CONSTANTINE AND THE GLADIATORS

摘要

Amongst the reforms of Constantine that are commonly regarded as ‘anti-pagan’ nis an attempted ban on gladiatorial combat. The stress here must be upon the nword ‘attempted’ since it has long been recognized that this ban was not effective n(gladiatorial combats are attested into the fifth century). Constantine’s measure can nbe seen, at best, as a premature attempt to eliminate an activity that Christians nfound deeply distasteful, and that was the way that it was taken by Georges Ville nin what remains the fundamental study of gladiatorial combat under Christian nemperors.n1n To take this view is, however, to misread Constantine’s intention, and nthe nature of the evidence at hand. I will suggest that Constantine never intended nto abolish gladiatorial games; that the principal piece of evidence for this view nrelates instead to the practice of damnatio ad ludum (a capital penalty whereby nconvicts were required to fight duels to the death in the amphitheatre; such duels nwere an extreme rarity for gladiators), and should be understood as what Fergus nMillar would call an ‘internal communication’ connected with the penal code of nthe eastern empire, recognizing that some practices in the east were different from nthose in the west.n2