http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=416350&c=1

The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games
By Garrett G. Fagan | Cambridge University Press | 374pp, £60.00 and £22.99
ISBN 9780521196161 and 185967 Published 17 February 2011

Reviewer : Tom Palaima is professor of Classics, University of Texas at Austin in the US.

Times Higher Education 2 June 2011

Blood flowing, hordes roaring
Tom Palaima agrees that people’s fascination with watching violence against others doesn’t change

Readers who are lured to Garrett Fagan’s The Lure of the Arena for graphic descriptions of violent acts will not be disappointed. Given the universal questions about human nature and human societies that Fagan poses in trying to explain the phenomenon of the Roman amphitheatre, they will be rewarded with catalogues, drawn from many societies and periods of human history, designed to prove that “the Romans were by no means alone in finding the sight of people and animals tormented and killed both intriguing and appealing”.

Cultures closer to our own in time have been more creative in devising forms of violence for their men, women and children, poor and simple-minded or wealthy and well educated, to witness and enjoy together.

Fagan devotes a long chapter, judiciously illustrated with woodcuts of 16th- and 18th-century public executions, to sampling the “vast corpus of comparative evidence for violence staged before spectators”. Crucifixion, castration, stoning, clubbing, flaying, burning, boiling alive in oil, decapitation, burial alive, drawing and quartering, branding, flogging and other kinds of mutilation cannot match being “braided” on a wheel for gruesome cruelty.

Practised in France until 1787 and in Germany into the 1840s, this manner of execution pulverised the prisoner’s limbs, threaded his body through the spokes of a wheel, and then set it on a pole for public viewing. An eyewitness describes the victim eventually as “a sort of huge screaming puppet, writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster of raw, slimy and shapeless flesh, mixed with splinters of smashed bones”. This makes Martial’s description of the Sicilian bandit Laureolus, who was ripped apart by a bear in the arena so that “in his body there was no body”, Continue reading →