Those Who Are About to Die

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1

Vesper

(Evening)

The men reclining at the tables are heavyset, with great rolls of flesh; very different from the stick-thin spectators watching them eat. The bodies of those dining are scarred from the edge of the blade and the track of the whip; their necks ridged with muscles; their faces lined and callused from wearing helmets. Some are almost deformed, with one arm longer than the other. They are all the subject of intense scrutiny. Some laugh and joke, talking lightly; others are calmly ordering their financial affairs; many are silent, pale and sweating, unable to choke down their food. Some drink heavily. By this time tomorrow some, perhaps one in eight of them, will have died a violent death. But no one knows which one in eight. This is the cena libera, when the public are admitted to the barracks to watch the last supper of the gladiators.

The Cena Libera

The cena libera, a kind of public meal for gladiators, was a strange ritual: thin men observing fat men eat. Like so much ancient history—like the structure of a day at the Games itself—it must be stitched together and reconstructed from scattered fragments of evidence: a line in a Latin novel, a passing example in Greek philosophy, a couple of pieces of Christian propaganda, and a humorous mosaic. It raises many questions: of diet and body shape, of privacy and dining, of courage and disgrace, of the purpose of this odd custom and of what drew the spectators, of how the fat men became gladiators. In the cena libera the gladiators offer us our first window into the Roman mind.

Diet and Body Shape

The thin men watching habitually ate a vegetarian diet. This had nothing to do with modern concerns about health, or morality, or animal rights, let alone saving the planet. In antiquity vegetarianism was very much a minority choice. It was best left to eccentric philosophers, like the motley band of charlatans and wizards who liked to think of themselves as the school of Pythagoras. For the Pythagorean vegetarianism was all about the transmigration of souls. There was always the danger of eating your deceased parents. In his youth, Seneca the Younger flirted with Pythagoreanism and gave up meat, until set right by his father: vegetarianism was un-Roman and might bring accusations of adherence to one of the dubious, if not illegal, eastern cults, with their bizarre dietary restrictions.

The vegetarianism of those viewing the gladiators was caused by poverty. They existed in a time when the social pyramid was as steep as in any modern country in the developing world. The elite (maybe about 10 percent of the population) were well-off, if not fabulously wealthy in contemporary terms, while the vast majority existed on or below the subsistence level. The plebs, or hoi polloi (respectively in Latin and Greek—both pejorative terms in elite mouths, usually coupled with adjectives like dirty or superstitious), lived on what is often called the “Mediterranean triad” of grain, olives, and the vine. They also ate other vegetables—mainly beans and legumes—though they have not made it into popular understanding of the “triad.” Although nowadays endlessly lauded in color newspaper supplements for the affluent middle classes, the Mediterranean triad makes for a limited and repetitious diet. When animals were sacrificed at religious festivals the plebs gleefully seized the opportunities for a dinner of roast meat. The moral philosopher Plutarch felt the need to remind people that festivals were more enjoyable for those who attended with genuine religious belief.

The gladiators were also usually vegetarian, but they had a different and distinctive diet. Pliny the Elder said they were nicknamed the “Barley-men” (hordearii), from the stew or soup of beans and barley that was the main component of their rations. In the Roman army barley was a punishment food. Pliny goes on to say it was mainly used to feed animals. Gladiators were given large amounts of food. The emperor Vitellius, in a doomed attempt to increase the loyalty of his soldiers, increased the level of their wheat-based, better-quality rations to match the quantities given to gladiators. A member of the elite wrote that gladiators were crammed with food, which was worse than any hunger. The word used—sagina, “stuffing”—was more appropriate to feeding animals. As we will see, the elite often equated gladiators, or at least most gladiators, to beasts. But there again the elite tended to see everyone except themselves—the plebs and barbarians alike—as “bestial.”

Gladiators not only ate different food; to strengthen their bones they drank a unique concoction of ash (either from burned wood or bone) dissolved in watered-down wine. Just outside the ancient Greek city of Ephesus (in modern Turkey) archaeologists have excavated a graveyard of gladiators. It contained the remains of at least sixty-seven men and one woman (we will return to this important site frequently). Scientific analysis has shown that the bones of some of the men exhibited exceptionally high levels of calcium.

Gladiators were fattened up by their barley stew “stuffing” (it is all too easy for us to slip into the attitudes of the ancient elite, as they wrote all our literary texts). Those depicted on the Borghese Mosaic (named after the owners of the estate outside Rome on which the seven panels were found) look very heavy indeed (Plate Two). Why was it thought desirable for them to be so bulky? As Cyprian, an ancient Christian bishop and opponent of the Games, put it: “The gladiatorial Games are prepared, that blood may gladden the lust of cruel eyes. The body is fed up with stronger food, and the vigorous mass of limbs is enriched with brawn and muscle, that the wretch fattened for punishment may die a harder death.” In modern terms, gladiators needed a strong frame to support short bursts of intense and violent physical activity, and their carbohydrate-rich diet produced a thick layer of subcutaneous fat that shielded the vital organs. This enabled the combatants to take flesh wounds that would bleed profusely but would not prevent them from continuing to fight. Fat gladiators made a better visual spectacle.

Food and Participants

The cena libera literally translates as the “free dinner,” but the gladiators’ rations probably were always provided for them free of charge. Libera could be translated as “unlimited,” but quantity was never an issue. It should best be understood as “unconstrained,” as in the type and quality of what they consumed. The Roman expression for “mansplaining,” spelling out obvious things in tedious detail, was to go “from the eggs to the apples.” Formal Roman dinners, like modern Italian ones, tended to consist of three courses. Eggs, often hard-boiled, usually featured in the first, apples, fresh or dried out of season, in the last. Greeks under the empire continued to divide a meal into the sitos, the staple (almost always bread), and the opson, sometimes translated as “relish,” but really covering everything else: the meat, the fish, the sauces, the pies, all the good stuff. Plutarch says that gladiators about to enter the arena had set before them many expensive foods. For once, instead of stodgy stews and cheap wine that tasted of grit, the gladiators could enjoy meat and other delicacies copiously washed down with fine wines. Perhaps among the emotions of the thin men watching them eat were hunger and envy.

Apart from the gladiators, who partook of the cena libera? In his Apology, a defense of the Christian way of life, Tertullian writes that at the pagan festival of the Liberalia he will not feast in public, as is the custom for the beast fighters, when those unhappy men take their last meal. The word he uses is bestiarii. Technically these were the men who managed the animals used for performances and executions, not the venatores who hunted and fought beasts in the arena. But the two roles overlapped and were often conflated. By extension bestiarii came to be applied to those who were executed by exposure to fierce animals. Unsurprisingly, given their sole role as victims in the arena, Christians tended to view the whole day of gladiatorial spectacle through the lens of the midday executions. In another work, On the Spectacles, Tertullian has the lion stand for the entirety of gladiatorial Games (munera), as the horse does for chariot racing in the Circus Maximus, bodily strength for athletics, and sweetness of voice for the theater. Needless to say, as a Christian moralist, Tertullian is vehemently opposed to all of them.

Alongside the gladiators, the venatores, and the bestiarii, some modern scholars include among the diners those condemned to execution the next day. They point to The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. This is an important text that can yield many insights, but it is a complicated document. It recounts the last days of six Christian martyrs (four male, and the two young women of the title) in Carthage in North Africa in the spring of AD 203. This text tells its story in three voices: an unnamed narrator, supposedly a contemporary, frames what it claims are the actual words of two of those killed: Saturus, the male leader of the group, and Perpetua, the female main character. Modern readers are keen to take the narrative at its word about Perpetua. It would give us a very rare female voice from antiquity. No one seems all that bothered about the authenticity of the words of Saturus. Whether by three hands or one, the Passion is an explicit piece of Christian religious propaganda: miracles now are as good as those in the past, if not better. Now even delicate young women endure martyrdom, and this converts many pagans. Actually, it can only convert some pagans. Martyr literature needs a baying mob. If they were all converted, the divine plot would shudder to a halt as there would be no martyrdom.

The anonymous narrator claims that the martyrs transform their cena libera into an agape, the Christian “love feast” based on the last supper of Jesus and his disciples. At an agape, Christians sat, rather than reclined. It shows that the condemned could be allowed a cena libera at least in fiction if not necessarily in reality. But it is unwise to generalize from this sole piece of evidence. In the previous section, the narrator has given Perpetua strong arguments to win this privilege from the Roman officer in charge: Why do you not permit us to refresh ourselves—we, the most noble of the condemned belonging to Caesar, who are to fight on his birthday? Would it not be to your credit, if we were brought forth well-fed? The implicit threat worked—the tribune was horrified and flushed—and the condemned were granted a one-off privilege. It is most unlikely that those sentenced to the beasts or the flames—Christian or otherwise—were normally allowed such a treat.

Backgrounds

Those drinking the sweet wine and eating choice meats must have wondered how they came to be at the cena libera. How did a man end up as a gladiator? What were their backgrounds?

After victorious Roman campaigns many were barbarian prisoners of war. In AD 70, having crushed the Jewish revolt and destroyed Jerusalem, Titus, son of the new emperor Vespasian, marched to the town of Caesarea Philippi, “where he stayed a long time exhibiting shows of every kind. Many of the prisoners perished here, some thrown to wild beasts, others forced to meet each other in full-scale battles.” From there, Titus went to another Caesarea—Caesarea on the Sea—and celebrated his brother’s birthday, “reserving much of his vengeance on the Jews for this notable occasion. The number of those who perished in combats with wild beasts or in fighting each other or by being burned alive exceeded 2,500. Yet all this seemed to the Romans, though their victims were dying a thousand different deaths, to be too light a penalty.” At the next city, Berytus, he celebrated his father’s birthday, “with a still more lavish display . . . vast numbers of prisoners perished in the same way as before.” Later, “he passed through a number of Syrian towns, exhibiting in them all lavish spectacles in which Jewish prisoners were forced to make a show of their own destruction.” Despite having also presented great numbers of prisoners to appear in the arenas in the provinces, and sent others to hard labor in Egypt, there were thousands left—“the tallest and most handsome”—to adorn a triumphal procession in Rome, then fight in the newly opened Colosseum.

The greater the number, and the more diffuse the origins, of the prisoners the better. At times the elaborations of ancient fiction give a clear picture of the values of Roman culture. A lengthy Latin historical novel, set out as a series of biographies of emperors, written about AD 400 and now known to historians as the Augustan History, says that the emperor Probus (AD 276–82) exhibited “three hundred pairs of gladiators, among whom fought many of the Blemmyae [from Sudan], who had been led in his triumph, besides many Germans and Sarmatians [a nomadic tribe from the Great Hungarian Plain], and even some Isaurian brigands [from Asia Minor].” In the world created by this text Probus’ events were vastly overshadowed by the triumph and subsequent Games of the emperor Aurelian (AD 270–5), which featured 800 pairs of gladiators, as well as captives from the Blemmyae, Axomitae (from Abyssinia), Arabs, Indians, Bactrians (from Afghanistan), Iberians (from Georgia), Saracens, Persians, Goths, Alans (nomads from the Steppes), Roxolani (nomads from north of the Danube), Sarmatians, Franks, Suebians (from the headwaters of the Rhine and Danube), Vandals, Germans, Palmyrenes (from Syria), and Egyptians. To gild the lily, among the Goths were ten women armed for war: “these, a placard declared, were from the race of Amazons.”

Spartacus, who had been a Roman auxiliary soldier, deserter, and bandit, before being condemned to the arena, was the leader of the great slave revolt that convulsed Italy from 73 to 71 BC. At funeral Games for his fallen comrades, he ordered 300 Roman captives to fight as gladiators. In about AD 117 Jewish rebels in Cyrene in North Africa, among many other outrages, including cannibalism and making belts of human entrails, were accused of giving prisoners to wild beasts and forcing others to fight as gladiators. For the Romans such a role reversal was a terrible humiliation, which, somewhat paradoxically to our eyes, marked the utter inhumanity of their enemy.

After the battle of Cannae (216 BC), Hannibal was said to have made senators and other distinguished Roman prisoners fight each other. With a refinement of cruelty, typical of Carthaginians in Roman thinking, he compelled fathers to fight sons, and brother against brother. In another version, Hannibal promised freedom to a Roman matched against an elephant. When the Roman unexpectedly won, with characteristic Carthaginian untrustworthiness (Fides Punica—Carthaginian good faith—meant the opposite in Latin), Hannibal sent horsemen to kill the victor as he left. The two sources for these tales were written long after the supposed events. As nothing of the sort appears in the earlier and more reliable Histories of Polybius, most likely they reflect Roman mentalities rather than reality. Spartacus and the Jews, of course, knew Roman customs all too well from the inside, but it is surprising that, apart from the imagined cruelties of Hannibal, we do not hear of any external enemies, the demonized barbarians beyond the frontiers, turning this powerful symbol back against Rome.