Gladiators

(March, 2008). I read a book called Gladiators and its author is Daniel P. Mannix. The book belongs to a collection called BreveHistoria [Short History], which has a website at www.brevehistoria.com that is promoted in the book; it says you can participate in its forums, which I visited but they are very poor in content, and the book also says you can download parts (introduction and first chapters only) of the books that make up the collection—and in fact I downloaded the available chapters of three more books that I am initially interested in.
The book Gladiators is around 200 pages long, and it is quick and easy to read. The original title is The Way of the Gladiator, and the translation is by Manuel de la Pascua.

The downside is that it is expensive, very expensive—I imagine because it is new, from 2007, and I suppose imported. The cover is made of plasticized cardboard with a nice drawing. It is a section, a crop of a painting called Pollice Verso (Thumbs Down), by Jean-Léon Gérôme, representing the end of a gladiator combat. Cover design and production by Carlos Peydró.

The book is well told in a very particular way; it recreates lives and events, always based on real facts, and on one occasion it invents an ending.

It gives a general overview of gladiators and everything the Roman circus represented, from its beginnings to its decline. It tells of the entire holocaust, everything they did, so we are going to find mostly blood and sex. A lot of savagery. Everything takes place during the Empire period. It repeatedly mentions no more than three emperors on several occasions. On some opportunities, it draws parallels with modern times. I liked the way it was written. It dwells a lot on the subject of animals. Regarding the persecution of Christianity, it deals with it very little. And as for the gladiators, it does not develop the topic as much as one might expect; Spartacus is only mentioned in passing, for example—in other words, it talks more about the animals in relation to the gladiators, but perhaps there wasn't much to develop about the latter or they were only used for the text. It mentions various authors as sources, of which I have some of the books but haven't read them yet.

I liked a quote by Juvenal: the people only want "bread and circuses". When it talks about what we can call the people, it refers to them as the mob, along with other adjectives, meaning the most vulgar people of the city who were the ones asking for these spectacles.
These holocausts of people and animals happened when Rome had already conquered everything, and it seems that life in the city was boring and they had nothing better to do. Even some emperors did not approve of them, but they had to do it by force to win the public's favor. Ultimately, they were not only a business, part of the economy because of everything they moved, but they were also—above all—used for political purposes, both to gain votes and favors, as well as an effective means of distracting the mob.

The day I acquired the book, a Sunday, when I was walking, there was a street corner crowded with people up to almost half the street, watching a football match. Facts like this and many others are mentioned by the author when he draws parallels to the present day, even though these mass murders of people and animals are forbidden. Still, cruelty in people persists; let's look at, for example, the case of illegal dog fighting, or cockfighting, with their also illegal bets, or the legal ones in some countries, bullfights—the latter of which the author mentions. And why not mention "vale tudo" [mixed martial arts], a fighting system that sometimes ends badly. And he goes further and mentions 20th-century holocausts. But not only regarding deaths, but also sex; in one of the current parallels, he mentions the case of revue theater and how it changed from acting numbers to semi-nude dancers, among other examples.
It exposes and discusses situations; it is not a novelized book, but it teaches what a political career was like—at least a partial view, related to spending money to get votes and climb up.

As the collection points out, it is a brief book, which is why it is called "Breve Historia"; whoever expects something in-depth has to read other books or turn to other sources. Anyone who read this book and was disappointed due to a lack of details or deeper investigations is because they didn't understand what the book is about. For those looking for an approach to the subject that is simple, makes you want to read, and when you think everything has been covered, surprises you with more, this is the right book.

It helped me learn about customs—almost all of them bad and banished, but which I was totally unaware of.

(Originally published on 03-11-2008)