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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2012

Zahra Newby
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With the release in the year 2000 of the film Gladiator, 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 as Spartacus or the famous chariot race in Ben-Hur — as much as through our knowledge of their popularity in antiquity, often summed up in Juvenal's comment that the Roman plebs wanted 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, Domitian 4).

Le gare di atletica greche come spettacolo romano: mosaici da ostia e roma

La passione dei Romani per gli spettacoli di combattimenti tra gladiatori e per le corse delle bighe è ben nota; in questo articolo ci si occupa del ricevimento di un altro tipo di spettacolo a Roma, quello delle competizioni atletiche nei versi greci. Attraverso la discussione di mosaici pavimentali con scene di gare di atleti da Ostia Antica e Roma, la ricerca si concentra sulle diverse interpretazioni che questi mosaici potevano invitare a dare. La somiglianza con le rappresentazioni di auriga vittoriosi sembra indicare che i giochi atletici in stile greco venivano qui rappresentati come uno tra i vari tipi di spettacolo pubblico, come le corse delle bighe. La presenza di molte di queste immagini in complessi termale, peró, invita anche a considerare la possibilità di un modo di vedere le immagini di ‘identificazione’, in cui l'osservatore vedeva un'analogia con le attività in cui egli stesso era coinvolto. Includendo dettagli specifici quali premi e targhette con i nomi, questi mosaici indicano l'interesse negli spettacoli di atletica della società romana, completano la visione dataci dalle fonti letterarie e forniscono un esempio specifico dell'integrazione della cultura greca nella vita sociale romana in età imperiale.

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Papers of the British School at Rome , Volume 70 , November 2002 , pp. 177 - 203
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Copyright © British School at Rome 2002

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