You Should Consider Nothing Good Which Has Its Beginning in Evil

“You should consider nothing good which has its beginning in evil. The origin of the games is in shamelessness, in violence, in hate, in a fratricidal founder, in the son of the god of war.” – Tertullian, De Spectaculis V “But if I could account for the origin of these divine properties, then I might also be able to explain how they might cease to exist.” – Cicero, de Re Publica I.XXIV University of Alberta Violence, Pleasure, Civilization: Roman Gladiators and the Writing of History by Erin M. Stepney A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Sociology ©Erin Stepney Fall 2013 Edmonton, Alberta Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission. Dedication I would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Alberta Departments of Sociology and of History and Classics, and of Drs. Kevin Haggerty, Stephen Hijmans, Paul Datta, Sandra Bingham, Jeremy Rossiter, Andrew Gow, Derek Sayer, Mike Gillespie, Bill Johnston, Haim Goldfuss, Peter Fabian, the late Sharon Rosenberg, the late Philip Stepney, and forever and always Richard Fletcher. Abstract This dissertation takes Foucault’s statements regarding political strategies of historical discourse in modernity, from the Enlightenment to the present, and through this lens reads the historiographic study of gladiators as a text which reveals deeper truths about the modern west’s self-image as the seat of ‘civilization’. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault claimed that the modern discourse of history is essentially structured as a ‘discourse of perpetual war’, which narrates a permanent state of conflict between history’s speaking subject and a constructed figure of the barbarian against which ‘civilized society’ defines and defends itself. The construct of civilization exists in a complex and perplexed relation to the ‘barbarism’ of violence, and successive strategies of historical writing have, in Foucault’s terms, applied different models of filtering such barbarism. Within this discursive framework, classical historiography, particularly with respect to ancient Rome, performs a foundational function as a myth-history of ‘western civilization’. This dissertation takes the historical image of gladiators, especially insofar as this image signifies the intersection of violence with pleasure, as a particular barbarism which troubles the myth-historical narrative of western civilization, and critically examines the shifts of scholarly opinion surrounding three linked dimensions of the practice: its origin, the ‘nature’ of the crowd of spectators, and the concomitant interpretations of the meaning of both the violence and the pleasure of gladiators in terms of the sub-discourses of race and class struggle. The persistent imperative to account for the anxiety invoked by gladiators as a ‘barbarism within civilization’ reveals a deeper discursive structure of power and legitimacy surrounding the linked constructs of nation and State. A selection of scholarly texts from the mid-eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries tracks the course through which the interpretation of gladiators, in the context of changing strategies of historical discourse, has shifted from violence to non-violence, from illegitimate to legitimate pleasure, and from barbarous to civilized. Table of Contents 1 Introduction p. 1 The problem of gladiators: violence, pleasure, and p. 1 civilization Stories of origin: historico-political discourse p. 8 Modernity, mythology, and self-image: Elias and the auto- p. 15 narration of civilization Elias’ ‘civilizing process’: violence, game, teleology p. 23 Elias as symptom: game vs. war p. 26 A Foucauldian approach to Eliasian terms: abhorrence and p. 28 decivilizing A Foucauldian approach to classical historiography: p. 33 gladiatorial origin and the end of the Republic ‘There Is No Mention of Rome’ p. 35 2 The Historical Sources of the Myth of Western p. 36 Civilization The Roman ‘crowd’ and the class war: metaphor of power, p. 42 political fantasy, and the theme of degeneration Gladiatorial origin p. 54 Funerary origin: piety p. 60 Funerary origin: politics p. 64 The Etruscan hypothesis p. 68 The South Italian (Osco-Samnite / Campanian) hypothesis p. 70 Origin as historiographic trope p. 75 Narratives of civilization and the State p. 77 3 Luxus, Munus, and Spirit p. 82 The origin of the nation: gladiature and the Enlightenment p. 82 Historical nostalgia and the fear of decivilizing p. 90 Early approaches to civilization: the exception of the Greeks p. 99 ‘Spirit’ and the nation p. 105 Pollice verso and the moral exclusion of the barbarous p. 111 crowd Violence, abhorrence, and the discourse of perpetual war p. 118 4 Imperita Multitudo p. 121 Struggle, utopia, and origin p. 121 Etruscomania and the roots of civilization p. 131 Etruscan racial origin p. 134 Etruscan gladiature and the racial ‘origin’ of civilization p. 138 The decivilizing of the Etruscans p. 145 The discourse of the ‘two races’ p. 152 Patricians, plebeians, and political change p. 155 The origin of the mob in nineteenth century classicism p. 160 Race/class struggle and the roots of the nation p. 161 The nation within the State p. 164 The mob’s pleasure, decivilizing, and nineteenth century p. 168 anxieties p. 177 Mapping the nation/State onto antiquity 5 Primitive Violence of the Plebs p. 183 From struggle to purity p. 183 The new historico-political discourse: a case study from the p. 185 early twentieth century Race, class, and pleasure p. 192 The withdrawal of the trope of struggle p. 196 Abhorrence, purity, origin p. 205 The Etruscan hypothesis p. 214 The return of ‘national spirit’: the Samnites p. 216 The new mythos of origin p. 220 Abhorrence and Greece p. 228 Abhorrence and decivilizing p. 233 6 Romanitas et Violentia p. 236 Postwar historico-political discourse: the barbarian p. 236 democracy Civilization and the indigenization of Etruria p. 240 The barbarian democracy: the Samnites p. 247 Filtering the new barbarian p. 253 Rome, decivilized p. 267 Gladiature, bourgeois myth-history, and social cohesion p. 276 7 Pax Romana p. 288 The ‘elite crowd’ and the myth-history of democracy p. 288 The amphitheatre as civilization p. 295 Social order and integration p. 302 The civilizing of the crowd p. 310 Order as pleasure p. 314 Pleasure/virtus: legitimate violence in service to the p. 319 (civilized) State Violence and ‘good barbarism’ p. 326 Universalization of the State p. 328 Stantes Missi/Sine Missione p. 338 8 Telos p. 344 Civilization, democratization, reconciliation, and myth p. 344 Endnotes p. 357 Works Cited p. 363 1 Introduction The problem of gladiators: violence, pleasure, and civilization The image of Roman gladiaturei – violent armed combat, blood on the sand of the arena, and the massive amphitheatre with its roaring crowd – is utterly familiar. The Grand Tour made much of the Colosseum, in both poetry and visual art; gladiatorial combat was a favourite trope of historical romances of the nineteenth century, and made several famous appearances in canonical literature as well. In the twentieth century it has been the subject of novels both philosophical (Arthur Koestler’s 1939 The Gladiators) and pulp (Philip Wylie’s 1930 Gladiator). It is a recent mainstay of English-speaking historical television programming, and the history of its representation in cinema is as long as the history of cinema itself, ranging from lauded epics such as Spartacus and Gladiator to dubbed B-movies and pornography. Modern tourists to the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome are met by a fully unionized troupe of actors in historically inaccurate costume, who for EU5 will hold a plastic sword to one’s throat for souvenir snapshots. They do, by all accounts, a brisk trade. Less familiar is the academic question of gladiature’s origin. The historiography of gladiatorial origin has its roots in the classicism of the eighteenth century, although it was not explicitly articulated before the nineteenth, and the lately subdued debate continues into the present. Scholarship on the subject traditionally rests heavily upon surviving written texts, but refers also to material and visual evidence, architectural history, and at its best integrates broader historical circumstances to increase the coherence of a historical picture 2 which has always been ambiguous. A brief glance at over three centuries of academic labour, however, immediately reveals two arresting points. One, the origin of gladiature has long been constructed in terms of an originating cultural context: the question has long assumed the form of asking ‘who’ first developed gladiature, and for most of the relevant period of historiography, the answer has located the origin of gladiature outside the boundaries of Roman society itself. Two, the question of ‘who’ originated gladiature has always simultaneously evoked a following question of ‘how’: how it initially appeared in its original non-Roman context, but more importantly, how the practice of gladiature was able to traverse the boundary of Rome, how it was able to find purchase within Roman society, and how it was subsequently able to reach such staggering proportions of mass spectacle under the Empire. Thus, the origin story of gladiature has been consistently deployed in classical historiography to provide some rationalization for the subsequent bloody history of gladiature at Rome.

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