Note: this post was originally published on 10/05/2023
This past weekend I have once again not been able to attend Les Grands Jeux Romains at Nîmes in France. I'm not happy about it. Attending for the first time six years ago set me on a course of specialising in spectacle, and my BA diss would not exist without it. So, if I cannot go, allow me to reminisce and ruminate a little.
The amphitheatre at Nîmes is wonderfully intact, and the annual event each spring puts on a show to give a wonderful sense of what it must have been like to attend the games of antiquity. It starts with a pompa, the procession of participants, and includes a chariot race (with 3 bigae, two horse chariots - a small taste of the Circus Maximus races with 12 four horse chariots,) gladiator fights and a mock battle representing a historical event (this year was the exploits of Vercingetorix.) There are even, on occasion, mock naumachiae with moving warships! I've managed to visit 3 times, and the attention to detail never fails to astound. I know that for one-on-one fights, the very front rows are the best place to sit. You can see the whites of the retiarius' eyes. For larger events like the big set pieces and chariot races, it's actually the 'cheap seats' in the higher levels that are best, that were reserved for women, the poor and the enslaved. I know this because I've been experimenting with sitting in different sections each time I attend, and I've come to the conclusion that the larger the display, the further back one should sit. The front rows are just too close for the eye to take in the entire arena, and much of the 'scenes' are lost.
I had the games at Nîmes in mind when I started reading in earnest about the seating plan of the Colosseum, which was not randomly assigned in antiquity. The cavea, or seating area, was split into three horizontal bands:
The seven front rows of the ima cavea were called the podium and was reserved for senators, priests, military heroes and foreign dignitaries. This most prestigious seating was carefully organised by rank. Senators of patrician status with consuls among their ancestors were given better seats away from senators with plebeian ancestry. 14 wedges separated the uppermost crust from the homines novi.
The top of the lowest band had 12 rows split into 16 wedges, and were allocated to men of equestrian rank. Equestrian rank had strata of its own, and Bomgardner makes a suggestion that one might chart highs and lows of a knight's career by noting his changing seat allocation over time. Tacitus suggests that older knights were sat in lower rows whilst the eager young upstarts had higher seats.
The middle bank of seating had 19 rows in 16 wedges. Male citizens would be seated here if they had enough wealth to wear a toga. The subdivisions here were categorised by profession, wealth, and age. The summa cavea was for plebs, slaves, poor immigrants and women. Whilst individual seats may not have been as closely allocated here as below, separation was still the order of the day. At the very top, there were boxes for rich women. All women were relegated to the top, but god forbid a senator's wife got within sniffing distance of a tanner's wife. It's been suggested that the punishing hike to the top (if you've ever visited an amphitheatre, you'll know how steep those staircases are!) and a poor view were a subtle deterrent, for respectable women weren't really encouraged to enjoy bloodsports. Sat at the top, a roman matron wouldn't be able to see a gladiator closely enough to lust over them. Besides, after 220 steps to your seat, who has the energy to fantasise about eloping with a warrior?
And so the spectators weren't a faceless, anonymous mass as they are in movies. Spectators were sat according to a myriad of social factors, and most of them were sat with their peers, in close(ish) proximity to those ahead and behind them on the social ladder. Potentially, one could look at a seat by tier (maenianum,) wedge (cuneus,) and row (gradus,) and be able to tell you a dizzying amount of information about who was to sit there. Your seat was your identity. It's the kind of info Zuckerberg would kill for, and a very public indication of your place in society. Half of the amphitheatre experience was seeing, and half on being seen. This element of spectacle is lacking at the recreated shows in Nîmes, where your seat is chosen by the size of your budget. The modern spectators are now a homogenous mass, save for the performers dressed as Hadrian and his retinue in the VIP imperial box called the pulvinar.
So much of Les Grands Jeux Romains gives glimpses into the past: the collective gasps when a chariot 'crashes' and its charioteer/stuntman is dragged behind the wreckage, the visceral roar of thousands of people calling for mercy or (simulated) death, the charismatic pull of a particularly talented performer... On one particularly windy day, the MVP turned out to be the sparsor, whose job is was to sprinkle water on the arena sand to prevent the dust being swept up into the faces of the crowd. I'd read about these employees only in the context of chariot racing, depicted carrying their bowls and jugs of water in various circus mosaics, but as far as I was aware their main role was to use the water to cool down the horses (Varnica 2015). Having experienced the arena sand blown into our faces even in the higher seats, I now understand how dampening the sand on windy days would have been crucial for spectator comfort, and sparsores must surely have been as valuable at amphitheatres as they were at race tracks. Even watching the labyrinthine corridors and stairways beneath the seating fill up as spectators file in, watching how seamlessly the building design allows them to get to their seats quickly without getting stuck or lost. Experiencing a day at the amphitheatre as a spectator has given me a new appreciation of what it means to be a spectator.
That doesn't mean that I can't ponder what's lost in translation. I wrote here about why the games were the consumption of state ideology by stealth, and here about what I consider to be the nearest modern equivalent. Les Grands Jeux Romains is not, for me, that equivalent regarding ideology. At Nîmes, particularly as a Brit who can pretty much only order a ham sandwich in French, I did not feel like part of a group. I was able to chat with my family, but I do wonder what it would be like to watch the entertainments sat in a peer group as the Romans would have done. As Edmonson puts it, the seating promoted social cohesion despite being strictly hierarchical (1996), but, particularly as a foreigner, I was unable to see the cavea as a 'map' of the city's populace as it would have been in antiquity. In the Colosseum, the lowest two tiers, the ima and media, would have been a thick white belt around the arena, populated with men in togas. The senators at the bottom added a dash of colour with the broad purple band that marked their rank, whilst the summa was a hodgepodge of workaday tunics in various muted colours topped with a rainbow of ladies' gowns. The overwhelming prevalence of black and navy raincoats at Nîmes doesn't exactly serve to separate us by rank according to power (albeit nominal) and prestige.
Gunderson wrote something that I think about often, and I'll paraphrase here: Rome was a tiny speck surrounded by her empire. The difference in size threatened to be overwhelming, both geographically and in terms of people. Rome was surrounded by territories she had conquered, some more docile than others, and beyond them are territories she had yet to conquer, always in danger of antagonising her borders. Her gaze must necessarily be outward. In the Colosseum, all of this is reversed. The arena was home to the lowliest, the conquered, and the enslaved. The arena, large as it is from a gladiator's perspective, is tiny in comparison to the enormous cavea. The Colosseum is where Rome gazed in, where Rome surrounded and outnumbered the empire.
This is to consider the Colosseum as the world inverted: the cavea as Rome and the empire, and the arena as Beyond. I wonder how the striped stratigraphy of the cavea appeared to the men standing on the sand. Proximity to aristocracy, to (again, pretty nominal) power. For the have-a-go plebs that signed away what little social status they had to perform as gladiators in a risky bid for much-needed financial rewards, their friends and former peers sat high above the band of white respectability. The white band of wealth separated plebs and performers whose lived experiences of hardship meant that they had much in common.The gladiator represented, and were dressed akin to the historical foes of Rome, barbarian warriors who required subjugation or elimination. The white band represented the upper echelon of the Imperial heap, the conquerors. It didn't really matter which gladiator won; the real winners were the men in crisp, white togas.
Nîmes doesn't have that element of ruthless imperialism as state ideology built in, and really it's a blessing that we've excised the contempt previously so rigidly held and openly demonstrated for the poorer in society, women and particularly the performers, for whom applause was always tempered with abhorrence. The ideology of the arena was borne of collective anxiety and promoted virtues that now should have no place in a functioning society
As experimental archaeology goes, Les Grands Jeux Romains creates plenty to think about without engaging with the complicated ideological nature of ancient spectacle. For now, scratching the surface is more than satisfactory. The 21st century cavea is no longer Rome, but the arena is still Beyond, only now distinction is temporal. The cavea is now a modern society fascinated with a past that ordinarily surrounds us, and, once a year, celebrating it in the centre of the sand. All this pondering in this post proves that spectacle still provokes thought. Whilst I am spurred to consider what it took to be Roman, I'm also thinking about what it means to be considering that from my position as a historian of antiquity living in a modern society. Save me a seat for next year...
Further reading, inc scholars mentioned above:
Bomgardner, The Story of the Roman Amphitheatre, 2002
Edmondson, 'Dynamic Arenas: Gladiatorial Presentations in the City of Rome and the Construction of Roman Society During the Early Empire' 1996
Fagan, The Lure of the Arena, 2011
Gunderson, 'Ideology of the Arena' 1996 available at JSTOR - tweet me for access!
Newlands, 'Urban Pastoral: The Seventh "Eclogue" of Calpurnius Siculus', 1987
Welch, The Roman Amphitheatre, 2007
This past weekend I have once again not been able to attend Les Grands Jeux Romains at Nîmes in France. I'm not happy about it. Attending for the first time six years ago set me on a course of specialising in spectacle, and my BA diss would not exist without it. So, if I cannot go, allow me to reminisce and ruminate a little.
The amphitheatre at Nîmes is wonderfully intact, and the annual event each spring puts on a show to give a wonderful sense of what it must have been like to attend the games of antiquity. It starts with a pompa, the procession of participants, and includes a chariot race (with 3 bigae, two horse chariots - a small taste of the Circus Maximus races with 12 four horse chariots,) gladiator fights and a mock battle representing a historical event (this year was the exploits of Vercingetorix.) There are even, on occasion, mock naumachiae with moving warships! I've managed to visit 3 times, and the attention to detail never fails to astound. I know that for one-on-one fights, the very front rows are the best place to sit. You can see the whites of the retiarius' eyes. For larger events like the big set pieces and chariot races, it's actually the 'cheap seats' in the higher levels that are best, that were reserved for women, the poor and the enslaved. I know this because I've been experimenting with sitting in different sections each time I attend, and I've come to the conclusion that the larger the display, the further back one should sit. The front rows are just too close for the eye to take in the entire arena, and much of the 'scenes' are lost.
I had the games at Nîmes in mind when I started reading in earnest about the seating plan of the Colosseum, which was not randomly assigned in antiquity. The cavea, or seating area, was split into three horizontal bands:
- The ima cavea - 'ima' means lowest, and this level of seating was closest to the arena. Think the 'Splash Zone' at Seaworld, if the splashes were a little more sanguine.
- The media cavea - 'media' - think medium - it's the middle band of seating.
- The summa cavea - 'summa' means upper or highest. In modern theatres these seats are known as 'The Gods' because of the breathtakingly high perpective they give. At the very top was a colonnade called the summum maenianum in ligneis, where ladies sat, shielded from the urban poor.
The seven front rows of the ima cavea were called the podium and was reserved for senators, priests, military heroes and foreign dignitaries. This most prestigious seating was carefully organised by rank. Senators of patrician status with consuls among their ancestors were given better seats away from senators with plebeian ancestry. 14 wedges separated the uppermost crust from the homines novi.
The top of the lowest band had 12 rows split into 16 wedges, and were allocated to men of equestrian rank. Equestrian rank had strata of its own, and Bomgardner makes a suggestion that one might chart highs and lows of a knight's career by noting his changing seat allocation over time. Tacitus suggests that older knights were sat in lower rows whilst the eager young upstarts had higher seats.
The middle bank of seating had 19 rows in 16 wedges. Male citizens would be seated here if they had enough wealth to wear a toga. The subdivisions here were categorised by profession, wealth, and age. The summa cavea was for plebs, slaves, poor immigrants and women. Whilst individual seats may not have been as closely allocated here as below, separation was still the order of the day. At the very top, there were boxes for rich women. All women were relegated to the top, but god forbid a senator's wife got within sniffing distance of a tanner's wife. It's been suggested that the punishing hike to the top (if you've ever visited an amphitheatre, you'll know how steep those staircases are!) and a poor view were a subtle deterrent, for respectable women weren't really encouraged to enjoy bloodsports. Sat at the top, a roman matron wouldn't be able to see a gladiator closely enough to lust over them. Besides, after 220 steps to your seat, who has the energy to fantasise about eloping with a warrior?
And so the spectators weren't a faceless, anonymous mass as they are in movies. Spectators were sat according to a myriad of social factors, and most of them were sat with their peers, in close(ish) proximity to those ahead and behind them on the social ladder. Potentially, one could look at a seat by tier (maenianum,) wedge (cuneus,) and row (gradus,) and be able to tell you a dizzying amount of information about who was to sit there. Your seat was your identity. It's the kind of info Zuckerberg would kill for, and a very public indication of your place in society. Half of the amphitheatre experience was seeing, and half on being seen. This element of spectacle is lacking at the recreated shows in Nîmes, where your seat is chosen by the size of your budget. The modern spectators are now a homogenous mass, save for the performers dressed as Hadrian and his retinue in the VIP imperial box called the pulvinar.
So much of Les Grands Jeux Romains gives glimpses into the past: the collective gasps when a chariot 'crashes' and its charioteer/stuntman is dragged behind the wreckage, the visceral roar of thousands of people calling for mercy or (simulated) death, the charismatic pull of a particularly talented performer... On one particularly windy day, the MVP turned out to be the sparsor, whose job is was to sprinkle water on the arena sand to prevent the dust being swept up into the faces of the crowd. I'd read about these employees only in the context of chariot racing, depicted carrying their bowls and jugs of water in various circus mosaics, but as far as I was aware their main role was to use the water to cool down the horses (Varnica 2015). Having experienced the arena sand blown into our faces even in the higher seats, I now understand how dampening the sand on windy days would have been crucial for spectator comfort, and sparsores must surely have been as valuable at amphitheatres as they were at race tracks. Even watching the labyrinthine corridors and stairways beneath the seating fill up as spectators file in, watching how seamlessly the building design allows them to get to their seats quickly without getting stuck or lost. Experiencing a day at the amphitheatre as a spectator has given me a new appreciation of what it means to be a spectator.
That doesn't mean that I can't ponder what's lost in translation. I wrote here about why the games were the consumption of state ideology by stealth, and here about what I consider to be the nearest modern equivalent. Les Grands Jeux Romains is not, for me, that equivalent regarding ideology. At Nîmes, particularly as a Brit who can pretty much only order a ham sandwich in French, I did not feel like part of a group. I was able to chat with my family, but I do wonder what it would be like to watch the entertainments sat in a peer group as the Romans would have done. As Edmonson puts it, the seating promoted social cohesion despite being strictly hierarchical (1996), but, particularly as a foreigner, I was unable to see the cavea as a 'map' of the city's populace as it would have been in antiquity. In the Colosseum, the lowest two tiers, the ima and media, would have been a thick white belt around the arena, populated with men in togas. The senators at the bottom added a dash of colour with the broad purple band that marked their rank, whilst the summa was a hodgepodge of workaday tunics in various muted colours topped with a rainbow of ladies' gowns. The overwhelming prevalence of black and navy raincoats at Nîmes doesn't exactly serve to separate us by rank according to power (albeit nominal) and prestige.
Gunderson wrote something that I think about often, and I'll paraphrase here: Rome was a tiny speck surrounded by her empire. The difference in size threatened to be overwhelming, both geographically and in terms of people. Rome was surrounded by territories she had conquered, some more docile than others, and beyond them are territories she had yet to conquer, always in danger of antagonising her borders. Her gaze must necessarily be outward. In the Colosseum, all of this is reversed. The arena was home to the lowliest, the conquered, and the enslaved. The arena, large as it is from a gladiator's perspective, is tiny in comparison to the enormous cavea. The Colosseum is where Rome gazed in, where Rome surrounded and outnumbered the empire.
This is to consider the Colosseum as the world inverted: the cavea as Rome and the empire, and the arena as Beyond. I wonder how the striped stratigraphy of the cavea appeared to the men standing on the sand. Proximity to aristocracy, to (again, pretty nominal) power. For the have-a-go plebs that signed away what little social status they had to perform as gladiators in a risky bid for much-needed financial rewards, their friends and former peers sat high above the band of white respectability. The white band of wealth separated plebs and performers whose lived experiences of hardship meant that they had much in common.The gladiator represented, and were dressed akin to the historical foes of Rome, barbarian warriors who required subjugation or elimination. The white band represented the upper echelon of the Imperial heap, the conquerors. It didn't really matter which gladiator won; the real winners were the men in crisp, white togas.
Nîmes doesn't have that element of ruthless imperialism as state ideology built in, and really it's a blessing that we've excised the contempt previously so rigidly held and openly demonstrated for the poorer in society, women and particularly the performers, for whom applause was always tempered with abhorrence. The ideology of the arena was borne of collective anxiety and promoted virtues that now should have no place in a functioning society
As experimental archaeology goes, Les Grands Jeux Romains creates plenty to think about without engaging with the complicated ideological nature of ancient spectacle. For now, scratching the surface is more than satisfactory. The 21st century cavea is no longer Rome, but the arena is still Beyond, only now distinction is temporal. The cavea is now a modern society fascinated with a past that ordinarily surrounds us, and, once a year, celebrating it in the centre of the sand. All this pondering in this post proves that spectacle still provokes thought. Whilst I am spurred to consider what it took to be Roman, I'm also thinking about what it means to be considering that from my position as a historian of antiquity living in a modern society. Save me a seat for next year...
Further reading, inc scholars mentioned above:
Bomgardner, The Story of the Roman Amphitheatre, 2002
Edmondson, 'Dynamic Arenas: Gladiatorial Presentations in the City of Rome and the Construction of Roman Society During the Early Empire' 1996
Fagan, The Lure of the Arena, 2011
Gunderson, 'Ideology of the Arena' 1996 available at JSTOR - tweet me for access!
Newlands, 'Urban Pastoral: The Seventh "Eclogue" of Calpurnius Siculus', 1987
Welch, The Roman Amphitheatre, 2007