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Murderous Games: Gladiatorial Contests in Ancient Rome

Keith Hopkins shows that gladiatorial shows in Ancient Rome turned war into a game, preserved an atmosphere of violence in time of peace, and functioned as a political theatre which allowed confrontation between rulers and ruled.

Rome was a warrior state. After the defeat of Carthage in 201 BC, Rome embarked on two centuries of almost continuous imperial expansion. By the end of this period, Rome controlled the whole of the Mediterranean basin and much of north-western Europe. The population of her empire, at between 50 and 60 million people, constituted perhaps one-fifth or one-sixth of the world's then population. Victorious conquest had been bought at a huge price, measured in human suffering, carnage, and money. The costs were borne by tens of thousands of conquered peoples, who paid taxes to the Roman state, by slaves captured in war and transported to Italy, and by Roman soldiers who served long years fighting overseas.

The discipline of the Roman army was notorious. Decimation is one index of its severity. If an army unit was judged disobedient or cowardly in battle, one soldier in ten was selected by lot and cudgelled to death by his former comrades. It should be stressed that decimation was not just a myth told to terrify fresh recruits; it actually happened in the period of imperial expansion, and frequently enough not to arouse particular comment. Roman soldiers killed each other for their common good.

When Romans were so unmerciful to each other, what mercy could prisoners of war expect? Small wonder then that they were sometimes forced to fight in gladiatorial contests, or were thrown to wild beasts for popular entertainment. Public executions helped inculcate valour and fear in the men, women and children left at home. Children learnt the lesson of what happened to soldiers who were defeated. Public executions were rituals which helped maintain an atmosphere of violence, even in times of peace. Bloodshed and slaughter joined military glory and conquest as central elements in Roman culture.

With the accession of the first emperor Augustus (31 BC – AD 14), the Roman state embarked on a period of long-term peace (pax romana ). For more than two centuries, thanks to its effective defence by frontier armies, the inner core of the Roman empire was virtually insulated from the direct experience of war. Then in memory of their warrior traditions, the Romans set up artificia1 battlefields in cities and towns for public amusement. The custom spread from Italy to the provinces.

Nowadays, we admire the Colosseum in Rome and other great Roman amphitheatres such as those at Verona, Arles, Nimes and El Djem as architectural monuments. We choose to forget, I suspect, that this was where Romans regularly organised fights to the death between hundreds of gladiators, the mass execution of unarmed criminals, and the indiscriminate slaughter of domestic and wild animals.

The enormous size of the amphitheatres indicates how popular these exhibitions were. The Colosseum was dedicated in AD 80 with 100 days of games. One day 3,000 men fought; on another 9,000 animals were killed. It seated 50,000 people. It is still one of Rome's most impressive buildings, a magnificent feat of engineering and design. In ancient times, amphitheatres must have towered over cities, much as cathedrals towered over medieval towns. Public killings of men and animals were a Roman rite, with overtones of religious sacrifice, legitimated by the myth that gladiatorial shows inspired the populace with 'a glory in wounds and a contempt of death'.

Philosophers, and later Christians, disapproved strongly. To little effect; gladiatorial games persisted at least until the early fifth century AD, wild-beast killings until the sixth century. St Augustine in his Confessions tells the story of a Christian who was reluctantly forced along to the amphitheatre by a party of friends; at first, he kept his eyes shut, but when he heard the crowd roar, he opened them, and became converted by the sight of blood into an eager devotee of gladiatorial shows. Even the biting criticism quoted below reveals a certain excitement beneath its moral outrage.

Seneca, Roman senator and philosopher, tells of a visit he once paid to the arena. He arrived in the middle of the day, during the mass execution of criminals, staged as an entertainment in the interval between the wild-beast show in the morning and the gladiatorial show of the afternoon:

All the previous fighting had been merciful by comparison. Now finesse is set aside, and we have pure unadulterated murder. The combatants have no protective covering; their entire bodies are exposed to the blows. No blow falls in vain. This is what lots of people prefer to the regular contests, and even to those which are put on by popular request. And it is obvious why. There is no helmet, no shield to repel the blade. Why have armour? Why bother with skill? All that just delays death.

In the morning, men are thrown to lions and bears. At mid-day they are thrown to the spectators themselves. No sooner has a man killed, than they shout for him to kill another, or to be killed. The final victor is kept for some other slaughter. In the end, every fighter dies. And all this goes on while the arena is half empty.

You may object that the victims committed robbery or were murderers. So what? Even if they deserved to suffer, what's your compulsion to watch their sufferings? 'Kill him', they shout, 'Beat him, burn him'. Why is he too timid to fight? Why is he so frightened to kill? Why so reluctant to die? They have to whip him to make him accept his wounds.

Much of our evidence suggests that gladiatorial contests were, by origin, closely connected with funerals. 'Once upon a time', wrote the Christian critic Tertullian at the end of the second century AD, 'men believed that the souls of the dead were propitiated by human blood, and so at funerals they sacrificed prisoners of war or slaves of poor quality bought for the purpose'. The first recorded gladiatorial show took place in 264 BC: it was presented by two nobles in honour of their dead father; only three pairs of gladiators took part. Over the next two centuries, the scale and frequency of gladiatorial shows increased steadily. In 65 BC, for example, Julius Caesar gave elaborate funeral games for his father involving 640 gladiators and condemned criminals who were forced to fight with wild beasts. At his next games in 46 BC, in memory of his dead daughter and, let it be said, in celebration of his recent triumphs in Gaul and Egypt, Caesar presented not only the customary fights between individual gladiators, but also fights between whole detachments of infantry and between squadrons of cavalry, some mounted on horses, others on elephants. Large-scale gladiatorial shows had arrived. Some of the contestants were professional gladiators, others prisoners of war, and others criminals condemned to death.

Up to this time, gladiatorial shows had always been put on by individual aristocrats at their own initiative and expense, in honour of dead relatives. The religious component in gladiatorial ceremonies continued to be important. For example, attendants in the arena were dressed up as gods. Slaves who tested whether fallen gladiators were really dead or just pretending, by applying a red-hot cauterising iron, were dressed as the god Mercury. 'Those who dragged away the dead bodies were dressed as Pluto, the god of the underworld. During the persecutions of Christians, the victims were sometimes led around the arena in a procession dressed up as priests and priestesses of pagan cults, before being stripped naked and thrown to the wild beasts. The welter of blood in gladiatorial and wild-beast shows, the squeals and smell of the human victims and of slaughtered animals are completely alien to us and almost unimaginable. For some Romans they must have been reminiscent of battlefields, and, more immediately for everyone, associated with religious sacrifice. At one remove, Romans, even at the height of their civilisation, performed human sacrifice, purportedly in commemoration of their dead.

By the end of the last century BC, the religious and commemorative elements in gladiatorial shows were eclipsed by the political and the spectacular. Gladiatorial shows were public performances held mostly, before the amphitheatre was built, in the ritual and social centre of the city, the Forum. Public participation, attracted by the splendour of the show and by distributions of meat, and by betting, magnified the respect paid to the dead and the honour of the whole family. Aristocratic funerals in the Republic (before 31 BC) were political acts. And funeral games had political implications, because of their popularity with citizen electors. Indeed, the growth in the splendour of gladiatorial shows was largely fuelled by competition between ambitious aristocrats, who wished to please, excite and increase the number of their supporters.

In 42 BC, for the first time, gladiatorial fights were substituted for chariot-races in official games. After that in the city of Rome, regular gladiatorial shows, like theatrical shows and chariot-races, were given by officers of state, as part of their official careers, as an official obligation and as a tax on status. The Emperor Augustus, as part of a general policy of limiting aristocrats' opportunities to court favour with the Roman populace, severely restricted the number of regular gladiatorial shows to two each year. He also restricted their splendour and size. Each official was forbidden to spend more on them than his colleagues, and an upper limit was fixed at 120 gladiators a show.

These regulations were gradually evaded. The pressure for evasion was simply that, even under the emperors, aristocrats were still competing with each other, in prestige and political success. The splendour of a senator's public exhibition could make or break his social and political reputation. One aristocrat, Symmachus, wrote to a friend: 'I must now outdo the reputation earned by my own shows; our family's recent generosity during my consulship and the official games given for my son allow us to present nothing mediocre'. So he set about enlisting the help of various powerful friends in the provinces. In the end, he managed to procure antelopes, gazelles, leopards, lions, bears, bear-cubs, and even some crocodiles, which only just survived to the beginning of the games, because for the previous fifty days they had refused to eat. Moreover, twenty-nine Saxon prisoners of war strangled each other in their cells on the night before their final scheduled appearance. Symmachus was heart-broken. Like every donor of the games, he knew that his political standing was at stake. Every presentation was in Goffman's strikingly apposite phrase 'a status bloodbath'.

The most spectacular gladiatorial shows were given by the emperors themselves at Rome. For example, the Emperor Trajan, to celebrate his conquest of Dacia (roughly modern Roumania), gave games in AD 108-9 lasting 123 days in which 9,138 gladiators fought and eleven thousand animals were slain. The Emperor Claudius in AD 52 presided in full military regalia over a battle on a lake near Rome between two naval squadrons, manned for the occasion by 19,000 forced combatants. The palace guard, stationed behind stout barricades, which also prevented the combatants from escaping, bombarded the ships with missiles from catapaults. After a faltering start, because the men refused to fight, the battle according to Tacitus 'was fought with the spirit of free men, although between criminals. After much bloodshed, those who survived were spared extermination'.

The quality of Roman justice was often tempered by the need to satisfy the demand for the condemned. Christians, burnt to death as scapegoats after the great fire at Rome in AD 64, were not alone in being sacrificed for public entertainment. Slaves and bystanders, even the spectators themselves, ran the risk of becoming victims of emperors' truculent whims. The Emperor Claudius, for example, dissatisfied with how the stage machinery worked, ordered the stage mechanics responsible to fight in the arena. One day when there was a shortage of condemned criminals, the Emperor Caligula commanded that a whole section of the crowd be seized and thrown to the wild beasts instead. Isolated incidents, but enough to intensify the excitement of those who attended. Imperial legitimacy was reinforced by terror.

As for animals, their sheer variety symbolised the extent of Roman power and left vivid traces in Roman art. In 169 BC, sixty-three African lions and leopards, forty bears and several elephants were hunted down in a single show. New species were gradually introduced to Roman spectators (tigers, crocodiles, giraffes, lynxes, rhinoceros, ostriches, hippopotami) and killed for their pleasure. Not for Romans the tame viewing of caged animals in a zoo. Wild beasts were set to tear criminals to pieces as public lesson in pain and death. Sometimes, elaborate sets and theatrical backdrops were prepared in which, as a climax, a criminal was devoured limb by limb. Such spectacular punishments, common enough in pre-industrial states, helped reconstitute sovereign power. The deviant criminal was punished; law and order were re-established.

The labour and organisation required to capture so many animals and to deliver them alive to Rome must have been enormous. Even if wild animals were more plentiful then than now, single shows with one hundred, four hundred or six hundred lions, plus other animals, seem amazing. By contrast, after Roman times, no hippopotamus was seen in Europe until one was brought to London by steamship in 1850. It took a whole regiment of Egyptian soldiers to capture it, and involved a five month journey to bring it from the White Nile to Cairo. And yet the Emperor Commodus, a dead-shot with spear and bow, himself killed five hippos, two elephants, a rhinoceros and a giraffe, in one show lasting two days. On another occasion he killed 100 lions and bears in a single morning show, from safe walkways specially constructed across the arena. It was, a contemporary remarked, 'a better demonstration of accuracy than of courage'. The slaughter of exotic animals in the emperor's presence, and exceptionally by the emperor himself or by his palace guards, was a spectacular dramatisation of the emperor's formidable power: immediate, bloody and symbolic.

Gladiatorial shows also provided an arena for popular participation in politics. Cicero explicitly recognised this towards the end of the Republic: 'the judgement and wishes of the Roman people about public affairs can be most clearly expressed in three places: public assemblies, elections, and at plays or gladiatorial shows'. He challenged a political opponent: 'Give yourself to the people. Entrust yourself to the Games. Are you terrified of not being applauded?' His comments underline the fact that the crowd had the important option of giving or of withholding applause, of hissing or of being silent.

Under the emperors, as citizens' rights to engage in politics diminished, gladiatorial shows and games provided repeated opportunities for the dramatic confrontation of rulers and ruled. Rome was unique among large historical empires in allowing, indeed in expecting, these regular meetings between emperors and the massed populace of the capital, collected together in a single crowd. To be sure, emperors could mostly stage-manage their own appearance and reception. They gave extravagant shows. They threw gifts to the crowd – small marked wooden balls (called missilia ) which could be exchanged for various luxuries. They occasionally planted their own claques in the crowd.

Mostly, emperors received standing ovations and ritual acclamations. The Games at Rome provided a stage for the emperor to display his majesty – luxurious ostentation in procession, accessibility to humble petitioners, generosity to the crowd, human involvement in the contests themselves, graciousness or arrogance towards the assembled aristocrats, clemency or cruelty to the vanquished. When a gladiator fell, the crowd would shout for mercy or dispatch. The emperor might be swayed by their shouts or gestures, but he alone, the final arbiter, decided who was to live or die. When the emperor entered the amphitheatre, or decided the fate of a fallen gladiator by the movement of his thumb, at that moment he had 50,000 courtiers. He knew that he was Caesar Imperator , Foremost of Men.

Things did not always go the way the emperor wanted. Sometimes, the crowd objected, for example to the high price of wheat, or demanded the execution of an unpopular official or a reduction in taxes. Caligula once reacted angrily and sent soldiers into the crowd with orders to execute summarily anyone seen shouting. Understandably, the crowd grew silent, though sullen. But the emperor's increased unpopularity encouraged his assassins to act. Dio, senator and historian, was present at another popular demonstration in the Circus in AD 195. He was amazed that the huge crowd (the Circus held up to 200,000 people) strung out along the track, shouted for an end to civil war 'like a well-trained choir'.

Dio also recounted how with his own eyes he saw the Emperor Commodus cut off the head of an ostrich as a sacrifice in the arena then walk towards the congregated senators whom he hated, with the sacrificial knife in one hand and the severed head of the bird in the other, clearly indicating, so Dio thought, that it was the senators' necks which he really wanted. Years later, Dio recalled how he had kept himself from laughing (out of anxiety, presumably) by chewing desperately on a laurel leaf which he plucked from the garland on his head.

Consider how the spectators in the amphitheatre sat: the emperor in his gilded box, surrounded by his family; senators and knights each had special seats and came properly dressed in their distinctive purple-bordered togas. Soldiers were separated from civilians. Even ordinary citizens had to wear the heavy white woollen toga, the formal dress of a Roman citizen, and sandals, if they wanted to sit in the bottom two main tiers of seats. Married men sat separately from bachelors, boys sat in a separate block, with their teachers in the next block. Women, and the very poorest men dressed in the drab grey cloth associated with mourning, could sit or stand only in the top tier of the amphitheatre. Priests and Vestal Virgins (honorary men) had reserved seats at the front. The correct dress and segregation of ranks underlined the formal ritual elements in the occasion, just as the steeply banked seats reflected the steep stratification of Roman society. It mattered where you sat, and where you were seen to be sitting.

Gladiatorial shows were political theatre. The dramatic performance took place, not only in the arena, but between different sections of the audience. Their interaction should be included in any thorough account of the Roman constitution. The amphitheatre was the Roman crowd's parliament. Games are usually omitted from political histories, simply because in our own society, mass spectator sports count as leisure. But the Romans themselves realised that metropolitan control involved 'bread and circuses'. 'The Roman people', wrote Marcus Aurelius' tutor Fronto, 'is held together by two forces: wheat doles and public shows'.

Enthusiastic interest in gladiatorial shows occasionally spilled over into a desire to perform in the arena. Two emperors were not content to be spectators-in-chief. They wanted to be prize performers as well. Nero's histrionic ambitions and success as musician and actor were notorious. He also prided himself on his abilities as a charioteer. Commodus performed as a gladiator in the amphitheatre, though admittedly only in preliminary bouts with blunted weapons. He won all his fights and charged the imperial treasury a million sesterces for each appearance (enough to feed a thousand families for a year). Eventually, he was assassinated when he was planning to be inaugurated as consul (in AD 193), dressed as a gladiator.

Commodus' gladiatorial exploits were an idiosyncratic expression of a culture obsessed with fighting, bloodshed, ostentation and competition. But at least seven other emperors practised as gladiators, and fought in gladiatorial contests. And so did Roman senators and knights. Attempts were made to stop them by law; but the laws were evaded.

Roman writers tried to explain away these senators' and knights' outrageous behaviour by calling them morally degenerate, forced into the arena by wicked emperors or their own profligacy. This explanation is clearly inadequate, even though it is difficult to find one which is much better. A significant part of the Roman aristocracy, even under the emperors, was still dedicated to military prowess: all generals were senators; all senior officers were senators or knights. Combat in the arena gave aristocrats a chance to display their fighting skill and courage. In spite of the opprobrium and at the risk of death, it was their last chance to play soldiers in front of a large audience.

Gladiators were glamour figures, culture heroes. The probable life-span of each gladiator was short. Each successive victory brought further risk of defeat and death. But for the moment, we are more concerned with image than with reality. Modern pop-stars and athletes have only a short exposure to full-glare publicity. Most of them fade rapidly from being household names into obscurity, fossilised in the memory of each generation of adolescent enthusiasts. The transience of the fame of each does not diminish their collective importance.

So too with Roman gladiators. Their portraits were often painted. Whole walls in public porticos were sometimes covered with life-size portraits of all the gladiators in a particular show. The actual events were magnified beforehand by expectation and afterwards by memory. Street advertisements stimulated excitement and anticipation. Hundreds of Roman artefacts – sculptures, figurines, lamps, glasses – picture gladiatorial fights and wild-beast shows. In conversation and in daily life, chariot-races and gladiatorial fights were all the rage. 'When you enter the lecture halls', wrote Tacitus, 'what else do you hear the young men talking about?' Even a baby's nursing bottle, made of clay and found at Pompeii, was stamped with the figure of a gladiator. It symbolised the hope that the baby would imbibe a gladiator's strength and courage.

The victorious gladiator, or at least his image, was sexually attractive. Graffiti from the plastered walls of Pompeii carry the message:

Celadus [a stage name, meaning Crowd's Roar], thrice victor and thrice crowned, the young girls' heart-throb, and Crescens the Netter of young girls by night.

The ephemera of AI) 79 have been preserved by volcanic ash. Even the defeated gladiator had something sexually portentous about him. It was customary, so it is reported, for a new Roman bride to have her hair parted with a spear, at best one which had been dipped in the body of a defeated and killed gladiator.

The Latin word for sword – gladius – was vulgarly used to mean penis. Several artefacts also suggest this association. A small bronze figurine from Pompeii depicts a cruel-looking gladiator fighting off with his sword a dog-like wild-beast which grows out of his erect and elongated penis. Five bells hang down from various parts of his body and a hook is attached to the gladiator's head"so that the whole ensemble could hang as a bell in a doorway. Interpretation must be speculative. But this evidence suggests that there was a close link, in some Roman minds, between gladiatorial fighting and sexuality. And it seems as though gladiatoral bravery for some Roman men represented an attractive yet dangerous, almost threatening, macho masculinity.

Gladiators attracted women, even though most of them were slaves. Even if they were free or noble by origin, they were in some sense contaminated by their close contact with death. Like suicides, gladiators were in some places excluded from normal burial grounds. Perhaps their dangerous ambiguity was part of their sexual attraction. They were, according to the Christian Tertullian, both loved and despised: 'men give them their souls, women their bodies too'. Gladiators were 'both glorified and degraded'.

In a vicious satire, the poet Juvenal ridiculed a senator's wife, Eppia, who had eloped to Egypt with her favourite swordsman:

What was the youthful charm that so fired Eppia? What hooked her? What did she see in him to make her put up with being called 'The Gladiator's Moll'? Her poppet, her Sergius, was no chicken, with a dud arm that prompted hope of early retirement. Besides, his fare looked a proper mess, helmet scarred, a great wart on his nose, an unpleasant discharge always trickling from one eye, But he was a Gladiator. That word makes the whole breed seem handsome, and made her prefer him to her children and country, her sister and husband. Steel is what they fall in love with.

Satire certainly, and exaggerated, but pointless unless it was also based to some extent in reality. Modern excavators, working in the armoury of the gladiatorial barracks in Pompeii found eighteen skeletons in two rooms, presumably of gladiators caught there in an ash storm; they included only one woman, who was wearing rich gold jewellery, and a necklace set with emeralds. Occasionally, women's attachment to gladiatorial combat went further. They fought in the arena themselves. In the storeroom of the British Museum, for example, there is a small stone relief, depicting two female gladiators, one with breast bare, called Amazon and Achillia. Some of these female gladiators were free women of high status.

Behind the brave facade and the hope of glory, there lurked the fear of death. 'Those about to die salute you, Emperor'. Only one account survives of what it was like from the gladiator's point of view. It is from a rhetorical exercise. The story is told by a rich young man who had been captured by pirates and was then sold on as a slave to a gladiatorial trainer:

And so the day arrived. Already the populace had gathered for the spectacle of our punishment, and the bodies of those about to die had their own death-parade across the arena. The presenter of the shows, who hoped to gain favour with our blood, took his seat... Although no one knew my birth, my fortune, my family, one fact made some people pity me; I seemed unfairly matched. I was destined to be a certain victim in the sand... All around I could hear the instruments of death: a sword being sharpened, iron plates being heated in a fire [to stop fighters retreating and to prove that they were not faking death], birch-rods and whips were prepared. One would have imagined that these were the pirates. The trumpets sounded their foreboding notes; stretchers for the dead were brought on, a funeral parade before death. Everywhere I could see wounds, groans, blood, danger...

He went on to describe his thoughts, his memories in the moments when he faced death, before he was dramatically and conveniently rescued by a friend. That was fiction. In real life gladiators died.

Why did Romans popularise fights to the death between armed gladiators? Why did they encourage the public slaughter of unarmed criminals? What was it which transformed men who were timid and peaceable enough in private, as Tertullian put it, and made them shout gleefully for the merciless destruction of their fellow men? Part of the answer may lie in the simple development of a tradition, which fed on itself and its own success. Men liked blood and cried out for more. Part of the answer may also lie in the social psychology of the crowd, which relieved individuals of responsibility for their actions, and in the psychological mechanisms by which some spectators identified more easily with the victory of the aggressor than with the sufferings of the vanquished. Slavery and the steep stratification of society must also have contributed. Slaves were at the mercy of their owners. Those who were destroyed for public edification and entertainment were considered worthless, as non-persons; or, like Christian martyrs, they were considered social outcasts, and tortured as one Christian martyr put it 'as if we no longer existed'. The brutalisation of the spectators fed on the dehumanisation of the victims.

Rome was a cruel society. Brutality was built into its culture in private life, as well as in public shows. The tone was set by military discipline and by slavery. The state had no legal monopoly of capital punishment until the second century AD. Before then, a master could crucify his slaves publicly if he wished. Seneca recorded from his own observations the various ways in which crucifixions were carried out, in order to increase pain. At private dinner-parties, rich Romans regularly presented two or three pairs of gladiators: 'when they have finished dining and are filled with drink', wrote a critic in the time of Augustus, 'they call in the gladiators. As soon as one has his throat cut, the diners applaud with delight'. It is worth stressing that we are dealing here not with individual sadistic psycho-pathology, but with a deep cultural difference. Roman commitment to cruelty presents us with a cultural gap which it is difficult to cross.

Popular gladiatorial shows were a by-product of war, discipline and death. For centuries, Rome had been devoted to war and to the mass participation of citizens in battle. They won their huge empire by discipline and control. Public executions were a gruesome reminder to non-combatants, citizens, subjects and slaves, that vengeance would be exacted if they rebelled or betrayed their country. The arena provided a living enactment of the hell portrayed by Christian preachers. Public punishment ritually re-established the moral and political order. The power of the state was dramatically reconfirmed.

When long-term peace came to the heartlands of the empire, after 31 BC, militaristic traditions were preserved at Rome in the domesticated battlefield of the amphitheatre. War had been converted into a game, a drama repeatedly replayed, of cruelty, violence, blood and death. But order still needed to be preserved. The fear of death still had to be assuaged by ritual. In a city as large as Rome, with a population of close on a million by the end of the last century BC, without an adequate police force, disorder always threatened. Gladiatorial shows and public executions reaffirmed the moral order, by the sacrifice of human victims – slaves, gladiators, condemned criminals or impious Christians. Enthusiastic participation, by spectators rich and poor, raised and then released collective tensions, in a society which traditionally idealised impassivity.

Gladiatorial shows provided a psychic and political safety valve for the metropolitan population. Politically, emperors risked occasional conflict, but the populace could usually be diverted or fobbed off. The crowd lacked the coherence of a rebellious political ideology. By and large, it found its satisfaction in cheering its support of established order. At the psychological level, gladiatorial shows provided a stage for shared violence and tragedy. Each show reassured spectators that they had yet again survived disaster. Whatever happened in the arena, the spectators were on the winning side. 'They found comfort for death' wrote Tertullian with typical insight, 'in murder'.

French Anti-Americanism and McDonald's

David Ellwood

David Ellwood shows how anti-American feelings today have roots and parallels in the past.

The year is 1930, the writer Georges Duhamel, popular Parisian commentator:

I was born in a country whose soul, inhabitants and products are diverse, motley, changing and ingenious. From milk, this simple and elementary food, we Frenchmen know how to make more than 100 kinds of cheese. All are good, healthy, strong, substantial and amusing. All have their history, character and role. In this feature alone, I recognise the genius of my country, in it I understand that she has produced so many great men in all professions ... I belong to a peasant people which has cultivated lovingly for centuries 50 different plums and which finds in each one a deliciously incomparable taste.

Duhamel wrote this in a powerful diatribe warning Europeans, and Frenchmen in particular, that unless they took steps to protect their traditions, values and identities, the system of advanced industrialism which modernity had produced in America would soon overwhelm them. Seventy years later the same battle is being fought, this time by a farmers’ leader, José Bové, who in August 1999 broke up the site of a new McDonald’s restaurant in his home town of Millau, and almost instantly became a sort of national hero. Bové was briefly arrested, led a delegation of supporters to the Seattle conference of the World Trade Organisation in November 1999 (smuggling in a Roquefort cheese), and in July 2000 was put on trial in the midst of a ‘happening’ which brought 40,000 young people to Millau and the attention of international media.

Meanwhile the Parisian bookshops were once more filling up with titles deploring American society and its overweening foreign policy: No Thanks, Uncle Sam, The World Is Not Merchandise, Who Is Killing France?, The American Strategy, and others. The American Ambassador commented: ‘The Anti-Americanism today encompasses not a specific policy like Iranian sanctions but a feeling that globalisation has an American face on it and is a danger to the European and French view of society ... There is the sense that America is such an extraordinary power that it can crush everything in its way.’ The feeling certainly seemed to be shared by the government. Foreign minister Hubert Védrine was quoted as saying that America’s role in 20th-century European history did not give it the rights of a sixteenth member of the European Union. Only the French government explicitly presented the birth of the Euro as an antidote to the strength of the dollar.

‘It’s important to understand why a new stridency has crept into France’s warnings about American power’, commented the Wall Street Journal Europe in late February 1999. The problem, suggested interviewees, was the insecurity of the élites. In culture, diplomacy and political culture, they looked ever more beleaguered, overtaken and outpaced by the appeal of American dress-styles to their children, of fast-food to their youth, and of Hollywood to their cinema audiences. ‘The government, and the élites, realise that culture, writ large, is a battle that they’re losing. They’re very jealous of America’s power to seduce,’ Alain Franchon, an editorial writer for Le Monde, was quoted as saying. ‘When faced with that you have to fight, even if you risk looking ridiculous.’

Jack Lang, the man who brought a new prominence to these questions in his years as Minister of Culture under President Mitterand, recently insisted that if the nation’s heritage was not to dwindle into insignificance, economics and culture should learn to live together in France, so that France would be better placed to ‘bet on the future’. Calling for a new Ministry of External Cultural Relations, Lang demanded more energy, more openness, more international operations by French television channels and a whole-hearted build-up of a European identity ‘of imagination, youth and spirit’. Either the Old World could remain frozen in the shadow of American culture, in which case diplomatic subjection would soon follow, said Lang. Or Europe, under France’s powerful impulse, could show all those peoples wishing to seek an alternative to US domination, that ‘the West is declined in the plural. A message of hope.’

The leading French international relations expert, Dominique Moisi, believes that to resolve the nation’s fundamental identity problem, which is whether to be ‘a modern, normal country’ or one which is different, even exceptional, the French must stop bewailing globalisation and America’s role in it, give up cultural protectionism and refurbish instead their own message: ‘What France should seek to preserve – once it has conceded defeat in the language battle – is the context and originality of its message, not its medium.’ Jean-Marie Guéhenno, an expert on the State and national identity, is pessimistic about the chances of such a strategy being given a chance to work. Anti-Americanism is probably growing, he writes, ‘in spite of claims to the contrary and in spite of the success of American culture among French people.’ It is, he says, a dangerous development which isolates France and encourages people ‘to withdraw in to a world of illusions in which la francophonie stands up to les anglo-saxons in the same way that Astérix confronted the Roman Empire.’ And sure enough, within months of this warning, on February 3rd, 1999, the French film industry brought out to great acclaim its most expensive production ever: Astérix and Obélix against Caesar. It was, said Le Monde, a superproduction which represented the very image of national resistance against American cinematic imperialism.

Anti-Americanism is certainly an ambiguous form of response to America’s presence as a power in Europe. Its more ideological manifestations often reflect the proselytising fashion in which America presents the lessons of its history to the world. When a unique national experience is characterised in the language of ‘exceptionalism’, then it’s not suprising that opponents reject the way of life as well as the message, the symbols as well as the actions. In the French case, writes the American specialist on France Richard Kuisel,

the basis of anti-Americanism is cultural and pivots on the notion of protecting and disseminating civilisation. Though differences over international relations, trade and economics will continue to stir criticism of the hegemonic Western power, the core of resistance derives from a sense of French difference, superiority and universal mission – all bound in the term civilisation. The implied universality of civilisation breeds competition with the United States because America has its own sense of universal mission.

But contemporary anti-Americanism is more than just a pseudo-ideological posture. Behind it lies the baggage of images and stereotypes about the new nation which European visitors accumulated throughout the nineteenth century. Then came America’s development of an ideologically dynamic and disruptive model of modernisation in the 1920s. And the shared trans-Atlantic experience of two World Wars and the Cold War also left a legacy of attitudes. Without all these historical precedents and pretexts, the ascendancy of US power since the Second World War would never have attracted the resentments and antagonisms which classical anti-Americanism has expressed in a country like France. Today the true parallel of America’s position vis à vis the Old World is not the Pax Britannica of the nineteenth century, but the 1920s. At that time Fordism, Hollywood, Jazz, dance-halls, new forms of advertising, leisure pursuits and role models swept through post-First World War Europe, and antagonised traditional élites engaged in the difficult business of reconstituting their power and legitimacy. ‘Americanism’ was a phrase already current in the mid-nineteenth century which recognised that nation’s unique inheritance of ideals and aspirations. The use of the term ‘Anti-Americanism’ started in the 1920s. The transatlantic grievances of the time – war debts and reparations, naval competition, the force of the new mass culture – now began to be expressed in a language which connected American politics and foreign policy with what were perceived to be the nation’s defects as a society and a civilisation.

In France this new critical attitude produced books which were destined to acquire lasting significance as trend-setters in the critique of America’s likely impact on the nation’s future. The most famous was Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future (1930). The most authoritative was political commentator André Siegfried’s Les Etats-unis d'aujourd'hui, a discussion of all the issues outstanding between France and the US at the time. The politician and diplomat André Tardieu provided Devant l'obstacle: L'Amérique et nous, while the work of the business journalist Lucien Romier, Qui sera le maître, Europe ou Amérique?, was a thoroughgoing critique of mass society and America’s responsibility for diffusing it. All were best-sellers and they set a pattern which would later include René Etiemble’s Parlez-vous franglais? (1964) and Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s Le défi américaine (1967). The first of these opened the vexed question of language and called for a campaign which would rescue the French cultural heritage from the American ‘air-conditioned nightmare’, just as de Gaulle was doing in international relations and economics. Servan-Schreiber’s even more influential production called for a Europeanisation of America’s most successful technical and social features, just as he had invented L’Express, a French version of Time or Newsweek. From the 1960s too came the radical, Third World-ist critique of American imperialism best articulated by Le Monde’s international affairs supplement Le Monde diplomatique, which continues this tradition today.

The 1990s shifted the argument back to the influence of Hollywood’s film and television output, reviving a debate which had provoked strong impulses of cultural protectionism in the 1920s and 1940s. At the 1993 GATT talks on world trade the French audiovisual industry, strongly supported by the socialist president and the conservative government, led efforts to have its products removed entirely from the purview of the negotiations, on the grounds that free trade invariably favoured the most powerful producers. No single country ‘should be allowed to control the images of the whole world,’ Mitterand declared in October 1993; ‘what is at stake is the cultural identity of our nations, the right of each people to its own culture’. If Jurassic Park could be attacked as a threat to French national identity, as it had been some months earlier by the Minister of Culture, then this was not simply about the balance of economic power between the French cinema industry and Hollywood. A position like this reflected a sense of being forced to give up ‘a concept of nationhood that presumed sovereignty over culture’, as the American historian Victoria de Grazia has written, talking of Hollywood’s impact in the 1920s.

Until recently the battle of cultural sovereignty has been over languages, images and expectations, over the minds of one’s own younger generations. Now the battle seems to be shifting to the stomach. As a target for generalised abuse of American commercial intrusiveness the McDonald’s chain has faced levels of aggression in France which never troubled its predecessors of the 1940s and 1950s, Reader’s Digest and Coca-Cola. Although contested from Hampstead to Hamburg, from Florence to Cracow, opposition has not been directed at other fast-food vendors, no other chain has seen an employee killed by a terrorist attack, as happened in Brittany in April 2000. In France the first McDonald’s opened in Strasbourg in 1979. Twenty years later 790 restaurants were functioning, after expanding at the rate of around 80 per year since the middle of the decade. The company’s annual report for 1999 announced that Europe was McDonald’s most successful global sector, and within Europe France was one of its leading countries. In the meantime hundreds of traditional bistros and bars have closed up and down the country, victims of changing tastes and a punitive tax regime which, said a chefs’ protest in Paris in October 1999, directly favoured the fast food industry.

The McDonald’s experience in France shows how relatively small symbols of American economic power, because of their visibility, ubiquity and dynamism, are still the ones expected to bear the most disproportionate burden of anti-Americanist resentment, as local citizens and consumers attempt to pit their influence against that of corporations once merely ‘multinational’ but now turned global. In 1999 Bové’s protest against the Big Mac was sparked by the inclusion of Roquefort cheese among a cluster of European goods punished by the US with high import tariffs, a protest against European refusal to take unlimited supplies of hormone-raised beef. The cheese’s timeless manufacture required the kind of unsullied milk Bové’s farm supplied; but now, under the conditions of globalisation, ‘the Americans could cancel your business at the push of a computer button’, as the new national hero said to a television interviewer. Le Monde meanwhile criticised an America ‘whose commercial hegemony menaces agriculture and whose cultural hegemony insidiously ruins culinary customs, the sacred gleams of French identity’.

Wherever ancient, modern and post-modern meet in contemporary Europe, the chances are that some version of the twentieth’s century’s long, intense and complicated encounter between American and European mass culture is being re-enacted. With food moving abruptly up the list of contested areas – elbowing aside such staples as movies and technology, business and language, television and intellectual fashion – the encounter seems likely to take on a more bitter flavour. In a 1988 discussion the leading French specialist Marie-France Toinet emphasised the need to distinguish between the external manifestations of anti-American sentiment and their roots. The ‘important thing about the French fascination for and rejection of Americanism’ was that:

The French are not so much holding a debate about the United States but about themselves, about their society, their goals and their methods. It is, so to say, a Franco-French debate, where American arguments – often half-baked – are just an excuse or a pretence. The French hold up the United States as a mirror to look, in fact, at themselves.

But the pressures of social and technological change, of the imbalance of cultural power between America and France, are real enough, now as in the 1920s. Even if in no way comparable to the nation’s historic enmities with the British and the Germans, the anti-American leaning in French political and intellectual thought persists. As the twenty-first century opens, France remains the nation which worries most intensely about American power in international life. It is a debate which tries to correlate the political, economic and mass cultural dimensions of that power with the big contemporary questions of sovereignty and globalisation, identity and modernity.

http://www.historytoday.com/david-ellwood/french-anti-americanism-and-mcdonalds

BigGirlsLife: Правила необрезного маникюра в домашних условиях

http://annin.ru/?p=673

Правила необрезного маникюра в домашних уксловиях

Краса ногтей - вещь необходимая, но одновременно и быстро проходящая. Сколько радости и гордости женскому полу приносит великолепный маникюр, столько же досады приносит и его отсутствие. Хотя такое повышенное внимание к уходу за руками вполне объяснимо: они, одновременно с лицом, производят первое о нас впечатление, а кто еще не старался производить максимально положительное впечатление? К тому же гораздо приятнее ощущать себя немного совершеннее, что при наличии маникюра несложно! А как это тешит женское уязвимое самолюбие и словами не передать!




Другой вопрос в том, каким образом превратить мечту в реальность, ведь всякий результат требует усилий, порой немалых. Случай с маникюром как раз – таки требует огромных усилий. Ногти ломаются, слоятся, отчего - то совсем не растут, кутикула трескается, кожа морщинится и так до бесконечности.… А ведь нам часто приходится преодолевать такие препятствия, как стирка, мытье посуды и другие всевозможные домашние процедуры. И еще не забываем о труднозастегивающихся пуговицах и замках, тяжелоотстегивающихся ремнях безопасности и вообще-не-открывающихся дверях маршруток! Боже мой! Как эти счастливые обладатели маникюра добились таких результатов?



Сразу скажем – идеальный маникюр из сказки сделать былью возможно. Кроме того, это приносит удовольствие!

Современный бешеный ритм жизни привел к таким скоростям и спешке, что, кажется, времени ни на что, кроме работы не хватает. Поэтому очень многие пошли по обходному пути – наращиванию ногтей. Что ж, решение вполне объяснимое и комфортное, но оно противоречит главному правилу красоты – ее естественности. Сколь виртуозно ни был выполнен искусственный маникюр, он всегда выглядит навязчиво и неестественно. К тому же это сомнительное удовольствие – беспокоиться, не отлетел ли где на повороте ноготок!



Ухоженные естественные ногти – в первую очередь здоровые ногти. А здоровье, как известно, необходимо поддерживать регулярно. Соответственно, ухоженные ногти – ногти, за которыми налажен постоянный уход. Просто помните всегда, что ваш маникюр- это часть вас, обращайте на него внимание и исправляйте, если что несовершенно.



В первую очередь следует позаботиться о коже рук. Мягкость, гладкость и белизну ей дарят отшелушивание, массаж, питание, увлажнение и защита.

В самом начале выполнения маникюра необходимо произвести пилинг мягким скрабом, уделяя внимание коже вокруг ногтей и на запястьях. Почему-то нежную кожу запястий часто забывают привести в порядок.

Далее хорошо бы сделать массаж рук со специальным маслом или просто растительным маслом, например, оливковым или зародышей пшеницы. Наносите подогретое масло на кожу, помассируйте в течение 3-5 минут и удалите излишки салфеткой. Это насытит кожу рук и ногти питательными веществами и интенсивно увлажнит. Однако до этой процедуры, когда ногти еще сухие, необходимо придать им форму и оптимальную длину.



Форма и длина ногтей – выбор индивидуальный, они зависят от цвета кожи – например, если она у вас белая, длинные ногти выглядят поистине устрашающе. Кроме того, облик ногтей зависит и от формы пальцев, размера ладоней, да и форма – не последний фактор. Вряд ли будут привлекательны длинные ногти, загибающиеся вверх или вогнутой формы. Хотя выбор за вами.



Подпиливание ногтей - работа, соизмеримая с ювелирной. Для этого необходимо иметь набор абразивных пилочек разной зернистости. Чем выше зернистость – тем деликатнее будут спиливаться ногти. Оптимальная зернистость для подпиливания – 120-180. Инструмент, обладающий более высоким коэффициентом, будет пригоден для полировки. Хотя необходимость полировать ногтевую пластину, пожалуй, не всегда оправдана – во – первых, это лишает ноготь естественного защитного слоя и делает его слабее, а во- вторых, есть другие способы выравнивания поверхности ногтевых пластин.



В процессе подпиливания ногтей мы должны решить следующие задачи: придать ногтям форму и удалить повреждения. Начинать нужно с последнего пункта - скорее всего, на ногтевой пластине есть трещины, расслоения или сгибы. Главное – удалить все это аккуратно пилочкой, не повредив оставшийся ноготь. После этого можно придавать ногтю оптимальную форму и переходить к “декоративной” части маникюра.



Если вы решили покрывать ногти цветным лаком, то помните, что без базы и покрытия не обойтись. Бесцветный лечебный лак – база выравнивает, питает, укрепляет и защищает ногти, а быстровысыхающее покрытие помогает моментально высушить лак, принимает на себя все повреждения и сколы так, что цветной лак дольше радует глаз своей яркостью. Ну а выбор цвета – дело личное, чаще всего определяется настроением.



Что касается поддержания маникюра в хорошей форме, то тут не обойтись без резиновых перчаток, если, конечно, вы делаете работу по дому. Регулярное использование увлажняющего или питательного крема для рук также поможет сохранить руки нежными, а ногти красивыми. Частота же выполнения всего маникюра зависит, от того насколько быстро он теряет первозданный вид.

Впрочем, если результат действительно есть, вы же не будете лениться поддерживать свою красоту?

A part of me

I have a passion, you know. It is within me, and it is absolutely senseless to definite its size. My passion is neither small nor enormous - it is just me myself. I can not imagine myself without it – without thinking about it, dreaming or just looking at it: my greatest passion is decorative cosmetics.


By the way, I am quite educated – I am almost a philologist with a diploma and I need a year to become an economist as well. But it’s nothing in comparison with my love to cosmetics – I am absolutely in love with it- I look at it, buy it, use, smell, economize, and try to get rare and expensive things: lip glosses, lipsticks, blushes, shadows…How wonderful is a world of it! I know that if devoted all my life to it, I would be absolutely brilliantly happy. I know that this is my life and my success. Because I have never met a person to be so in love with it…