Animals, Gods and Humans - Chapter 9

9 FIGHTING THE BEASTS Damnatio ad bestias In the Roman Empire, the sentencing of humans to the beasts – damnatio ad bestias – was a punishment for severe crimes and not open to pardon (Ville 1981: 235–40).1 It implied being killed by animals in the arena and was a most shameful way to die, a punishment normally not imposed on Roman citizens.2 It was also a penalty that was expensive and required a consider-able amount of planning. Such killings were staged in the amphitheatres of the great cities at the celebration of feasts and for the general amusement of the spectators. The killing of humans by means of beasts was usually staged in the morning as part of a venatio, while ordinary executions were shown in the intermission between the morning programme and that in the evening: “In the morning they throw men to the lions and the bears; at noon, they throw them to the spectators”, wrote Seneca (Epistle, 7.4). Humans being killed by animals, together with arena performances, such as gladiatorial fights, killing of animals, fights between animals, chariot races, athletic competitions and theatrical performances, were part of the mass entertainment of antiquity, viewed by virtually everyone, even if not everyone appreciated it: Cicero, for instance, asked rhetorically what pleasure it can afford a man of culture “when either a weak human being is mangled by a most powerful beast, or a splendid beast is transfixed with a hunting spear?” (Letters to his Friends, 7.1.3). Classical authors mention the damnatio ad bestias sporadically, and scenes in which humans are killed by beasts in the arena are often found in mosaics, especially those from North Africa. Through these mosaics we get a sort of commentary on this type of killing. But even if to be attacked, killed, torn to pieces and sometimes eaten by wild animals is a terrible way to die, depictions of such scenes do not seem to have been thought of as especially revolting by the Romans, who sometimes used them to decorate their dining rooms.3 We must conclude that the spectators in the Roman world did not usually identify with the victims. This point of view is convincingly argued by Shelby Brown, who has exam-ined scenes from the arena on Roman domestic mosaics and used them to 183 FIGHTING THE BEASTS illuminate these cultural norms that made people want to look at the killings in the arena (Brown 1992). Her conclusion is very clear: the Romans did not see the mosaics in which the victims’ wounds and anguish were depicted in the same way as we do with empathy for the victims. On the contrary, the mosaics emphasize the distance of patron and audience from those who were killed. They celebrated a shared social structure according to which this type of punishment had an educational value and was seen as just in relation to the worst crimes. The victims had got what they legitimately deserved. Humiliation and mockery further contributed to alienating the spectator from the offender. A similar impression is given when one reads Martial’s descriptions of the killing of men and animals at the spectacles at the opening of the Flavian Amphitheatre (cf. Coleman 1990). His compassion for the victims is nil. This may also imply that in the case of the damnati ad bestias, the onlookers, rather than siding with the victims, sided with those who were carrying out the law (ibid.: 58) and probably also with the instruments of this justice – which in this case were the beasts. In contrast to the ordinary Roman attitude, the Christians were a group that did not usually side with the beasts. The Christians were potential victims of such punishment and also had an abhorrence of the arenas, being virtually the only people in the Graeco-Roman world who criticized the entertainment of the arenas (Tertullian, On the Spectacles). Since they sometimes became victims of damnatio ad bestias, execution by means of animals was a theme upon which the Christian imagination dwelt, and a theme that is treated in the Acts of the Martyrs. But in contrast to pagan art, the Acts of the Martyrs definitely sided with the victims. What is so special about the Christian texts is not only that the story is told from the point of view of the victims but also that the Acts of the Martyrs became one of the main Christian literary genres. It is also strange that even if Christians were thrown to the beasts, these beasts seldom managed to kill them. Consequently, the theme of this chapter is not only the function and value of animals in the Acts of the Martyrs, i.e. how real animals are described and more fanciful beasts are symbolically invented, but more specific questions are also raised, as to why these sources seldom allow the beasts to kill the martyrs, and why descrip-tions of beasts killing Christians are almost never given. A clash of cosmologies Christians were persecuted sporadically during the first two centuries, but they became subject to empire-wide persecution during the reigns of the emperors Decius (250–1 CE) and Diocletian (303–13 CE).4,5 There was prob-ably no general law against Christianity, merely a constant suspicion that Christians meant trouble.6 The test with which they were confronted, when for one reason or another they had been exposed to public scrutiny, was whether they would sacrifice or not, either to the emperor but more often to 184 FIGHTING THE BEASTS the gods.7 Those who refused to sacrifice were potential martyrs. During Emperor Decius’ reign, an edict was issued that especially required that everyone should sacrifice to the Roman gods, thus ensuring the loyalty of the emperor’s subjects. Those who did obtained an attestation (libellus); those who did not risked being confronted by the local authorities.8 It is a striking contrast between the pagan and Christian cosmologies that “explained” the events in the arenas. From the Roman point of view, those who were killed were the enemies of Rome, people who by their crimes had cut themselves off from human society. For instance, Tacitus mentions that the Christians who were killed under Nero were dressed as animals and killed by dogs (The Annals, 15.44.4). In general, the arena was a stage on which Roman values were re-enacted in the presence of both the common people and the elite (Barton 1996: 33). The proceedings in the arenas were ritualized activities introduced by processions and sacrifices (Tertullian, On the Spectacles), where the executions were attended not only by humans but also by the gods, who were present in the form of their statues. The fact that these statues, out of reverence, were veiled when offenders were being executed only underlined the monstrosity of these offenders’ crimes. The killing was sometimes even staged within the framework of religious mythology, as in the case of the “fatal charades” described by Martial, when Orpheus was killed by a bear (Coleman 1990; see Chapter 1). Thomas Wiedemann has pointed out that the use of mythological characters and of the framework of Greek myths placed “what went on in the arena into a cosmic universal context” (Wiedemann 1995: 85, cf. Auguet 1994: 100ff). The re-enactment of mythological stories did not take place only in Rome. When the young patrician woman Perpetua and her fellow martyrs were killed in Carthage in 203, they were rigged out in the outfits of Saturnine priests and servants of Ceres.9 In this way, the enemies of the state were killed within the context of a cosmic drama. Through Christian narratives about the martyrs, alternative frames of interpretation were established to explain what happened in the amphithe-atres (Potter 1993). The amphitheatre was no longer the arena of Roman power and justice; instead, it was described – in Tertullian’s words – as “that dreadful [horrendus] place”. According to Tertullian, the amphitheatre, “is the temple of all demons. There are as many unclean spirits gathered there as it can seat men” (On the Spectacles, 97). In Scorpiace, Tertullian introduces a different perspective. He compares the contest of the martyrs to secular contests in which some are winners and others losers, and he describes the arena as being in the service of God. In a way, God himself had staged what happened in the arena, for by means of martyrdom, God tested the steadfastness and endurance of those who believe in him (Scorpiace, 6). Tertullian also writes about “the sharp pain of martyrdom” but promises that the suffering of the martyrs will unlock paradise (A Treatise on the Soul, 55) and that their ultimate prize is life eternal 185 FIGHTING THE BEASTS (To the Martyrs, 3). In his texts, we meet a world turned upside-down where martyrs are better off in jail than in the world. The world is the real prison, because it is filled with sinners, who in Tertullian’s perspective appear as the true criminals. A similar perspective is found in the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas.10 In one of Perpetua’s visions, she is fighting in the arena with an evil Egyptian. In reality, this Egyptian is the Devil, while the person who presides over the games (lanista) is to be interpreted as Christ (Bowersock 1995: 51–2).11 The fight in the arena is also seen in this totally changed perspective. Perpetua and her fellow martyrs returned to prison in high spirits because they had been sentenced to the beasts and later went happily from prison to the amphitheatre as if to heaven (18.1–3). Sometimes the heavenly powers intervened directly in the fate of the martyr, as in the martyrdom of Polycarp, when a voice from heaven encouraged the old bishop to be strong (9.1). In most of the Acts of the Martyrs, there is a strong appeal to the martyr to sacrifice and an even stronger refusal to do so.12 The turning-point of the narrative is when the martyr declares that he or she was a Christian. Then those who were not willing to sacrifice were themselves turned into victims. It varied if beasts were used in the killing of the martyrs. The Acts of the Martyrs mention torture, scourging, beheading and burning as well as damnatio ad bestias. In this way, animals that killed Christians became func-tional equivalents to the stake, the axe and the instruments of torture. This connection is also made when Tertullian lumps together “the merciless sword, and the lofty cross, and the rage of wild beasts, and that punishment of the flames, of all most terrible, and all the skill of the executioners in torture” (To the Martyrs, 4), or when Minucius Felix says that Christian boys and women were so inspired to suffer pain that they scorn “crosses and tortures, wild beasts and all frightful torments” (Octavius, 37.5; cf. Hermas, 2.1; Justin, Dialogue with Tryphon, 110). Various sorts of punishment were not seldom measured out to one martyr, with the double purpose of causing as much pain as possible to the victim and presenting varied entertainment for the onlookers. Different animals followed each other, or attacks by animals were combined with other penalties. In Lyons, the slave-girl Blandina was both crucified on a post and at the same time served as bait for the beasts. Judith Perkins has convincingly argued that characteristic of Christian discourse was a particular understanding of self, the Christian as sufferer. Christian narratives offered “a new literary happy ending for readers – death, in particular, the martyr’s death” (Perkins 1995: 24; cf. Shaw 1996).13 This implies that in the Christian scenario, martyrs were turned into cultural performers who acted out this new plot and rejected a conventional social life. However, when Christians in the Acts of the Martyrs are described as victims, the traditional hierarchy of power is at the same time turned upside-down: through their suffering and death, the martyrs were given 186 FIGHTING THE BEASTS power (Perkins 1995: 104–23). In this way, the Christian texts challenged the traditional image of power and gradually created a new one. By embracing martyrdom but denying that they experienced terrible pain or saw death as defeat, the Christians rejected the social order and the power structure that surrounded them (ibid.: 117). The Acts of the Martyrs, as texts of subversion, were part of a discourse that eventually contributed to creating a new power structure in the Roman Empire. As pointed out by Jane Cooper, by means of the martyr texts Christians were putting them-selves in a new position in relation to pagans by creating a new type of hierarchy and status. They refused to be intimidated by the persecutions and were thus making the Roman system unstable (Cooper 2003). The new cosmological context into which the Christians had put the damnatio ad bestias implied that the drama in the arena was no longer a rightful struggle to maintain law and order, a struggle in which the enemies of the state and of the gods had to pay with their lives through gruesome but well-deserved punishments. Instead, it was conceived of as a struggle between God and Satan in which human and bestial actors also played their parts. Some of the narratives are fantastic. There has been a continuous discus-sion as to how far these reports truthfully render what really happened when the martyr was killed. Fantastic and miraculous events are usually not seen as increasing the source value of a text. Sometimes the whole genre of Acta Martyrum is described as fictitious, a point of view that undermines the usefulness of an important early Christian genre and does not seem to be very well founded. However, considering that our topic includes imagined animals as well as real ones, that the differences between these categories are blurred (see Chapter 4) and that one goal is to describe the use of animals in cultural processes, the discussion about reality and fiction in the Acts of the Martyrs does not have to bother us too much. In this context, any animal goes. How realistically the beasts are described is less interesting than the use to which they were actually put. Threatening beasts and cosmological symbols In the Acts of the Martyrs, animals generally have four functions. In addi-tion to the animals’ obvious function as instruments of torture and killing, martyrs were urged to sacrifice animals, and wild animals were used to threaten would-be martyrs. In addition, on a metaphysical level, animals appeared as symbols of a polarized cosmos. When the animal sacrifice is introduced in the Acts of the Martyrs, it usually appears as a prescribed ritual action in which the animal is presup-posed but not present. When Perpetua was brought before the governor, her father urged her: “Perform the sacrifice – have pity on your baby” (6.2), and the governor also bade her “to offer the sacrifice [fac sacrum] for the welfare of the emperors” (6.3).14 No animal is mentioned. Not only is the animal 187 ... - tailieumienphi.vn