GLADIATOR: BLOOD, SEMEN, ECSTASY

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 would invariably spend the preceding night in grunting tussles, to discover who could take the upper hand sexually. As potent symbols of virility – whose sweat was collected and sold as an aphrodisiac – the gladiators were also surrounded by an entourage of female prostitutes and fans, the so-called “screaming whores”, who hung around the entrance to the barracks until one or two of them at a time were allowed inside for sessions of multiple penetration. The gladiators evolved a language all of their own, comprising only forty to fifty one-syllable words, accentuated by a system of dismissive grunts and obscene gestures. As a result, on the rare occasions when the gladiators emerged from their barracks, they would find themselves unable to make themselves understood in the streets by the populace, who assumed (often correctly) that they were being propositioned to take part in bizarre sex acts. The gladiators’ regime was akin to that of sumo wrestlers in contemporary Japan, themselves similarly sexually idolized and subject to sudden falls from grace; the key difference was that the sumo wrestler’s most undignified fate was to be abruptly upended by his opponent into the crowd, whereas the gladiator could very well find himself in the process of being eviscerated alive under the gloating eyes of one hundred thousand dementedly roaring spectators.

The immense amphitheatre which formed the arena for gladiatorial combats during the era of Caligula had been constructed by a wealthy enthusiast, Statilius Taurus, and had already been in use for around thirty years. It would later be destroyed during the reign of Nero, and the Colosseum constructed by Jewish prisoners near its ruins. And Caligula’s arena had itself been preceded by innumerable others, accumulating in size and majesty over centuries, each successively replaced when the braying crowd overspilled its limits, or else simply tore it apart in the insane frenzies of bloodlust and aberrance with which the population of Rome was intermittently infected. The arena was built for the mass hordes, and for no-one else. All behaviour was permitted on its upper tiers, where the plebeian scum amassed, crammed together in their thousands. On the lower seating tiers, senators, merchants and wealthy visitors to Rome sprawled on more spacious seating, their attention often diverted to vitriolic in-fighting and score-settling among themselves. In between the rich and the scum, a scattered array of philosophers, magicians and dissidents sat under the close gaze of the imperial bodyguards, since they could be a source of potential trouble. The philosophers often dissimulated their excitement at witnessing the combats by affecting an air of disdain, discussing the futility of life with their companions, while the magicians spent their time prophesying the utter annihilation which would be Rome’s due fate.

Poised above the infinitely extending mass of screaming, hooting and overheated bodies, in an enclosed and luxuriant area which gave him the best view of the massacres, the emperor himself could be seen watching the games. It was the emperor alone who had the authority to decide the dates and programmes for the games; an emperor such as Caligula who could be observed relishing every moment – entranced by each beheading, mauling and disembowelment – won the immediate adulation of the crowd. All emperors knew that the most effective pacification of the otherwise rebellious and unruly plebeian scum could be achieved via the most visually spectacular and technologically sophisticated games, with the maximum number of blood-drenched fatalities. The arena became stage to a form of primaeval snuff theatre, a controlled catharsis of unalloyed carnage where the shrieks of the butchered were countered by antistrophes of sexual ecstasy from the onlookers. The importance of ensuring that the games were staged lavishly and regularly was paramount; games could be scheduled to coincide with particular festivals or to mark the anniversary of great events and military victories in the history of the Empire, but could equally well be concocted whenever the plebeian mob showed signs of unrest, or simply when the emperor’s deviant whim dictated that they should be held.

The arena was the one place where the lowliest human detritus of Rome could make their voice heard by the emperor. And, if his favourite gladiators were winning and if he was feeling sexually satiated, the emperor could indulge even the most obtuse demands or comments. Short intervals in the combats were assigned for these public interviews between the emperor and his subjects. One by one, a few of the spectators would cautiously get to their feet and yell their contribution out over the echoing arena towards the recumbent emperor. Many emperors liked nothing better than to exchange inane quips with the most mentally damaged of their subjects, in order to show themselves off in the most favourable light. And every emperor – except Tiberius – welcomed ribald repartee of any kind: the more obscene, the better. Mild insults about their inbred physical peculiarities could be levelled at the emperors by the assembled scum (themselves habitually deformed, mentally abnormal and freakish) at such moments, and taken in good heart by even the most murderous tyrants. However, all emperors without exception were notably unreceptive to appeals for particular monetary levies to be lifted, especially if the income from such financial burdens on their subjects could be channelled directly into the capacious imperial coffers. Both Caligula and Nero would unhesitatingly order the slaughter of the hapless person making such an outrageous request, together with the several hundred people sitting around him, who had been contaminated by association. The order would be carried out instantly by the sword-wielding imperial bodyguards, and a mass stampede towards the arena’s labyrinthine exits would invariably entail the further deaths of several thousand crushed individuals.

The dates of major gladiatorial combats, each usually lasting for one to two weeks, were announced by erecting notices on tombstones in all of the cities, towns and villages of the Empire. Although most provincial places had their own minor arena and games, the spectacular events staged in Rome itself, under the divine gaze of the emperor, possessed an irresistible attraction. From all over the Empire – from Gortyn in the south to Vetera in the north – the peasants would abandon their animals and crops, the merchants would neglect their business affairs, and the prostitutes would discard their clients in mid-fellatio, and set out in a mass convergence upon the capital. Gangs of brigands would often waylay the would-be spectators as they passed through wild areas, leaving them messily garrotted and hanging from trees, their purses emptied. When the surviving travellers finally approached Rome, often after a journey of many months, the massively over-populated city threw out towards them a sensory tidal wave of raw exhilaration mixed with human and bestial stenches. The wastelands around the arena became saturated with improvised tents, although many spectators simply slept exposed in the open air. The native inhabitants of Rome fleeced and robbed the great influx of visitors, and the intricate tariffs of prostitution (a triple penetration topped the list) soared. Since the entrance to the games was always by free admission, the moment when the arena’s gates were opened at dawn proved acutely dangerous, since a swarm of seventy to one hundred thousand crushed-together bodies would try to enter all at once; this was another source of mass fatalities through suffocation. Although a separation between the male and female spectators on the upper tiers of the arena was ostensibly prescribed, it was never enforced. Once the audience was seated, the games would begin immediately – with some summary executions of criminals, purely to whet the crowd’s appetite for the far more entrenched combats to come – and would continue, with short breaks every few hours, until the fall of darkness.

No spectator ever left the place they had seized on the tiers: if they needed to urinate or defecate, they would do it on the spot. The human bodies were packed together so closely (often seated on rough wooden benches, although in provincial arenas it was customary to sit directly on the stone tiers) that, as the day went on, huge clouds of steam would rise up from that corporeal overload, and the arena would appear as a heated human cauldron. The vocal noise was unbearably loud, sustained even during the intervals when no conflict or killing was taking place, since the crowd would utilize those moments for acrimonious disputes about the ranking of particular gladiators: such disputes were often resolved only by knife-thrusts discreetly exchanged between the quarrelling factions. At the fall of dark, when the emperor departed and the games concluded for the day, the crowd would reluctantly file out of the arena. Nothing held any importance for them except the next day’s continuation of the spectacle, and so they would usually throw themselves to the ground, as close to the arena’s entrance as possible, and try to sleep for a few hours, their ears still ringing with a ferocious noise of screams and taunts, mixed with the echoing cries of the maimed combatants.

In the arena, the intricate regime of atrocity at ground level was mirrored by the differing layers of sexual activity underway among the spectators, as the tiers of seating ascended upwards, from the elite of Roman society to its ultimate dross. The preferred sexual act among the aristocracy was invariably fellatio, and the young male and female companions of the elderly senators and merchants were selected for their expertise and subtlety: those sex acts took place almost invisibly, with hands and mouths working in stealthy gestures, all the more sophisticated for their covert nature. But up on the highest tiers of the arena, such delicacy was unnecessary, and the crowds emanated a relentless cacophony of sexual exclamations and neural furore. In the domain of heterosexual acts, the preferred position was with the young woman crouched over the sitting man, both of them facing out towards the struggles in the arena as the woman moved on the man’s penis in a rhythm designed to exactly match the rhythms of the combat below – slow and wary at first, and then increasingly frenzied. Often, when a revered gladiator executed a particularly expert sword-thrust, the woman would open her robe as a mark of adulation, revealing the hard-nippled expanse of her breasts and the penis moving in and out of her vagina. The man would be gasping over the back of her shoulder, trying to maintain a clear view on the action below as the woman’s spasmodic movements became ever more erratic. But buggery too was a preferred medium of sexual exchange on those high tiers of the arena, both for homosexual and heterosexual participants, and also for those to whom the division between the two sexes evanesced in a miasma of lust and momentary freedom. The same, crouched posture was often adopted; but an equally attractive alternative would be for one participant to kneel on the benches, with a perfect view on the carnage far below, while the other participant stood behind, his penis incessantly grating its way into his lover’s rectum. Obviously, this variant would often cause friction within the saturated ranks of the other spectators, since it would block the view of those seated in the rows behind the copulating pairs. The best solution was for those who preferred that sexual position to monopolize the benches at the very top of the arena; as a result, the highest summit of the amphitheatre was crowned with a circle of wild sodomites, whose screams of ecstasy or torn anal muscles gave an urgent texture to the more generalized sound of vaginal penetration and its resulting cries. But many of those cries were, in any event, drowned out in the thunderous bloodlust commotion of the rampant crowd.

The expert capacity of the sexual participants to regulate their acts in intimate tandem with the gladiatorial combats in the arena below was a matter of considerable pride, both for the wealthy denizens of the lower tiers and the plebeian scum of the upper tiers. The crucial factor in that proximity of bloodshed and ejaculation was engrained training and practice – all of the participants demanded a finesse of timing in their couplings. Such expertise sometimes brought great wealth to skilled participants, such as those youthful prostitutes servicing the rich merchants who were able to make their client’s semen shoot in a great rush into the air (or into their mouths, depending on the employer’s preference) at the exact moment that the struggle below also achieved its resolution. The young girls and boys, able to modulate their buccal pressure with the maximum proficiency, had been intensively schooled, under the tuition of retired prostitutes known as “fuck-masters”; exceptionally well-endowed slaves were strapped down and compelled to undergo bouts of fellatio often extending over twelve to fourteen hours, until their members were so chafed and sore that they would plead to be re-assigned to latrine-cleaning duties. On the upper tiers, such sexual erudition was absent, but a high degree of co-ordination was still achieved, between the moment of orgasm and the moment when the gladiatorial combat ended in the extinguishment or capitulation of one or other of the parties. The eyes of the spectators shifted incessantly between the combat below and the facial contractions and exhaling mouths of their lovers. All sex acts were strictly suspended for the periods when the crowd awaited the raised or lowered thumb of the emperor, even when ejaculation or orgasm were imminent. Then, amid the roaring celebration or dissent which accompanied the emperor’s caprice, a flood of multiple ejaculations would immediately convulse the crowd.

The pre-eminent aberrations of the crowd would sometimes result in such a rigorous doubling of carnage and orgasm proving impractical. Carried away by the elation of the arena’s atmosphere or by the victory of a favoured gladiator, great chains of copulating figures would amass on the highest tiers. Although three, four or even five spectators could, with much practice, seat themselves on each another’s laps, gripping one another by the shoulders and anchoring themselves via their sexual organs, that precarious, tower-like configuration presented the danger of the figures suddenly toppling over at the moment of orgasm; the sheer slopes of the arena meant that a fatal fall could result from such an over-balancing. The more usual arrangement would be to cordon off a rear bench and allocate it exclusively to multiple sexual constellations. A special problem would arise if a spectator had brought a dog or other large animal along to the games (after all, everyone and everything was entitled to free admission), since sexual combinations of human and bestial figures proved to be volatile arrangements: a dog with a penis lodged in its anus and its own penis moving at speed in a vagina would not necessarily be sufficiently attentive to the nuances of the gladiatorial conflict below, and would fire off its semen at inopportune moments. But, on the whole, the sexual regime of the arena’s tiers took its cues from those of the combat below, and the endless waves of acclamation which accompanied the slicing of a defeated gladiator’s throat were always mixed with the guttural and ecstatic cries springing from the accomplishment of innumerable sex acts.

The spouting trajectories of blood which punctuated and concluded the gladiatorial combats also had their close counterparts within the crowd. Strategies of power and revenge were at work here. Even the most senior senator would sometimes find his dignity had been ruffled by the spattering impact of a rain of semen onto his bald pate, launched from somewhere further back in the near-perpendicular seating tiers. The crowd watched both for the moment when a stream of rich arterial blood would issue from a wound pierced in a gladiator’s flesh, and also for the simultaneous gush of sperm from those in their more immediate proximity. A skilled prostitute, highly trained in the art of fellatio, could direct the geyser of an ejaculating penis towards the head of one of his or her employer’s enemies; a direct hit would always be rewarded with a generous payment. Nothing pleased a senator or merchant more than to see his rival or enemy turn towards him, his concentration on the games broken, and glare upwards as the trails of semen dripped down from his apoplectic forehead, trying to search out its source. But for the purists, such as the dour philosophers, such worldly or score-settling uses of ejaculation were perceived as deeply undignified, and they would simply shoot their semen as far into the air as possible, as a gesture encapsulating the futility of all earthly ambitions. Sadly, the high barriers which surrounded the ground level of the arena – ostensibly erected to prevent the wild animals used in bestial combats from leaping among the spectators – prevented the crowd from ever covering the gladiators themselves (either in derision or in adulation) with the tribute of their semen.

One particular sexual spectacle of the arena was reserved only for exceptional occasions. This coincided with those extravagant events designed by the more exorbitant emperors, Caligula among them, which involved flooding the ground level of the arena through a network of water channels, in order to stage simulations of great naval battles. Immense ships would enter the arena and lock together in conflict; the participants often drowned in the seething water or were obliterated by broadside attacks. Invariably, the engulfing of the arena in water comprised only a small segment of the day’s entertainment; the rapid system of drainage enabled the ground to be once again dry and pristine for the next feature of the programme. Such floods naturally required an appropriate reaction from the arena’s spectators, and co-ordinated ejaculations were the order of the day. At the climax of the sea-battles – when one faction had bloodily triumphed, and the simulacrum of the ocean had served its purpose and was about to be drained – a collective gush of semen would signal the crowd’s appreciation of the emperor’s spectacular benevolence. Even those in the crowd without the luxury of a facilitating prostitute or sexual partner were expected to include themselves in that fluidic outburst. They would unleash fountains of urine at that moment of mass ejaculation, so that a gathering wall of semen and urine would descend, in monsoon-like showers, from the top to the bottom of the arena’s levels.

At the end of each day’s games, it would fall to the slaves assigned to the cleaning of the arena to mop up the accumulated semen and urine from the seating tiers. Just as the gladiators left a morass of blood and rawly severed body parts at ground level, the spectators too had their own duty to imprint the stone of the arena with their corporeal deposits. It was a difficult and dangerous job to prepare the seating for the next day’s crowd, and the cleaners would often slip on the treacherous surface and plummet to oblivion from the highest tiers of the arena, where the residue of semen was at its most dense. The cleaners would discover the left-behind corpses of open-eyed spectators, especially those elderly figures whose orgasmic tumult – often undergone beneath a relentlessly burning sky, shaded only by an overhead canopy which was shifted by sailors during the course of the day and offered the dross of the crowd little protection – had led to cardiac arrest and a swift death. The last echoes of the crowd’s screams still hung in the darkening evening air, as the hundreds of slaves worked to channel the sperm and other debris out through stone channels, allowing it to course through a complex of specially-designed chutes, until it was finally ejected from the arena and landed in the dust of the wastelands that surrounded the magnificent amphitheatre, often drenching the people who had camped there.

Every emperor knew that he must himself be seen masturbating during the games, or being assiduously serviced by the Empire’s most skilled prostitutes, in order to win the maximum acclaim from the crowd. Caligula, who was renowned for the size of his organ, was always ready to unveil it before the crowd, which responded with gasps of incredulity and adoration. It proved to be a key factor in Caligula’s great popularity with the plebeian population of Rome, from the most abject scum upwards. Everyone remembered that Julius Caesar had refused to unsheathe his penis before the crowd, preferring to affect disdain for the sexual spectacle of the arena by reading dull administrative documents during the games. And the emperor Tiberius had been of such a terminally dour disposition that he had refused to even attend the games at all. Those figures were remembered with little affection, as having created nothing of the essential civilization of Rome and as having provided little entertainment for the edification of its voraciously demanding citizens. Caligula, of all the Roman emperors, best understood the fragility of the membrane that separated death and sex, just as he also perceived the ephemerality of the division between anal and vaginal sexual muscles. The arena exacted great sacrifices from everyone who entered it, and most of all from the emperor himself. To wholly fulfil the vital art of sex and death, the corporeally living god Caligula was finally ready to die in order to accommodate the ultimate desire of his expectant subjects, and did so, provoking a sensory seism which came to mark the supreme moment of Rome’s perverse history and aberrant civilization.

The entrance of the gladiators provoked the greatest neurally-detonating rush of noise and sexual energy. Below the surface level of the arena, the gladiators began to make their way through the labyrinthine tunnels which criss-crossed its subterranean vaults. Along the way, they passed by the cages of the wild beasts that would appear later on in the day’s entertainment. The lions and panthers roared and lashed out with their razored paws at the gladiators’ legs. The floors of their cages were equipped with pulley devices to ensure that they could be suddenly levitated into the arena and catapulted into the open air without any bystanders suffering injury. The very foundations of the arena shook in great spasms as the crowd stamped its two hundred thousand sandaled or bare feet in unison, impatient to see the first gladiator appear for the day’s combat. Next, the gladiators passed by the cages assigned for the detrital human elements who would be massacred during that day’s games: a miserable collection of sobbing or cursing figures jammed the cages. The most fierce of them were the heavily bearded, sneering prisoners who had been captured during the perpetual battles waged by the Roman legions against the Teutonic hordes along the banks of the river Rhine. Still wearing their woolly costumes, their grim faces scarred by decades of brutish fighting, the unsubduable Teutonic prisoners spat and hurled invective at the passing gladiators as they awaited their own bloody demise. Finally, the gladiators passed the cages which held the condemned members of the many religious cults which proliferated in the Empire, especially in the region of Judea. The naked and dung-smeared acolytes of magicians and dubious prophets lacked the ferocity of the Teutonic captives, and many of them simply huddled together and whimpered in terror at their imminent evisceration; others, still imbued with psychotic fervour, screamed abuse at the gladiators and warned them that their participation in the ungodly regime of Rome would exclude them from one eden or another.

But the gladiators proved oblivious to every taunt, and as they strode towards the arena’s entrance, their minds were locked into concentration on the combat to come; they attempted to uproot any treacherous trace of panic from their faces or bodies, since a gladiator who showed the least sign of dread or nervous hesitation would be cut down instantly by his opponent. Then, the underground cacophony of screams, bestial roars, whining sobs and maledictions abruptly fell silent as the gladiators emerged from the tunnels and entered the arena. The subterranean stench of terror fell away and the pristine early-morning air struck the gladiators’ faces. After the dank darkness of the underground passages, the sudden daylight blinded them, and for a moment, there was no sound to be heard, either in the arena or in the vast expanse of Rome itself. Every eye in the crowd was fixed upon the gladiators, from the gaze of the basest scum to that of the emperor himself. Then, massive sonic shock-waves resonated in spirals around the arena, pulsing outwards and threatening to send that building, and the entire city around it, crashing to the ground. The gladiators heard the crowd’s great chant: “Gladiator! Gladiator! Now kill! Now kill! Rome demands it!”

The ultimate paradox of the gladiator’s life lay in the contrast between that momentary acclamation and the lower-than-zero status which he habitually held in Roman society. As each gladiator made his ritual greeting to the emperor – “Those about to die salute you!” – he possessed an exceptional nobility and purpose which still echoed with the original role of the gladiator as the liberator of the Mediterranean world from its malicious deities. But as soon as he stepped outside the arena, the gladiator was back in his usual sphere of unrelenting tedium, scorn and buggery. Innumerable mosaics and carvings were created, throughout the Empire, depicting gladiators in the heated combat which was their authentic element, with one elated gladiator about to plunge his sword or trident into the exposed throat of his exhausted opponent: such images served as exciting sex aids for their wealthy owners. But the everyday life of the gladiator generated no compulsive engagement for anybody, apart from the sexual hangers-on who dreamed of having their vaginas and anuses full of the fresh semen of the same gladiator that they were now seeing in the process of being cut into bloody pieces of slaughtered meat in the arena. Some gladiators had futile ambitions to finally leave their profession and become farmers or slave-drivers, but only the most unexceptional among them actually received the wooden sword of cowardice from the emperor which showed that they had been allowed to cast off their gladiatorial status. Few actually made anything of their subsequent lives, and it was a familiar sight in the most backward parts of the Empire to encounter a wandering ex-gladiator, destitute and starving, who was ready to commit any act of murderous or carnal depravity in exchange for a dry hunk of spelt-flour bread. Like ronin, the masterless-samurai class of seventeenth-century Japan, the former gladiators led broken lives of nostalgia and bitter regret, belatedly wishing that they could have died in the arena while hearing the rabid roar of the crowd as their ultimate sensory input. The best of the gladiators would never leave their profession, tenaciously fighting until the end, and finally exiting the cursed world in a blaze of glory.

The number of gladiators whose lives were expended in the most profligate of Caligula’s spectacles could be enormous, extending into thousands of pairs of fighters. His miserly predecessor, Tiberius, had kept the crowd rationed to under a hundred gladiatorial pairings for each games, and prior to that, the first of the Julio-Claudian emperors, Augustus, had only managed a maximum of six hundred pairs. As in all domains, atrocity soared under Caligula’s control of the gladiatorial combats. The main provider of the finances for each games, known as the “editor”, was invariably a fabulously wealthy individual who wanted to ingratiate himself with the emperor by providing an event whose sheer excess, in terms of both violent deaths and luxurious attention to spectacular detail, would make even the most extravagant of previous games appear parsimonious by contrast. The emperor would lavishly reward any outstanding “editor” who managed to provide him with a new dimension of sensory overkill, often by simply re-assigning entire tracts of the Empire to be the lucrative fiefdom of that ambitious aristocrat or corrupt senator. The current ruler of the territory would usually find himself being inexplicably crucified or roasted alive, in order to ensure that he would neglect to dispute the new arrangement. Although the “editor” was nominally in charge of arranging the contents of the games, it was the emperor himself who had the final say; some emperors even took on the role of “editor” themselves if they wanted to stage a particularly spectacular carnage. The technical details of the spectacles were left to the most ingenious of the owners of gladiatorial schools to devise, and tens of thousands of engineers and designers from throughout the Empire were entrusted with making sure that the staging of the gladiators’ entrances and exits – and their confrontations with suddenly-appearing wild beasts such as ravening lions and cougars – were synchronised in such a way as to drive the crowd into the most berserk frenzy imaginable. Innovations such as multiple-bladed decapitating machines, designed to harvest the heads of victims planted in the sand to neck level, were a further provocation to orgiastic abandon.

Once each of the combatants had approached and saluted the emperor – entrusting his life to the most arbitrary, divine caprice – and had received a lascivious wink or languid gesture in return, depending upon whether the muscled physique and easily-discernible penis of the gladiator appealed to the imperial eye, all of the gladiators then gathered together and began to form a procession which circuited the borders of the arena’s combat zone. The gladiators were grouped into distinct factions, each armed with a different array of weapons; the combats almost always matched a gladiator with one set of weapons against another with a dissimilar set. One faction had their bodies covered almost entirely in protective leather and metal costumes, and carried small, circular shields, along with sabres and daggers; another faction appeared almost naked, with only miniscule loincloths pulled tightly over their sexual organs, and carried long, oblong shields and hefty swords. The gladiators removed their heavy helmets for a moment, allowing the straining crowd to pick out their favourites, as they screamed in wild adulation. Because each gladiator only appeared in the arena at intervals of every four to six months, the crowd eagerly convulsed with the fulfilment of lengthy anticipation whenever it recognized the face and body of an exceptional or preferred combatant. And the gladiators themselves were invariably eager to start fighting, after their long months of forced seclusion and mind-numbing monotony in the sex-reeking barracks. Although they often formed brusque, monosyllabic friendships with their fellow gladiators in those confined quarters, the raw elation of the arena instantly shattered any such bonds, and the eyes of the gladiators scanned their adversaries with excoriating menace.

Although the combat pairings of gladiators were ostensibly determined at the last minute, and left to chance, with a drawing of lots, this was entirely a bogus facade. The combats had actually been decided weeks beforehand, painstakingly arranged in order to provide the crowd with a grandiose spectacle of well-matched and gruelling combats, interspersed with instances of the most gratuitous killing. It was essential, over the long day in the arena, to maintain the crowd’s level of acute cardiac adrenaline, and that could never have been left to chance. The crowd would swiftly turn against any “editor” who failed to provide them with a sufficiently intricate neural thrill coupled to the unrefined butchery which they craved; any badly-managed spectacle would usually result, at the end of the day, in the “editor” himself facing public disembowelment and simultaneous crucifixion in the centre of the arena, as a suitable compensation offered to the restive crowd by its emperor for lax or disappointing entertainment. The gladiators were informed of the running order and combat pairings several days in advance, at their barracks, in order to give them the opportunity to thoroughly bugger their opponent into subjugation as a prelude to the more murderous part of the confrontation. So, while the charade of the drawing of lots went on, the gladiators would look at one another with raised, blasé eyebrows, while the gullible crowd waited with baited breath.

After the combat pairings had been announced to the crowd, drawing from it gasped exclamations of pleasure or frustration, the gladiators would make one final processional circuit of the arena, before the combats started. A nervous gladiator making his first appearance would often involuntarily glance upwards, towards the high tiers of the arena, and see endless swathes of plebeian scum with their faces contorted in anticipation of the carnage to come; this was invariably a mistake, since the sight of that moronically salivating human debris would unfailingly terrify the young gladiator, coating his face with a sweat of abject fear, and ensuring that he would become the moribund combatant, unceremoniously carried out from the arena, feet-first and open-arteried, within the next few minutes. The more experienced and nonchalant gladiators knew never to look up at the crowd until their bout was over, by which time everything would be settled, and they would either be dead on the ground or else at the receiving end of a momentary torrent of exhilarating adulation. Finally, two of the gladiators would step forward. After a prolonged session of eye-to-eye glaring as they circled each other’s fast-breathing bodies, their feet kicking up the earth and dust of the arena as though in utter derision of their opponent, the two gladiators finally closed in on one another and the combat began.

Not all combats were evenly matched. Often, to give the crowd a brutal sensory rush of the most invigorating kind, and to rapidly moisten its collective sexual organs in preparation for the more virtuoso performances to come, the day’s bouts would commence with several examples of pure atrocity. A grizzled old gladiator with a hundred victories under his belt would calmly face a beardless, inexperienced gladiator who, only a short time before, had been herding pigs in the Calabrian hills, prior to receiving “the true call” to Rome. The young gladiator would make a show of curling his lip in derision at his relentlessly advancing opponent, and would execute a textbook defence with his shield, but the elderly gladiator would know just the right moment to feint to one side, exposing the young gladiator’s throat to attack as he attempted to counter his opponent’s ruse. In the very same second that the young gladiator realised that he had been tricked, he would find the blade of his adversary’s sabre had been embedded six inches into his gullet. Few of those combats were offered for the arbitration of the emperor’s thumb, since they had their place in the day’s programme as foregone conclusions. The expression of the young gladiator’s eyes would metamorphose in an instant from defiance to a look of total incredulity as the indented blade of his opponent’s sword severed every major neck artery in a skilled sawing motion, sending vast gouts and spurts of arterial blood in carefully choreographed patterns around the arena. A skilled gladiator could divest his opponent of fifty per cent of his total blood content in the space of five seconds, but the mark of a truly top-rank gladiator was the ability to direct that pumping blood-flow into aesthetic configurations: the name of the emperor could be spelled out on the sand and dirt of the arena floor, and alongside it, the shape of the imperial Roman eagle itself would appear in black-red lines of blood. The young gladiator would then discover that, with the final adept movement of his artful opponent, he had been completely decapitated. The ultimate test of his adversary’s skill would be to make the severed head fall to the ground in such a way that its position exactly dotted the single “i” of the revered name “Caligula”, inscribed in blood. In the few seconds before the blissful unconsciousness of death set in, it only remained for the lips of the young gladiator’s severed head to silently mouth the emperor’s name, while the headless body itself slowly slumped to the ground in a blood-sodden tangle of limbs. The crowd would experience a moment of soaring neural ecstasy as they watched the young gladiator’s summary execution, but that gratuitous sensation rapidly diminished, and they would begin to whistle and hoot for more punishing demonstrations of slaughter.

The combats then began in earnest. In many of the pairings, the weapons at one gladiator’s disposal would necessarily put him on the defensive, so that he had to keep parrying his opponent’s sword blows with his shield, until the moment came when the sheer intensity of those blows had exhausted the opponent. The defensive gladiator could then reverse his strategy and advance, charging down his fatigued opponent and gaining the upper hand. The crowd would follow every nuanced twist and turn of the combat, entranced, emitting collective exclamations, gasps of amazement, grunts of indignation and screams of approval as the bout progressed. In other, more evenly matched permutations of weaponry, the gladiators would struggle for long minutes on end in an intricate exchange of sword thrusts and counter-movements, until one proficient or unexpected blow would deeply penetrate flesh, with a sudden hissing sound that the crowd knew and loved. The wounded gladiator would then sit back on one heel with his eyes fixed on the ground; his adversary positioned his sword at an angle against the exposed throat. The vital moment had arrived for the imperial adjudication, and all eyes in the arena turned towards the emperor.

The emperor’s thumb was the most crucial and most capricious organ in the entire arena. If the combat had come to an abrupt conclusion, the emperor would often be caught with his thumb, together with the rest of his fist, embedded in the anus of an exquisite young slave brought from Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where civilization had originated and muscular rectal elasticity was highly prized. The emperor would then have to retrieve his thumb at short notice, much to his dismay; such interruptions would usually provoke a psychotic fit of imperial petulance that led to a firmly down-turned thumb and the gladiator’s immediate demise, whatever the degree of courage he had displayed in the combat. But, on most occasions, the emperor would meticulously gauge the mood of the crowd before making his decision. That mood could never be judged in advance, and because of the crowd’s integral perversity, it could often take unexpected forms: the most inept or cowardly gladiator could receive collective roars calling for his reprieve, while a gladiator who had shown mettle of the highest order could dissolve into sobs of anguish as he heard the crowd braying in unison for his demise: “Jugula! Jugula!” It was invariably the lowest human dross on the upper tiers of the arena who determined the entire crowd’s decision, and the deviance of the plebeian scum’s verdict would often result from their having been too distant, poised high above the arena, to have seen exactly what had happened in a particular bout; occasionally, too, they were unsighted or distracted by wildly copulating figures who blocked their perspective on the action below. Ultimately, though, the mood of the crowd remained enigmatic and inexplicable, almost mystical in its contrary judgements and their vocal manifestation.

The emperor acquiesced on most occasions to the crowd’s mass verdict, however bizarre or illogical it might appear to be; at such moments, an attempt by the emperor to overrule the ferocious will of the crowd might well result in an uncontainable riot that would have seen him floating face-down in the river Tiber, minus his majestical testicles, before nightfall. But on the occasions when the crowd hesitated, or vocalized a split decision, the emperor would seize the opportunity to exert his own perverse authority. He would allow his thumb to waver in a horizontal hold for minutes on end, each slightest tremor eliciting gasps from the crowd’s one hundred thousand gaping mouths. Then, he would suddenly twist it upwards or downwards as though impelled by a definitive muscular spasm. It was divine will in operation. The gladiator who received a negative decision always took the imperial verdict in good heart, and, still sitting back on one heel, now nonchalantly tilted his chin up to the left, baring his pulsing artery to the victor, inviting him to slice through it. He would also tightly grip the victor’s muscled thigh with both hands to steady himself with one final carnal gesture, and then nod his head. The victor would gruffly return the nod, and execute the blow in one movement, providing a dignified and relatively painless death. The expiring gladiator would tense his grip on his opponent’s thigh in a momentary, orgasmic paroxysm, then release it and pivot backwards to sit down, his arms folded and his throat unleashing great spurts of blood, calmly waiting to die.

However, the emperor was sometimes faced with more intricate decisions and dilemmas at the termination of gladiatorial bouts. If the two gladiators were evenly matched, forty or even fifty minutes of gruelling but inconclusive combat could pass by, and the crowd would grow increasingly restless at the lack of a lethal resolution. Neither of the gladiators would want to subjugate himself before the other, since they knew that such an entrenched combat would ultimately have alienated the crowd, which required a steady regime of at least three eviscerations and two decapitations per hour. Finally, the emperor himself would have to step in to call a halt to the combat, by formally accusing both gladiators of the crime of “professional tedium”; they would then face one another and, at a signal from the emperor, simultaneously cut one another’s throats and fall dead together. The insoluble dilemma posed by this outcome was that the victorious gladiator of a combat pair was invariably required to remain in the arena and immediately fight one further bout; when no victor survived, this was impossible. If it transpired that the locked gladiators were among his favourites, the exasperated emperor could simply gesture dismissively at the combatants, ordering them to suspend their bout until a later date, and then throw bags of low-denomination coins among the plebeian detritus in order to distract their attention from such a breach of protocol.

A less intractable dilemma for the emperor occurred when a gladiator, usually on one of his first outings in the arena, would lose his nerve completely and run away from his opponent, battering with his fists on the unscalably high barriers which divided the scowling and hissing crowd from the blood-reeking combat surface. Only one outcome was conceivable in such a situation. The crowd would curse and murmur to one another: “Hoc habet” – “He’s had it”. The emperor would nod brusquely, and the disgraced gladiator’s opponent discreetly stepped away to one side. The crowd grew hushed, and then into the arena strode a golden-costumed dwarf of appalling hideousness. He belonged to a remote hill tribe on the eastern edge of Armenia that had developed an astral level of brutality to compensate for their stunted growth and freakish appearance, the result of millennia of inbreeding. The condemned gladiator would blanche at the array of weapons brandished with an ultimate sophistication by the approaching dwarf. The gladiator’s abject screams would then resonate far beyond the arena, echoing through the city and even the surrounding countryside, and after ten minutes, he would find himself reduced to minuscule cubes of hot flesh scattered over the dirt of the arena. The crowd watched the lethal display in awed silence, and then applauded respectfully as the dwarf urinated on the flayed human cubes and serenely retired from view.

After each bout of combat, a bald-headed and nightmarish figure, the “carrion man”, clothed in tight-fitting black leather and carrying a long-handled silver hammer and a burning poker, entered the arena. He ritually pressed the poker against the sexual organs of the defeated gladiator to determine whether he was alive or dead. If the gladiator screamed, he was alive. If he remained silent, he was dead, and the “carrion man” would strike his forehead with the silver hammer to take possession of his soul, which the grim figure was charged with transporting to hell. On the occasions when a gladiator had received a debilitating wound which had failed to kill him but prevented him from continuing the bout, he would be unceremoniously removed from the arena, on a stretcher pulled by a pony, down to a subterranean annex known as the “finishing-off room”. There, despite the gladiator’s protests that he now preferred to continue his fight or wanted to be returned home to the barracks, a hulking horse-butcher hired specially for the purpose would eventually appear, and soon put paid to the maimed combatant with a few well-aimed strokes of a cleaver.

It was essential that no loose ends were allowed to subsist from the day’s work in the arena. The end of each day of the gladiatorial games had to be marked by a zero degree of carnage, in order for the following day’s combat to begin with a pristine aura of renewed purity. Hundreds of slaves abruptly appeared in the arena and hosed the bloody sand clean with floods of perfumed spring water; other slaves rapidly sorted out the severed body parts and assigned them to a collection of jute sacks. At the same time, the victorious gladiators would gather to salute the emperor once more, and then exited from the arena with the thunderous cacophony of the crowd’s adulation still pulsing in their heads; they retraced their steps through the labyrinthine tunnels echoing with the now-desperate cries of the criminal prisoners and the religious cultists, and returned to their dressing room, where they would grunt at their fellow survivors. The emperor himself would sometimes call by on his way back to the palace to congratulate them, usually arriving at the point when they had removed their battered costumes of leather and were standing naked within a trickling sheath of steaming blood. He would distribute a few gold pieces to their eager hands. After his departure, the gladiators – abruptly scum once again – would anonymously sidle out from a rear exit of the empty amphitheatre and slowly make their way back to their barracks.

Many other acts of slaughter also constellated the games. These took three main forms: duels between criminals, the massacre of dissidents and religious fanatics, and chariot combats. On some occasions, these spectacles of out-and-out butchery were segregated from the gladiatorial combats, which still possessed some faint residue of their original sacred purpose and needed to be cordoned off from the more profane acts of carnage. As a result, the gladiatorial bouts and other events were then staged on alternate days of the games. However, this arrangement remained eminently flexible, with the gladiatorial combats often being evenly interspersed with other entertainments. And if the day’s gladiatorial bouts had failed to yield the required death toll and if the desired lake of arterial blood had not collected on the ground of the arena, then all of the gladiators would be summarily dismissed with one obscene gesture of the emperor’s fist, and it would be time for the real slaughter to start.

For the crowd, the criminal duels could prove as exhilarating in their way as the most skilful gladiatorial bouts. The overriding factor which provided the fascination of those duels was that they could never ultimately be won. Every duel comprised a gruelling fight to the death, and the victor of one pairing immediately had to confront a new opponent. Even if he was totally exhausted from the previous duel, only a matter of a few seconds would elapse before the next combatant was catapulted into the arena from the subterranean cages of the amphitheatre. Nothing convulsed the crowd with greater ecstasy than a demonstration of the futility of human existence – it served to give their ephemeral moment of pleasure on the tiers of the arena a thrilling edge, which always manifested itself in desperate acts of multiple copulation. Sperm spurted in greater intensity during the criminal duels than during any other element of the games. Even the young spectators who disdained sexual interaction while watching the gladiatorial combats – believing them to form a spectatorial experience that demanded total concentration – would reach frenziedly for the nearest penis and jam it into their anuses, as soon as the brutality of the criminal duels had whipped them up to a dangerous level of neural oblivion. The only certain outcome of the criminal duels was that they would leave no survivors. Their participants fought only to live on for a further few minutes, at most a few hours, and that brief extension to their lives would take the form of punishing hand-to-hand fighting of the most ferocious, inhuman kind.

Many species of criminal found themselves condemned to fight in the arena, but the overwhelming majority of the participants belonged to the plebeian scum of the Empire. This factor, too, added to the elation which the massed ranks of human dross in the crowd experienced, since they simultaneously gloried in the deaths of the criminals and also empathized with them – only a slender thread separated the crowd from the criminals down below. The legal code of the Empire had been conceived with such arbitrariness that offenders who had committed exactly the same crime could find themselves either condemned to death in the arena or else released with a mild caution, depending on the whim of the judge who heard their case and the bribes or sexual favours they could offer him. Anything from urinating in a public place to sporting an objectionable amount of facial hair could land the offender in lethal trouble. In the rural provinces, incest and sex with minors loomed temptingly large in every peasant’s mind; such crimes merited immediate condemnation in Tingitana, on the south-western fringes of the Empire, whereas in the moronic northern province of Belgica, no one would dream of considering such everyday acts as criminal or even reprehensible. Criminal fodder for the arena’s atrocities arrived from every far corner of the Empire, but many of the citizens of Rome itself also fell victim to the impenetrable twists of the legal code as it was applied under the Julio-Claudian regimes. Occasionally, hapless senators and merchants became mixed in with the common scum in the criminal duels, especially if the emperor had seized their fortunes and wanted to subject them to a final humiliation before they exited from the cursed mortal world. The Empire’s prisons remained almost empty for centuries, their contents dispatched for public disposal in the arena.

The criminal duels, like the gladiatorial combats, were organized by “editors”, whose principal dilemma lay in ensuring that the duels would achieve the requisite level of eyeball-to-eyeball brutality. Nobody in the crowd wanted to see the two combatants simply throw their jagged swords to the ground and refuse to fight, or run screaming in terror to the edges of the arena to plead for mercy from the howling audience. One solution was to make the criminals ingest a powerful hallucinogen shortly before they entered the arena; this provoked a searing narcotic frenzy which gave each combatant the paranoid delusion that their opponent was the embodiment of Death itself, who had come to claim them. In all cases, the combination of fear and the feral rage induced by the hallucinogen propelled the two duelling criminals into an amateurish but engrossing fight. Other incentives were offered to the more reluctant criminals: if they refused to fight and turned their backs on their opponents in disgust, attendants immediately began to lash them with whips and to thrust white-hot branding irons towards their sexual organs, until they finally turned back to face their adversaries. But the crucial lure for the combatants remained the desire to stay alive, even just for a few more hellish minutes.

An endless stock of criminals was available in the arena’s subterranea, and however rapidly the massacre progressed, more and more wild-eyed figures, invariably naked and armed only with a rusty but razor-sharp sword, could be projected out into the gaze of the crowd. Since almost all of the criminals were untrained in the use of weapons, they would attempt to inflict as many deep wounds upon their adversaries as possible, often simply making mad, lumbering lunges. Sometimes, one crazed criminal would knock the other to the ground, then gouge out his eyes or insanely throttle him. Unsuccessful contestants often ended up with their testicles between their teeth. The crowd loved the ludicrous criminal duels, since unlike the more predictable gladiatorial combats, there existed no set rules, no codes of conduct and no dignified deaths: it was utter annihilation executed in the most clumsy, bungling way imaginable – the equivalent in the Roman era to the no-budget exploitation film, preferred by its adherents to hackneyed and sanitized Hollywood product.

At the end of the duels, one combatant necessarily remained alive; in a few rare instances, a criminal who was particularly skilled in swordplay or driven by unstoppable ferocity could survive from end to end of the day’s combat, notching up hundreds of kills. The crowd would usually spit out the most malevolent obscenities and derision at the criminals, but, if one criminal showed special resilience, the plebeian scum would gradually get behind him and begin to applaud him at each victory. In the face of imminent death, carried along by the vocal adulation of the crowd, the blood-spattered criminal would suddenly experience contrary sensations of hopelessness and euphoria. He would look upwards in dazed disbelief at the precipices of the arena’s tiers, packed with endless swathes of slavering and copulating scum. High up, above the hundred thousand steaming human bodies, a patch of blue sky appeared to indicate the faint possibility of a reprieve. He would triumphantly throw his arms in the air, as though claiming the status of a victorious gladiator, and look with pleading eyes towards the emperor. But it was useless: he was already condemned. Once he had massacred his final criminal opponent, a silence would fall upon the arena. An eight-foot-tall gladiator would appear, wearing an enormous black metal helmet and full visor, and swinging a mighty two-handled axe around his head; he advanced rapidly upon the now-cowering criminal and cut him cleanly in two at waist or chest height, eliciting from the crowd a furious roar of ejaculatory exultation that ricocheted around the vast arena. The day’s spectacle was over, and the satisfied crowd would be left with a final view of the arena strewn with several hundred ineptly butchered human carcasses. The survival rate of the criminal duels was absolute zero.

In the systematic decimation of the Empire’s dissident elements and its religious fanatics, the preferred instrument of death was the wild beast. Occasionally, as a special treat for the crowd, an emperor would also pit gladiators against the beasts. The massive operation of capturing great numbers of ravening animals to be used in the arena’s spectacles eventually rendered entire species extinct, especially in the then-lush forests, mountains and plains of North Africa, whose fragile eco-systems became transformed into arid deserts as a result. Big cats and bears of every kind constituted the particular focus of the search, but the sight of unusual and previously unseen beasts in the arena always sent the crowd into unprecedented fits of adulation for the emperor, who regularly dispatched expeditions of tens of thousands of hunters to bring back such novelties. The gathering of wild beasts for use in the arena became a major industry, with vast shipments of caged animals arriving daily from the far corners of the Empire. They were housed in a zoo adjacent to the amphitheatre, where they were kept in a semi-starved state to ensure that they would be avid to rip the bodies of condemned dissidents and mystics into shards of bony pulp in the shortest possible timespan. From every part of Rome, the animals could be heard roaring away at night, and those terrifying howls were easily audible in the subterranean dungeons where the magicians, revolutionaries and cultists spent their final nights on earth, chained together and subject to torture and humiliation, whenever their brutal jailers felt the compulsion take hold of them to commit acts of sexual atrocity.

The logic of employing wild beasts in the wholesale massacring of the Empire’s wide range of enemies lay precisely in the terror which they engendered in their victims, and in the open-mouthed awe which their appearance in the arena inspired in the crowd’s plebeian detritus. The animal used most frequently in the arena was the legendary Libyan lion: the most magnificent specimens of this mutant species grew to eleven feet in length, with enormous paws armed with razorsharp claws of sabre-size dimensions; even their engorged testicles were as large as a man’s head. The Libyan lion was the ultimate killing machine, especially if deprived of its usual diet: in the wild, on the then-fertile terrain of the Idehan Marzuq, it could lay waste to two hundred wildebeests and ostriches at one sitting. Armies of slaves were expended in the capture of those majestic beasts – they were impervious to tranquillizer arrows, and the only way to subdue them was for a particularly handsome slave to present his shapely, exposed anus to the lion’s mighty sexual apparatus; then, once the act of copulation (which invariably proved terminal for the unfortunate slave, due to unsustainable blood loss) reached its critical point and the lion was momentarily distracted, a gang of a hundred or more whooping slaves would wrestle the lion to the ground and throw a net over it. It was a delicate operation which often failed: the lion would escape again after making short work of decapitating the slaves with its monstrous maw. The captured lions could be pacified by feeding them with almost-infinite quantities of Armenian brandy, the addictive qualities of which put them into near-comatose trances of gurgling tranquillity and rendered them amenable to their long journey over the Mediterranean. But as soon as they reached the port of Ostia, at the mouth of the Tiber river, their intake of brandy would be abruptly ended, sending them into a state of ever-greater rampant fury which reached its pinnacle at the moment of their entrance into the arena.

It was essential for the well-being of the Empire that its enemies – everyone from dissidents and terrorists to zealous cultists and mystical fanatics of every kind – should make their exit in as undignified a way as possible, and the use of wild beasts provided the medium for that degradation. If the terrorists had been paired together in the same way as the criminal duels operated, the scope would have existed for all kinds of final statements of revolutionary vitriol to be yelled in the presence of the emperor and the gullible crowd. But, faced with an enraged and slavering Libyan lion approaching at maximum velocity, its saliva-spurting maw already open to sever its prey’s neck, few dissidents retained the presence of mind to call for a mass uprising of the downtrodden plebeian scum against the oppressive yoke of the psychotic Julio-Claudian regime. Most simply turned tail in terror and fled, thereby winning a millisecond of additional life before the lion caught up with them. For the crowd, such displays of foregone slaughter only provided a modest amount of excitement, even when the dissidents were allowed to group together in gangs of ten and were given weapons with which to defend themselves. The starving lion still annihilated them instantly, ramming two or three protesting heads into its dripping buccal orifice at the same time. The purpose of the slaughter was purely to rid the Empire of its rebellious elements, and the crowd had to accept that and to wait patiently for the more satisfying entertainments of the day’s programme to begin. The arena’s cleaners, however, always preferred the bestial carnage above any other element of the games, since the lions left no human remains to clean up, preferring to gulp down every last scrap of cracked human bone and assiduously lick up the pools of blood.

The decimation by wild beasts of the captured members of the Teutonic hordes could present special difficulties, since those heavily-bearded and scarred primitives knew exactly how to defend themselves against most onslaughts. They were the denizens of the vast Teutoburg forest, on the far side of the river Rhine, where the greatest-ever defeat of the Roman army took place in AD 9: three entire Roman legions had been mercilessly wiped out in an ambush within the glowering semi-darkness of the dripping forest, and the many thousands of dead bodies of the butchered Roman soldiers had, without exception, been defiled by the necrophiliac Teutons. The unlucky survivors of the battle were sexually tortured for years on end, with the captured Roman standards used as sex aids, before the devilish Teutons finally tired of their prisoners and killed them by bloody emasculation. The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest remained the Empire’s own pre-eminent humiliation, and the sight of Teutonic prisoners in the arena invariably whipped the crowd into a frenzied fury. The problem was that the sturdy Teutonic fiends, many of whom stood over seven feet in height, were hard to kill. And they were supremely indifferent to the deadly situation they faced in the arena, obliviously stomping around as though they owned the place, and directing obscene and provocative gestures at the crowd and even towards the emperor himself. Confronted with an assault by a crazed but lumbering bear, the unfazed Teuton would nonchalantly wait until the bear was breathing into his face, and then stun it with one mighty punch to the forehead, before strangling it to death. And as a lion or tiger leaped towards the Teutonic savage, he would suddenly thrust his fist into its open maw, grab its tongue, and twist it around sharply, thereby choking the beast to extinction. The only solution was to send into the arena those beasts which the Teutonic thugs had never seen before, and were unsure how to defend themselves against, such as Mediterranean bulls; charged by an enraged bull with its spiked horns aimed at their stomachs, the Teutons would soon find their intestines had been looped around their kneecaps.

In the massacre of the religious cultists, the potential existed for more compelling displays for the benefit of the atrocity-avid plebeian scum. The more resolute of the fanatics and magicians would stand their ground in the face of the approaching wild beast, loudly invoking their deity and insisting that the lion or other animal should be transformed into stone or dust. Few lions would be stalled by the cultists’ imprecations, and would simply charge into the pompously proselytizing figures and tear them limb from limb. The only prisoners capable of halting a lion’s onrush were the skilled magicians who knew how to execute a complex series of waving hand gestures and vocal expulsions that would instantaneously hypnotize the lion and render it docile. It would roll over onto its side, purring. The magician would then look around at the already moronically stupefied spectators and begin to direct the same effective hand gestures at the crowd itself. The spectacle’s “editor” then had to act quickly, unleashing a further ten lions into the arena; they would encircle the magician, making it impossible for him to mesmerize all of them at once, and the magician would soon discover that his head had been summarily ripped from his body: his final sensory experience would be the reeking stench of a lion’s gulping gullet, and his last sight would be that of its pulsing, scarlet oesophagus. Among the more notable leaders of sects whose members were slaughtered in the arena was Pachrates, who habitually rode around on the back of a crocodile and once spent twenty-three years in a darkened room learning how to transform a doorbolt into a robot; and Plotinus, who famously had himself burnt alive in a heavily-advertised performance for which the spectators had to buy expensive tickets, and then reappeared some days later in the form of a snake. Part of the crowd’s fascination with the spectacle of the martyrdom of fanatics stemmed from the fact that the uninspiring Roman gods themselves formed an amorphous, barely tangible collection; as a result, the bizarre range of religious sects – and the delusional hold they exerted on their adherents – intrigued the crowd, and even interested those authoritarian figures in charge of designing the Empire’s power regime. After all, the most supremely bizarre and factional of the cultists’ obsessions eventually came to be adopted as the Empire’s official religion, in a cold strategy of power preservation that saw the emperor change his job-title to that of “pope”, thereby preserving the corruption and atrocity of the Empire intact into the Dark Ages.

The chariot combats required a great degree of skill and training, and those criminals or dissidents condemned to pursue a career as a charioteer could survive for several years in their profession, if they mastered the strategies by which they could adroitly slice their opponent into several pieces, or else see him jettisoned from his chariot to crumple into a mangled mass of pounded bones. Enormous sabres were attached at horizontal angles to the chariots’ wheels; a proficient charioteer would attempt, on one circuit of the arena, to knock his opponent out of his chariot by jolting against it from behind, and then, on his next circuit, to cut his adversary cleanly in two at waist level, as the dazed victim tried to stagger to his feet. The chariots would also crack against one other in ferocious splinterings of wood and metal, as the charioteers attempted to shatter one another’s wheel axles. If the wheels broke off, the chariot catapulted into space; the foaming horses veered off in another direction while the charioteer tried to stay inside the rapidly crumbling box of wood in which he stood. This was called a “shipwreck”. If he fell out of his chariot, the combatant faced certain death from being crushed under horse hooves or being exposed to the whipping sabres of oncoming chariots. But if he remained in his stalled chariot, he would then be rapidly decapitated by a sword blow aimed by a passing charioteer. And the flimsy boxes in which the charioteers rode provided no protection in the event that the driver collided with the barrier which separated the track from the crowd, so that his body would be compacted at high speed against that wall, instantly disintegrating in a scarlet liquid pall of bloody pulp that spattered upwards and drenched the closest spectators. The spectators had to keep scanning the entire expanse of the arena’s killing ground with their eyes, since a deluge of blood could appear anywhere, at any moment, as the twenty to thirty chariots thunderously made their invariable fourteen circuits of the track. The rare charioteer who managed to survive a crash at full tilt unscathed was soon pulled to his feet by his assistants, the “agitatores”, and given a restorative drink made principally from the crushed dung of a wild boar, the recipe for which had been devised by the emperor himself. Then the charioteer, invigorated, was given a new chariot and immediately pushed back into the race.

A series of chariot combats often filled the very last day of one games, since they required extensive modifications to be made to the arena, with the demarcation of the race track around its edges. But chariot combats also took place outside the arena, in a special stadium constructed solely for that purpose; it could accommodate three hundred thousand spectators, far exceeding the already vast capacity of the arena. And since the stadium was made of wood, it could be enlarged whenever the emperor judged that the chariot combats should be made even more spectacular, under the eyes of yet more of the insatiable plebeian scum of Rome. Around the stadium, hundreds of prostitutional huts sprang up, each catering to a different sexual deviancy; but the spectators also lost no opportunity to stage sessions of mass copulation and buggery on the tiers of the stadium itself, whenever the breakneck velocity of the chariot combats’ murderous impacts pushed those spectators beyond their maximum neural threshold, into a pulsing sensory terrain where only multiple acts of lustful copulation with strangers could calm their rabid fever. The chariot combats attracted a very young audience who dressed stylishly for the occasion, in anticipation of the sexual furore in the stadium which was certain to result; the women wore bright robes which allowed their neighbours glimpses of achingly-erect nipples and shaven, semen-leaking vulvas, while the men showed off their straining penises through intricate folds in their own robes.

But even so, the stadium for chariot combats lacked the compulsive aura of slaughter and fornication which the gladiatorial arena generated to white-heat intensity. The plebeian crowd was always contented to the utmost degree when the games took place within the echoing precipices of the arena: the undisputed domain of the gladiator.

CALIGULA: DIVINE CARNAGE