1993
I recall, as a boy, seeing footage of concentration camp personnel dragging the bodies of holocaust victims with a hooked bar, the like of which I have often used to drag stacks of crated milk. That sometimes gave me a chill as an adult. But when I began reading for The Broken Dance, and specifically Mister Barton's gruesomely empathetic book, I came across accounts of the Roman arena—that society's counterpart to watching TV—that described similar means of human disposal. However, rather than feed the dead into ovens, they were fed to lions and tigers and leopards and other carnivores, which were then slain by celebrity hunters, with the meat given out to the crowd—often their only meat—along with the normal bread dole. So the arena was also like our welfare system, and slain gladiators who had not paid for their brothers to arrange for a proper burial, would be fed to the monsters that people feared, all to keep the greatest monster Man had so far made terribly alive.
Just as modern athletes who slap their children or wife are sacrificed on the altar of the national consciousness, the ancient Roman gladiator who failed in his prescribed ritual was sacrificed, his body dragged off with a hook or conducted gracefully on a bier [death bed]. The important aspect of the sacrifice in terms of the mass society, is that the hero must ultimately fail. In the morning hunters slaughtered dangerous animals gathered from around the world to demonstrate the all reaching power of the state over those things that the individual human so feared—the monsters of his primal past, of his dreamtime.
In so doing the Roman State conducted an extinction event, denuding Europe of much of its wild life, most notably the lion. There was a sorrow associated with this, as emperors had to send off to far India or down the Nile to find animals worthy of their grim stage. Commodus, degenerate son of a philosopher king, was the most reviled emperor of the line, and sought to redeem himself by stepping into the mythic dimension of the arena dressed in a lion skin like Hercules—the Man-become-God that emperors had come to identify with—as he was the lion-killer; the monster slayer, and hence embodied the monster. As his father had dreamed of resurrecting the ideals of kingship in the face of the machinery of the impersonal state, Commodus fantasized about being the Monstrous State himself, and was strangled in his bath by a wrestler.
From this sordid point on increasingly Greek-identified Roman emperor-generals would personally seek to emulate the warriors king of old, in the person of Alexander who wore a lion helmet as a symbol of his masculine legitimacy to rule over men. They would ultimately fail in the face of social rot and barbarian invasions—and worst of all the invitation of barbarians to reside within the empire. But their descendants, would be emperor-kings who would rule in Europe for a thousand years, in the lands that were once prowled by lions, the animal of the hunt sought by the king to prove his right, would adopt lion images for their royal crests. An animal that had been so long gone from the natural world as to be a veritable dragon continued to capture the imagination of men who sought to exceed—or be—the State, to go beyond a life of serving or squabbling.
In The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans, Carlin A. Barton unveils the monstrous mania at the root of the celebrity aspects of mass society, as well as the wicked pal that the State casts over the collective drive of humanity and the pathos of the individual to identify with its environment.
This is a deeply—even frighteningly—insightful work. In this profound study Barton does a better job of crawling through the toxic jungle of the Roman mind than any scholar read for this project, and reminds us in a chilling tone of how close our society's decline mirrors that of the famously monstrous Rome.
