The Noble Gladiator:  Addressing the Elusive ‘VIRTUS’ in Gladiatorial Combat at Rome

Despite the best efforts of scholars like Carlin, Barton, Susan Mattern and Marilyn Skinner, stereotypes about Roman masculinity have pervaded popular culture as innate aggression, destructive conquest, and outright bloodlust.  Thomas Wiedemann, a formidable force in classical scholarship, wrote as recently as 1992 that “the universality of violence in the ancient world, as in most pre-industrial societies, is well attested:  the gladiatorial games of the Romans glorified violence to the point where these games became the central ritual of public life” (Wiedemann, 1992, p.27).  This single statement represents how complex the games in the Roman amphitheatre were to both ancient and modern societies, and how they are frequently described primarily through inherent stereotyping. 

Ever since Heinrich Schliemann and other archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century rejuvenated interest in the ancient world, scholarship has been endless.  Naturally, particularly among Western European scholars, the tendency has been to focus on the writings of Christian Romans such as Tertullian to develop the argument that the gladiatorial games were nothing more than immoral, sacrilegious acts of bloody violence.  This is not ineffective, but it is easy to agree with someone else especially if their values are similar to your own.  Some of these same scholars added another dimension to their application of primary sources – they were interested in how ancient spectacles could be compared to the modern world.  RM Chase’ 1927 article ‘De Spectaculis’ reveals a serious concern for changes in social morality and “what the world is coming to” (Chase, 1927, p.109).  The fact that PA Brunt wrote about the Roman mob in the late 1960s coinciding with the socio-political upheavals affecting a large part of the world is also revealing (Brunt, 1966, pp.3-7).  Michael Grant compares the gladiator shows to Nazism as “two [of the] most quantitatively destructive institutions” in human history (Grant, 1967, p.8).  This is quite a potent statement to make.  If from the earliest stages of study academics have compared gladiator shows with their own eras, there is something unanimously clear about the social implications of the games.

What is rarely addressed without this comparative bias is how the Romans themselves appreciated gladiatorial combats.  The ubiquity of Tertullian aside, other primary sources such as Caesar’s comments on his own greatness, the De Spectaculis epigrams of Martial, and the playful analogies of Ovid bring a much more complex impression.  Pride, awe, and sex figure highly in these texts, hence the reason for Tertullian’s vehemence.  But he was not looking at the combats from the same perspective.

There is a subtlety to the pre-Christian Roman’s concept of his own masculinity and personal virtue and what better way to exemplify this than through one of the most prejudicial atmospheres for a modern audience:  the amphitheatre.    Here, where men fought and died for the pleasure of the audience, Roman virtus – masculine virtue, courage, and civic and social perfection – was enacted.   It was performed with such exquisite vitality in fact that the Roman audience experienced a transcendent sublimity that reinforced the nature of their social world as they watched ‘non-persons’ (forgive the modern term) represent Roman excellence.

For the scope of this paper, I will confine myself to dealing with male gladiators, since the subject matter focuses on those virtues reserved exclusively for the male Roman audience.  Suffice it to say however, much can be said about women’s involvement in gladiatorial spectacle, and that includes a vehement disagreement with the above statement.  I will also refrain from descriptions of the different types of gladiators who performed in the amphitheatre in the first and second centuries CE because it is the contrast between combatants that, under scrutiny, is most illuminating. 

To begin, the nature of prejudicial treatments of Roman character are found in the racial profiling of the past as well as from a means to emphasize philhellenism.  The actions of a single member of a ‘race’ are no more indicative of the character of that ‘race’ than is ‘race’ a feasible way to describe a cultural group.  Regarding philhellenism, the most popular images of Ancient Greece are of philosophers gesticulating intently in the gymnasion or the agora as they extend the limits of the human mind.  Classical Greece is distinctively more cerebral than Imperial Rome.   But their intellectualism is visible because it is our own.  On the other hand, only a small demographic of modern society enjoys watching people die for their own moral development.  If I were to say that the death of a gladiator was only visible in the arena in accidental or unexpected circumstances, how does that change our perceptions of the combat?

What we know about gladiators is limited to amphitheatre sites throughout the Roman Empire, armour and decorative formalwear discovered at Pompeii, and the literature of Martial, Josephus, Pliny, and Tertullian among others.  What is most quietly viable from the study of these sources is that the violence in the arena was clearly not the main concern of the Roman people in the same way that modern-day censors condemn the viability of media programs with violent content. 

The image of a gladiator most familiar to the modern world, apart from cinema, is the 1872 painting by Jean-Leon Gerome entitled “Pollice Verso” (wikipedia.org) that depicts a physically powerful helmeted gladiator standing over his vanquished opponent waiting for the sign to kill from a mighty aristocrat unidentifiable in the throngs of wild spectators.  Let us contrast that with an archaeological discovery that recently made news.  A mosaic found in a villa at Wadi Lebda in Libya dubbed “The Exhausted Gladiator” has been called ‘worthy of Botticelli’ for its realism (Times Online, June 13, 2005).  Archaeologist Mark Merrony has said that “the human expression is captured in a realistic manner hitherto unknown in Roman mosaics” (ibid).   In it, the gladiator stares across the arena at his slain opponent from a seated position, his helmet and weapon depicted in the image but off to one side, entirely separate from either the gladiator or the dead figure to his right.  This is not a scene of violence, but of repose.  If gladiators were such a bloodthirsty spectacle, why represent one in such an intellectually pensive situation?  I do not believe the answer is that the owner of the villa who commissioned the mosaic wanted simply to avoid violent images in his house.  There is ample evidence that this was rarely a deterrent, as Marilyn Skinner has spent decades researching and publishing (Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, 2005 and Roman Sexualities, 1997, for example).

The emotional element of amphitheatrical combat is much more compelling because it is so obvious.  Martial, in his second epigram of the De Spectaculis Liber, praised the Emperor Titus for restoring the rightful property of the Roman people in such a way as to focus on the importance of the building and the sentiments of the audience within it.  Knowing Martial’s biting humour, it is indicative of the seriousness with which the Roman people approached the amphitheatre that there is no ulterior rhetoric here.  A number of important issues have arisen from these two examples.  Let us address them in order. 

In the “Pollice Verso”, the artist has emphasized the physique of the gladiator and the necessity of that physique with weaponry and armour and solitude in front of a massive audience.  Gerome has also helmeted the gladiator, most likely using for his model one of the artifacts discovered at Pompeii.  The helmet is huge and completely obscures the face of the gladiator from the audience.  It would have provided only minimal protection for the head since, regardless of how the fighter would protect it anyway, the helmet is heavy and hard to see through.  The helmet was not utilitarian but symbolic.  Roman masculine virtue was reserved for a very select few and the thought of seeing the face of a scarred, world-worn slave exhibiting this virtus was more than the audience could socially conceive of.  This also shows that the emphasis was not on the violence or the ‘vulgarity’ of the man but on the admiration of an action, an exhibition of what was most innately Roman.

The realism that Roman artisans were able to compel from a mosaic is in itself impressive.  The realism they were able to give their gladiator subject brings vividness to their understanding of a gladiator’s nature.  The gladiator in the mosaic from Wadi Lebda is totally visible and this augments the human quality of the combatant.  He is not a senseless killer but part of a greater social environment that needs him more than can be described.  That the artist was willing or paid to represent a gladiator in such a way is indicative of the Roman people’s understanding of this environment and, because it is found within a provincial villa, their willingness to engage in discourse on the subject.  (see Amos Rapoport).

This intellectual approach is perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence that eliminates the bloodthirsty and innately aggressive stereotype of the Roman people and their spectacles.  Material remains prove, unlike the fantasies of modern artists, that gladiators were not inanimate subjects:  consideration was made in their regard.  Primary sources deal just as extensively with conceptions and analyses of war which, as Susan Mattern explains, are the basis for the stereotype of aggression.  “The Romans at all times valued victory and conquest, as part of a system in which aggression… was crucial for maintaining honour and security” (Mattern, 1999, p.208).  Violence was a means to a moral end and praise was given to the end, not the means. 

Finally, I turn to the gladiator himself.  Most often slaves, though not usually prisoners of war as Michael Grant would have us believe (Grant, 1966, p. 28), gladiators had been dubbed infamis – a meaning that carried with it more social disgust than prostitutes do with today’s conservatives.  These men were non-citizens, one of the worst ways to exist.  Not only were they unable to be politically active, they were incapable of restoring dignity to themselves once it had been lost.  Gladiators were socially and politically inert, and thus the perfect catalyst for the demonstrations of virtus that the Roman audience came to the arena to see.  The very reason the public death of a combatant did not occur with the frequency we assume is because demonstrating virtus made a man worthy of his dignity.  Wiedemann believes this is exemplified in the honour given to worthy gladiators of a death fit for a Roman citizen on the battlefield:  death by the sword.  Those who had fought well were allowed a death reserved for the permanent holders of the highest Roman virtues.  Only insofar as it represented life, the blood sacrifice had been successful; the audience had received visible proof of the existence of virtuous perfection, and the gladiator had won back for himself some of the nobility which he had lost.  Roland Auguet argues that the same blood spilt for the dead “could ensure a permanent revival… a real deification” of the man whose blood had been offered (Auguet, 1972, pp.22-23).  The person in which Roman virtus resided was owed the right of a dignified death.  Mortally injured, they were pulled into the dark chambers underneath the arena and met death through a quick blow to the back of the neck from something resembling a pick-axe.  This has been, for centuries, a mercy-killing in the field for soldiers beyond hope**.  But death had been met facing a sword in battle, and a renown inconceivable for the social outcast had been achieved.  The inevitable death of a gladiator had a continuous visceral and vital element to it, one which restored the faith of an urban empire in its commanding traditions.  This is what the Roman audience hoped to bear witness to.

The need for Roman society to witness acts of virtus is demonstrative of a certain intellectualism within their society that is unfamiliar to us and thus easily misread.  The desire to see what it was that made the Romans a successful imperial community is not totally alien to us.  That the Romans used a physically violent medium to treat this imperative is however deterring.  Masculine virtue through violence and death is not what modern audiences would consider applicable or even stomach-able, but in a world where violence was just another part of life, it was a way to make the experience accessible to all elements of society (unlike rhetoric or drama that, arguably, were constructed to appeal only to the upper classes).

The gladiators, by their dress and fighting style, represented the vial into which the virtus sacrifice could be poured.  The traditional match-ups of a murmillo with a thraex and a retiarius with a secutor exemplify the focus on skill over brute force in these combats (Kohne and Ewigleben, 2000, pp.48-49, 59-61).  Each pair looked unevenly matched, but this was the result of the audience’s desire to see thought and skill; they were made intentionally uneven to force this display.  It is easy to believe that they were faced off in this unfair manner to ensure the death of one and that it was merely the death blow that the audience anticipated.  This over-simplifies the audience’s interest in how the combat concluded.  Of course the completion of the fight was important – how can one’s opponent display virtuous prowess if there is no end to the test?  The fact that gladiatorial combats became almost exclusively munera sine missione – to the death – over time draws attention to this since society had decided that death was the only way to truly witness virtus personified.  It does not however mean that death was lusted after.  The visceral experience of virtus was the goal, and witnessing it was made all the more potent in the intense revelation of death.

Herein lies the truly visceral nature of the gladiatorial games, not in stereotypical bloodthirstiness, but from an understanding that is innately human that virtue is more real in how a man faces death than in how he faces life.  A gladiator, fully aware that entering the arena could be one of the last things he does, takes action and fights his opponent.  If he does so bravely, exemplifying strategy, skill, and courage, he transcends the boundaries of the social world that were so clearly delineated when the combat began.  And the enthralled audience joins his transcendence realizing that virtue does not exist in a single kind of person but in the actions of any person.
 
Selected Bibliography

Alberge, Dalya (correspondent).  June 13th, 2005.  “Roman Mosaic ‘Worthy of Botticelli’”, in The Times Online.  London.

Auguet, Roland.  1972.  Cruelty and Civilization:  The Roman Games.  London:  George Allen and Unwin Ltd.

Bailey, D.R. Shackleton (editor and translator).  1993.  Martial.  Epigrams, Vol.1  Loeb Classical Library.  Cambridge, MASS:  Harvard University Press

Benario, Herbert W.  “Amphitheatres of the Roman World”, in The Classical Journal, Vol.76, No.3 (Feb.-Mar. 1981), pp. 255-258

Brunt, P.A.  “The Roman Mob”, in Past and Present, No. 35 (Dec. 1966), pp. 3-27

Chase, R. M.  “De Spectaculis”, in The Classical Journal, Vol, 23, No.2, (Nov. 1927), pp. 107-120

Clarke, John R.  1998.  Looking at Lovemaking.  Berkeley:  University of California Press

Garnsey, Peter.  1996.  Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine.  Cambridge, UK:  Cambridge University Press

Grant, Michael.  1967.  Gladiators.  New York:  Delacorte Press

Graves, Robert (translator).  1957.  Suetonius.  The Twelve Caesars.  Great Britain:  Penguin Books

Green, Peter (translator).  1982.  Ovid:  The Erotic Poems.  Toronto:  Penguin Books

Hoffman, Carl.  2000.  “The Evolution of a Gladiator:  History, Representation and Revision in Spartacus”, in Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, Vol.23, Issue 1.  pp.63-70

Kohne, Eckart and Cornelia Ewigleben (editors).  2001.  Gladiators and Caesars:  The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome.  Berkeley:  University of California Press

Mattern, Susan P.  1999.  Rome and the Enemy:  Imperial Strategy in the Principate.  Berkeley:  University of California Press

Potter, D.S. and D.J. Mattingly (editors).  1999.  Life. Death and Entertainment in the Roman Empire.  Michigan:  University of Michigan Press

Poynton, J.B.  “The Public Games of the Romans”, in Greece and Rome, Vol.7, No.20 (Feb. 1938), pp. 76-85

Skinner, Marilyn B.  2005.  Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture.  Oxford:  Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Ward-Perkins, J.W.  1981.  Roman Imperial Architecture.  New Haven:  Yale University Press

Wiedemann, Thomas.  1992.  Emperors and Gladiators.  London:  Routledge

Wiedemann, Thomas.  1981.  Greek and Roman Slavery.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press

Wikipedia.org

The University of Toronto Graduate History Symposium, entitled “After the Fall: Sex, Gender, and Power”, has released its program for February 9th to 10th, 2007. Under discussant, Barbara Todd, I will be presenting my paper on Virtus among gladiators to a group composed of two Laurier students and a student from Harvard. The session is “Macho, Macho Man” and looks to be an engaging look at masculinity across the ages. The paper titles seem to encompass a great many things, and I’ll be particularly interested to hear Phyllis Thompson Reid’s paper on the masculinization of professional cooking.

The New Frontiers conference was almost completely different than the UofT conference a week earlier, and yet there are the obvious connections – there were still nervous students, still some very interesting paper topics, and still some that could have been stellar but structure or presentation took away from it.

York’s conference was much more relaxed, partly because I knew some of the participants, and the atmosphere was much more amicable – the laughing and joking was less forced. I give credit to Alban Bargain for that, a first year PhD student at York researching twentieth century German emigrations, who shuffled a bunch of his friends down to pub and invited me along. This, on the first evening of the conference, made the situation much less immediate or tense, as several graduate students from all disciplines got together around a pitcher to argue about anything.

My presentation was much less solid or well-organized than at UofT, but apparently I did not do as badly as I sounded. There were several other papers and topics I found intriguing – Karen Macfarlane’s work on eighteenth century foreigner juries in Britain, Lee Slinger’s paper on Queen Elizabeth I and her image during the age of PM Walpole, and Jared Secord’s work on the self-mutilation of Origen, a second century CE Christian theologian.

Any information on the conference itself can be found at the New Frontiers conference website. My paper, entitled “The Amphitheatre Sublime, or How I Stopped Worrying and Love Russell Crowe”, can be viewed here.

The two conferences were almost perfectly juxtaposed to one another: structure versus flexibility. UofT’s conference organizers were incredibly astute, planning in advance for every contigency that came up. York, again partly because as a volunteer at the registration desk I saw more of the behind-the-scenes panic, seemed more haphazard.

And yet, at York I found myself listening for euphony in the presenters’ scholarly vocabulary but not actually listening to what they were saying, at least not without effort. I think the fact that both conferences were based in History departments and not in Classics made the subject matter less accessible for me. York also demonstrated a general and undirected enthusiasm for history.

UofT was clearly much more a case of a recognized need for social networking and elements of career ambitions. UofT was also much more eclectic – there were not as many participants and so the sessions had to accomodate people over subject matter. York’s conference planners seemed to have no problem with the eclectic nature of their conference and was able to avoid resistence to it, for example by having a moderator instead of a discussant.

And yet, I was much more impressed with UofT’s conference. There was a degree of professionalism there that I was expecting and was not disappointed by. It was what I was expecting a conference would be like, even though I had hoped it would be more scholarly than it was (due to the varied subject matter). Because the surprise was not in the structure of the conference but in the lack of serious scholarly discussion, I have something to look forward to when planning my next conference application.

It was a very obvious stepping stone at UofT, whereas York felt more like required participation because of my affiliation there. Perhaps that can sum up, to a very basic extent, how my Masters degree will measure up to the BA (honours) that I received from the University of Toronto.

This particular lecture dealt with the history of Classical archaeology in Rome from the fall of the western empire to the present day and how that reflected or was made to reflect current nationalistic ideology in Italy. Truly archaeology was a political weapon.

He began with the Ara Pacis in its new building, designed by California architect Richard Meyer, and opened in the recent past. Professor Dyson’s dislike for the building was not an unusual sentiment among the men and women present at the lecture, but he was careful to give reasons for his dislike, however personal they might be. He continued from there back to the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance and outline what the city looked like in these eras – basically a papal village surrounded by farmland and villa estates, which came close enough to the heart of the old city that they were built on several of the Seven Hills.

It was not until the unification of Italy in 1870 that excavations within the city itself really started to take off. Rome was now the centre of a bureaucratic state and new urban expansion began for the first time since the age of Empire. The city itself was overwhelmingly papal, but the newly formed Italian nation was decidedly secular. It was not until Mussolini that some kind of reconciliation would occur between the Vatican and the rest of the country.

Jumping ahead to Mussolini in the 1920s, I was incredibly surprised that much of the city that I recognized from pictures and topographical maps as the city of Rome was actually developed by the fascist leader in the 1920s and 1930s. Particularly, there are three major monuments of the city that bear the sometimes irreconcilable stamp of Italian fascism.

To accomodate a very visible urban parade route, a swath of road was cut out of the middle of the city between the Colosseum and the Piazza and Palatia Venetia, drawing crowds from the ancient world to the monument of Victor Emmanuel to hear Mussolini shout from his balcony. With the Roman Forum to the right and the Fora of the Caesars to the left, the route was unabashedly symbolic.

Secondly, the Mausoleum of Augustus, that had served as a bull-fighting ring and a lavish concert hall, was restored to its original brick and had a piazza built around it, again cut right out of residential sections of the city. This site has been left to itself since then, and much needs to be done to make it a safer part of the city as well as a historical attraction. Mussolini drew links between his identity and purpose within Italian nationalism and that of Augustus, the peace-maker and protector of law and order.

The third major monument is, of course, the Ara Pacis itself. Reassembled from pieces strewn across the urban landscape, the Ara Pacis has been housed in two different buildings in the twentieth century, with the Res Gestae available for perusal close by. Not surprisingly, at the time Mussolini was using archaeology for political and ideological ends, there was great support for what he was doing within Italy. Outcries about the nature of fascist archaeology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did not arise until the 1970s and 1980s when popular politics shifted to the left. The search for great buildings and inscriptions was considered buffoonery and the need for closer attention paid to the Roman proletariate and to daily life began to take hold in the city. There was also a desire to research artifacts OTHER than early imperial Roman pieces, and consideration for Late Antique and Medieval excavations also developed.

When the newest architect in Rome, Richard Meyer, constructed a new building to house the Ara Pacis, he wanted to restore Rome as a “centre of active culture” once again. Professor Dyson mentioned quite plainly that, besides Meyer’s design, there is remarkably little modern architecture in the city of Rome. There has continued to be strong debate about the aesthetic value of Meyer’s product, and there was no irony lost when the building opened shortly after the Iraq War got under way. Such “neo-imperialist architecture” is no longer appreciated in contemporary Italy.

I really enjoyed Professor Dyson’s lecture. It was informal but not uninformed, relaxed but
wonderfully detailed. His style was blunt, light-hearted, and sophisticated, something I always appreciate being in the presence of. Many thanks to JS Perry, Matthew Clark, Steve Mason (PACE project), and the head of the York Department of History for allowing us to learn from Professor Dyson!

The first presentation by Ohio State’s Sarah Johnston on Signs of the Gods investigated divination in Ancient Greece using three sources: the Magical Papyri (PGM and PDM), the Chaldean Oracles, and the Egyptian Mysteries. Using each of these, Dr. Johnston discussed the power held by the god and by the magician where, although the god was seemingly calling the shots, it was the magician who could predict, expect, and control the ways in which the deities manifested themselves. What I found stunningly implicit in her presentation was the ways in which ancient Greek divination and its purposes so closely resembles Christian spiritualism. That the presence of a god purified the soul, that during “photogogia” the god manifested as light – in a bowl of water, in a lamp, etc. – that magicians were always wary of “false prophets” and devised methods of identifying true gods; all these encounters were intended to bring the god itself into the physical presence of the magician. Such an ecstatic event was something often yearned for by Christian saints and religious officials, but also by everyday people: nuns, monks, and peasants.

Dr. Johnston also talked about a crisis of truth at one point in the history of Greek divination (although she did not give a precise date for this crisis). When not only gods but othere diviners could deceive the magician doing the spell, there developed a need and a desire for expected forms of divine manifestation. This was the result of an increased interest in and fear of “daemones”, representing the existence of different levels of divinity, and thus of different levels of deception. Dr. Johnston asks a valid question: who did these magicians think they were that they could discern thruth from deception?Most by this point had been initiated into the various mysteries that were active in Greece and helpd privileged positions wherein they had access to inner sanctuaries and temples that were heavily invested with spiritual significance.

This gradual transition into a semi-elite divinatory caste, a priestly caste if you will, acknowledges both the evolutionary nature of human spiritualism and one possible route by which Christianity developed into the powerhouse of the Middle Ages as it did.

I was incredibly impressed with Dr. Johnston’s presentation style. She was both subtle and accessible with a topic that I was entirely unfamiliar with, outside of generic textbook identifications, and it made me consider a great deal more in regards to the rituals of religions I was familiar with in an attempt to understand their origins.

The second speaker of the morning was Stella Georgoudi from l’Universite de Paris, a tiny lady with the rare and cherished ability to get right to the point. Her presentation on “Sacrificing to the Gods: Ancient Evidence and Modern Interpretations” drew attention to the assertion in scholarship of guilt involved in animal sacrifice. References to the need for the animal to nod its head in ascent was interpreted as permission for the sacrifice to be held and vindication by the sacrificers that the animal had died willingly. Dr. Georgoudi immediately brushes this notion aside with some well-aimed comments about the lack of any concrete evidence that guilt over the murder of the sacrificial victim existed at all. Instead, she offers the interpretation that sacrificial ritual was about the willingness of the god to the accept the offering and not about guilt over killing a living thing. She believes that the “free will” of the animal, acknowledged through the nodding of the head, was directed at the gods, and is not an issue related to the human sacrificers.

Her very direct observation that guilt over sacrifice is a modern anachronism and not grounded in the available evidence is quite valid. I have come up against such overly moralizing scholarship in my own research on gladiators and have often found myself irritated at such modern western enlightenment ethics. And yet, Dr. Georgoudi was neither scathing nor condemning of the work of these other scholars; she merely offered what in her opinion was a much more feasible option. This munificence and scholarly professionalism are things I still need to learn.

The third speaker, Anja Klochner from Giessen, took archaeological depictions of epiphany and examined them through the interpretation of symbolic and iconographic elements on vases and reliefs. Here the morning’s associations with Christian spiritualism turned sharply away from the comparative as Dr. Klochner first noted that Greeks felt neither love nor joy for their gods but fear. This fear is shown from the leaning back of the upper body in the presence of a god. She also noted that it is usually women who show an overt emotional reaction and that, as a result, thsi can be identified as a potential iconographic element.

This raised the issue of gender reactions versus human reactions to epiphany. The manner of veneration depends on gender, age, social status, and so on. Dr. Klochner also asks if men, who stand upright and show dignified respect for the god, are in fear of him/her or feel an emotional intimacy with the god.

She went on to describe several other unique iconographic elements in archaeological remains, including divine care represented when a god touches a man, the frequent examples of Aesclepius depicted in the presence of his family and wearing Athenian clothes (something particularly unusual outside of healing cults), and images of the heroic couple banqueting. In all instances, however, the god is depicted as separate and distinct from the humans in the scene, either by their relative size or by the use of dividing architectural elements.

Dr. Klochner’s presentation was thought-provoking, not least because her perspective was refreshingly non-literary. Archaeology has always held that fascination for me because it takes its practitioners right to what the creator of an object thought; it is intentions they are interpreting rather than text. I am sure that other archaeologists and scholars will disagree with Dr. Klochner’s conclusions, and that is of course their prerogative, but her interpretations can stand quite comfortably on their own, in the humble opinion of this amateur.

In the second half of the morning, after a short coffee break and chat with Andrew Erskine (the conference organizer and my potential doctoral supervisor) and Calum MacIver (one of the most pleasant senior PhD students I have ever met), the schedule began again with Ken Lapatin from the J.Paul Getty Museum. Admittedly, I found his presentation fascinating for all the reasons he declined to go into. One of his life-long curiosities is apparently krys-elephantine statuary, and I should look for a book of his on the topic, and he spoke for a short time on the competition between city states in the creation of these mighty gold and ivory statues. Again, for someone who is not intimately familiar with the entire corpus of ancient Greek textual fragments, the existence of more than two of these statues (being the Athena Parthenos in Athens and the Zeus at Olympia) came as a wonderful shock. Dr. Lapatin’s reference to a statues of Athena, begun at Megara but never completed, standing half finished for hundreds of years, was enthralling. I was especially overjoyed to learn that this statue, existing well into the Roman occupation of Greece, garnered acknowledgement on the obverse side of a Roman coin of approximately the second century.

I simply must find a text that describes in detail the histories of these several statues, and see also about identifying the coin Dr. Lapatin spoke of with the Megarian Athena. This is a topic I was happy to have introduced to me by an enthusiastic expert and I will enjoy pursuing it further.

The final speaker of the morning was Tom Carpenter, also from Ohio State, who discussed Greek Gods in Apulian imagery. I found this an interesting geographical choice, particularly when Dr. Carpenter mentioned the sophisticated intellectual knowledge of Greek myths necessary for the highly symbolic representations on Apulian red-figure wares.

He also identifies a regularly occuring divine group, consisting of (from left to right), Apollo, Artemis, Athena in the centre, Aphrodite, and Eros. I have included an example of this group that I photographed at the British Museum after the conference. Occasionally, Poseidon is on the far right, and there are also instances of Nike. He also notes that the krater, upon which much of these representations exist, was a vessel favoured in Apulia not Greece and so this sophisticated mythological knowledge was intended for the people on the Italian peninsula and not for export.

Dionysus is a frequent figure, despite the use of these vases as funerary pieces, alluding to a possible Apulian understanding of the god in a funerary context, separate from the god of wine and theatre recognized in mainland Greece. There are often depictions of Dionysus as a nude male youth, identifiable only by the northex (a flowering fennel stalk) and the presence of a satyr. Dr. Carpenter suggests that this may simultaneously represent the god and the deceased youth for whom the funerary vessel was made.

I was well aware of the extensive interest in Apulia for the study of Greek culture and of the 1939 study of Taranto that is constantly being explored. And yet, this one particular example of Dionysus brought to light a good deal of what must undoubtedly appeal to scholars of the subject: a unique perspective for interpretation, a probe into the depths of Greek culture, and an example of the incredible creativity of a people when examining their own cultural traditions.

I was incredibly impressed with the intellectualism and topical variety of the conference and wish to express my thanks to Andrew Erskine for inviting me to attend. Such a production as this has made me all the more impressed with the University of Edinburgh and has further heightened my desire to one day be a doctoral student there. Kudos!

The basic purpose of my proposal for the BAAS was initiated by the advertisement for  yet another film about violence, cruelty, and morality:  ‘The Brave One’, starring Jodie Foster and Terence Howard.  I had been startled by the overwhelming number of what is commonly called ‘torture-porn’ meeting with mainstream audience support and felt that this film could be nothing but more of the same, if a little diluted.  More definitive examples of the ‘torture-porn’ genre are ‘Saw’ (2004), ‘Hostel’ (2005), and ‘Captivity’ (2007).  These films, as far as I can tell, were set up with a very basic slasher or thriller plotline and then just allowed to run wild with the idea of pushing the limits of acceptibility in cinematic violence.  Assuredly, some special effects co-ordinators, make-up artists, and cinematographers must have had a field day as they worked to create a realistic portrayal of such brutal violence, including decapitations, amputations (without anaesthetic), physical and mental torture, and anything else that one human being can conceivably do to another.

What I find interesting is that, in light of such terrible events going on around the world today – the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the continued unrest in Israel and Palestine, the terrorist attacks in the United States, the school shootings starting with Columbine and escalating from there, the human rights issues in China and elsewhere, and probably hundreds more that I am unaware of - the artistic impulse has turned towards ‘torture-porn’ as a response.  In the face of death, destruction, and suffering, what cinemas are showing more and more frequently is death, destruction, and suffering.  Long gone are the days when audiences preferred seeing Cary Grant in a beautifully-cut suit on screen while POWs were being tortured and killed in war-torn Europe.  The escapism of the cinema has taken a dark turn.

Because this certainly retains escapist tendencies; there is something fantastical about the brutality and cruelty enacted on screen, simply because we cannot imagine what it would be like if it happened to us.  The ‘what if’ question of old, previously used in discussions over the death penalty, now refer to questions of how much pain someone can endure.  “Could you handle it?”  “Could you survive it?”  “Could you walk away from it and lead a normal life?”  This is the new focus.

Let us see a few examples.  Matt Damon’s character, Jason Bourne, regains a heightened sense of morality only after a clear break with the past wherein he was an assassin.  He had to lose his memory and all sense of his previous self to regain the ethical code familiar to the modern western world.  And yet, he still kills.  But rather than killing for money or pride, he kills to survive and to ensure that the truth will out eventually.  It is interesting to note that the character must break completely with the enculturation that defined his personality in order to have his morality restored.

Jodie Foster’s character in ‘The Brave One’, Erica Bain, on the other hand, is acutely aware of her lack of morality as she kills.  She had suffered a terrible loss, both in the person of her fiance, and in her sense of personal security and the general goodness of humankind.  The film asks the question:  does it matter what she is looking for, be it revenge, justice, or something else?  Or is the audience meant to focus on the way in which she copes with tragedy and suffering?

Jennifer Tree, the character played by Elisha Cuthbert in ‘Captivity’ is forced to come to terms with the inherent cruelty of humanity when she suffers as a captive for no apparent reason whatsoever.  There is no motive here, except the enjoyment of watching suffering in others.  ‘Saw’, the 2004 film that spawned no less than three sequels, follows the experiences of several captives in a maze of what is affectionately referred to as ‘evil’ and how they survive.

The basic question that comes out of these films is simple.  How can one survive the dangers of the world?  This is certainly not a new question, no is it an invalid one that has no bearing on the modern world.  I find it unnerving, however, that the people who look for the answer to this question are rarely the ones who go to the cinema to see it in gruesome detail on screen.  We are all aware of how war movies can send veterans back into shell-shock; for example, the Normandy sequences in ‘Saving Private Ryan’.  As a result, many of our grandparents decline to attend such films and show no interest in seeing them at any time in the future.  So why is there an audience for ‘torture-porn’?

This was the question I had put to myself to answer for the purposes of the BAAS conference.  I have not yet completed the necessary research to offer a possible solution, but invite comments on this site to engage in discussion on the subject.

Annika (and sadly I did not write down her last name), who works at Sick Kids and at the CERIS project (part of Metropolis) in Toronto, introduced the morning seminar with a basic definition of knowledge transfer as “the exchange, synthesis, and application of knowledge” and how this requires a complex system of interactions to succeed. If we want to inform policy and practice, we must be able to exhange information effectively. If we retain only 20% of what we hear and 30% of what we see, how do we do research? We do, at least, retain 90% of what we see, hear, talk about, AND do.

John Biles introduced himself and his purpose by identifying with the rapid growth of immigration in the Ottawa area and his feeling that local groups should be interacting with larger affiliations such as the United Way. The Metropolis Project, currently in its second term of 5-year funding, is a huge policy research project of over 5500 participants in more than 20 countries. The major element of Monday’s discussion was to point out that policy should not be focused on the privilege of position over what a person has to say, and thus information must be made more accessible to a larger audience. In this way, the objective to produce material that people across a wide spectrum can actually use can be achieved. Mr. Biles did mention, however, that there is no way to evaluate an effective dissemination process and this is the continued struggle of a “social science initiative”. There are more ways to ‘translate’ information to this wide spectrum and the Metropolis Project is focused on continually working out which methods or combinations of methods are the most utilitarian; therefore, the Project is heavily involved in the field of education. Metropolis has annual national and international conferences, consultations and round-tables, media exposure, and seminars to develop relationships that cross sectoral lines and thus facilitate the development of informed policy.

Barry, (and I again I neglected to write down his last name), who is one of the leading members of Metropolis’ website management team, believes that the main focus of Monday’s discussion should be on knowing your audience. The website, www.metropolis.net, emphasizes the need to identify clear responsibilities, roles, and delivery system, to articulate who they are and what they do, and to be aware of exactly what the website provides that personal interaction in other areas of the Project do not. Barry’s talk on a particularly dynamic but complex exemplar of the Project’s greater interest in audiences and knowledge transfer was incredibly helpful in identifying the nature of the abstract terms and policy discussed earlier so that the current audience could understand how these thought processes within the Project can work efficiently and effectively, as well as where they did not. He also mentioned one or two ideas that his research team is developing for the website, showing how this is always a continuous process.

Annika spoke again on how research is interpreted, even to the point where she re-evaluated her audience’s assumptions about research itself. She also provided the framework around which the Metropolis Project came into existence. Comprised of individuals from NGOs for settlement – the United Way, OCASI (The Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants), and the Social Planning Council of Toronto – and funded by three universities (York, the University of Toronto, and Ryerson), Metropolis’ research teams have incorporated all these different perspectives along with government on all three levels to produce a more functional knowledge transfer process. Metropolis’ community-based researchers are often immigrants who are able to provide the perspective of one of the major target audiences for this information. They have identified the critical nature of timeliness and the value of face-to-face interaction to facilitate the discussion vital to the Project’s process.

Finally, John Shields discussed the value of knowledge mobilization today. Initially, the access to this kind of information outside scholarly communities was limited and the need to expand potential audiences was clear. Calls for precisely this were coming from the governmental and civil communities, especially after cuts in the 1980s and 1990s led to “diminished policy capacity” within government itself. These major cuts were to the federal, provincial, and municipal governments’ ability to do in-house research, so another venue had to be established in place of that loss. Within the policy community, three elements were identified: the policy decision-makers such as leading politicians, the scholars and researchers who created the knowledge and information on policy, and knowledge brokers. This last element, acting as a bridge, is able to distill information from researchers for decision-makers, and this is what Metropolis was designed to do.

I unfortunately had to leave the seminar before the question period began to get to a graduate class, but I was very impressed with the speakers and their ability to convince an eternal terminology skeptic such as myself that these words were not meaningless but rather functional instead of being definable. As I told Mr. Michael Johnny in an email I sent to apologize for my abrupt departure, these ideas of the need for universal (and not basic) information will figure into my own research. I now have part of the puzzle that I wish to solve in my own professional career to bring the subject matter that I love to a wider audience without ‘dumbing it down’ for people who do not have the same education history as I do. I had been taught that this was impossible. Now I am not so sure.

For further information, please visit the Metropolis Project’s website www.metropolis.net which should have any links to other projects on this kind of policy dissemination and knowledge mobilization you may be interested in.