Personal Blog #3
This week I have been focused on Gladiators: Violence and Spectacle in Ancient Rome by Roger Dunkle. The center of my focus was how the gladiators trained this week. “Trainees worked out carrying shields made of twigs that were woven in a such a way as to be double the normal weight of wicker-work and wooden swoards that were double the weight of real swords. In the morning and afternoon they practiced at the palus which each recruit stuck in the ground so that it was 6 (Roman) feet high (5 feet 8 inches in modern measurements)” (41). What I found interesting about this is really the amount of the preparation that was put into the training. These gladiators for the most part are prisoners sentenced to the games, so why invest so much training into these people? The lens the group is looking through is a political one seeing how the political problems were masked through spectacle. I personally feel like they really got caught up in it and made a system much like their empires. The games were very structured and had a society all its own to the point where some people volunteered to be in the games.
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