Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Even a humble working person who hired themselves out for labor, the Romans thought that was innately demeaning because you're using your body for someone else's benefit or pleasure. So they didn't have this notion of the dignity of hard labor or something. They thought the only noble profession was farming. Okay, because there you generate something and you're producing it for yourself.
But if you work for someone else, you're demeaning yourself. And gladiators are the worst of the worst, right? You're performing for someone else's pleasure. So on the one hand, they're very low status. But on the other hand... Successful gladiators get famous. People admire them. Women find them attractive. They're celebrities. And so this is the status dissonance, right?
You have these people who on the one hand formally are very low status in society but yet are very popular on the other hand. Another kind of myth about gladiators is that they were just dying all the time. I mean, you watch movies, and again, they'll always throw a bunch of gladiators and they all die.
I think some scholar did a study of – there's like 100 fights we know of where we know some details, and I think 10% of those ended in the death of one of the people. So gladiators are a lot more like boxing matches. Yeah.
where you're watching a display of skill between two people who are more or less evenly matched in terms of their abilities and probably they'll survive though there's a chance that one of them might get injured in fact one might die um Having said all that, in the end, you really are having people fight and potentially die for the pleasure of an audience.
And anthropologists and Roman historians like to speculate, why did the Romans do this? The Romans address it. I mean, there's a famous thing where a Roman says, we Romans were a violent people. We're a warlike people. And so it's fitting that we should be accustomed to the sight of death and violence. It kind of works.
There's a more symbolic interpretation that says the amphitheater is an expression of Roman dominance, a symbolic expression, because what you have are all segments of Roman society gathered together to control the fate of others. So you have foreigners, you have wild animals, you have criminals, you have other people.
And we are symbolically asserting our dominance over those groups by determining do you live or do you die. And that kind of works too. And the cynical one is humans like violence. I mean, when people watch a hockey game, what gets the most excited? The fight. When people watch car racing, violence. There's a crash. What's going to be shown on the news? It's the crash.
So there's something dark in human nature sometimes that likes violence, and maybe the Romans are just being more honest about it than we are.
On the other hand, to be fair, I mean there were Romans at the time who morally objected to them and said this is morally degenerate to take pleasure in this and that's wrong. So I think in all eras, you have a diversity of opinions. There's no unanimous take on what this is or what this means.
Was it – Well, the most common source, again, is prisoners of war. So if you conquer some people and they seem to be warlike, you might well consign some of them to fight in the arena. And the other thing about gladiators is they were highly trained professionals. Mm-hmm. So the gladiator schools who train them were spending a lot of money to train these people.
And it wasn't just we take some guy and throw him into the arena like you see in movies all the time. These were people that you'd invested a lot of money in. That's why you don't really want to see them killed. But yeah, mostly they're prisoners of war. I mean, in very rare instances, you might have a free person volunteering or even selling themselves to fight as gladiators. But
Much more common was that. And what's interesting is some people wouldn't do it. I mean, there's a lot of instances of gladiators refusing to fight and committing suicide, which you don't hear. So like there was one German who was supposed to fight as a gladiator and instead he stuck his head between the spokes of a wagon that was spinning and snapped his own neck.
There were a group of 29 Germans who all sort of said, we're not going to fight for the Romans' pleasure, and they strangled one another the night before they were supposed to fight. So, I mean, you have people sort of objecting to being complicit in this kind of performance as well.
Yes.
And animals fought animals. Yeah, the Romans were a little weird with their animal thing. They loved exotic animals, but mostly they liked to see the exotic animals die. So, I mean, there was an enormous industry collecting wild beasts, transporting them to Rome, which is no easy matter to transport elephants and giraffes and rhinos, particularly in
This era of technology, but they were like draining Africa and bringing lions and all these things and sacrificing them.
Well, the Colosseum, its real name is the Flavian Amphitheater, is interesting because for a long time, Rome always had a chariot racing arena, the Circus Maximus. But it didn't have a permanent gladiatorial venue until relatively late, until about 80 AD, so during the reign of the Emperor Vespasian. And he built this thing. So he built the Flavian Amphitheater.
He was from the Flavian family of emperors. And he did it as a deliberate act of propaganda. So before him had been Nero, who was sort of seen as a crazy or bad emperor. And one of Nero's indulgences is he had built this enormous palace for himself called the Golden House.
So it was kind of this pleasure palace with 50 dining rooms and all this stuff, and it was basically wasting a ton of money on him, right? So right on the site where Nero had his golden house, Vespasian says, I'm going to erect a new building on top of it that's going to be for the pleasure of the people.
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