The crowd murmured in anticipation as a large number of men were driven at spear point into the arena. Most wore togas and looked like respectable businessmen and property owners. They were stripped first of their togas, then of their tunics, so that they wore nothing but loincloths, like slaves, though one seldom saw slaves as fat as most of these men. In groups of ten, the men were secured by the neck with two-pronged pitchforks and forced to stand in place while they were beaten with whips and rods. The beatings were severe: bits of flesh and showers of blood were scattered across the sand. Even when the men collapsed to their knees, they were forced by the pitchforks to hold their heads up.
“Do you see who’s delivering the punishment?” said Martial. “Titus chose a corps of officers made up entirely of nomadic Gaetulians from North Africa.”
“Why the Gaetulians?” said Lucius.
“For one thing, they’re outsiders with no connection to the victims or to anyone else in the city. More importantly, they’re famous for their cruelty.”
It certainly seemed to Lucius that the Gaetulians enjoyed their work. So did the audience. Many of the victims, more used to handing out such treatment to slaves than to receiving it, reacted with a great deal of screaming and blubbering. The more undignified the victim’s behaviour, the more boisterous was the crowd’s reaction. Rather than tiring as the punishments proceeded, the Gaetulians were urged on by the cheering of the spectators and grew increasingly violent. The later victims were more severely beaten than the first ones; to even the punishment, and to the delight of the crowd, the first victims were scourged again.
Many of the informers lost consciousness or could not stand after being scourged and had to be dragged from the arena. A few of them died from the punishment. (“Not from scourging, but from shame!” whispered Martial, taking notes.) Those who survived would be sent into exile to live out their days on remote islands or, in the worst cases, would be sold into slavery at public auction.
More punishments followed. The victims were all condemned criminals, guilty of a capital offense – murder, arson, or theft of sacred treasure from a temple.
The organizers of the games outdid themselves in the creation of special tableaux for the various ordeals, staging several of them at once around the vast arena so that there was always something dramatic or suspenseful to engage the spectators. The punishments were based on myths and legends, with the victims playing parts, like actors. The fact that each victim’s suffering and death were not imaginary but real made their performances all the more riveting to watch.
In one of the tableaux, the naked victim was chained to an elaborate stage set made to appear as a craggy cliff. A crier proclaimed that the victim was a murderer who had killed his own father. The audience booed and hurled curses at him. He was a muscular man of middle age with a bristling beard, a suitable candidate to play Prometheus, the Titan who gave fire to mankind in defiance of Jupiter. To remind the audience of the story, dancers dressed in animal skins circled the shackled Titan, waved torches, and chanted a primitive song of thanksgiving. The song was suddenly drowned out by a stage device hidden inside the rock face, which loudly reproduced the sound of thunder. At this sign of Jupiter’s wrath, the worshippers of Prometheus dispersed in panic. As soon as they were out of the way, two bears were unleashed. The animals headed straight for the bound Prometheus, who began to scream and struggle frantically against his chains.
“Bears?” Epaphroditus wrinkled his nose. “Everyone knows Prometheus was tormented by vultures. Every day they tore out his entrails, and every night he was miraculously healed, so that the ordeal was endlessly repeated.”
Martial laughed. “The trainer who can induce vultures to attack on command will be able to name any price! I suspect we’ll see a lot of bears today. The emperor’s beast trainer tells me that bears are by far the best choice when it comes to attacking human victims. Hounds are too common, elephants too squeamish, lions and tigers too unpredictable. Bears, on the other hand, are not only terrifying but extremely reliable. These come from Caledonia, the northernmost part of the island of Britannia.”
The bears who converged on the helpless Prometheus lived up to their trainer’s expectations. They concentrated their furious attack on the man’s midsection, ripping out his entrails just as the vultures were said to have done in the ancient story. Martial voiced the opinion that the bears had been trained especially to attack that part of the man’s body; Epaphroditus suspected that honey had been smeared on the man’s belly. The victim’s screams were bloodcurdling.
At length the bears’ trainer appeared and shooed them away. The stage set was wheeled about in a circle so that the gory sight of the disembowelled Prometheus could be seen by everyone in the stands. Then the dancers reappeared, pirouetting and lamenting before Prometheus, waving their torches so that they produced a great deal of smoke. Only after they ran off did Lucius realize that the purpose of their dance and the smoke was to distract the audience from a bit of stagecraft being performed on the victim. As if by magic, his entrails had been stuffed back inside him and his belly had been stitched up. Even the blood on his legs had been wiped clean. The man was extremely pale, but apparently conscious; his lips moved and his eyelids flickered. Just as the punishment of Prometheus was said to be repeated in an endless cycle, so this victim had been made ready for yet another assault by the bears. Again they came loping towards him. The man opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. Instead of struggling against his chains, he twitched and convulsed as the bears proceeded to disembowel him again. Eventually even the twitching stopped.
The dancers reappeared. They cast aside their torches, flinging them onto the stage set. The mock cliff went up in flames, consuming the body of the victim with it. The dancers circled the bonfire, joined hands, and sang a song of jubilation, praising the wisdom and justice of Jupiter.
Lucius found himself wondering what Epictetus and Dio would have made of the tableau. The victim was not just a murderer but the very worst sort of murderer, a parricide. Surely he deserved to be punished, and why should his death not be used to educate the public? The tableau taught a double lesson. First, while men might sympathize with a rebel like Prometheus, the authority of the king of the gods – and by extension the authority of the emperor – must be respected, and would always triumph in the end. Second, on a more basic level, no man should dare to kill his own father, for fear of suffering such a terrible fate. Lucius suspected that his philosopher friends would be unmoved by such arguments. He himself was left feeling more queasy than uplifted by the spectacle.
There were a great many other such tableaux. As Martial had predicted, bears featured prominently in most of them. A temple thief was made to reenact the role of the robber Laureolus, made famous by the ancient plays of Ennius and Naevius; he was nailed to a cross and then subjected to the attack of the bears. A freedman who had killed his former master was made to put on a Greek chlamys and go walking though a stage forest populated by cavorting satyrs and nymphs, like Orpheus lost in the woods; when one of the satyrs played a shrill tune on his pipes, the trees dispersed and the man was subject to an attack by bears. An arsonist was made to strap on wings in imitation of Daedalus, ascend a high platform, and then leap off; the wings actually carried him aloft for a short distance, a remarkable sight, until he plunged into an enclosure full of bears and was torn to pieces.
“A bit repetitious, isn’t it, ending all the tableaux with bears?” said Epaphroditus.
“Ah, but those are Lucanian bears, not Caledonian,” said Martial. “Good Italian beasts, not exotic stock from beyond the sea. See how the people cheer them on? Poor Daedalus never stood a chance.”