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    Gladiator: Orgy Of Death: The Unexpurgated Text
    Gladiator: Orgy Of Death: The Unexpurgated Text
    Gladiator: Orgy Of Death: The Unexpurgated Text
    Ebook56 pages57 minutes

    Gladiator: Orgy Of Death: The Unexpurgated Text

    By Stephen Barber

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    About this ebook

    Gladiatorial combat formed the seminal experience and spectacle of the Roman Empire, its regime of all-out bloodshed, mutilation and decapitation allowed the Empire to flourish with ever-more innovative slaughterhouse-spectacles designed to propel their audiences' corporeal and sensory experiences beyond all boundaries. Those combats exacted extreme ritualistic discipline and subservience from both fighters and audiences, so that the arenas in which combat took place formed worlds apart in which all desires, including sexual obsessions, could be instantaneously gratified. With the collapse of the Roman Empire, that gladiatorial world instantly disintegrated, but it remains a compelling contemporary preoccupation, manifested in such films as Gladiator and Spartacus: Blood and Sand, through the vast ruins of its arenas and the aura of sheer sensorial ferocity which that culture generated. Taken from Stephen Barber's ground-breaking study "Caligula: Divine Carnage", this definitive and original summation of gladitorial spectacle is the result of many years of exhaustive on-site research, across Europe, as well as into the Roman Empire's iconographical and archival records. It offers a visceral, unprecedented experience of the culture of the Gladiator. This special ebook edition includes bonus material in the form of a history of the gladiator revolution led by Spartacus, Crixus and Oenomaus in 73BC.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherElektron Ebooks
    Release dateMar 4, 2015
    ISBN9781908694034
    Gladiator: Orgy Of Death: The Unexpurgated Text
    Author

    Stephen Barber

    Stephen Barber is Professor of Global Affairs at Regent’s University London, Senior Fellow at the Global Policy Institute, Board Member of the International Public Management Network, and Visiting Professor at the University of Cagliari.

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      holy shit! I've read a lot about the Romans in my life and this is, by far, the most ridiculous "book" ever written about them, it is, truly BEYOND PATHETIC.

    Book preview

    Gladiator - Stephen Barber

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    GLADIATOR : ORGY OF DEATH

    By STEPHEN BARBER

    AN EBOOK

    ISBN 978-1-908694-03-4

    PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

    COPYRIGHT 2011 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

    www.elektron-ebooks.com

    No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

    GLADIATOR : ORGY OF DEATH

    The gladiatorial arena was a site both of momentary, intensive freedom and of always-imminent atrocity. Life for its battling participants and entranced spectators began and ended there. The origins of gladiatorial combat had emerged in ritualistic ceremonies designed to placate monstrous deities which were believed to inhabit the borders of the Mediterranean ocean, occasionally insurging into the cities, driven to ferocity by the lack of human sacrifices made to them, in order to wreak turmoil and to swallow entire populations alive. Countless human sacrifices, especially of virgins, infants and pregnant women, were devoted to appeasing those maleficent deities; but the monsters demanded an ever greater deluge of blood.

    The gladiatorial battles were conceived as a means of avoiding mass human sacrifices, by giving a small group of fearless men the mission of courageously fighting to the death on sacred sites where the monstrous gods would be watching. The intention was that those threatening deities would be awed into a pacified state by the intensive butchery exacted on one another by the extra-ordinary band of combatants. The gladiatorial fights thus began as a means both to challenge and to give a spectacular performance for the gods, whose great malediction against human life coincided with the very origins of Roman civilization, and would ultimately decimate it.

    But by the era of Caligula, those origins had become perverted to a maximal degree. The gladiatorial combats retained their aura of being majestic feats, performed within a hanging pall of blood for the edification of feverishly watching eyes, but their audience was now composed of a hundred thousand human beings, ranging from the most destitute and depraved scum of Roman society to the emperor himself. Necessarily, that emperor took the place of the original deities. Those gruesome, intangible presences crystallized into the unique physical form of the divine emperor himself, who watched the games with a permanent erection, deciding on the life or death of the combatants with a capricious twist of the thumb.

    The status of the gladiators had transformed over centuries from that of heroic saviours to that of the most undignified, reviled detritus of the Empire. Whether they were free men or slaves, the gladiators comprised the most disinherited layer of Roman society.

    Only those few gladiators who became the subject of the crowd’s adulation achieved a soaring ascent of their social status, and that lasted only for as long as they were held within the crowd’s fickle esteem. In Rome, the gladiators were housed in austere barracks, invariably run by a brutish, aged taskmaster who had himself been a mediocre gladiator (the most eminent gladiators always fought bout after bout until they were themselves slaughtered) who harangued them with nostalgic accounts of how his own era had been better than theirs. Some of the gladiators belonged to the emperor as his personal property, and were trained in schools funded by one of his wealthy acolytes. The gladiators slept on wooden benches in the unheated barracks, and were awakened at four o’clock each morning by having buckets of icy water thrown over them. Since most gladiators only fought two or three brief bouts each year (so that their appearances could be eagerly anticipated for months beforehand by the crowd), they had considerable time on their hands. Once the basic strategies of combat had been learned, over a gruelling induction period of a year to eighteen months, the gladiators were left to their own devices for most of each day, apart from the practice sessions which took place at dawn.

    The gladiators were hard men of destitute origin, whose days revolved around an endless struggle against fear. But noble buggery was the order of the night, and if two combatants from the same school were due to face one another in the arena on the following day, they

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