Greek Athletics as Roman Spectacle: the mosaics from Ostia and Rome

Abstract

With the release in the year 2000 of the filmGladiator, and the exhibition ‘Gladiators and Caesars’ in Hamburg and London, Roman spectacular entertainments, never out of the public eye for long, have returned once again to the limelight. Chief among these entertainments are gladiatorial games and chariot races, exerting a pull on the modern imagination through the famous re-enactments of them in popular films — such asSpartacusor the famous chariot race inBen-Hur— as much as through our knowledge of their popularity in antiquity, often summed up in Juvenal's comment that the Romanplebswanted only ‘panem et circenses’. Yet there was more to Roman spectacle than gladiators and chariots, popular as these were. The aim of this paper is to use the visual evidence from mosaics in Ostia and Rome to investigate the Roman reactions to another type of public spectacle, Greek athletic contests. These were held in Rome periodically from 186 BC, and gained a new momentum in AD 86 with Emperor Domitian's institution of a permanent four-yearly festival on Greek lines in honour of the Capitoline triad (Suetonius,Domitian4).