit, Rome, Rugball, Seneca, Taste for Bloodshed, Tripolitania
You must die erect and invincible
Seneca, in his thirty-seventh letter to Lucilius, has made the gladiator’s compact (“the most loathsome of contracts”, ["turpissimum auctoramentum"]) the most powerful bond (“maximum vinculum”) of “the good man”. (Notice Seneca’s conflation of the soldier and gladiator) The gladiator’s oath expresses the highest ideal and commitment of the virtuous man (the philosopher/soldier), a man severe and without hope or illusion; a man who escapes from humiliation of being under compulsion through enthusiastic complicity :
You have enlisted [in life] under oath. If any man should say that this is a soft or easy form of soldiering it will only be because he wishes to mock you. But I do not want you to be deceived : the words of this most honorable of compacts are the very same as those of that most foulest of compacts : “to be burned, to be bound, to be slain by the sword”…You must die erect and invincible. What difference will it make if you gain a few more days or years ? We are born into a world in which no quarter is given (Epistulae 37.1-2)
Seneca’s world without quarter is a munus sine missione, a particular version of the tournament from which the editor (the producer of the games) has determined that no one is to exit alive : “The spectators demand that those who have murdered confront, in turn, those who will murder; they reserve the victor of one bout for but another round of slaughter. Death is the only issue for the men who fight (Epistulae 7.4).
In this world without quarter, this munus sine missione, “You must die erect and invincible” (“recto tibi invictoque moriendum est”). Seneca thus, strangely enough, links utter compulsion together with pride and invincibility; the man who has taken the gladiator’s oath is compelled to die, but he dies unconquered (“invictus“).
In the Tusculanae Disputationes, while dismissing the person of the gladiator as worthless and contemptible, “either abandoned men or barbarians” (“aut perditi homines aut barbari), Cicero allows the gladiator to be (despite himself and through the habit of discipline) one model and paradigm of “the good man”, the soldier/philosopher who through his consistent and unflinching fierceness in the face of death and his complete collusion (and even pleasure) in his own powerlessness couples his slavery with honor. It is not a transformation so much as a conjunction; not a reconciliation but a radical dichotomy, an ‘inverse exaltation”.
Seneca, in his essay On Tranquillity (11.1-6), models his wise man (sapiens) after the gladiator. Like the gladiator entering the arena, the wise man enters life having already signed a contract acknowledging that his body is occupied by him only on the sufferance of the master/deity and can be properly demanded of him on a moment’s notice. like the brave gladiator (11.4-5), the wise man, bound by the terms of his contract, must surrender life and limb directly to his divine master, without murmur or hesitation : “I seek not to evade or hang back; you see me prepared to render willingly to you what you gave to me before I was conscious. Away with my Life!” ( De tranquillitate 11.3)
Carlin A. Barton, The sorrows of the ancient Romans: the gladiator and the monster, 1995, p15-16-18-19
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