Roman Games
People mean a lot of different things when they say Roman
games. Sometimes they mean the sitting-down games people played with each
other, like dice and checkers. Sometimes they mean the athletic games people
played, like ball games.
Other times when
people say Roman games they mean games that people went to watch, like a
football game today. You can find out about these by clicking on one of the
pictures below:
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Roman people played most of the different kinds of games
that people play today.
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Knucklebones is like jacks today.
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The Romans also played games like checkers,
and a lot of games where you moved pebbles from one square to another in a
grid. We find these grids scratched into floor stones and floor tiles all
over the Roman Empire, in houses, and by guardhouses, and in amphitheaters,
wherever men or women, boys or girls, had some time to waste. |
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The Romans also played more active
games. They played ball games, sometimes with a small ball and sometimes with
a big heavy ball that was more exercise. |
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For the Romans, physical fitness was not so much about
the gods, but more about being able to fight in a war, and so it was not as
much about being graceful and beautiful as it was about being tough.
Romans liked watching other people die. They thought
that was fun, like maybe you think going to horror movies or watching Cops on
TV is fun. They also believed that their gods liked gladiatorial fights, so
that going to the fights was a sort of religious experience as well as being
fun. Other times, you had to pay, and it cost more money for the good seats
than for the bad seats, so the poor people had to sit way up top where it was
hard to see.
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First men in armor
came out and fought against wild animals, like bears, bulls, alligators,
ostriches, lions, or tigers. They captured the animals in faraway places and
brought them to the stadiums specially. Then the Romans treated the animals
badly to make them hungry and mean so they would fight. Usually the men killed
the animals, but sometimes the animals killed the men, which everyone thought
was very exciting.
Around lunchtime there would be a break, and people would eat
their lunches. Some people brought picnics with them: bread, cheese, and
vegetables mostly. Other people bought food from the vendors who were walking
around the stadium selling wine and water and stuffed pastries. While people
were eating lunch, in their seats, there would be a half-time show that sometimes
had singers, dancers or a little play, or sometimes had criminals being killed.
Because the gods loved to see justice done, they also liked to see criminals
being killed.
After lunch sometimes there was another show, where men fought
men. In big cities, these fights were to the death. In smaller towns, probably
the men usually just fought until someone was hurt, though sometimes men did
get killed. The men who were fighting were often, though not always, slaves.
Circus games were of different types: the two-wheeled chariot
races, loved by ladies; The hunts where armed men faced beasts such as tigers,
lions, bears or bulls; the executions of criminals, where the convict people
were thrown to wild beasts or left to die with the pretext of a revocation of a myth or a historical event. But the gladiator’s games were the favorite
ones: the fight man to man.
The gladiators, were trained become fighting machines, they
competed one against the other with the same or different arms, trying to wound
and kill each other. In case of defeat, the destiny of the loser depended on
the public mood: if everybody waved the handkerchiefs, he had his life saved,
if they turned the thumb down, he had to die in the arena.
The athletes of these games were slaves, usually
heroes of the masses.