Meggie Macdonald

THE ROMAN HOUSE:  The Meaning Behind Representations of Gladiators in Domestic Space

The domestic artwork of the Romans has always interested modern artists, partly because the materials and pigments used have in many cases held up well to the test of time.  Modern scholars and archaeologists are thus able to study Roman wall painting, mosaics and other decorative ensembles that retain much of their original lustre.  Gladiators, too, have been a major source of interest for the academic world because of their strange allure that drew crowds, made women sigh, and incited the spite of ancient authors such as Juvenal.  However, rarely have these two aspects of Roman culture – domestic art and gladiators – been juxtaposed in an examination of their socio-cultural value.

Much scholarly work has been done analysing Roman domestic art and the architecture of the domus, the villa, the insula and other public buildings.  A recent book by John Clarke has focused on the visual aspect of domestic art, where and how it is seen by a viewer, and how that view dictates the social status of the viewer.  Amos Rapoport has shown how systems of activities in domestic space hold the key to the manner in which that space is recognised by the people who inhabited and visited the house. 

With discussions of space, context comes into play quite readily, but in many cases the fact that scholarly work has been placed in context is often assumed rather than investigated in studies of the ancient world.  Such examples include the famous Alexander Mosaic, an ornate and stylized floor mosaic from the House of the Faun in Pompeii, that now resides on a wall in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples.  Its position on the museum wall allows visitors to examine the intricate detail and the colourful tesserae up close, but what would this mosaic have looked like in situ?  To analyse social phenomena out of context – to comment on an ancient culture without first attempting to understand it from the perspective of the people who lived in that culture – overlooks an important element of analysis and constrains our understanding of the historical phenomena under study.  One of these types of phenomena is the paradox that exists in regards to gladiators in the Roman world and their use as motif in domestic art.

The situation of gladiators in Roman society is complex – one of revulsion as well as reverence, they were simultaneously condemned and celebrated – and placed them in a framework that encompassed political, legal, social and physical elements.  Roman society labelled gladiators infamis, and yet they were neither removed from, nor disinherited by, the community.  Gladiators were legally non-persons and yet they were an important element of civic urbanity and entertainment.  They were physically fit and overtly masculine but, despite the extent to which this was a dominant part of the elite male social structure, they lacked sexual definition because of their physical vulnerability as slaves and to-the-death fighters.

Marilyn Skinner’s work on sexuality in the ancient world is thought-provoking.  The instances of erotic images that were displayed in Roman homes, long considered illicit and lewd by Victorian-era archaeologists, were interpreted by Skinner as a way for Romans to engage in social discourse on sexuality (ie sexuality was made accessible through visual images in the home).  This approach raises an interesting question about artistic representations of gladiators that were also displayed in homes.  Gladiators were a visible element of Roman society when they performed in the amphitheatre so the visual discourse could have been undertaken at the games themselves, the most public of venues.  So why include gladiatorial representations in domestic decoration?  Perhaps, both sexual acts (as Skinner examines) and gladiatorial activities were depicted in Roman homes because their subtly complex nature demanded more than passing attention.

Thomas Wiedemann identifies two very pertinent aspects of gladiatorial representation.  First, “the very fact that references to this [the funeral games of Junius Brutus Pera in 264 BCE], and many subsequent, gladiatorial displays survive in the historical record shows their ambiguous position between Roman private and public life”.  Second, Wiedemann draws attention to a unifying theme of purpose for gladiatorial representation throughout the empire.  Contrary to most of the material in his 1992 book Emperors and Gladiators, he concedes early on that, because gladiatorial depictions “are found in private houses[, this] suggests that in many parts of the Roman empire, these combats had an important place in the way in which wealthy people ordered their domestic lives”.

The house itself represented a strange concoction of public and private space that the gladiator motif (representing a personal act of violence in fighting in the public space of the arena) could complement and modify.  To understand the relationship between gladiatorial representation and the house, one must approach it by means of the socio-cultural function of the Roman house in the context of Roman society and familial structures.

Bettina Bergmann has characterized the house as ‘memory theatre’ and emphasizes the need for a comprehensive viewing of domestic decoration by owners, inhabitants and guests.  A popular memory exercise in the ancient world, one which Cicero himself utilized when preparing his Senate speeches, used the house as an intangible space to aid in recollection.  The rhetorician would compose and associate each argument with a room in a house.  This way, if during the performance itself, he found it necessary or prudent to change the structure of his speech, he could do so easily by walking into a different ‘room’ of his memorized speech.  Romans looked at their houses and the art within them on a cerebral level as well as a consciously aesthetic one in a way which included culturally specific and unique visual cues.

Domestic spaces in the Roman world were not a refuge from the activities of public society.  Rather, the house acted as a mutable venue for the master of the household (the paterfamilias) to display his public status in the most effective way possible.  “The house is regarded as an extension of the man, a tangible symbol of his accomplishments, and thus a suitable object of veneration”.  The house was an active functioning element in society, reflecting the nature and status of the owner and his household.  Here, evidence of the master’s style – his tastes and comprehension of the social utility of decoration – as well as his wealth and civic reverence (dignitas) were projected through art and architecture for visitors who arrived to conduct all levels of business.

The salutatio, one of the cornerstones of Rome’s hierarchical society, was the twice-daily ceremony at which the clients and other external dependents of the paterfamilias would visit their patron in his home and ritually reconfirm his power and beneficence by appealing to him for his protection and help.  Thus these clients reinforced their patron’s high status and emphasized his wealth and dignitas, though the latter was more important than the former.  However, as his clients reinforced his social status, the paterfamilias had to justify that status in the physical space where the salutatio was undertaken.  “The magnificence of a house was supposed to be on display from the moment one crossed the threshold” notes Thébert.  Not only was the first room one entered from the street a major reception area (the atrium), but it and others were filled with items that demanded reverence and recognition of status, such as decorative wall art and mosaics.

The centrality of these reception rooms coincided with the visual axes created architecturally throughout the house.  The traditional axis – from the front door, through the atrium, to the tablinum (a sort of study or den of the master of the household) – was exceptional for its direct line of sight through the layers of public space, allowing entrants into the house to see their objective, even if they would never get close to it (or in this case him).  Another axis, from the traditional place of honour where guests reclined during meals, provided a view outward along the lateral axis of the back of the house, emphasizing the central role played by the master in the household and the privilege extended to those who reclined with him.

This interplay between where the viewer can see and what the viewer does see reinforces the social status and cultural reverence due to the master of the household.  This draws us to why the master would choose to display representations of gladiators within view of members of the public.  In most cases, the extant pieces of gladiatorial motifs were found in the dining areas of opulent urban houses (the domus) or luxurious country estates (the villa), and there was never any doubt as to what was being depicted.

Of the depictions of gladiators in domestic art, two examples are most commonly used in the analysis of the nature of domestic Roman art:  the mosaic in the reception room of the villa at Nennig in Germany (2nd or 3rd century AD), and the atrium floor mosaic from Zliten in North Africa (1st or 2nd century AD).  In addition to these, a wall mosaic found during a recent excavation of a domestic bath house in Libya and dubbed ‘The Exhausted Gladiator’ is exceptionally valuable in determining the nature of gladiatorial representations to the Roman eye in domestic space.

At Nennig, we are presented with seven complementary mosaic panels that identify the varying nature of gladiatorial games.  Not only would this mosaic have been expensive to commission and lay but also the figures, nearly life-sized, would have struck the dinner guests because of the realism and fluidity of movement suggested by the mosaic itself.

The Zliten mosaic does not use gladiators as its centrepiece but rather as the border which surrounds the mosaic and the room itself.  Again, the structure of the games in the amphitheatre is addressed, with the procession of figures moving from beast hunts to the execution of criminals to the gladiatorial matches themselves.  The fighting figures include attributes such as typical armour and weaponry, but also includes the wounds inflicted by one fighter on another and by a beast onto a condemned man.  For an atrium decorative motif, the Zliten mosaic is surprisingly brutal.

Finally, when addressing the ‘Exhausted Gladiator’ mosaic discovered in 2005, the archaeologists themselves were haunted by the almost humanist approach to this depiction.  The gladiator, his vanquished foe lying dead a short distance away, has shed his armour and his spear, and sits in the sand in a posture suggesting fatigue and staring at the man he has killed.  Nothing like this has ever been found before, where the sentiments of the gladiator – a slave and non-person in the Roman empire – are addressed in a setting that bathers would have found impossible to ignore.

Unlike the stereotypes of a bloodthirsty audience in the arena, shouting for the fighters to murder each other, the images of a life-size fighter in Nennig, mortal and brutal wounds at Zliten, and the gladiator’s exhaustion at the end of a match in Libya suggest a much more subtle social commentary.  Gladiators were not seen merely as beasts to pit against each other, but nor were they seen as men worthy of dignified representation.  They were however recognised as ‘human’, much the way a modern historian would consider the observation of humanity, in the introspective language of domestic art.  Oppulence and luxury were demonstrated by the master of the household with such discursive representations, suggesting also that the value of these figures in art extended beyond the confines of the arena.  It is clear that gladiators played a substantial part in the social context of the Roman world but that this value was both public and private is unique and alluring.