Being Chained to the Village Idiot

"Owning a penis is like being chained to the village idiot." I read that on someone's blog the other day. I wish I had said it. Well, now I have.

So, what else is on my mind. Well, the OU stuff is grinding along. At the moment it's a study of the Roman Empire with particular focus on the Colosseum. So far we've been reading on the origins and function of this famous amphitheatre and, I must say, it has been quite interesting.

Those gladiatorial games were awesome, and gruesome, productions. "At the hundred days festival given by Titus at the Flavian amphitheatre (Colosseum) in 80 ad, on one day 5,000 wild animals of various sorts were exhibited, and 9,000 tame and wild was the sum total of the killed (over the hundred days) ... " These inaugural games in the Colosseum are said to have involved "fights of up to 3,000 men in a single day". (Quotes from sources in the OU published course material).

The scale of it is mind boggling and it begs the question; who was in charge of production? maybe that's where the great blockbuster film directors like De Mille and Spielberg and Peter Jackson get their directing genes. If you think about it, there must have been their equivalent in ancient Rome. It wasn't just a bunch of mindless animal torturers; someone with great project management skills and an eye for theatre had to be orchestrating the whole gory business.

The course raises questions on how we view these events from a twenty-first century perspective. Was it all just mindless gore and crowd-pleasing bloodlust, or was it more complex? A way of keeping the Roman populace contented while controlling crime and rebellion? It's easy to be moralistic and condemn the barbarity of the people who staged such events, but modern liberal high-mindedness is not useful when studying events of two thousand years ago. For the Romans, to kill wild beasts was to protect mankind. Criminals and Christians during that period were regarded as having put themselves in the position of outcast. The games were a way of dealing with capital punishment, and the crowd could ameliorate their sub-conscious guilt by giving the criminals a "fighting chance". Some modern "enlightened" societies deal with capital punishment in a different, but equally self-deceiving way. Executions are carried out behind closed doors, out of sight and largely out of mind.