Roman sport and spectacle regularly find their way into modern literature and film. From Henrik Sienkiewicz’s Quo Vadis and Steven Saylor’s novels to Ben Hur, Gladiator, HBO’s Rome, and Starz’s recent Spartacus, we are inundated by written and visual representations of the Romans’ seemingly insatiable thirst for blood. But did Roman authors view sport and spectacle in the same way that they are treated in modern sources?
The most immediately familiar Roman judgment on sport and spectacle is the phrase coined by Juvenal (c.55–127 CE), panem et circenses (“bread handouts and circus games,” Satires 10.81). Juvenal’s bitter contempt for his contemporaries’ love of sport and spectacle still resonates because, despite our pervasive interest in Roman blood sports, there is a strong desire among many moderns to believe that the Romans were horrified by the cruelty of gladiatorial games, public executions, and staged animal hunts. Yet the attitude of Roman authors toward their most (in)famous pastimes is far more complex than merely a negative reaction (on ancient critics of Roman sport and spectacle, see Chapter 41 in this volume). The present essay looks at some of the most celebrated literary works from Roman antiquity that reveal the Romans’ own complicated experiences with and attitudes toward their sport and spectacle, and it also considers what those works can tell us about Roman self-conceptions and identities.
Before proceeding, a few notes on boundaries and limitations are in order. Because of its limited length this essay does not attempt to address all the extant Roman texts that reference sport and spectacle. It focuses instead on the most well-known authors and does not, for example, examine graffiti, curse tablets, and various other epigraphic materials. The work of the authors considered here for the most part presents the point of view of the wealthy elite, not the common man. The focus throughout is on the Romans’ attitudes to sport and spectacle in general terms, a helpful simplification that nonetheless elides a certain amount of variation in Romans’ understandings of individual events or specific occasions.
In order to understand the portrayal of sport and spectacle in Roman literature, it is necessary to give some thought to literary genres and to Roman attitudes toward entertainments of all kinds and toward the past. Roman authors drew careful distinctions between different kinds, or genres, of literature and paid close attention to literary traditions, both those they inherited from the Greeks and those they created for themselves. Certain ideas and perspectives were felt to be appropriate to certain genres, and a Roman author interested in exploring a particular subject typically selected a genre whose traditional form best reflected his intentions. It is, therefore, crucial to give due consideration to the context that frames authorial attitudes toward sport and spectacle.1
This essay puts the relevant texts under two broad headings. One consists of “serious” genres such as history, epic poetry, philosophical dialogue, panegyric speeches, and formal letters. Works in these genres typically use sport and spectacle as a didactic tool and as a means to define and contemplate evolving and changing Roman political and social identities. The other heading consists of the “lighter” genres such as love elegy, the so-called Roman novel, satire, and epigram, which focus on the salacious and scandalous aspects of sport and spectacle. This classification by no means implies that there is no overlap between these texts in regard to the way that literary representation manipulates the audience’s self-perception. Moreover, the attitude of writers working in the “serious” genres is complicated by their at times ambivalent view of sport and spectacle as unworthy of any kind of reaction. For example, in Tacitus’s opinion such things as the building of amphitheaters or the regulation of the gladiatorial shows were too inconsequential to merit inclusion in historical writing (Annals 13.31.1, 13.49.1). Yet, despite such stern assertions, sport and spectacle found their way into all genres of Roman literature.
Romans had a deeply ambivalent attitude toward pleasures of all kinds, including sport and spectacle. Romans referred to sports and spectacles as ludi and spectacula, respectively.2 Both were, like other forms of entertainment, seen as part of a broader category of activities that the Romans called voluptates, a word that designates any kind of pleasure (Wistrand 1992: 11; see Chapter 30). Roman writers evinced an enduring concern about the psychological effect of indulging in voluptates, including, for example, the effects of watching spectacles. There is no precise equivalent in English for voluptates, but “pleasures,” with its connotations of delights that are potentially morally harmful, gets the general flavor right.
Many Romans had a particular concern that voluptates would erode two of the most essential traits of the ideal Roman male, virtus (“manliness”) and pietas (“devotion to duty, loyalty”). Indeed, according to Stoicism, the dominant philosophical school in Rome for much of its history, voluptates stood in direct opposition to virtus and pietas (Wistrand 1992: 61). It is also important to keep in mind that by the first century BCE many Romans saw the period stretching from Rome’s founding to the end of the Second Carthaginian War (753–201 BCE) as the good old days, a time when virtus and pietas reigned supreme and when a simple, rustic lifestyle permitted few if any voluptates. This past was more of a nostalgic construction than a reflection of reality, but it had a firm grip on the Roman imagination.
Some authors working in the “serious” genres resolved the notional opposition between voluptates on the one hand and virtus and pietas on the other by portraying ludi and spectacula as expressing an aggressive form of masculinity that served the interests of the Roman state. In the first book of his Early History of Rome (Ab Urbe Condita), the Roman historian Livy (59 BCE–17 CE) offers an account of an event from Rome’s earliest days, when a lack of suitable women to marry threatened the city’s very existence. The city’s founder and ruler, Romulus, invites a neighboring group of people, the Sabines, to Rome to attend the Consualia, a religious festival in honor of the god Consus (more commonly known as Neptune). This festival included chariot races and celebrated Neptune as the patron of the horse. These particular games end badly for the Sabines, whose women are kidnapped and become at first unwilling and then later loyal wives and mothers of the first Romans (1.9).
What is especially important in Livy’s account is the connection he makes between games on the one hand and the origins of Roman identity and its most defining concepts of virtus and pietas on the other. Livy’s main interest in the humble beginnings of Rome was the mores maiorum (“the customs of our ancestors”). According to Livy, those customs were originally austere but had in his time degenerated into corruption and an insatiable desire for luxury. The ultimate goal of the kidnapping of the Sabine women at the first Roman games was not the actual act of violence but the honorable desire for the perpetuation of Rome. The first Romans used ludi and spectacula to claim what they coveted and needed but could not obtain through peaceful negotiations. Although Livy nowhere unconditionally celebrates Roman achievements, he also never dwells on why a religious festival should end in the abduction and rape of the females among the invited guests. But it is clear that he, as a historian, was interested in the origins of the Roman penchant for violent behavior, which was presented in this case as necessary. The Romans’ competitive and aggressive spirit that manifested itself in the games transmuted into an act of violence toward their own neighbors. Despite that violence, Livy presents these early games as an expression of Roman masculinity and devotion to duty – virtus and pietas.
The event described by Livy, the rape of the Sabine women in the aftermath of the games held in honor of the god Consus, was understood very differently by Roman authors who worked in the lighter genres and celebrated the games as an experience brimming with sexual license. Ovid (43 BCE–18 CE) describes this event in his playful Ars Amatoria (Art of Love), which was written about the same time as Livy’s Early History of Rome. “You first, Romulus,” Ovid states, “made the games disturbed, when the rape of Sabine women consoled the wifeless men” (1.101–2).3 Ovid, like Livy, does not criticize the act of violence, but his approval of it is rooted not in its manifestation of virtus and pietas but in its overtly sexual component: “Romulus, you alone knew how to provide your soldiers with rewards. If you were to give them to me, I would become a soldier” (1.131–2).
Ovid represents the ludi and spectacula of both the past and present as occasions made memorable by the (primarily sexual) delights they brought with them. Elsewhere in Ars Amatoria he advises his readers that the large crowds that attended chariot races were an ideal place to find sexual partners: “Do not let the races escape your attention, the spacious Circus provides many opportunities” (1.135–6). For Ovid, as Plass pithily observes, the circus games presented “the ambience of sexual excitement dating back to the rape of the Sabine women” (Plass 1995: 31).4
The genre of the Ars Amatoria, love elegy, hardly allowed for Livian moralizing images of the past as paradigms of true Roman character and ruminations on the loss of mores maiorum. By Ovid’s time Roman love elegy took the form of what Veyne referred to as “false confidences” (Veyne 1988: 50) that detailed the male protagonist’s overwhelming desire for, and endless difficulties with, a female lover and his concomitant neglect of his civic duties. (The protagonist in these poems almost always temptingly but deceivingly resembles the poet himself.) Roman love elegy thus featured men who not only had surrendered to voluptates but allowed themselves to be enslaved by them and showed minimal concern for traditional pietas. Indeed, like his elegiac hero, Ovid, at least in the early stages of his poetic career, had little interest in the religious origins of the Roman games and even less interest in the primitive rituals of his ancestors. His focus was cultus, the newly found refinement and sophistication of the Augustan Age. Images of rustic and unkempt Sabine women probably repulsed the self-proclaimed praeceptor amoris (“advisor on love”). If anything, the genre of love elegy called for a rebellion against the “established values of tradition” by transferring them into the world of coy didacticism where the most revered concepts of the old days were completely inverted (Conte 1994: 323).
Livy and Ovid vividly illustrate the existence of widely varying attitudes toward sport and spectacle among different Roman authors working in different genres. With that fact in mind, we can look at the representation of sport and spectacle in other Roman authors who wrote in other genres. Livy’s perspective on sport and spectacle is echoed in Vergil’s (70–19 BCE) Aeneid where Aeneas, whose constant epithet is in fact pius (“duty bound”), organizes funeral games on the first anniversary of the death of his father Anchises (5.35–603). These games follow sacrificial offerings and include rowing, footraces, javelin, and boxing. The competitions are described as a true show of youthful Roman virtus and pietas inspired by dutiful awe toward gods and ancestors.5
Cicero (106–43 BCE), another example of a Roman author who wrote “serious” literature touching on sport and spectacle, presented these activities in a positive light based on what he saw as their educational value. Cicero was a prolific writer whose work includes a philosophical dialogue, the Tusculan Disputations, which among other things explores and explains Stoic philosophy. While contemplating steadfastness in battle, he lauds gladiators, who, although “ruined men or barbarians,” never disgrace themselves when faced with death. In this manifestation of courage Cicero sees “the force of training, preparation, and habit” (2.41). The practice and perseverance, violence and aggression required of gladiators are portrayed by Cicero as vivid and instructive manifestations of the warlike temperament required from a Roman man during military campaigns.
The enduring attraction of the idea that the arena was an educational venue is apparent from its appearance, a century after Cicero’s death, in the work of Pliny the Younger (61–132 CE). Pliny was especially interested in gladiatorial combats. In a famous panegyric (a formal speech delivered in praise of an individual) of Trajan he extols the emperor for staging a gladiatorial combat because the participants, even though slaves and criminals, displayed contempt for death and desire for victory, both traits closely associated with virtus (Panegyricus 33.1). The implicit message is that Roman citizens could be made braver by seeing their inferiors displaying courage and that gladiatorial shows therefore had important educational value (Wiedemann 1992: 38).
The reckless bravery in the face of death shown by performers in the arena also fascinated the statesman and philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE). In the present day Seneca is perhaps best known as the author of a collection of 124 letters that bears the title Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium (Letters from a Stoic to Lucilius). These highly elaborate and formal letters were written with an eye to publication, not as informal correspondence with a friend. In one of these letters Seneca indicates his admiration for people who, having been condemned to death in the arena, committed suicide in order to avoid the humiliation of being slain in public (70.20–7). In the same fashion he expresses his fascination with the courage of men pitted against wild animals in the arena (On Benefits 2.19.1–2; On Providence 2.8, 8.8; On the Shortness of Life 13.6; Cagniart 2000: 608). While Seneca’s attitude toward gladiatorial combats was occasionally negative (Epistulae Morales 95.33), as a Stoic philosopher he was interested in how virtus manifested itself in the arena.
Thus, for Cicero, Pliny, and Seneca, among others, gladiatorial combats and animal hunts were morally positive events because they instilled virtus in spectators. For Seneca these activities were also an important example of overcoming the irrational fear of death (Epistulae Morales 93.12), especially considering that “even the lowest people find courage and dignity when facing it” (Epistulae Morales 30.8; Cagniart 2000: 614). Indeed, Seneca regularly watched shows in the arena, a fact that he makes clear in many of his writings without even pretending, like most cultivated aristocrats of his era, that the shows were “vulgar and boring” (Cagniart 2000: 609).
There were, however, limits to these authors’ enthusiasm for sport and spectacle. Gladiatorial combat and animal hunts, which involved displays of martial skill against dangerous opponents, met with more approval than public executions of condemned criminals. Seneca, for example, was extremely concerned with the detrimental moral effect that executions and their senseless cruelty could have on spectators (On the Shortness of Life 13.6–7).
It is also important to note that Roman authors never stretched the metaphor of gladiatorial combat as a school of virtue so far as to suggest that it was acceptable for people of high status to appear in the arena. Cornelius Nepos (100–27 BCE), a stalwart supporter of traditional values, asserted that for the Romans, unlike the Greeks, the participation of elite citizens in public performances could bring only infamia (“disgrace”) and was in general incompatible with pietas (Lives pref. 5). Seneca, despite his open admiration for certain spectacles, deplored the choice of a young Roman aristocrat who preferred gladiatorial combats to a military life (Epistulae Morales 87.9). Suetonius’s highly negative portrayal of Caligula includes the charge that he appeared in the guise of a gladiator and charioteer (Caligula 54.1) and Dio Cassius is reproachful of the emperor Commodus for his pretensions, acted out in private and in public, of being a charioteer, gladiator, and beast hunter (Roman History 73.16–21). A certain amount of caution must be exercised in reading these sorts of accounts, which may be based on exaggerations and rumors intended to besmirch the memory of dead and loathed emperors, but such “crimes of status” (Futrell 2006: 159) were frowned upon throughout Roman history.
Roman authors working in the “lighter” genres frequently focused on the sexual dimensions of sport and spectacle. We have already seen Ovid in his love elegies evincing a positive attitude toward sports and spectacles because of the sexual opportunities they offered. The sexuality that Roman authors linked to sport and spectacle is even more explicitly expressed in Petronius’s (c.10–66 CE) Satyricon, a work that defies simple characterization but is perhaps best known as a novel. Petronius writes with some glee about wealthy women who were sexually aroused by watching gladiators (126). In the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, a collection of biographies of Roman emperors that perhaps dates to the end of the fourth century CE, it is even suggested that Marcus Aurelius’s wife Faustina conceived the future emperor Commodus in an adulterous relationship with a gladiator because only that would explain the latter’s obsession with the arena (Marcus Aurelius Antoninus 19; Wiedemann 1992: 26).
The characterization of the circus and amphitheater as places for scandalous behavior is most closely associated with Juvenal, who became famous for writing satires, which were typically biting, relatively short poems that addressed problems of personal ethics and social morality. In his misogynistic sixth satire, Juvenal recounts the immorality of a woman named Eppia (ostensibly a senator’s wife), who was smitten by the gladiator Sergius and chose him over her family (102–12). He took an even dimmer view of women, especially women from respectable families, who chose to appear in the arena. For Juvenal that kind of shamelessness completely betrayed traditional values and was incompatible with matronly dignity (246–67; see Chapter 32).
Juvenal also expressed disapproval of sport and spectacle on the grounds that they were occasions for the display of extravagance and luxury that put the Roman populace on the ruinous path to decadence. While Ovid juxtaposed the simplicity of the original games to what he portrayed as the luxurious improvements during his own times (Ars Amatoria 1.105–8), Juvenal lampooned the extravagant pompa (“procession”) that preceded Roman spectacles and that featured the presiding magistrate wearing a “heavy Tyrian [and thus expensive] toga” and a crown and carrying an ivory staff while accompanied by a crowd of trumpeters (Satires 10.36–46). Juvenal criticizes the popularity, wealth, and at times decadent lifestyles of successful charioteers such as Lacerta (literally “the lizard”) who, he claims, made as much money as a hundred lawyers (Satires 7.105–14). The satirist sees both the sexual license and extravagance he associates with sport and spectacle as the root of moral degradation that eroded Roman virtus and pietas and made women promiscuous and men unsuitable for military campaigns.
A similar attitude toward the games can be detected in Martial’s (c.40–104 CE) epigrams. Epigrams were originally very short poems that were inscribed on monuments such as tombstones and battle memorials to commemorate an occasion such as a death or a funeral. By Martial’s time they had developed into a form of literature that treated a wide array of subjects succinctly and elegantly. Roman authors used them to explore the entire range of human experience and frequently as a vehicle for social criticism (Conte 1994: 508). The main characteristic of Martial’s epigrams is their “sophisticated wit” rather than “bawdy or scurrilous jokes” (Coleman 2006: xliv). Martial’s earliest known work is the Liber Spectaculorum (Book on Spectacles), which appeared in 80 CE to commemorate the opening of the Colosseum. This is the only surviving piece of Roman literature that concentrates solely on sport and spectacle; roughly thirty poems from it are extant. They contain a certain amount of panegyric of the emperor Titus (or possibly Domitian); for example in one poem (Liber Spectaculorum 17) Martial writes: “Since he is loyal and suppliant the elephant adores you, Caesar, he who only recently ought to have been so feared by the bull. He does it unbidden, with no master teaching him. Believe me, even he senses our god.” Other poems in the collection present brief vignettes from the first set of games held at the Colosseum. One, for instance, describes the combat between the gladiators Priscus and Verus (Liber Spectaculorum 31). While Martial frequently describes sport and spectacle in terms that can be read as either neutral or approving, in some later epigrams he presents a direct critique of sport and spectacle. The speaker in one poem complains that he earns only “a hundred coppers a day,” whereas Scorpus, a famous charioteer, walked away from a race with “fifteen heavy bags of gold” (Epigrams 10.74).
The genres of satire and epigram as represented respectively by Juvenal and Martial called for sharp criticism of the public spectacles that dominated Roman attention and elevated their participants to the heights of popularity. However, one has to recognize a difference in attitude even between these two seemingly similar genres. Juvenal’s remarks against the ruinous effects that the voluptates of the games have on spectators and on the moral fabric of Rome are mostly rancorous and acerbic. His satires adopted an elevated tone not usually characteristic of a genre that had mundane reality as its subject. His at times hyperbolic indignation and invective are prone to distortion because he is resentful of the continuous subversion of traditional Roman values. Overall, Juvenal presents himself as a man offended by the vices of a perverted society in which greed, extravagance, and lust are rewarded and virtue humiliated.
Martial, on the other hand, as Coleman astutely observes, busies himself with “encapsulating the experience of the spectacles for an audience of vicarious spectators” (Coleman 2006: lxxxii). There is even a possibility that Martial’s epigrams in the Liber Spectaculorum brought him the approval of the emperor Titus. Martial offered his reading public something distinctly different from Juvenal. His goal was not bitter invective aimed at curing the vices of society. For him the Roman games were but a part of a much larger spectacle of Roman life and an illustration of the most salient aspects of that life. Like Juvenal, Martial is interested in the vices of society and emphasizes the grotesque aspects of the games. But his view and criticism of the overblown popularity of the games during his times are witty rather than bitter since he looks at them more as a detached spectator uninterested in condemnation. In that respect Martial remains faithful to the general tenor of his chosen genre, the epigram, which with its short form and elliptical content always made “a direct appeal to the reader’s powers of intellectual reconstruction, to the need to interpret” (Hunter 1992: 114).
It is time now to draw some conclusions from this brief survey of Roman writers’ attitudes toward sport and spectacle. Roman writers did not portray chariot races and bloody shows in the arena as harmful to their society. On the contrary, most of them emphasized the positive elements, especially the educational value of the courage displayed in the arena. However, Roman writers also found deplorable some of the same characteristics that many modern spectators deem objectionable: the thirst for violence, the salacious and scandalous aspects associated with the celebrity culture engendered by these games, the deterioration of traditional morality, and the decadent tastes and ways of life fostered by sport and spectacle. Part of that criticism is undoubtedly associated with the fact that the Roman writers discussed in this essay represented the attitude of Rome’s educated elite, who may have truly felt or at least feigned disgust for mass entertainment.
But the truth of the matter remains that for all their philosophical musings and haughty disdain, the testimonies show that the writers went to the shows as eagerly as the common people.
The best illustration of that fact is a story related by none other than St Augustine (354–430 CE) who, in accordance with his emerging Christian sensibilities, was horrified by the power of the arena. In his Confessions, Augustine’s passionate recounting of his conversion to Christianity, he tells a story about his student, Alypius. The latter upon embarking on the study of law in Rome at first detested gladiatorial shows, only to be swept away by the overpowering desire for them after being forcibly dragged into an amphitheater by his friends. This is how Augustine describes Alypius’s eventual “conversion” to Rome’s bloody pastime (Confessions 6.8):
For when he saw that blood, he immediately drank down the savageness; indeed he did not turn away, but fixed his eyes on it; and unknowingly he drank up the Furies; he delighted in the wickedness of the fight and became inebriated with bloodthirsty lust. He was no longer the man who had come there but was one of the crowd to which he had come, indeed a true companion to those who had brought him. What else is there to say? He looked on, he shouted, he was burning with excitement; he took away with him a madness that enticed him to come back.
Augustine’s perception of his student’s “fall,” expressed with such unequivocal immediacy, clearly did not allow for any positive thoughts on the subject. The concept of virtus so dear to the pagan Roman writers was far from Augustine’s mind. He found the proximity to the crowd and partaking in its frenzy psychologically damaging and nothing less than a loss of his student’s soul, which was defiled by the sight of such cruelty. One has to wonder, however, if the writers of Roman antiquity truly felt the same way even when they expressed their revulsion toward the games. Or perhaps like poor Alypius they were shutting their eyes and trying not to look at the arena all the while drinking in its roar and reveling in the irresistible energy of its violence. And if that is so, they were perhaps not much different from some of us.
NOTES
1 König has astutely noted that “extracting” the opinions of individual authors from texts about sports and spectacle can result in a failure “to acknowledge that these texts have any purpose other than the faithful portrayal of athletic techniques and procedures” (2005: 8).
2 The Latin term ludus is always used in the plural (ludi) when referring to public games.
3 All translations of Latin texts are my own.
4 Ovid treated even the triumph, the ultimate display of Roman military prowess, as a fitting occasion for making advances to the opposite sex (Ars Amatoria 1.217–22). Such unsavory advice and the cavalier attitude it reflected may have contributed to his being exiled from Rome by the emperor Augustus.
5 A slightly later Roman epic, the Thebaid of Statius (c.45–96 CE), also contains a lengthy description of a set of funeral games. An insightful analysis of the games in the Thebaid can be found in Lovatt 2005.
REFERENCES
Boyle, A. and W. Dominik, eds. 2003. Flavian Rome: Culture, Image, Text. Leiden.
Bradley, K. 1981. “The Significance of the Spectacula in Suetonius’ Caesares.” Rivista Storica dell’Antichità 11: 129–37.
Briggs, W. 1975. “Augustan Athletics and the Games of Aeneid V.” Stadion 1: 267–83.
Cagniart, P. 2000. “The Philosopher and the Gladiator.” Classical World 93: 607–18.
Coleman, K., ed. 2006. M. Valerii Martialis Liber Spectaculorum. Oxford.
Conte, G. B. 1994. Latin Literature: A History. Translated by J. B. Solodow. Baltimore.
Dunkle, R. 2005. “Games and Transition: Aeneid 3 and 5.” Classical World 98: 153–78.
Edwards, C. 2007. Death in Ancient Rome. New Haven.
Futrell, A. 2006. The Roman Games: A Sourcebook. Malden, MA.
Galinksy, G. 1968. “Aeneid V and the Aeneid.” American Journal of Philology 89: 157–85.
Glazewski, J. 1972. “The Function of Vergil’s Funeral Games.” Classical World 66: 85–96.
Hope, V. 2007. Death in Ancient Rome: A Source Book. London.
Howatson, M., ed. 1989. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Oxford.
Hunter, R. 1992. “Callimachus and Heraclitus.” Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 28: 113–23.
König, J. 2005. Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire. Cambridge.
Lovatt, H. 2005. Statius and Epic Games: Sports, Politics and Poetics in the Thebaid. Cambridge.
Newbold, R. 1975. “Cassius Dio and the Games.” L’antiquité classique 44: 589–604.
Plass, P. 1995. The Game of Death in Ancient Rome: Arena Sport and Political Suicide. Madison.
Toner, J. P. 1995. Leisure and Ancient Rome. Oxford.
Veyne, P. 1988. Roman Erotic Elegy. Chicago and London.
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Wistrand, M. 1992. Entertainment and Violence in Ancient Rome: The Attitudes of Roman Writers of the First Century a.d. Göteburg, Sweden.
GUIDE TO FURTHER READING
Good introductions to Latin literature as a whole can be found in Conte 1994 and Howatson 1989. There are several source books that contain translations of most of the key Roman texts on sport and spectacle; among the most recent and comprehensive is Futrell 2006. A detailed study of the sole surviving piece of Roman literature that concentrates solely on sport and spectacle, Martial’s Liber Spectaculorum, can be found in Coleman 2006.
There are many modern works that examine literary representations of Roman sport and spectacle. König 2005 looks at several literary works from the first through third centuries CE in which sports play an important role: Lucian’s Anacharsis, Dio Chrysostom’s Melankomas orations, Pausanias’s Description of Greece, Silius Italicus’s Punica, various treatises from Galen’s corpus, and Philostratus’s Gymnastikos. He explores how different authors used sports to treat issues ranging from what it meant to be Greek to the effects of military conquest on Roman culture and in doing so he offers stimulating, frequently provocative, readings of a number of challenging texts. Wistrand 1992 is especially helpful in exploring the attitude of Roman writers toward games in the first century CE. It offers a detailed but accessible examination of the attitudes of nine writers – Juvenal, Martial, Petronius, Pliny the Younger, Seneca the Younger, Suetonius, Tacitus, Valerius Maximus, and Velleius Paterculus – toward entertainments in the arena, theater, circus, and stadium; and it also provides an exploration of the role of entertainment in Roman society. Roman attitudes toward voluptates are also discussed sensitively and at length in Toner 1995.
Articles by Bradley (1981); Cagniart (2000); and Newbold (1975) concentrate on specific Roman authors and their attitudes toward sport and spectacle. Several essays included in Boyle and Dominik 2003 cover literary attitudes toward ludi and spectacula in Rome in the second half of the first century CE. Especially noteworthy are essays by Hardie, who discusses poetry and politics at the games of Domitian, and by Gunderson, who focuses on several texts that shed light on the function and social significance of the Colosseum. The funeral games in Vergil’s Aeneid have attracted a great deal of scholarly comment, including Dunkle 2005; Galinsky 1968; Glazewski 1972; and Briggs 1975.
Some scholarly studies of Roman sport and spectacle gravitate toward discussion of their violent nature and of death in the arena. Hope 2007 concentrates on “athletic texts” that present death as entertainment. Edwards 2007 looks at death in the arena and examines representations of gladiators’ death in literature. Plass 1995 offers a thorough analysis of arena violence in Rome and excellent insights into its sociology and politics.