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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Fagan, Garret. The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Main Argument: Any answer to the question of "why did the Romans watch the games?" "requires due consideration of human psychology, once it is properly set against the Romans' historical context" (2). Sociological explanations for the appeal of the Roman games are not enough, as the Romans were by no means the only people to enjoy this kind of spectacle. Fagan argues "that an explanation for the transcultural and transhistorical appeal of violent spectacle must be sought in human psychology and, on the other, that appreciation of the psychology in turn depends our understanding of the Roman experience" (ibid).
Historiographical Engagement: All the historiography of the games, and social psychology too.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The mature Roman games formed a "conglomerate spectacle" that merged ludic, punitive, and religious spectacles, each of which had complex (if sometimes obscure) histories of their own prior to their merger--the venatio of beasts seems to reach back to the ancient Near East, while gladiators were most likely an Italic innovation oldest attested in the funeral rites of the Lucanians of southern Italy in the 4thC BCE and first attested in 264 BCE. Fagan uses a social psychology approach to investigate the games on the grounds that 1) our common humanity with people of the past is more readily demonstrated than radical disjunctures in mentality; and 2) culture and psychology are intimately related. Fagan's explanation does not supersede the culturally specific explanations for the games' appeal that have been developed, since "they psychological processes at the heart of this study must be understood as operating in close conjunction with the historical and cultural environment the Romans had created" (9).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Fagan reviews previous culturally-specific explanations for the appeal of the games and outlines the "features of Roman society that seem closely connected to the phenomenon of gladiatorial spectacles" (22). First, slavery, which for reasons that should be familiar from the writings of abolitionists history over; "pervasive slavery and the attitudes it generated in treating human beings as instruments played a central part in fashioning the culture of the arena" (25): "slavery conditioned the Romans to see certain classes of people as wholly expendable" (ibid). The second factor is "the firm suspicion that widespread violence pervaded Roman society. Put plainly, the sources leave a strong impression that the Roman world was awash with brutality, violence, and degradation of the weak and powerless" (ibid). The third factor is that "Rome was a society marked by an almost obsessive commitment to hierarchy and status," and in fact, "the inflicting of violence [was] closely tied to the implacably hierarchical cast of Roman social thought" (28, 30). Fourth, "pain and death were far more proximate companions to the ancient Roman than they are for most moderns, at least those fortunate enough to live in the developed world," and their threshold of tolerance for viewing the same was much higher than ours (30). Fifth, "specific historical circumstances contributed to the emergence and development of the gladiatorial games at Rome" (32). Put together, and especially after the historical development of the games into their most complex form in the high imperial period, all these add up to "a certain callous fatalism about human mortality" (33). Fagan argues that social psychology is valid because the physiology of the human brain is universal, so are the faculties of psychology, giving rise to human universals that take multiple forms based on the kaleidoscopic variety of human cultures formed under a multiplicity of environmental circumstances, which is so partly because culture molds human behavior but is also a product of it.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, even more depressing than the last, offers a brief survey of some of the many ways people and animals have been degraded, hurt, and killed as a public spectacle, making clear that "the draw of violent spectacle" is not the exception but rather the rule (49). Furthermore, because of that very fact, culturally and historically specific explanations for that appeal are insufficient. Fagan also outlines four features about arena deaths in particular: 1) they were intentionally degrading and humiliating; two, the amphitheater was neither the original nor primary site of executions; 3) arena executions were adapted or invented to offer the most interest to the audience; 4) "arena executions communicated symbolic messages to the crowd about the value of conformity, the power of the emperor, and society's solidarity in the face of threats to the established order" (50).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at group and crowd processes; groups in particular allow people to form "social identities," which are part of social categorization, which is a fact of the fact that people order their social universe according to group membership. Groups, as well, are cohesive insofar as they share norms and members conform to them. Despite having been incorrectly theorized as "mindless" by various 19thC writers, crowds usually gather for a purpose, and "crowd members lather their social identities to accord with the larger crowd's norms, which are in turn shaped by shared understandings that underlie the crowd's identity" (91). For both groups and crowds, much depends on the circumstances and context of their occurrence. Fagan goes into great detail about seating at the games, and concludes that "spectators were segregated on various criteria into peer groups…there were rules as to who precisely got to sit where; and the crowd looked at itself as well as the events on the sand, as the spectators were mutually visible to each other" (120).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Fagan reviews the role that prejudice may have played in attending the games: while it seems reasonable to assume that it may have worked most strongly in the executions stage of the spectacle, it is not sufficient to explain attendance overall, particularly given that significant chunks of seating were assigned. Indeed, the brutal midday executions are, in extant sources, often attested to have been sparsely attended, and it was crucial that the crowd feel both that victims deserved their fate and that the punishment was appropriate. If these two conditions were met, the crowd was ready to applaud any conceivable brutality.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples Fagan argues (convincingly, one might add) that the experience of watching the gladiator events specifically was psychologically comparable to that of watching modern sporting events. Gladiators were professionally trained experts whose careers and "stats" were known, which facilitated "sports talk" and betting, and the arena was a noisy, excited, exciting place featuring music, chanting, and in general, the features of crowds in sports stadiums today [expect perhaps vuvuzelas]. Moreover, gladiator pairs were set to provide maximum entertainment value. In short, "spectatorship at gladiatorial bouts…was not far removed from that at a boxing spectacle, an ice hockey or rugby match, an American football game, or an Ultimate Fighting tournament" (228).
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples So: why did they watch?Why do we? Fagan offers a few preliminary observations, 1) that the modern appetite for violence is not restricted to the "fakery" of the movies (which for that matter frequently spares no expense to look as realistic as possible) and 2) Roman games were no less stage-managed and stylized than, say, professional wrestling is today. Fagan uses the concept of "affective dispositions" to analyze the sympathies of the crowd in each stage of the spectacle, and focuses in particular on the paradox of the gladiators: loved for their skill in the arena, they were yet slaves, legal non-persons, and despised outside it: "approval was conditional on the display of skill (ars), and the gladiator was reduced to nothing more than a breathing medium of that skill (artifex); beyond that, he was entitled to no consideration. Like any slave in the Roman world, the gladiator's personhood had been absorbed by his function" (272). Crowds spurred gladiators' performance, as gladiators were aware, and gladiators did their best to live up to crowds' expectations: "gladiator and spectator were thus partners in the arena's dance of violence, and each played a key role in its lethal choreography" (273).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In this conclusion, Fagan reminds us that reactions to the games varied by individual, particularly among the elites whose reactions are the best documented, which leads to the observation that not everyone attended the games (in a city of ~1 million, the Flavian Amphitheater seated at most 80,000 people), just as not everyone shared a homogeneous sense of Roman-ness or, for that matter, not everyone today likes sports at all or even the same sports.
Critical assessment: I really like Fagan's work in general, and this is an excellent book which I basically completely agree with.
Meta notes: "The nexus of patronage, indeed, was pretty much how everything got done in ancient Rome, and the ability to attend games was no exception" (115).
Main Argument: Any answer to the question of "why did the Romans watch the games?" "requires due consideration of human psychology, once it is properly set against the Romans' historical context" (2). Sociological explanations for the appeal of the Roman games are not enough, as the Romans were by no means the only people to enjoy this kind of spectacle. Fagan argues "that an explanation for the transcultural and transhistorical appeal of violent spectacle must be sought in human psychology and, on the other, that appreciation of the psychology in turn depends our understanding of the Roman experience" (ibid).
Historiographical Engagement: All the historiography of the games, and social psychology too.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The mature Roman games formed a "conglomerate spectacle" that merged ludic, punitive, and religious spectacles, each of which had complex (if sometimes obscure) histories of their own prior to their merger--the venatio of beasts seems to reach back to the ancient Near East, while gladiators were most likely an Italic innovation oldest attested in the funeral rites of the Lucanians of southern Italy in the 4thC BCE and first attested in 264 BCE. Fagan uses a social psychology approach to investigate the games on the grounds that 1) our common humanity with people of the past is more readily demonstrated than radical disjunctures in mentality; and 2) culture and psychology are intimately related. Fagan's explanation does not supersede the culturally specific explanations for the games' appeal that have been developed, since "they psychological processes at the heart of this study must be understood as operating in close conjunction with the historical and cultural environment the Romans had created" (9).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Fagan reviews previous culturally-specific explanations for the appeal of the games and outlines the "features of Roman society that seem closely connected to the phenomenon of gladiatorial spectacles" (22). First, slavery, which for reasons that should be familiar from the writings of abolitionists history over; "pervasive slavery and the attitudes it generated in treating human beings as instruments played a central part in fashioning the culture of the arena" (25): "slavery conditioned the Romans to see certain classes of people as wholly expendable" (ibid). The second factor is "the firm suspicion that widespread violence pervaded Roman society. Put plainly, the sources leave a strong impression that the Roman world was awash with brutality, violence, and degradation of the weak and powerless" (ibid). The third factor is that "Rome was a society marked by an almost obsessive commitment to hierarchy and status," and in fact, "the inflicting of violence [was] closely tied to the implacably hierarchical cast of Roman social thought" (28, 30). Fourth, "pain and death were far more proximate companions to the ancient Roman than they are for most moderns, at least those fortunate enough to live in the developed world," and their threshold of tolerance for viewing the same was much higher than ours (30). Fifth, "specific historical circumstances contributed to the emergence and development of the gladiatorial games at Rome" (32). Put together, and especially after the historical development of the games into their most complex form in the high imperial period, all these add up to "a certain callous fatalism about human mortality" (33). Fagan argues that social psychology is valid because the physiology of the human brain is universal, so are the faculties of psychology, giving rise to human universals that take multiple forms based on the kaleidoscopic variety of human cultures formed under a multiplicity of environmental circumstances, which is so partly because culture molds human behavior but is also a product of it.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, even more depressing than the last, offers a brief survey of some of the many ways people and animals have been degraded, hurt, and killed as a public spectacle, making clear that "the draw of violent spectacle" is not the exception but rather the rule (49). Furthermore, because of that very fact, culturally and historically specific explanations for that appeal are insufficient. Fagan also outlines four features about arena deaths in particular: 1) they were intentionally degrading and humiliating; two, the amphitheater was neither the original nor primary site of executions; 3) arena executions were adapted or invented to offer the most interest to the audience; 4) "arena executions communicated symbolic messages to the crowd about the value of conformity, the power of the emperor, and society's solidarity in the face of threats to the established order" (50).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at group and crowd processes; groups in particular allow people to form "social identities," which are part of social categorization, which is a fact of the fact that people order their social universe according to group membership. Groups, as well, are cohesive insofar as they share norms and members conform to them. Despite having been incorrectly theorized as "mindless" by various 19thC writers, crowds usually gather for a purpose, and "crowd members lather their social identities to accord with the larger crowd's norms, which are in turn shaped by shared understandings that underlie the crowd's identity" (91). For both groups and crowds, much depends on the circumstances and context of their occurrence. Fagan goes into great detail about seating at the games, and concludes that "spectators were segregated on various criteria into peer groups…there were rules as to who precisely got to sit where; and the crowd looked at itself as well as the events on the sand, as the spectators were mutually visible to each other" (120).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples
The social identity of arena crowds, as broadly reconstructable from an admittedly patchy body of evidence, instead reveals that they were meaningful and exciting experiences where people went to connect with peers and with the wider community, to have their worldview validated, and to feel what it was like to have power. They did not consciously think of these things as they went along to the arena, of course. The processes of crowd dynamics supplied the means by which it could all be experienced as a suite of dynamic, shifting emotions and sensations felt en masse. And that prospect was quite its own lure. (147)
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples Fagan reviews the role that prejudice may have played in attending the games: while it seems reasonable to assume that it may have worked most strongly in the executions stage of the spectacle, it is not sufficient to explain attendance overall, particularly given that significant chunks of seating were assigned. Indeed, the brutal midday executions are, in extant sources, often attested to have been sparsely attended, and it was crucial that the crowd feel both that victims deserved their fate and that the punishment was appropriate. If these two conditions were met, the crowd was ready to applaud any conceivable brutality.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples Fagan argues (convincingly, one might add) that the experience of watching the gladiator events specifically was psychologically comparable to that of watching modern sporting events. Gladiators were professionally trained experts whose careers and "stats" were known, which facilitated "sports talk" and betting, and the arena was a noisy, excited, exciting place featuring music, chanting, and in general, the features of crowds in sports stadiums today [expect perhaps vuvuzelas]. Moreover, gladiator pairs were set to provide maximum entertainment value. In short, "spectatorship at gladiatorial bouts…was not far removed from that at a boxing spectacle, an ice hockey or rugby match, an American football game, or an Ultimate Fighting tournament" (228).
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples So: why did they watch?
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In this conclusion, Fagan reminds us that reactions to the games varied by individual, particularly among the elites whose reactions are the best documented, which leads to the observation that not everyone attended the games (in a city of ~1 million, the Flavian Amphitheater seated at most 80,000 people), just as not everyone shared a homogeneous sense of Roman-ness or, for that matter, not everyone today likes sports at all or even the same sports.
The Roman games ought not to be viewed as a singular phenomenon, as so often has been the case in the past, but rather as one calibration on a spectrum of ritual violence, which can be demonstrated to exert a strong pull on spectators' attentions across the ages. … Appreciation of the psychological dynamics that coursed through those far-away spectators leads to the rather more unsettling realization that the lure of the brutalities staged in the Roman arena may well lie closer to home than many of us might like to think. (285-86)
Critical assessment: I really like Fagan's work in general, and this is an excellent book which I basically completely agree with.
Meta notes: "The nexus of patronage, indeed, was pretty much how everything got done in ancient Rome, and the ability to attend games was no exception" (115).