https://kottke.org/25/11/mary-beard-hollywood-lied-to-you-ab...
https://kottke.org/25/11/mary-beard-hollywood-lied-to-you-ab...
It's not really possible to remove ourselves from this fact of being human. We can of course create a narrative about removing ourselves from narratives and experiencing the world directly, but that's not it.
I think if someone wants to know more about ancient Rome, it's on them to spend the time learning about it outside of an entertainment venue.
Well were you?
I'm surprised people are still talking about it today.
Plenty of people do, though. I recall a friend many years ago who genuinely believed “the people ruled Rome” because he heard it in Gladiator. He was an otherwise intelligent, educated person but there was nothing I could say that would dissuade him.
Mostly things are bad, but if you look there are people who did care about the truth - though they only cared about their little niche - everything else they could say whatever was entertaining.
Separate topic: The way the show handled Antony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral got one of the biggest laughs out of me of any TV show ever.
On the one hand, okay - it was fancier. However, I do not believe that any public air ceremony with fighting, dying, and live animals in it will be sedate. I’ve been to open air events in many continents, and people just aren’t naturally all quiet like when life and death things are happening. I just cannot imagine this behavior outside of a religious ceremony.
Even at the opera or live theater, both of which darken lights, light a stage, architect for acoustic carry, there is often shushing, resettling, multiple cues for the audience to sort of ‘settle down’ and pay attention. The idea that 50k people are going to watch some captured Christians face down a lion and make no noise while they were their Tuxedo equivalents seems to me to be in its own way a weird and just off Anglicism. I guess I might be straw manning her pitch a little, but I think she just over pitches this idea — I truly think a society that did that would be very, very unusual, to the point of being extremely creepy.
Romance and picaresque dramas weren't that dissimilar to love epics from the Classical times. And ofc treasonry, backstabbings, and the like would be the same today, 300 years ago and millenia ago.
The townsfolk shouting and laughing against a poor dude being burned down between logs wouldn't be that different to similar peasants reacting in the same way to slaves fighting at the Circus.
I think the emphasis is on the class structure, formality, etc. rather than saying the Coliseum followed modern theatre etiquette. And the according comparison about status of attendees, etc.
SOme history here too https://ledbooks.org/proceedings2019/tag/silence/
I wouldn't actually expect to see those norms in Roman culture, given how Latin is naturally a very flowing language and I've never heard of Romans valuing silence like the Spartans (or Japanese for that matter). But I wouldn't consider it particularly strange either - to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.
> Japan has by far the best combat sports audience in the world. Most of the time they are so quiet that you can literally hear the corners talking and even the ring shifting as the fighters move around. But then when something cool happens they go crazy.
Japanese MMA was founded and branded by people who were saying that Japanese professional wrestling was too theatrical, and Zuffa UFC was branded by people who were saying that professional wrestling wasn't violent enough (if anything, they were competing with "backyard" wrestling.) UFC has improved since, but imo that's because it became a monopoly and had to absorb all the other MMA audiences (and fighters), and the wrestling fans who didn't get bored with MMA eventually got less stupid.
> to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.
I also don't think there's any safe assumption of how Colosseum crowds behaved other than how contemporary narratives say they did. I agree that life and death brings an atmosphere of seriousness that wouldn't often exist at the Circus.
From what I've read I wouldn't call games at the Colloseum formal, other than the senators (seated in the front) apparently having to wear togas. There were more (class-based) levels of seating, and restictions on women, but the Circus Maximus also reserved the best seating for the equestrians.
Circus Maximus - Nascar - 250,000 spectators
Coliseum - Football - 50,000 - 80,000 spectators
(Science? Science is a craft for creating stories closely coupled to reality. It's a special case and not as popular as you might think.)
To get popular a story needs to be simple, satisfying, logically consistent with the other stories... I think that covers it.
Reality? LOL. We are bronze-age mud-worshippers.
Did she,in the book, give a reason why the list can't possibly be right?
> There's a lot of myths that you need to bust about the gladiatorial games, particularly in the center of Rome in the Colosseum. I think everyone's image of that is in some way based on modern movies on "Gladiator I," "Gladiator II." In some ways, I think those were rather impressive, but they got some things terribly wrong. And I think the thing that, for me, the biggest mistake they made is to imagine how the audience behaved. We do tend to think that somehow the audience must have gone wild, they were there because they wanted blood lust, they were erupting in passion, in anger, saying "Kill him," or "Save him," or whatever. Everything that we can tell about the audience from Roman sources themselves suggests that actually it was much more controlled than anything you see are in the movies. For start, it was completely sex-segregated, the women sat separately from the men. But more than that, everybody came dressed quite posh, you had to wear a toga to go. Now a toga is the official Roman dress for Roman men, but it's worn when you are doing something official, you don't wear it to the local bar in the evening. To go to the gladiatorial games, that was kind of official, and you had to wear your toga. Everybody sat not just segregated by sex, but they sat in rank order. Senators by law, the top rank of Roman society, on the front rows, and then the next rank down just above them, until you got to the very back where you found the slaves and the women. Now I think that we somehow have to just overturn our sense that it was kind of mad, "losing control" going on. I think it was probably more like an evening at the opera than an evening at a football match.
If you're going to make an assertion that seems absurd on its face ("The large crowds of wine-drunk plebs were subdued and mild mannered whilst observing blood sport!"), you should offer up evidence that actually supports your assertion. Her reasoning appears to have been: Men and women sat separately. The rich got preferred seating. You had to dress up (in a toga). QED, the atmosphere was like an evening at the opera. Huh?
Framing the uncertainty around early record keeping is a good. Similarly, the second Servile war in historic documents matches the first Servile war almost like Star Wars ep7 matches ep4. That _hints_ at fabrication. So if they fabricate data in one place.. :)
+1 to the recommendation.
I find Mary-Beard satisfying to watch. I'm having trouble finding it but she was on a panel and asked about the fall of Rome and her response was something to the effect of "Asking why Rome fell is the wrong question. A better question is why was it so successful in the first place."
Her reasons were, if I remember correctly, though Romans were brutal, for a long time and for the most part, they provided a better quality of life to many of the subjugated people and provided a path to citizenship. Further, they were adaptable about the places they governed, at least relative to other options at the time, keeping established powers in play, so long as they pledged allegiance to the Roman empire.
From what I gather, Mary-Beard's reasons for why Rome eventually fell was because they became too insular, eventually denying citizenship to larger cohorts of people and succumbing to corruption. I remember her saying that Rome was on the knife's edge of collapse many times and that it was more about their successes that pulled them through than about avoiding failure.
Just as an aside, I've heard that the concept of cyclops might have been from finding old mammoth skulls. The hole in the middle is for the nose cavity could be mistaken for an eye socket. Many pictures show cyclops as having tusks.
Sounds quite a lot like Ghengis Khan, who oversaw the largest empire in history until the British one.
Next up, how Carthaginians were actually the good guys and child sacrifice was not that bad.
He said both had their rise to power rooted in a (for-the-time) unique meritocratic element, where people would join you compared to the alternative options due to the ability to advance.
The sack of Rome in 410 was a shock, but the end of the western Roman empire later that century probably wasn't understood as such at the time since they didn't know that decentralization would be permanent; after terrible civil wars, another emperor would usually reunite the empire. And even much later there were often claims to be a continuation.
Contrast with China where new dynasties would rise after the old one falls.
Well he did, in the 530-550s to a significant extent. That of course didn’t work out because of the plague, climate change and other factors.
That varied. The taxation was very oppressive and there is some evidence that QoL (based on skeletal remains) did improve in quite a few places after the empire collapsed for some time.
That's weird to say they were too insular and that at the same time there was large cohorts of non-romans. It read more like an opinion based on modern sensibilities than history
I got something too, something that nobody wants to depict:
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia...
A good part of our cultural vision of Rome and Greece was influence by wishfully thinking of renaissance and enlightenment intellectuals that sought legitimacy for their ideas.
The rediscovery of Cicero’s letters had huge influence on statecraft in renaissance Italy.
It’s telling that in more modern times we project ourselves on Rome in a different way.
bell-cot•2mo ago
(Not saying they're malicious, usually. Just that looks-cool pretend will almost always rake in more revenue than reality. Without the hassles or expense of researching what the truth actually is, or changing their script/casting/costumes/whatever to bear a passable resemblance to it.)