My Telegraph article on Gladiators in Britain

 

The brutal reality of gladiators in Roman Britain

Headless skeletons, feral bears and female fighters – a new British Museum show revolutionises our understanding of life in 175 AD

 Edith Hall

 

It’s 175 AD in Colchester – then called Camelodunum – a prosperous industrial town. Several thousand people are making their way past villas, pottery factories and temples of Jupiter and the deified Claudius to the amphitheatre. Local Britons, descended from the tribes who long ago rebelled under Cunobelinus (Cymbeline) and Boudicca, now live peacefully side-by-side with retired legionaries from Gaul, Thrace, Italy and Anatolia.

After buying refreshments from market traders at the entrance, they take their seats on wooden benches around the oval arena to await the day’s entertainment. First, hares and deer are released, followed by a large, ravenous dog, who takes some time to shed the first blood of the day. Then, to great applause, the famous venators (hunt-showmen) Marius and Secundus, armed with only a whip and a cudgel, subdue an enraged bear. 

But the climax is a long-awaited showdown between the professional gladiators. Loud applause greets the helmeted Memnon, a celebrity African combatant who has adopted the stage-name of an Ethiopian superhero who fought Achilles at Troy. It is Memnon’s ninth appearance here; he has always won. He takes the role of secutor, armed with sword and shield; the retiarius with a hunting net and trident is named Valentinus, sent by a division of the 30th legion stationed in Gaul. Few retiarii have ever kept Memnon at bay for long; he has the advantage of being left-handed and difficult to ward off. Valentinus eventually drops his net and Memnon lifts his sword to strike. Valentinus points his index finger upwards to concede defeat. The crowd roars to signal whether he should live or die.

We can time-travel to these thrilling spectacles because they are illustrated on a clay vase made locally around the time of the event, which will be on display at the British Museum throughout its touring exhibition Gladiators in Britain, which opens at the Dorset Museum & Art Gallery on January 25 and travels throughout the rest of year. The vase was buried at the funeral of a middle-aged man, perhaps a deceased gladiator. The names were inscribed before the pot was fired. It was one of the more elaborate souvenirs that spectators could purchase at stalls around the amphitheatres in at least ten towns in the province of Britannia. 

Gladiator culture united this north-western extremity of the Roman Empire with hundreds of towns across the Roman world, from Algeria to Israel, Spain to Syria. Britannia was no rustic backwater, but a thriving and cosmopolitan civilisation receptive to all the technology and culture that flourished under the Roman Empire.

 Gladiators were common across Roman Britain – and evidence for them is abundant. At Richborough in Kent, the arena wall was painted in brilliant hues of red and blue. Chester offers plentiful evidence for portable fast-food ovens and souvenir shops. Londonium’s amphitheatre, beneath Guildhall Yard, sported tiled entrances. At Aldborough in North Yorkshire (Isurium Brigantum) the amphitheatre entertained the merchant travellers who passed through this trade point at the highest navigable point on the river Ure.

One of the oldest arenas was constructed at Silchester, the capital of the Atrebates tribe, in around 75 AD. It could seat around 7,000 – a capacity midway between the Royal Albert Hall and the O2 Arena. The clergyman William Lisle Bowles visited it in the early 19^th century, recalling, “Here – where the summer breezes waved the wood / The stern and silent gladiator stood, /And listened to the shouts that hailed his gushing blood.”

 A muddier envisioning of Silchester gladiators occurs in the Roman Britain action movie Eagle (2011), directed by Kevin Macdonald and adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth (1954). In the film, the British youth Esca (played by Jamie Bell of Billy Elliot fame) faces death at the hands of a gladiator clad in a sinister full-face helmet, but is rescued by the Roman centurion Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) before they travel north to seek the famously missing 9th Legion.

 Meanwhile, the Neolithic henge at Maumbury Rings near Durnovaria (Dorchester) was converted into an amphitheatre in around 100 AD, its arena levelled with chalk and sand and recesses built into the walls to house the caged animals. Thomas Hardy used this atmospheric sense of a long-buried history to echo the pain of a lost marriage in The Mayor of Casterbridge; Michael Henchard arranges his clandestine reunion there with Susan, the wife he has not met for eighteen years. The emotional turbulence is reflected by the overgrown grass, “bearded with withered bents that formed waves under the brush of the wind, returning to the attentive ear Aeolian modulations, and detaining for moments the flying globes of thistledown”.

More recent archaeological finds have revealed more about the appearance of gladiators in Roman Britain, including a visually intimidating copper alloy helmet found at Hawkedon, Suffolk which is on show at the exhibition. The short City of London street named Poultry revealed an oil lamp portraying a fallen Samnite gladiator. The popularity of gladiator culture is further demonstrated by more than forty knife handles carved to portray fighting gladiators that have been discovered, from Corbridge and South Shields to Caerwent, Monmouthshire. Cupids fight as miniature gladiators on a mosaic from Bignor Roman villa in West Sussex.

Less certain evidence is provided by the more than 80 decapitated skeletons of well-built men under 45 found in a Roman cemetery in York, some of whom came from Syria, may have been gladiators; one of them had been bitten by a large carnivore. They may have been criminals beheaded in the arena after being forced to fight with beasts. Although female gladiators are attested in Rome and Antioch, it may be wishful thinking that has interpreted the skeleton of a twenty-something Romano-British woman found in Great Dover Street, Southwark, as belonging to a gladiatrix; the evidence is only that she was wealthy, perhaps suggesting a successful career in the arena, and that one of the oil lamps buried with her depicts a gladiator.

The exhibition will breathe new life into our understanding of ancient British recreation, revealing that new finds extend the evidence for the appreciation of gladiators across all England and Wales. Just last year, a delightful figurine found on the banks of the Tyne near Hadrian’s Wall depicts a perky, helmeted gladiator, and he is left-handed. Did Memnon, after his ninth victory at Colchester, tour every amphitheatre in Britannia?

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Gladiators of Britain runs until April 2026; further details, see: britishmuseum.org

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University. Her forthcoming book is Epic of the Earth (Yale, £18.99) 

 

A Week in Classics: Progress, Celebration and Grief

What a week that was. Forgetting that my surgeon told me last year I had to slow down, on Tuesday we wound up our pilot course, attached to both the Durham-based campaign Advocating Classics Education and the Durham Leverhulme-funded research project Aristotle beyond the Academy, bringing ancient civilizations and especially ethics to students in prisons. It has been an extraordinarily fulfilling activity for me and we hope to expand it nationally. 

The men’s favourite sessions were all related to Aristotle: they lapped up Arlene Holmes-Henderson’s advice on effective communication via his Rhetoric, and with George Gazis’ help debated Neoptolemus’ decision to change his mind and help the suffering Philoctetes in Sophocles’ tragedy—a mind-change of which Aristotle approves—after performing the play with enormous verve. Philoctetes’ vocalisations were thrilling and we gave him the Best Actor trophy. 

But the favourite session was Professor Phil Horky on the Nicomachean Ethics. What is happiness and will you be happier if you try to be the best version of your moral self? Questions for the ages. There will be a podcast on this whole course soon, with the students themselves talking, made by our wonderful colleagues at Against the Lore. Everyone enjoyed my home-made vanilla and chocolate chip cookies (contained in festive tin, below), I’m pleased to report. 

With Rory McInnes-Gibbons, Zenia and Meg from Against the Lore, Arlene

Wednesday saw three back-to-back events in Durham: first up, Alessandro Vatri’s excellent paper on Margaret Doody’s Aristotle Detective novels; Arlene Homes-Henderson then launched her essential new Centre for Classics Education Research and Engagements (CERES), which will transform how we understand the history and practice of classical-subject pedagogy. I had made a cake for her, which wasn’t as good as the cookies but served its purpose. Last up was Nebojša Todorović’s superb Durham Prize in Classical Reception lecture on Greek literature and its performance reception in relation to the Balkan War of the 1990s. 

Thursday was much sadder, as we held a valedictory retrospective event for our department’s beloved emeritus professor Christopher Rowe, who is mortally ill. He spoke with such mirth and sometimes trenchant barbs about his life in philosophy that my tears, at least, turned from those of grief to near-convulsive laughter. He has changed Platonic and Aristotelian Studies, but he also transformed the Department when I was first there in the early 2000s. More on this titan of virtue and friendship anon. People were relieved that I had done no baking and had offered shop-bought mince pies instead.

Classics, Class and ‘Class. Civ.’ Qualifications in the 21st Century

 

On Thursday I was excited to deliver the inaugurating lecture of the new Leeds University Centre for Ancient World and Classical Reception Studies. The Director, Dr Bev Back, had asked me to report in the current relationship between Classics and socioeconomic class in the UK since the book I published, with Henry Stead, A People’s History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland was published (Open Access) in 2020.

          An important development has been the establishment by a group of scholars, including Henry, of the Network for Working-Class Classicists, which earlier this year published their magnificent open-access report Classics in Class. This exposed the serious problems faced by socioeconomically deprived students and teachers of classical subjects and their institutional under-representation at all levels.  One of their recommendations is that access to classical subjects needs to be expanded, especially in regions where they are scarcely available. And at least on this issue there is some tentative good news.

          The project Advocating Classics Education that I’ve led since 2017 with Prof. Arlene-Holmes-Henderson seems to have made some impact, with numbers rising in enrolment for qualifications in both Classical Civilisation and Ancient History. 

Arlene and I have written a book which will be published next year by Liverpool University Press, Classical Civilisation and Ancient History in British Secondary Education, which covers not only the content and merits of these courses but their history. Our inspirational cover image was designed by Milo Palmer, then a year 8 student at Cranbrook School in Kent, after winning our nationwide competition.

          The origins of Classical Civilisation qualifications proved difficult to trace, but we unearthed an exciting story and identified an official birth date! The first ever examinations in Classical Civilisation at what was then called CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) were sat in May/June 1965! The 60th birthday party will coincide with the publication of our volume. Since  one of our longtime ACE campaigners, Dr Peter Swallow, was elected to parliament as Bracknell’s first ever Labour MP in July, we hope the celebrations may take on a nationwide dimension.

Classical Civilisation was very much a grass-roots endeavour, which began with committed teachers in the 1950s. They wanted pupils, often at Technical Colleges, who left school at 15, to benefit from some encounters with ancient Greece: see this inspiring, grainy photograph, all that remains of the performance of Aristophanes’ Peace by girls at Brierton Hill Technical High School for Girls, Hartlepool, in 1967. 

As soon as the school leaving age was raised to 16 and the CSE came into being, some progressive and far-sighted classicists led by the hero of the tale, John Sharwood Smith, got going on with designing CSE  courses in Classical Civilisation, and then, five years later, an A Level. 

John Sharwood Smith

They faced considerable opposition from old-fashioned school-teachers who wanted to stick to Latin language training despite fast-falling numbers when the requirement for O Level Latin was dropped for admission to Oxbridge. Sadly, far too many academic classicists sneered at Classical Civilisation for several decades after its inception, although few now do so today.

Leeds classicists have played an important role in the democratisation of Classics, both in the 1960s and 1970s and far earlier. I’m doing some research on W. Rhys Roberts, who was appointed Professor of Classics at Leeds University when it opened in 1904. 

He ran extra-mural courses for Leeds working people as well as being a great expert on ancient literary criticism and parallels between Welsh and Greek syntax. It was wonderful to share these heroes with a substantial number of Leeds undergraduates, who were not aware of the magnificence of their academic ancestors. More news soon, also on the extension of Classical Civilisation courses into UK prisons that I've recently initiated. I hope that the 60th anniversary and the book launch will help to keep this wonderful subject firmly on its course of expansion.

How Low Will Clytemnestra Go? On Editing Aeschylus

 

My edition of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon has finally been published, and I’m relieved to say that the paperback edition is currently priced at ‘only’ £31.99. It has taken me twenty years, on and off, to complete. It feels strange not to be talking to Aeschylus on a daily basis any more.

One major challenge has been the domination of Agamemnon studies for three-quarters of a century by the colossal three-volume edition of Eduard Fraenkel. This astonishing work is deservedly held in higher esteem than almost any commentary on a Greek tragedy.

Fraenkel was a Jewish refugee from Nazism, but the sole explicit reference I have found to this experience is his comment on the choral ode which describes how an allegorical pet lion cub grows up to slaughter the livestock of the very people who have tenderly raised it. Fraenkel dispassionately reminds us that Marshal Hermann Göring kept pet lions (vol. 2, 342), as can be seen in this striking film.

Fraenkel discusses his choices in assembling his Greek text from varied manuscripts in exhaustive detail. I, too, made such choices, but my comments on the reasons for them are kept to a minimum to allow more space for literary criticism.  In the case, however, of Clytemnestra, two passages reveal how editors have made choices about the Greek they print based on what they feel is appropriate language for the terrifyingly eloquent Queen of Argos.

First, Clytemnestra mendaciously claims she had been upset to hear frequent reports from Troy that Agamemnon had been killed there. If he had died as often as was alleged, he’d be able to claim that he had been covered with earth three times, like the triple-bodied (or triple-headed) monster Geryon. In the Greek manuscripts she then adds in parenthesis, ‘a large amount of earth needed for his upper half, although I can’t tell about the lower’ (870). Most scholars delete this line as just too crude: I have left it in. Clytemnestra, with savage humour, is inviting speculation about the lower half of Geryon’s body.

Two-Legged Geryon

Heracles’ fight with Geryon was a popular theme in Athenian sixth-century vase-painting, for example in these vases. Geryon has three heads, but in one vase his lower torso and legs are those of a single individual; in the other he has six legs and apparently three bottoms. Clytemnestra wonders very publicly about the logistics of killing and burying such a creature. She implies that all three of Geryon’s upper bodies needed to be killed/buried but she is not sure about his lower half—a flamboyantly gruesome train of thought in any context, let alone an ostensibly joyful speech of welcome to a loved one.

Six-Legged Geryon

Second, after she has killed Agamemnon and Cassandra, Clytemnestra says that the Trojan prophetess on the voyage to Argos ‘was pounded by the sailors’ masts beside their benches’ (1442-3). This is my attempt to translate the Greek, which in all manuscripts literally reads ‘mast-rubber/rubbed [istotribēs] of the sailors’ benches’.

This is more obscene than anything anywhere in Greek tragedy. It is not surprising that so many editors (not including Fraenkel) have accepted a nineteenth-century emendation to isotribēs, ‘equally consorting with’, which would mean that Cassandra indiscriminately 'hung out' with the lads on the rowing deck.  The trib- element, however, often has a physical sexual overtone of ‘grinding’ or ‘pounding’; moreover, one Corinthian prostitute spoke of her work as ‘lowering masts’ (Strabo 8.6.20). I'm leaving the masts in there.

I have preferred to let Clytemnestra (a) wonder publicly about Geryon’s nether regions and (b) envisage Cassandra rubbing/rubbed by the sailors ‘masts’. There are other arguments, of more linguistic kinds, for and against these readings. But the central question is whether Clytemnestra is explicit about the bottoms of both Geryon and Cassandra. It is crucial to bear in mind that textual criticism is sometimes an ideological process.

Inaugural Durham Prize in Classical Reception 2024

 

The results are in! Dr Caroline Barron, Director of the Durham Centre in Classical Reception, has made them public. The panel of judges, Durham scholars who work on Classical Reception, met on September 4th, after independently drawing up their lists of chosen candidates. The task of reading them had been a joy: the quality and number of submissions, diversity of their subject-matter, critical approaches, languages and classical traditions left us deeply optimistic about the future of this sub-discipline internationally.

All except one of us had selected as winner Nebojša (‘Nebo’) Todorović’s Tragedies of Disintegration: Balkanizing Greco-Roman Antiquity. This outstanding Yale Classics dissertation explores receptions of ancient Athenian tragedy ‘in contemporary Italian, Greek, and Yugoslav adaptations that thematize the violent disruption of former Yugoslavia’.

It has everything: meticulous archival research into substantial subject-matter covering cinematic as well as theatrical artworks and a clear, original over-arching argument. It bravely exposes how historiographical accounts of Yugoslavia’s breakup tend to undermine how certain fascist sentiments were never fully quelled after the Second World War; Nebo’s great-grandfather and great-uncles died fighting for the resistance. It is elegantly written and above all exudes a sense of political commitment and personal passion for acknowledging the inherent links between Classical Reception and historic trauma that sweep the reader along with it. Nebo’s parents were forced to leave their beloved, war-torn Sarajevo when he was just four months old.

But three runners-up for the prize have been Highly Commended. We were taken, entranced, to visit Arcadia by Topomythopoiesis: The Expression and Reception of Classical Mythology in Gardens from Antiquity to 1800 by Johan Prinsloo, from the Department of Architecture in the University of Pretoria. This thesis was distinguished by Johan’s firm control of his ancient sources, especially Greek sanctuaries and Roman private gardens, combined with a persuasive methodological framework and detailed study of neglected sources on landscape gardening until the 19th century, such as emblem books, design treatises and poetry.

We also highly commended Cassandre Martigny’s  Sorbonne dissertation Devenir Jocaste. Naissances et renaissances du personnage de l’Antiquité à nos jours.  The sheer bibliographical scope of this thesis is breathtaking. But Cassandre wears her erudition lightly, and deftly steers us through two and a half millennia of Jocastas by elegantly distinguishing the uses to which she has been put by each era, from democratic Athens and imperial Rome to French absolute monarchy, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis to contemporary feminist recuperation. Beautifully done.

Peter Makhlouf (Classics, Princeton) revealed fascinating but neglected images of Roman imperial continuity and downfall in fin-de-siècle German poets and intellectuals in his Declinations: German Decadence and the Fall of Rome and received the High Commendation, too. This thesis was remarkable for its synthesis of academic traditions with more public-facing culture at a crucial historical turning-point.

But it was a close-run race. There were several other dissertations that stood out, mentioned here in no particular order. Also from Princeton, but from the Department of Art and Architecture, Aleksander Musiał’s highly original and often amusing thesis took us into a world of bathing culture inflected with classical ideals in  his Classical Reception and Eastern European Transformations of Hygiene Architecture, ca. 1600-1830.

Anne Morvan’s Nantes thesis Écouter Cassandre? Étude d’une figure scénique paradoxale dans la tragédie grecque (Ve s. av. J.-C.) et ses traductions et réécritures à la Renaissance (XVIe s.) skilfully disinterred numerous reimaginings of Cassandra that have long been forgotten. Elena Stramaglia of Bologna and Giessen persuasively reminded us that the great East German poet, playwright and theatre director Heiner Müller was just as interested in ancient Rome as Greece in Gestaltwandlungen des Imperiums: Heiner Müller und Rom.

Wrocław candidate Antoine Haaker has produced a stupendous critical edition of Philibert de La Mare’s 17th-century biography of Claude Saumaise, an outstanding French classical scholar. Since none of the judges reads Polish, we were relieved—and mightily impressed—that Antoine’s thesis was in Latin, the ancient lingua franca of the Humanist intelligentsia! We were taken to Italy by Fulvio Vallana of Turin’s subtle and loving study of Arcadian poetry in Latin and Italian, L’Arcadia delle idee Poesia e pensiero nello spazio delle Bucoliche:  Calpurnio Siculo, Teodulo, Battista Spagnoli Mantovano, Giacomo Leopardi.

Alice Ahearn of Wadham College, Oxford, revived our love for Ovid’s playfulness with her sophisticated Heroines: Contemporary Anglophone Versions of Ovid’s Heroides. Sebastian Marshall of Christ’s College, Cambridge, provided us with a nostalgic feast for the eyes with his Beyond the Classical Landscape: Representing Greece and Anatolia in British Illustrated Books, 1832-1882. 16th-century homoerotically inflected poetry was given a nuanced treatment by UCL’s  Massimiliano Riviera in ‘Orpheus Came and Began to Sing’: Richard Barnfield’s Allusive Subversion.

 From St. Hilda’s and the Oxford Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama came Marcus Bell’s resonant Choreographing Tragedy into the Twenty-First Century, which does a brilliant job of enriching Classical Reception methods with Queer and Trans* studies, Performance studies and dance theory to put the body firmly back into the Tragic and revise traditional Idealist notions of that genre. From Sydney, we were treated to the changing faces of matriarchal warrior women in Connie Skibinski’s The Amazon Queen Penthesilea from Antiquity to Modernity: A Classical Reception Study.

Poets, playwrights, screenwriters, biographers, historiographers, landscape gardeners, architects, bathers, travellers, painters, etchers, dancers and mythical figures, discussed in five languages across four continents—the new Durham competition has revealed the depth, breadth and vigour of Classical Reception Studies in the hands of the rising generation of scholars. Congratulations to all entrants on their doctorates!

We will be hosting Nebo’s prize lecture in Durham on December 11th 2024; watch this space and and Twitter/X @Durham_DCCR for zoom links. And the competition will open again after Christmas to candidates who are awarded their doctorates between June 2024 and June 2025. Thanks to everyone for support.

Euripides on the 50th Anniversary of the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus

 

On July 10 I was in Nicosia and privileged to witness the first public performance of a production of Euripides’ Phoenician Women directed by a great classicist and former PhD student of mine. The review has been published in Greek. Here is the English-language original. 

Gaping Wounds in the Cypriot Body Politic

The opening night of the THOK Phoenissae in Magdalena Zira’s magnificent production was unbearably hot and airless. The actors must have struggled to keep up the amazing energy of the performance. But somehow the sense of strain enhanced the evocation of incurable tensions within the city-state of Thebes.  

The play premiered in 409 BCE, when Athens had just undergone four years of desperate trauma:  a catastrophic military defeat, thousands of fatalities, an oligarchic coup, the restoration of the democracy and vicious reprisals in the lawcourts leading to summary executions. The city was split into hostile factions.

Magdalena chose Phoenissae this year because only a Civil War play is appropriate to the 50th anniversary of the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, which tore so many longstanding communities apart. It led to much suffering, death, and the displacement and exile faced by Oedipus and Antigone at the end of the action.

Zira is a highly trained classical scholar who always remains true to the text and spirit of the ancient play, while using visual and aural means to make it speak resonantly to our modern context. The set suggested both the painted timber of military walls on ancient vases and the half-finished houses, their metal frames jutting out of concrete blocks, so familiar on Greek and Cypriot horizons; the soldiers wore costumes evoking 20th- or 21st-century militiamen.  The shouting and violence just beyond the encircling walls of the city was represented by a brilliant soundscape.

When I first discussed the play with Magdalena, I advised her that the most difficult aspect of this long, stately piece of epic theatre, at least  to make intelligible in modern performance, is the chorus. This play is rarely performed in northern Europe, where nobody knows much about the ancient Phoenicians. But she smiled.

Her own PhD was on the chorus in Greek tragedy and how to perform it today. Moreover, she reminded me that Cypriot people are descendants of Phoenicians as well as Greek-speakers, and—even more relevantly—the sight of refugee women from the Levant and Syria is an everyday fact of Cypriot life. We understood exactly what these lonely travellers were doing in Thebes and why the events they were witnessing so stirred their emotions. They are also specialists in myth and ritual, as hierodules on their way to Delphi.

The amazing chorale about Ares, whose primordial rage at the execution of his serpent-son is now massacring the present generation of Thebans, was perhaps the most exciting piece of musical theatre I have ever witnessed in a Greek tragic performance.

The Thebans belonged to one of two families, Oedipus’, directly descended from the Phoenician immigrant Cadmus, and Creon’s, sprung from the serpent’s teeth. The figure who unites and divides them simultaneously is Creon’s sister Jocasta, whose contested body symbolizes the Theban Body Politic. When she greeted Polynices, the physicality of their embraces represented in searing terms the deep love as well as hate integral to this household, and the dangerous possibility of incestuous desires. The altercation between the two brothers was executed with such commitment, passion and oratorical precision that the audience was physically trembling by the time Polynices stormed off to the battlefield.

The ending is perhaps the bleakest in the ancient stage repertoire. It is not just that three young men and a longsuffering mother lie dead and bloodied before our eyes. As Creon terrifyingly assumes the mask of power, his tyrannical disposition fully exposed by the action, we know that there is to be no healing or redemption in this community. Truly a tale—and a production—for our own dark and divided times.