a series of games had become. Symmachus wanted to put on a week's games in honour of his son who had just been made an officer in the swagger Praetorian Guard and would run for praetor in 401 a.d. Symmachus started preparing for the games two years ahead of time.
Symmachus, in addition to being a senator, was a very wealthy man. He owned three palaces and had held nearly every high office in the state. Being a devout man, Symmachus was greatly shocked at the growth of this new cult called Christianity, and he determined to put on some real old-fashioned games to impress the people with scenes of skill and courage in order to disgust them with the namby-pamby doctrines of the new religion. The Master of the Games tried to talk the senator out of putting on anything but the usual run of stuff then current, but Symmachus insisted that he wanted the real thing.
Poor Symmachus ran into nothing but headaches. To get really well-trained chariot horses, Symmachus had to import them from Spain. The nags used in Rome by then were only good enough to go around the track in a fixed race and stage a few smash-ups for the crowd. Eleven out of the sixteen horses Symmachus imported died before they reached the arena from bad handling on the voyage. The four left were so much better than the ordinary chariot horses that the race would have been a walk-away so the team had to be broken up. As a result, their charioteer quit. Four other charioteers were collected and more horses imported. Then it was discov ered that the best charioteer was a Christian. As the whole point of the show was to prove that the weak Christians couldn't compete with the manly adherents of the old Roman religion, he had to be fired. But as he was a member of the union; the union called a strike. In a rage, Symmachus threatened to stage a race using dogs instead of horses because, as he said, the regular chariot horses were nothing but dogs anyhow. This caused a riot in which the Prajtorian Guard had to be called out.
Meanwhile, Symmachus was trying hard to get wild animals for the games. He wrote to animal collectors, to friends in distant provinces, to officials, pointing out that they should co-operate in this great crusade to put on some really good shows to restore national morale. He spent months trying to unscramble the red tape. As professional collectors were now scarce, he had to hire his own men. This meant that he had to get them trapping licences, as lions and elephants could only be trapped by special permission of the emperor. He had to get special permission to give the shows in the Colosseum. The customs officials charged him an import tax on the animals although, as Symmachus explained in letter after letter, this tax was meant only to apply to professional dealers who retailed their animals after arrival.
In spite of all this trouble, Symmachus couldn't get any lions, tigers, elephants or even antelope (he wanted topi and impala especially). All that arrived were some 'weak and starving bear cubs' and a few crocodiles. The crocs hadn't eaten for fifty days and most of them had to be killed before the shows. Apparently the only animals that arrived in fit condition were some Irish wolf-hounds.
Symmachus had even more trouble getting gladiators. He managed to purchase twenty-nine Saxon prisoners, supposed to be terrific fighters, but the prisoners never got out of gladiatorial school. They strangled each other until there was only one man left—and he beat his brains out against the wall.
What sort of games Symmachus finally put on, I don't know. We only have his correspondence trying to get the acts lined up. We do know that the seven days' games cost him Ј148,000, and I'll bet his son never did get elected praetor.
By the beginning of the fifth century, Rome found herself fighting for her life against the barbarian hordes along her frontiers. With the tremendous cost of the continual wars, it became increasingly difficult to pay for the games. Yet they continued, always catering more and more to the mob. The emperors abandoned the royal box as being undemocratic and sat with the crowd. The patricians made a great point of eating the food thrown to the mob, instead of leaving the amphitheatre for lunch or having slaves serve their own repast.
The chariot races were a joke. People threw wine jars in front of the horses' feet and women encouraged their children to dart under the opposing teams hoping to make their team win. If the child was trampled, the indignant parents sued the racing stables for reckless driving. The crowd still continued to call themselves Blues, Greens, and so on, even though they no longer knew anything about the horses or the men. A somewhat similar trend has occurred in modern big league baseball. Once every man on a team was a local boy; the crowds knew each player individually and turned out to root for friends. Today, the teams are recruited from men all over the country and are sold as commodities without any regard for community feelings. Pliny's remark about the chariot factions would apply today: 'The people know only the colour.' Yet with no political parties and no feeling of belonging to any specific group, the people centred all their devotion on being a White or a Gold. People who were born Reds swore eternal enmity toward all other factions, supported the Reds under all circumstances, and considered a Green victory a national disaster.
With the economic and military position of the empire too hopelessly complicated for the crowd to comprehend, they turned more and more toward the only thing that they could understand—the arena. The name of a great general or a brilliant statesman meant no more to the Roman mob than the name of a great scientist does to us today. But the average Roman could tell you every detail of the last games, just as today the average man can tell you all about a movie star's marriages but has only the foggiest idea what NATO is doing or what steps are being taken to fight inflation.
For an ambitious man to get anywhere in public life, he had to establish a tie-in with the games. The Emperor Vitellius had been a groom for the Blues. As a result, he was made governor of Germany by a politician who was a Blue. After Vitellius became Emperor, he had anyone killed who booed the Blues. The Emperor Commodus went to gladiator's school and used to fight in the arena to win popular support. The Emperor Macrinus had been a professional gladiator. Even finding victims enough to be killed in the arena became a serious drain on the empire. 'We are sacrificing the living to feed the dead,' protested Caracalla, referring to the fact that the games were supposedly given to appease the souls of the departed. Yet the games kept on. Without them, the mob could not be controlled, and by now the entire national economy was tied up with the great spectacles. To have stopped them would have caused as serious a crisis as if our government suddenly abandoned dams, farm relief, and military spending.
Yet the end could not be postponed for ever. Rome began to be overrun by foreigners. Thousands of Gauls, Germans, and Parthians were living in the city, brought there to bolster the weakening empire. These 'barbarians' had no interest in the games which, after all, required a rather special taste to appreciate. A Parthian prince left the circus in disgust, remarking, 'It's no fun seeing people killed who haven't a chance.' The crowd yelled, 'Burr-head! Why doncha go back to Parthia where ya belong?' but the savages gradually obtained the balance of power. After all, the emperors depended on these foreign auxiliaries for support and placating the Roman mob became less and less important.
The Christian church was growing in power and did everything possible to stop the games. In 325 a.d., Constantine tried to put an end to the games but they still continued. Then in 365 a.d., Valentinian forbade sacrificing victims to wild beasts. He was able to make bis edict stick, and that took all the fun out of the spectacles. In 399 a.d. the gladiatorial schools had to close for want of pupils.
Then in 404 a.d., a monk named Telemachus leaped into the arena and appealed to the people to stop the fights. Telemachus was promptly stoned to death by the angry mob but his death ended the spectacles. The Emperor Honorius was so furious at Telemachus' lynching that he closed the arenas. They were never reopened. The last chariot race was held after the fall of Rome by Tolila, a Goth, in 549 a.d. He was merely curious to see what the business looked like.
Yet so deeply had the games entered into the national consciousness that people still considered themselves as supporting the Red, White, Green or Blue faction—although many of these people had no idea what the colours meant. In 532 a.d., riots broke out between the Blues and the Greens that threatened to wreck what remained of the empire. The Emperor Justinian had to call out troops to restore peace, and in the fighting over thirty thousand people were killed.
The only remaining relics of these titanic spectacles are some crude pictures scratched on the walls of gladiator barracks, a few cracked tombstones, references in the literature of the times and, here and there, the ruins of the amphitheatres. The games followed the legionnaires as chewing gum follows American GIs, and wherever the legions were stationed there was sure to be a circus. Roman governors built stadiums as soon as they arrived in their province, confident that this was the only way to keep the population contented. Many of their letters express amazement that the Greeks, Gauls and Britons seemed more interested in having enough to eat than in watching the games.
Establishing these amphitheatres was a difficult job. The Greeks fought them to the last (Plutarch
