HEROES OF THE COLISEUM
The sun shines brightly over the Coliseum, illuminating masses of rowdy spectators, who strain to catch glimpses of their favorites. The air is thick with excitement just moments before the event. Music plays and a colorful procession of costumed performers draws the attention of the crowd, but it is all just a prelude to the real contest everyone came to see. Athletes, finely trained and ritually armored for competition, wait nervously in the wings as the announcer's voice booms. All at once they burst into the arena and the crowd erupts into applause, shouting the names of their favorites and hurling insults at their rivals.
This scene could just as easily describe a USC Trojan game in twenty-first-century Los Angeles as a festival featuring gladiatorial games in first-century Rome. The modern American phenomenon of big-time college football has much in common with the gladiatorial spectacles of ancient Rome—too much in common, some might say. Like Rome's gladiatorial bouts, or munera, college football's contests are followed with interest by masses of passionate spectators who regard the athletes’ performance as an inspiring representation of their community's competitive virtues and noble fighting spirit. And, as in Rome, there is a certain irony to this because the players themselves aren't usually representative of their college communities.
Like the ancient gladiators, college athletes at NCAA Division I “football schools” often differ from the mainstream population in terms of race, socioeconomic class, and geographic origin. The difference is compounded in both settings by legal and social marginalization. On campus, athletes are unlikely to study or socialize with ordinary students, and their sports commitments leave them with fewer liberties.1 Nevertheless, they are expected to face grave physical risks for those same students’ entertainment. The phenomenon of the burned-out and used-up college star, abandoned with little more than memories and scarred knees at age twenty-five, is a dirty little secret of our college sports machine. Furthermore, some universities exploit players economically; as in Rome, the athletes toil and perform at a near-professional level for little or no pay while others reap both profit and power from their exploits.
What's most fascinating about college football players and Roman gladiators, however, is not their daily hardships or social marginalization. Rather, it is that so many transcend these things to distinguish themselves as revered symbols of excellence or virtue, virtus in Latin, aret
in Greek. Roman society and modern universities both focus on producing excellent citizens. Should we be surprised that gladiators and football players, otherwise considered social outcasts, so often end up as examples of virtue?
Not according to the philosophy of Roman Stoicism, a school of thought that disdained strong emotions, accepted inevitable fate, rejected common values, and prized virtue above all else. For the Stoics, college football players and gladiators can achieve virtue despite—and maybe because of—their difficult situations. Virtue in the Stoic sense does not depend on external circumstances; rather, it requires independence from them. In fact, college football players’ general lack of personal wealth, social privilege, and political power is precisely what makes them such inspiring symbols of Stoic freedom from worldly concerns. Considered from the perspective of such Stoic philosophers as Seneca (ca. 1 B.C.E.–65 C.E.), Epictetus (ca. 50–130 C.E.), and Cicero (106–43 B.C.E.), big-time college athletes may achieve virtue and happiness despite their predicament. Following the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180 C.E.), however, those with the power to improve players’ situations have a moral obligation to do so. We may admiringly call college football players “gladiators,” but we should do what we can to prevent their situation from too closely resembling that of their ancient Roman counterparts.
Students of a Lesser Good
Unlike the vast majority of student athletes who deftly combine sport and study at colleges and universities all across the United States, there is an enduring perception that college football players in Bowl Championship Series (BCS) programs are something less than full-fledged students. People believe that players are on campus not to study but to play a dangerous and sometimes brutal game that provides inspiration and entertainment for those at the university who do the “serious” work. Roman gladiators were also considered entertainers and counted accordingly as part of a lowly class of moral outcasts called infamia. Romans conventionally regarded a gladiator as “crude, loathsome, doomed, lost …utterly debased by fortune, a slave, a man altogether without worth and dignity, almost without humanity.”2 As a matter of fact, gladiators generally were slaves or criminals condemned ad ludum—to the life of the arena. Although some free men and women, including members of the nobility, did elect to fight in the arena, they were rare exceptions who nevertheless swore the gladiator's oath (sacramentum gladiatorium) to be “burned by fire, bound in chains, to be beaten, to die by the sword.”3 This oath amounted to a renunciation of one's rights as a Roman citizen.4
College football players may not be foreign slaves or convicted criminals, but many do come from neighborhoods and upbringings that are worlds away from those of their typical classmates. In fact the large number of African American students recruited to play football at predominantly white schools may improve those universities’ diversity statistics, but rarely are these athletes fully integrated into the college community. Studies show that on most campuses, recruited athletes differ markedly from students at large in terms of academic credentials, academic outcomes, and the way they live and socialize at college—a phenomenon dubbed “the academic-athletic divide.”5 It turns out that those students who so warmly cheer their classmates on Saturday are unlikely to study, party, or even eat lunch with them during the week. Although many colleges and universities use “representativeness” of the larger student body as a criterion in recruiting athletes, it is rarely achieved. In any case, there is a social stigma attached to athletic participation that marginalizes even those athletes who do reflect the college population.6 Student-athletes may not formally be denied basic rights and privileges, as were Roman gladiators, but the time required for practice and travel to games, as well as strict amateur regulations in the NCAA, result in their having fewer practical liberties than their classmates.
Despite their daunting power and celebrity in the arena, football players and gladiators turn out to be relatively powerless within their respective societies. Far from autonomous, they are controlled and manipulated by the elites of their communities. In Rome this was illustrated by the etiquette of the arena. Fights generally ended when one gladiator signaled concession or was brought to the ground by an opponent. At this point, the victorious gladiator was to look to the presiding dignitary, or editor, for the signal to kill or spare the loser. The editor decided who lived or died; he could even grant a gladiator freedom, a prize symbolized by a wooden sword, or rudis. Of course the crowd offered their vociferous advice on these decisions. If a loser had fought valiantly, they would call out “Mitte!” (“Let him go!”); if they thought he lacked valor, they would call for his death. Given the editor's political ambitions, he usually indulged their wishes, so in effect the power remained with the people in the stands. The gladiator himself was more or less a pawn in this political game.
The Roman crowd's influence was not unlike that of modern college fans and boosters. Nor is the modern coach's control over action on the field much unlike the editor's control of the arena. Indeed, college football teams are generally guided by a whole cadre of coaches, who gain obedience from their players not through slavery but through the all-important power to decide who does and doesn't play. Independent strategy decisions made by players on the field are quickly becoming a rarity. Most quarterbacks call plays that come prepackaged from coaches on the sidelines. The University of Florida's offensive success in the 1990s was regularly attributed to the strategic decisions and play-calling of their coach, Steve Spurrier. The football player who executes a brilliant play today is often regarded as unthinking brawn serving brainy skybox masters. Just as in Rome's Coliseum, the strongest guys in the stadium turn out to be political weaklings.
Free to Be Brave
So how can they be heroes? Most theories of virtue, including the Roman ideal of virtus, seem to require free agency (of the philosophical, rather than economic, type). As slaves, gladiators were compelled to fight, if not by their masters, then by their oath, or by the fact that someone was charging at them with a knife. Participation in college sports, by contrast, is voluntary almost by definition. Nevertheless it would be hard to deny that many college players compete out of financial necessity. Faced with the challenges of poverty and poor schooling, many perceive football to be one of precious few avenues toward a better life. It is a venerable species of the American dream: the impoverished and academically challenged child from the ghetto or cornfields combines his native strength with motivation from the promise of financial patronage to beat the odds, attend college, and perhaps reap riches and fame as a professional athlete. It is a path with a high statistical chance of failure, but for many football players it can seem like the only path available.
The situation was not so different for Roman gladiators. Those captured as slaves or condemned as criminals had an opportunity to earn their freedom and readmission to Roman society by demonstrating their valor (and social worth) in the arena. Those who volunteered, the autocrati, were usually freed gladiators who returned to their craft less out of free will than the cold reality that they could find no better means to support themselves. Volunteers of independent means were rare, and emperors who took to the arena, as Commodus does in the movie Gladiator, seem to have been indulging in fantasy rather than subjecting themselves to its real risks and dangers. The real emperor Commodus apparently won all his gladiatorial “fights”; his movie death at the hands of Maximus in the Coliseum is Hollywood fiction, not historical fact.7 In any event, the fact that some gladiators and all college athletes can be said to have chosen their lives does not erase the worry about voluntary participation and its connection to concepts of virtue and heroism.
For the Stoic idea of virtue, however, free choice to participate is hardly an issue. Stoics believe that external circumstances are determined; therefore moral worth derives from internal events, especially the adoption of certain attitudes. “Ask not that events happen as you will,” counsels Epictetus, “but let your will be that events should happen as they do, and you shall have peace.”8 One reason Stoics were willing to consider even enslaved gladiators as symbols of virtue is that their enslavement was only a more explicit version of the slavery we all face under the common master of fate. Making the point that slaves are human beings who share the same roof as their owners and should be regarded as friends, Seneca reminds his fellow citizens that “strictly speaking they're our fellow slaves, if you once reflect that fortune has as much power over us as over them.”9 No doubt college football fans also see some reflection of their own social struggles in the hard-luck players’ improbable success. The goddess of the Roman arena was Nemesis, who represents the unexplainable effects of mysterious, uncontrollable forces. The same sorts of forces often seem present in college football. For Stoic gladiators and football players alike, virtue is revealed in response to adversity.
Of course the Stoic ideas of determinism, slavery, and their effect on virtue were more sophisticated than popular beliefs about fate and fortune. The slavery condemned by Stoicism was self-imposed, caused by desires for things outside a person's control. Says the erstwhile slave Epictetus, “Let him …who wishes to be free not wish for anything or avoid anything that depends on others; or else he is bound to be a slave.”10 Enslaved gladiators are cut off from the things most people desire (wealth, status, power), and self-reliance is necessary for their survival. The gladiator who wishes only for what he or she can control is, in the Stoic sense, completely free. Therefore those gladiators who accept their role and choose to fight achieve liberty, while those who lust for escape are trapped by their own desires.
Perhaps this is why we are so puzzled by and admiring of the star college athlete who resists the temptation of a multimillion-dollar professional debut in favor of another year of frequenting the coin laundry, cramming for exams, and eating mystery meat from the dining hall. His heroism is displayed not in athletic indifference to pain but in Stoic indifference to the prizes and pleasures we're all conditioned to covet. Gladiators earned cash and glory too, but it was their freedom from society's corrupting distractions that Stoicism finds more valuable. Stoics such as Seneca believe that it is our attachment to scarce goods and the resulting fights over them that cause disturbance and unhappiness in our souls.11 We should admire the player who opts to stay in school for his apparent freedom from those desires.
So the freedom of the Stoics is a paradoxical sort of freedom, but if determinism is true and all things are fated to happen as they do, it is the only sort available to any of us. The appropriate attitude is extremely difficult to achieve, and the Stoics believed that it would take extensive philosophical training. But in the end it is a matter of facing up to the truth about fate and striving for virtue within the prescribed limits of self-sufficient activity. In a sense, the Stoics see fate as something we accept, just as players accept the rules of a game. And we all have a particular fate, whether it is to be a slave like Epictetus or an emperor like Marcus Aurelius. Says Epictetus, “Remember you are an actor in a play, and the Playwright chooses the manner of it: if he wants it short, it is short; if long, it is long. If he wants you to act a poor man you must act the part with all your powers; [likewise] if your part be a cripple or a magistrate or a plain man. For your business is to act the character that is given you and act it well; the choice of the cast is Another's.”12
The Stoic athlete's virtue, then, depends not upon the freedom to choose football rather than medicine but rather upon the choice to excel in whatever activity he finds himself in. It is not unlike the situation of a soldier involuntarily drafted into a war. He may fight valiantly and virtuously while regarding his presence on the battlefield as a morally neutral matter of fate. Of course our common fate as human beings is death, and that fate is not just something to be accepted but something potentially within our power. Just as the voluntary participant always has the option to quit playing, the Stoic sage always has the option to quit living. Says Seneca, “No one has power over us when death is within our power.”13 Indeed, suicidal gladiators are Seneca's favorite examples of courageous expressions of virtue and freedom; not just facing but actually choosing one's death to preserve one's dignity could be the ultimate act of bravery and autonomy.14
Risk and Violence
Considered against the idealized backdrop of college sports, however, suicide seems rather an extreme option for expressing a person's freedom. For that matter, the comparison between college football and gladiatorial combat may seem invalidated by the extreme violence of the latter. For many, the risk of death and dismemberment pushes gladiator fights outside the realm of sport altogether. How can killing cultivate virtue? Survival is simply too serious a concern to be made into a game. Michael Poliakoff excludes gladiators from his book Combat Sports in the Ancient World on the grounds that criteria for sporting success should be “different from those that mark success in everyday life.” Since war was part of everyday life in antiquity, he decides that “a gladiator fighting to kill or disable his opponent and save himself in any manner possible is not participating in a sport, but in a form of warfare for spectators.”15 Does the risk of serious injury prevent football from being a sport?
However brutal and violent college football may be, comparison to warfare is a stretch. One may interpret the game as opposing armies assembling lines and attacks in order to gain territory from each other, but deaths are uninvited, unexpected, and relatively rare. College football players can and do express their excellence on the field with medical assistance close at hand and the threat of death far in the distance. In the historical and cultural context of ancient Rome, the risk of death was necessary to test a gladiator's virtue. Unlike the gruesome public executions that pitted weakened convicts against hungry lions, gladiator fights were evenly matched precisely because this was a precondition for the display of Roman virtue and the achievement of personal glory.16 Says Seneca, “A gladiator reckons it ignominious to be paired with his inferior in skill and considers him to have conquered without glory who has conquered without peril.”17 The threat of career-ending injury is an analogous risk in college football, not least because it often represents the end of that dream path toward fame so many players are following. The pain and fear we see on an injured player's face are only partially physical, and our empathy for him often recognizes the compound fracture of body and dream. Safer versions of the game certainly exist, but it seems that the kind of virtue we admire in college football players cannot be had without the risk of injury any more than the Roman virtue attributed to gladiators could have been had without the risk of death.
Death, of course, was not a required outcome in gladiatorial fights; at first it wasn't even a frequent outcome. A gladiator's statistical risk of death changed along with cultural expectations over the years. In the first century of the Common Era, typical gladiators survived fewer than ten contests, although some survived more than one hundred and others were successful enough to earn their freedom.18 In succeeding centuries the odds got worse. Contests fought to the death became more popular as the political stakes rose and the public experienced what some contemporary philosophers called a “degeneration of taste.”19 Historian Carlin Barton has speculated that the Roman demand for brutal and bloody spectacles ironically grew as a result of increasingly posh living conditions and ease of life among Roman gentry.20
Perhaps it is America's relative wealth and ease of life that drive our passion for the violent game of football, but there may be something more serious at stake. It has been alleged that the Roman public's blood-thirstiness stemmed from a disregard for anything like universal human rights.21 Gladiators were members of a kind of disposable class whose health and lives were brazenly risked and destroyed for the entertainment of more important people. According to modern sport philosophers, violence in athletics stems from disrespect for persons.22 Could it be that our tolerance for violence in college football is based on socioeconomic class difference and the so-called athletic-academic divide? Was the system that forced gladiators to risk their lives in the arena really so different from the system that forces some athletes to risk their health in the stadium today? These may be questions worth pondering.
To the Stoic mind, however, risk is a fact of life, and death is a common human reality that must be confronted consciously. Says Seneca, “Death is not an evil. What is it then? The one law mankind has that is free of all discrimination.”23 Being forced to kill and facing death oneself are, for the Stoic, prime occasions to demonstrate human dignity. Gladiators exhibited their readiness to die by baring their torsos in the arena.24 The gladiatorial fight, according to historian Thomas Wiedemann, is a ritualization of the encounter with death designed to put “death in its place.”25 Gladiators enter the arena through the gate of life and face the opposite gate of death; the battle takes place, symbolically, in the space between life and death.26
The gladiators’ status as “socially dead” renders more dramatic the struggle to redeem themselves through valor. Explains scholar Roland Auguet, Romans did not regard the confrontation with death as undignified or even an act of “exceptional heroism; it was the normal way of proving oneself a Roman.”27 Likewise, modern Americans may see nothing undignified in an underprivileged youth's using the gridiron as a social ladder. Neither need we interpret his physical play as disrespectful toward opponents (trash-talking and egotistical end zone antics notwithstanding). The risk and brutality of college football seem to be part of what validates its function as a revealer of virtue, just as the risk of death validated gladiators’ social redemption and public glory.
Virtue without Status
Even as big-time college football exploits its servile gladiators for the benefit of the rich, even as it strips student-athletes of liberties and (more seriously) social equality on campus, even as players risk pain, injury, and public humiliation, there is one thing that cannot be taken from a right-minded college athlete: virtue. What kind of prize is that? To put a Stoic spin on the old phrase about winning, virtue isn't everything; it's the only thing. At least it is the only thing that matters to a Stoic. “Each man has a character of his own choosing,” says Seneca; “it is chance or fate that decides his choice of job.”28 The Roman audience clearly recognized and appreciated virtue in these outcasts of the arena. The idea that slaves could have virtue entered the Roman psyche as early as 216 B.C.E. after the defeat at Cannae in which oath-bound slaves had fought more effectively than free men.29 Not unlike the college sports adage that “there is no ‘I’ in ‘team,’” the Roman idea of military virtue was grounded in obedience to one's general and service to one's state. As Seneca observes, a gladiator's subjection to the will of the presiding official, or editor, actually enhances his status as an example of Roman virtue.30 Cicero's description of true courage seems tailor-made for gladiators or even college athletes:
The soul that is altogether courageous and great is marked above all by two characteristics: one of these is indifference to outward circumstances; for such a person cherishes the conviction that nothing but moral goodness and propriety deserves to be either admired or wished for or striven after, and that he ought not to be subject to any man or any passion or any accident of fortune. The second characteristic is that, when the soul is disciplined in the way above mentioned, one should do deeds not only great and in the highest degree useful, but extremely arduous and laborious and fraught with danger both to life and to many things that make life worth living. 31
What makes Stoicism work for victims of exploitation and social injustice like gladiators and college football players is that it assumes external conditions, such as worldly wealth and power, to be unreliable as indicators of virtue. In fact, Stoic writers came to regard gladiators as evidence that social conventions about human worth and inequality were unsound. This was a therapeutic idea for struggling Roman citizens.32 As Wiedemann sums it up, “The criminal condemned [to the arena] was a socially ‘dead man’ who had a chance of coming alive again.”33 In a world where, as Epictetus observes, climbing the social ladder meant bending down to kiss someone's feet, the gladiator emerges as a paradoxical hero whose lack of autonomy and social status comes to symbolize freedom, opportunity, and old-fashioned Roman values.34 Perhaps this explains why college football players are regarded as all-American heroes despite their social marginalization. They embody the rags-to-riches American dream symbolized by our beloved Statue of Liberty. Football becomes the social meritocracy so elusive off the playing field—a place where individuals can transcend their humble origins and reach heroic heights through talent, hard work, and the ancient ideal of virtue.
Conclusion: The Challenge of Justice for Gladiators and Left Tackles
Of course American society is not a perfectly level playing field, and neither is college football. There is reason for serious concern about players’ exploitation, lack of autonomy, and physical risk. Although Stoicism teaches us to find and cultivate virtue even if fortune lands us in such hostile conditions as the Roman arena, those who have a choice would be unlikely to participate in or promote the Roman games. The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius's distaste for the gladiatorial fights was well known, and he attempted to limit their scale, if not to eliminate them.35 Big-time college sports’ own emperors should consider diluting the resemblance between their premier game and that of Rome's ancient Coliseum. To what extent do entertainment concerns dictate the management of college sports today? Is the amateur student-athlete a worthy ideal, or an excuse for the economic exploitation of talented young men? How do the phenomena of financial need and athletic recruiting affect the ideal of voluntary participation? What is the worth of a college scholarship when poor academic preparation and extensive demands on time and energy keep student-athletes’ graduation rates low? At what point do the risks of sport outstrip the benefits to athletes and society at large? Stoicism helps individuals to transcend unjust circumstances, but it also compels us to labor for justice. Let us meet our challenge with the courage of Roman gladiators.
Notes
I wish to acknowledge assistance and resources provided by the American Academy at Rome, the Ver Steeg Faculty Development Fund at Morningside College, Nigel Crowther, Mark Holowchak, Sam Clovis, Robert Reid, Stephen Ryan, and Michael Austin. Parts of this paper were previously published as “Was the Roman Gladiator an Athlete?” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport 33, no. 1 (2006): 37–49.
1. William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin, Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 5.
2. Carlin Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 12.
3. Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 1998), 87.
4. Thomas Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 1992), 113.
5. Bowen and Levin, Reclaiming the Game, 5.
6. Bowen and Levin, Reclaiming the Game, 196.
7. Ludwig Friedlander, “The Spectacles,” in Roman Life and Manners under the Early Empire, trans. J. H. Freese and L. A. Magnus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1908), 2:50.
8. Epictetus, Discourses and Manual, trans. P. E. Matheson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916); Epictetus, The Handbook (The Encheiridion), trans. N. P. White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 8.
9. Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters from a Stoic (Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium), trans. R. Campbell (London: Penguin, 1969), Epistle 47.
10. Epictetus, Encheiridion, 14.
11. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 421.
12. Epictetus, Encheiridion, 17.
13. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Epistle 91.
14. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Epistle 70.
15. Michael B. Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 7.
16. Barton, Sorrows of the Ancient Romans, 28.
17. Seneca, On Providence, 3.4, quoted in Barton, Sorrows of the Ancient Romans, 31.
18. Kyle, Spectacles of Death, 86.
19. Friedlander, “The Spectacles,” 85.
20. Barton, Sorrows of the Ancient Romans, 46.
21. Friedlander, “The Spectacles,” 78.
22. Robert L. Simon, Fair Play: Sports, Values, and Society (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991), 108; Jim Parry, “Violence and Aggression in Contemporary Sport,” Ethics and Sport, ed. M. McNamee and J. Parry (London: E & FN Spon, 1998), 204–24.
23. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Epistle 123.
24. Marcus Junkelmann, “Familia Gladiatoria: The Heroes of the Ampitheatre,” in Gladiators and Caesars, ed. Eckart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben (Berkeley: University of California Press), 31–74.
25. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 97.
26. Amy Zoll, Gladiatrix (New York: Penguin, 2002).
27. Roland Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization: The Roman Games (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972), 198.
28. Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, Epistle 94.
29. Kyle, Spectacles of Death, 48–49.
30. Seneca, De providentia, 4.4–16.
31. Cicero, De officiis, trans. Walter Miller (New York: Macmillan [Loeb], 1913), 66.
32. Auguet, Cruelty and Civilization, 197.
33. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 105.
34. Epictetus, Encheiridion, 25.
35. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, 134–39.