Book: THOSE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE: GLADIATORS AND THE ROMAN MIND
Author: Harry Sidebottom
Published by: Hutchinson Heinemann
Price: Rs 999
Ridley Scott, the director of Gladiator, would have done well to read Harry Sidebottom’s book. This is because Sidebottom, author, scholar and an informed Romanophile, dismantles, with a flourish of the pen and the strength of his research, many of the myths that masquerade as facts in the popular discourse. Laymen, especially fans of the chiselled Russell Crowe, would be shocked to learn that gladiators were, more often than not, obese, had bad teeth and breath, and mostly survived on a vegetarian diet. Indeed, gladiatorial contests, supposedly an insignia of the Roman Empire itself, were not even organic to Roman culture: Sidebottom writes that the Romans may have adopted this ritual and then given it the distinct flavours of pax romana.
The ability to separate the chaff of popular myth from the hard grain of historical veracity is not Sidebottom’s only gift. Those Who Are About To Die has a curious structure: its chapters compartmentalise the Roman conception of time — “Vesper”, the “four ‘Watches’” of the night, the hours of daylight — to reveal the workings of the gladiators’ minds in the hours leading to a fight. But the close focus on the fighter does not blind Sidebottom to the need to illuminate the broader intersections — political, economic, cultural and moral — that led to the inception and, ultimately, the demise of these games. The world of the Roman Empire and the life of a mere cog in that great imperial wheel — the gladiator — thus get meshed, often with fascinating insights. Consider, for instance, the gladiator’s schizophrenic existence: socially ostracised but the philosophers’ role model; a sex symbol but also a person disfigured, literally and figuratively, by conflict, enslavement and death; a mere tool at the command of senators and the emperor and, yet, a symbol of public subversion potent enough to challenge power.
Sidebottom’s use of exhaustive historical sources — texts, images and treatises from antiquity — adds to this book’s charms.
