Christian and Pagan in the Roman Empire

3. Spectacles

3 S P E C T A C L E S Introduction The ruins of ancient cities offer an impressive witness to the passion that the citizens of Rome and the empire felt for four kinds of entertainment: races in the circus; stage plays, mimes, pantomimes, and farces in the theater; athletic and other contests in the stadium; and gladiatorial combats and beast fights in the amphitheater. In the heart of modern Rome a vast ellipse marks the place of the ancient circus; only a few remains of the theater of Pompey in the Campus Martius have been found, but the shell of the theater of Marcellus is one of the most striking sights in the eternal city.1 Just outside the ancient Roman Forum towers the great Colosseum, the immense amphitheater built by the Flavian emperors and dedicated in a.d. 80, while the modern Piazza Navona retains the contours of Domitian’s stadium. In Tertullian’s Carthage, too, archeology has revealed the once magnificent centers of popular entertainment—the amphitheater at Carthage, regarded as a marvel even in the Middle Ages, was capable of seating perhaps 35,000 spectators. Lesser provincial cities also clamored for shows. Indeed, remains from buildings that provided the space for shows are to 1. Cf. J. P. V. D. Balsdon, Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome (New York, N.Y.: McGraw -Hill, 1969), 255. 80 be found in virtually every city of any significance in North Africa, and their size suggests their importance: Thysdrus (modern El-Djem, some 250 kilometers south of Carthage) undertook to build in the early third century an amphitheater almost the size of that in Carthage. The importance to the populace of these shows may also be judged by the increasing time devoted to them. In Rome by the middle of the fourth century a.d., “one hundred and seventy-seven days of the year were the occasion of some regular games or other.”2 Obviously, then, spectacles played a central role in the life of pagan communities .3 Though Tertullian cannot have been the first to condemn the shows,4 he is the first from whom we have a reasoned exposition of the case against the shows through an argument that finds in the shows the locus for a radical distinction between Christian and pagan. Addressing his treatise not only to the faithful, but also to catechumens preparing for baptism,5 he focuses upon baptism as the primary event that distinguishes Christians from pagans, and he draws out the implications of baptism for the Christian who must make an evaluation of the popular entertainment of the pagan world. The issue was not merely academic. In spite of the bold claim in chapter 24 that Christians are marked primarily by their absence from the specSpectacles 81 2. Balsdon, Life and Leisure, 248. 3. All the kinds of entertainment described here are included in the Latin term spectacula, a word that, like its English derivative, connotes in the singular a “ show.” To speak strictly, theatrical performances and chariot racing were ludi, “games”—the Latin word suggests “play”—while the gladiatorial and wild beast fights were munera, a word that originally implied a service to the dead. The contests in the stadium were agones, a transliteration of a Greek word meaning “contest.” 4. Irenaeus, a Greek-speaker and the bishop of the Church in Lyons (second century), reveals his disapproval of “spectacles” by noting that it is at “spectacles ” that heretics are to be found (Against Heresies 1.6.3); cf. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. I, The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, American reprint, A. Cleveland Coxe, revised ed. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1989), 324. 5. Some scholars have conjectured from the pastoral role Tertullian seems to assume here that he was a priest; see Marie Turcan, ed., Tertullien: Les spectacles , Sources chrétiennes, vol. 332 (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1986), 43. Perhaps ; but he appears to include himself among the laity in the much later treatise Exhortation to Chastity 7.3. tacles, in practice some, perhaps many, Christians continued to enjoy the pleasures of pagan society. This we can infer from the mere existence of the present treatise, likewise from Tertullian ’s record (in the second chapter) of the debate among Christians on the matter, and, finally, from his account of the unpleasant circumstances of the...