The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Roman Empire Read Online Free PDF Page B

cats, but most of the time unarmed (and often bound) criminals were thrown into the arenas or other enclosures with them.
----
    Â  Lend Me Your Ears “What fun is it for a civilized person to watch either a helpless man being torn apart by a powerful animal, or some magnificent beast stabbed over and over with a spear? Even if this was something to behold, you’ve seen it often enough already, and I, who was watching there, saw nothing new. The last day was for the elephants. The huge crowd was genuinely impressed, but didn’t really enjoy it very much. In fact, there was a kind of sympathy for the elephants, and an impression that there was some connection between that large animal and humans.”
    â€”From Cicero’s Letters to His Friends, 2.1
----
    Mosaics from the Villa Romana at Piazza Armerina, Sicily show animals, such as this elephant, being loaded in Africa for transport to Rome.

----
    Â  Roamin’ the Romans If you visit Sicily, head north from Gela to Piazza Armerina. There you’ll find a wonderfully preserved third-century Roman villa alive with floor mosaics. Many of the mosaics feature scenes of animals being imported from Africa just a short sail away.
----
Human Combat and Spectacle
    The arena games also featured human combat. At one end of the spectrum were serial executions in which an armed criminal fought (and killed) an unarmed criminal. The winner was disarmed and the next (armed) opponent brought out. This scenario was repeated until all had been killed in some manner. At the other end of the spectrum were highly trained gladiators who often fought to the death. The gladiators were slaves owned and trained by the owner of a gladiator school. Some of them developed huge popular followings just like present-day World Wrestling Federation stars. A very, very few eventually won their freedom.
    Human combat or punishments sometimes took on the absurd and theatrical. The emperor Nero put aristocratic women in the arena to fight each other. The emperor Domitian pitted women against dwarfs. Commodus (the evil emperor of the movie Gladiator ) put cripples in the arena to fight each other and finished them off himself. Theatrical performances took on deadly twists of realism: Some arena productions included plays with real murders, and in one “performance,” a man was burned alive to reenact the funeral pyre of Hercules (must have been a one-night-only showing).
----
    Â  Veto! When a gladiator or other contestant was beaten but still alive, it was up to the gladiator owner or emperor to decide his fate. The crowd joined in like a game show audience, shouting, waving handkerchiefs, and signaling thumbs up or down for whether they wished to have the contestant finished off or spared. But where we use the “thumbs up” sign to signal “good job” or “yes,” the Roman thumbs up ( police verso ) probably signified Jugula! (“Cut his throat!”)—the last thing the contestant wanted to see.
----

In Chains: Slaves and Slavery
    Slavery pervaded the ancient world, and Rome was no exception. Slaves were involved in every aspect of daily life, at every level of society, in every kind of economic activity. Philosophers and moralists debated on how to treat or conceptualize them, but slaves were so integral to ancient cultures that, for the most part, they were assumed to be a natural part of things.
Kinds of Slaves
    Though there were no grades of slaves, some slaves had it better than others. In general, the closer the slave was to some kind of personal or business relationship with the owner, the better his chances for decent treatment and eventual freedom. The slaves who had it the worst were those who worked the mines. Such slaves were no more than interchangeable parts to be worked to death and replaced. Other terrible conditions were found on the large plantations and in the gladiatorial schools, where slaves were trained to kill or be killed