Free A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors by Anthony Blond Page B

killed.
    There is a legend that Mark, the youngest of the Gospel writers, witnessed Titus’ Triumph to celebrate the capture of Jerusalem and was so affected by the sight of the high priest in
chains on a Roman cart, surrounded by the treasures of the Temple, that he resolved never to incur the wrathof Rome. The triumphant generals laid trophies taken from the enemy
in temples, where Roman soldiers could honour them, in ceremonies of which the regimental services, victory parades and state – or as they used to say ‘public’ funerals of great
warriors like Wellington and Churchill, which take place at St Pauls in the City of London, are reminiscent. In Rome the temple of Jupiter was not far from the temple of Juno Moneta, where the mint
was housed. It is interesting that while poets lie with kings in the Royal Peculiar of Westminster Abbey, the monuments to the victories which made the British Empire are in the church built in the
City of London, where the money is, to celebrate England’s status as a great power.
    Rome peaked at a Triumph. While voices were raised, occasionally, at the excesses of the Games or the institution of slavery, no one criticized the expense, the grandeur, the arrogance, the
triumphalism of a Triumph, not even Cicero. Rome, which kept a copy, on a bronze tablet, of each individual soldier’s record of service, never forgot that Triumphs were achieved on his back.
Nero forgot and it cost him his life.

THE BLOODY GAMES
    The Roman Games descended from the Greek, whose inspiration had been religious, international and pacific. They had begun at Olympia in 776 BC and
lasted unchanged for 1,000 years until banned by the spoilsport Christian Emperor Theodosius. The winning athletes won only token awards but, sneered Cicero, were more celebrated in Greece than
were victorious generals. Roman Games, though attended by a whiff of religion and originally featuring athletic events like the foot-race, javelin throwing and the pentathlon, developed along quite
different lines, becoming bloody, political and expensive. In our period, they included fights to the death between every kind of wild beast, between men (criminals and, later, Christians) and
beasts, and, of course, between men and men – gladiators, professional killers.
    The passionate entertainment of Romans was the chariot race where, although accidents did occasionally happen – to a too-successful jockey just before a big race – death had no part.
The chariot race was essentially Roman. Romulus and Co. raped the Sabine women in a hippodrome at races in honour of an ancient rural deity, Consus, and throughout the history of the Roman Empire
there were annual games called the Consualia. In the end there were at least fifty circuses in the Empire and they are still being unearthed. The largest was the Circus Maximus, where the Great
Fire started,in a boutique, in AD 64; it was rebuilt by the Emperors Domitian and Trajan to seat 150,000 spectators, becoming the model (with
dimensions of 640 by 190 metres) for circuses throughout Europe. They can be seen, or bits of them, at Arles, Vienne, Trier, Antioch (which held 80,000 and where the film
Ben Hur
was shot)
and Carthage. Private circuses were built by the rich, like nine-hole golf courses, for their friends. The younger Pliny had one on his Tuscany estate.
    The centre of the Circus Maximus was used for the exhibition of trophies and prisoners-of-war, works of art and spectacular loot, like artefacts from Karnak (cf. Cleopatra’s Needle in
London or the lions in the Piazza di San Marco in Venice). Nothing was too grand for the greatest display of power, speed and danger in Rome, relished and anticipated with excitement by all ranks
– slaves, freedmen, citizens, knights, senators and the Emperor and his friends. Everyone could sit and free seats were allocated for the poor. Caligula complained about being kept awake by
the noise of the common people claiming their places