Augustus

On the day of the triumph, Caesar arrayed himself in some of the attributes of Jupiter, king of the gods and protector of Rome. His face was smeared with the same red paint that covered the great statue of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. Underneath an embroidered toga, he wore a purple tunic interwoven with gold and embroidered with palm leaves, a symbol of victory.

After making a speech and presenting military awards and decorations, Caesar reviewed the troops. These were then marshaled in column of route, and Caesar mounted a gilded chariot. A slave stood on the chariot with him, to hold a golden crown above his head and say in his ear that he was mortal. Octavius rode proudly behind on a horse.

The procession moved off in the direction of the city. The Senate led the way, after which came trumpeters and garlanded white oxen with gilded horns; the oxen would be sacrificed later. Then followed the spoils of war and floats with tableaux and paintings illustrating highlights of the African campaign. These caused outrage, Octavius noticed. One of the paintings carried on the floats depicted the republican general Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio stabbing himself in the chest and then throwing himself into the sea; in another, worse still, Cato was shown tearing himself apart like a wild animal. It would have been far wiser to avoid any mention of battles fought by Romans against Romans, but Caesar had still not forgiven his old opponent Cato for evading his forgiveness. As the floats were driven along the narrow city streets the crowd, too intimidated by the soldiery to do more, groaned.

Finally, Caesar and his legions arrived. The soldiers, carrying sprays of laurel, exercised their traditional privilege of singing satirical and sometimes ribald songs about their commander. They had a good deal to say about his reputation for philandering.

On the Capitoline, the ceremonies drew to a close with a mass sacrifice of the oxen, followed by a banquet in the Temple of Jupiter. To the sound of flutes, Caesar was escorted home to the Domus Publica, the official residence of the pontifex maximus.

The triumphs were interspersed with a varied diet of extremely costly spectacles, including theater and dance performances and chariot races in a stadium called the Circus Maximus beneath the Palatine Hill. The most popular attraction in a crowded program of events was a gladiatorial contest. Such contests were usually held in the Forum, where a temporary wooden arena was erected above a network of tunnels beneath the pavement. In these tunnels the gladiators would wait for their turn in the arena.

It is very hard to understand the appeal of killing human beings as entertainment. In the developed world, few people regularly encounter physical violence, but in premodern societies, as in the developing world today, pain, disease, and the frequency of sudden or premature death were routine and expected. Against this background, Rome’s imperial success rested on a culture of military prowess. War was glorious. Young men were trained to inflict and to endure violent death, and to value personal heroism above most other virtues. Indeed, virtus, from which the English word derives, not only encompassed manliness and moral excellence but conjoined these to the concept of physical courage.

The gladiatorial shows had originated centuries before, as human sacrifices, conducted in the community’s most sacred space, the Forum. Before it became a public square, the Forum was a marshy area where the villagers who lived on the surrounding hills buried their dead; perhaps a faint memory of this primary function survived in people’s minds. The victims’ blood sank between the flagstones to slake the thirst of the manes, the spirits of the dear departed who lived a sad, otherwise bloodless life in the underworld.

Most gladiators (the name comes from the Latin for sword, gladius) were slaves, but some citizens joined a gladiatorial troupe of their own free will. The profession gave asylum to social outcasts, the dispossessed, the bankrupt, and men on the run. Free fighters were much sought after, presumably because they performed with more zest than those who did so under compulsion. A volunteer won a bonus if he survived to the end of his contract. The contract was a fearsome document, threatening any who broke it with burning, shackling, whipping with rods, and killing with steel. In effect, it made a temporary slave of the signatory.

Successful gladiators became household names. On the one hand, they were the lowest of the low, ranking alongside male prostitutes and the worst categories of criminal, such as the parricide, and had lost all their dignitas as human beings. On the other hand, they were sexy pinups, as the graffiti at Pompeii show: Celadus the Thracian was “a girl’s heart throb and shining delight,” and Crescens the retiarius (net fighter) “every virgin’s doctor in the night.”