The Unofficial Hunger Games Companion (11 page)

The ancient Romans gambled on the outcomes of the gladiatorial battles, just as they do in The Hunger Games. The Romans looked all over their Empire for victims to serve in their games, and they glorified their bloodbaths in art.

So why did the ancient Romans have no opposition to the inhumanity of their games while we, as readers of The Hunger Games series, find the violence and bloodbaths deplorable? Have people really changed that much over time? If so, why does the world still have so much violence and brutal death?

While modern society seems obsessed with violence and death in literature, film, art, and video games, we don’t condone unnecessary brutality in our own lives. We read about horrors in other nations far away, but as long as the horrors don’t hit too close to home, most people have learned that there’s no point in doing anything other than shrugging it off. We feel impotent to do anything about the horrors in other countries. In fact, we’re impotent, if you get right down to it, to fix the indignities, starvation, homelessness, and senseless violence in our own countries. Most people are disgusted, albeit horrified, by the conditions of cows, chickens, horses, and other animals, particularly those meant for human consumption. And yet, most of us feel impotent to do anything about it.

And yet, compared to the ancients, we are much more sensitive to animal rights, to the inhumane living conditions of animals intended for slaughter, the rights of those on death row to have “humane” executions, the cruelty of bullfights and rodeos, and to lab experiments on animals.

In the times of the gladiators, as Duke University Professor Matt Cartmill writes:

In the real arenas of Rome, the battles were much worse than in the World of The Hunger Games. For example, in
AD
107, Trajan threw a twenty-three- day Games, in which
10,000 gladiators
fought to the death and men slaughtered
11,000 animals
.

It was common to beat and burn slaves to death if they were suspected of desertion, treason, or magic. Further punishments included crucifixion, and also excruciating death in the ring by wild beasts. In the latter case, a slave or criminal entered the arena naked with a chain or rope around his neck. He was tied to a post with no defense against the wild animals that then ravaged his body. The Romans sometimes used these methods on women and children as well as men.

Women were common in Nero’s gladiatorial events. He thrust women of all ages and classes into the ring: slaves, foreigners, and even nobles. In
AD
63, we know that Ethiopian women
and
children fought to the death in Nero’s games.

There simply were no boundaries regarding the methods of torture. Professional gladiators fought against older men with disabilities. Blindfolded men fought with swords. Men fought with lassos, tridents, spears, daggers, clubs, and nets.

Considering the size and length of the Games, the number of people—men and sometimes, even women and children—violently killed in the rings, and the torture and killing of so many animals, ancient Roman games were probably the most inhumane and brutal in history. Scholars suggest that the cruelties of the Games were as horrific as the Nazi exterminations of millions of people, and that even Genghis Khan wasn’t as inhumane as the ancient Romans. As one scholar put it, “No one can fail to be repelled by this aspect of callous, deep-seated sadism which pervaded Romans of all classes.”
⁵

As another example, in
AD
80 when the Colosseum opened, Titus threw a Games in Rome lasting one hundred days, in which nine thousand wild and domestic animals were slaughtered, followed by gladiatorial combats. Next, the arena was filled with water, so men could fight each other in mock sea battles. Outside the city, additional exhibitions pitted three thousand men against each other in another mock sea battle, which was followed by a mock military battle on the ground. And by “mock,” we mean that although the battles weren’t really waged between opposing government forces, the men and animals were killed in brutal combat.

In 46
BC
, Caesar threw another Games that definitely rivals the extravaganzas put on by the Gamemakers. Throughout Rome, gladiators fought on stages, athletes competed against each other, and there were horse races, military dances, plays, and fake sea battles in a pool arena built especially for the Games. These frivolities were followed by five days of gladiatorial combat featuring men versus wild animals. The finale of Caesar’s Games was a battle between two armies in the Circus Maximus; the battle included five hundred men on foot, thirty men on horses, and twenty elephants.

Note the reference to Spartacus in the box titled, “
Ancient Roman Games
.” A Thracian captured by the Romans and sent to their Capua gladiator school, Spartacus eventually led a revolution against Rome in 73
BC
.

On a popular Hunger Games website (www.mockingjay.net), Suzanne Collins writes that “the historical figure of Spartacus really becomes more of a model for the arc of the three books, for Katniss. [Spartacus] was a gladiator who broke out of the arena and led a rebellion against an oppressive government that led to what is called the Third Servile War.”
⁶

For most men like Spartacus, death in the arena was a certainty. For captured prisoners of war, things couldn’t have been much worse. They received no mercy at all while training for the games and certainly none while fighting in the arena. After all, the Romans thought of them as enemies, scum, worthy of nothing but the most excruciating deaths.

Spartacus was one of these men, a prisoner from Thrace, which later became known as Thracia when Emperor Claudius annexed it in
AD
46. In Spartacus’s time, the Thracians dwelled primarily in an area of southeast Europe that today cuts through Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria. Spartacus served as an auxiliary soldier in the Roman army, but after he deserted, the Romans captured and enslaved him at the gladiatorial school.

Ancient Roman Games: A Timeline of Atrocities Much Worse Than The Hunger Games

ALMOST A THOUSAND YEARS OF CARNAGE