"Blood In The Arena, The Spectacle of Roman Power"
Contact:
Alison Futrell, The University of Arizona, 520-626-1586 or E-mail: [email protected]
"Blood In The Arena," a new book by University of Arizona Professor of History, Alison Futrell, examines images of power in the Roman Empire. She looks at how these images were manipulated for political purposes and how this legacy affected modern conceptualization of power. The book is published by the University of Texas Press.
Futrell explores the arena, with its bloody gladiatorial contests and battles of humans against animals, as a key social and political institution for binding together center and periphery, Rome and its provinces. She begins by delving into the origins of the gladiatorial contest, and shows how it came to play an important role in reassessing and rearranging the structure of Roman authority in the later Republic.
Her research involves the larger implications of the arena as a venue for ritualized mass slaughter of human beings. Futrell shows how the spectacle of human sacrifice came to symbolize the very power of Rome, reminding local populations of the Empire's resolve to trade blood for civic order. Thus, the arena transcended mere entertainment. It was an ideology with both religious and political overtones. This wide-ranging study, which draws insights from archeology and anthropology as well as the Classics, substantially broadens our understanding of the gladiatorial contest and its place within the highly politicized cult practice of the Roman empire.
As part of the Department of History's centennial celebration, Futrell has been lecturing on how the images of power in the Roman Empire were manipulated. In her lecture, "The Mysteries of Cleopatra, Egypt's Last Queen," she discusses the Roman creation of a popular myth for contemporary political reasons-a popular myth that has become a legacy of western tradition. The well-known legend is a classic tragedy-the story of a great but flawed hero, Antony, undone by his passion for a beautiful and cunning queen, Cleopatra. He becomes her love toy, tossing the Roman Empire into her lap as a trinket for his mistress. The two are defeated and commit suicide, together in death as they were in life. Is this, however, the reality? Futrell questions whether they was a conspiracy to deny the power of Cleopatra and thereby deny the true story to the world?
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