The Colosseum by Mary Beard, Keith Hopkins Read Free Book Online Page B

translation puts it:
    Beleeve a bull enioy’d the Cretan Queene;
Th’old fable verif’d we all have seene.
Let not old times, Caesar, selfe-praised bee;
Since what fame sings, the stage presents to thee.
    How literally should we read this? Are we to take it that these opening celebrations of the Colosseum, under the admiring eye of the emperor Titus and of the massed ranks of Roman citizens, really featured sex between a woman and a bull? Possibly. There is other evidence for dramatic executions of criminals in the Roman arena along these lines (presumably the woman would not have survived the encounter, which we assume to have been some form of quasi-judicialpunishment). Condemned criminals were induced – again, it is difficult to see quite how – to take part in their own death scenes as if actors in a play. Later in The Book of the Shows Martial focuses on the crucifixion of a man, who seems to have re-enacted in the amphitheatre the punishment of a legendary Roman bandit called Laureolus, until he was put out of his misery by a bear imported from Scotland. He simultaneously reminded the audience of the myth of Prometheus, whose particular divine punishment was to have his liver continually devoured by vultures during the day and grow back again at night:
    Just as Prometheus, bound tight on a Russian crag
Fed with his ever healing and regrowing heart
The bird that never tires of eating
So,
cast as
Laureolus, the bandit king, nailed to a cross – no stage
prop this –
A man offered his exposed guts to a Highland bear.
His shredded limbs clung onto life though
Their constituent parts gushed with blood;
No trace of body – but the body lived.
Finally he got the punishment he deserved …
Maybe he’d slit his master’s throat,
Maybe he’d robbed a temple’s treasury of gold,
Maybe he’d tried to burn our city, Rome.
That criminal had surpassed all ancient folklore’s crimes.
Through him what had been merely myth
Became real punishment.
    This is also an aspect of games, that Tertullian – a late second-century Christian from North Africa, and a particularly strident religious ideologue – picks out when he complains that criminals in the amphitheatre take on the mythological roles of Attis (who castrated himself) or Hercules (burned alive). Even closer to Martial’s woman and the bull is an episode in Apuleius’ brilliant novel The Golden Ass , also a product of second-century North Africa. Apuleius recounts how a woman convicted of murder was condemned, before being eaten by a beast, to have intercourse in a local amphitheatre with an ass – in fact the human hero of the story, transformed into an ass by a magical accident. The brainy ass is not convinced that the lion will know the script, and fears that it might well eat him instead of the woman, so he scarpers before the performance.
    On the other hand, we might be dealing with a rather different kind of charade. It is not so much a question of how feasible the intercourse described would be; historians have been predictably ingenious with their solutions to that problem, and have plenty of parallels from modern pornography to hand. More to the point is that there is nothing here to disprove the idea that the ‘bull’ was in fact a human being in fancy dress and that the ‘reality’ of the union was something injected by the poet. After all, the wonderfully fantastical Golden Ass and the tirades of Tertullian are hardly very strong evidence for standard practice in the arena. Martial’s contribution to the celebration, in other words, might have been to take a piece of play-acting in the Colosseum and to make it real (by treating it as such) in his verses.
    Whatever reconstruction they prefer, most modern scholars have been keen to stress that Martial did not disapproveof such spectacles. True enough. But by using approval or disapproval as the touchstone, this observation tends to miss what Martial so positively admires in the shows and spectacles