Bibliographic Essay

While the athletic competitions of Greece and Rome are no longer seen as unique in the ancient world, since it is now recognised that other cultures also appreciated or made room for competitive events and various other ‘games', it nevertheless remains the case that such sports were ubiquitous and in many ways even a defining feature of Greek and Roman society.

The most important study of Greek combats sports remains Michael Poliakoff, Combat Sports in the Ancient World: Competition, Violence, and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), though Poliakoff specifically excludes Roman gladiatorial events from his study, arguing that they did not constitute a ‘sport' but were instead a form of ‘warfare for spectators'. Greek combat sports could be equally violent. See, for example, Nigel Crowther, ‘Reflections on Greek Athletic Events: Violence and Spectator Attitudes', Nikephoros 7 (1994), 121-33. At the same time scholars have begun to consider more closely the various rules and expectations by which gladiatorial combats were regulated, as can be seen especially in Michael J. Carter, ‘Gladiatorial Combat: The Rules of Engagement', Classical Journal 102 (2007), 97-113. Both Greek combat sports and Roman gladiatorial fights were violent contests bound by rules and regulations, with referees present to oversee them, and so the similarities now mean that the two are often studied together. The best example is the recent Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity, edited by Paul Christesen and Donald Kyle (Oxford: Blackwell, 2014), which contains forty-three chapters running chronologically from the Greek Bronze Age to the early Byzantine world in the sixth century ce. Kyle had earlier studied Greek sport and Roman spectacle as similar institutions in his 2007 Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World (Oxford: Blackwell; 2nd edn 2015), and this approach has been followed by Mark Golden, Greek Sport and Social Status (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008) and David Potter, The Victor's Crown: A a History of Sport from Homer to Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Still, despite the rule-bound nature of gladiatorial combats, it is still this spectacle that has attracted most of the attention for its violent nature and the window it potentially offers on Roman society more broadly. Such shows were typically accompanied by spectacular executions (including at times Christian martyrdoms) and displays and hunts of often exotic wild animals. It was a powerful spectacle and one which even the Christian victims of the arena wanted to appropriate for their own uses, as argued by Glen Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Donald Kyle had in 1998 published Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge), one of number of studies into the bloody spectacle. But the first and most important attempt to account for the violence of the arena is Garrett Fagan's The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). As the subtitle indicates, Fagan employs contemporary social psychology to explain human - not simply Roman - willingness to watch the sorts of violent acts found in gladiatorial combats and the other bloody shows in the arena, and indeed other forms of combat sports.

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Source: Fagan Garrett G., Fibiger Linda, Hudson Mark, Trundle Matthew (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 756 p.. 2020

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