Gladitorial Combat

2 Pages 476 Words

Evaluate the importance of Gladiatorial combat to public entertainment to Roman culture:
Kathleen M. Coleman, a professor of Latin at Harvard University, has written extensively on the Roman arena and teaches a course called Roman Games.
Gladiatorial combat at Rome first appeared in the third century B.C. as part of funerary celebrations. Slaves, or sometimes prisoners of war, fought in combat in honor of the deceased. During the Late Republic gladiatorial combat began to gradually move out of the funerary scene. It becomes an index of the popularity of civic leaders outside Rome or the emperor in Rome.
One key point is the deployment of violence as an ingredient in public entertainment. The Romans believed in physical bravery and its manifestation in combat as a cardinal virtue. And simultaneously they believed that persons of no status, particularly persons who had done something wrong, deserved physical punishment. The Roman arena was used to punish miscreants. Criminals were exposed to the beasts. It catered to an instinct in human nature that is attracted by the suffering and bloodletting of others. And this is certainly an element that is deployed in the modern entertainment media. Also, the extent to which we are distracted from the serious concerns of society by the glamour of public entertainment figures and the extravaganzas of the cinema and sports field represents a deep-seated human desire, familiar to the Romans, to be distracted from serious and troubling matters. And it was an effective tool to keep power in a few hands.
We know that beast displays continued well into the sixth century. But early in the fifth century, gladiatorial displays finally seem to have ended throughout the Roman Empire. Probably due to a combination of factors: they became extremely expensive, and possibly the church may have had something to do with this, since the church fathers objected to pagan attractions and exhorted their flocks to at...