Animals and Public Entertainment

Abstract

In the modern imagination, by far the most gratuitous association between animals and humans in the Classical world is the mass torture and slaughter of animals in the Roman arena, activities which actually took place in the city of Rome as well as in Italian and other regional centres. Even to focus on this phenomenon may be to misdirect ethical analyses of the use of animals for entertainment: horse racing and chariot racing were known in ancient Greece¹ and became mass spectator sports in Rome,² and there is evidence for a significant undercurrent of smaller-scale activities such as cock fights³ and other animal fights (a famous piece of archaic Greek relief sculpture depicts a group of youths pitting a dog against a cat);⁴ but the best literary evidence for the use of animals for public entertainment concentrates on the notorious large-scale games of Rome. However, systematic, state- sponsored use of animals for entertainment had a long history before Rome, dating in the Classical tradition from the Hellenistic period: we have seen Ptolemy II Philadelphus patronizing exotic hunts (see Chapter 11), and a spectacular account of a procession held by him in around 279 BC is preserved in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus (c. AD 190).