Aerial View Of The Amphitheatre At Arles (last quarter of first century A.D.). The elliptical auditorium was developed in central Italy about 100 B.C. as the home
par excellence of the immensely popular beast-hunts and gladiatorial games; and the Colosseum in Rome (inaugurated in AD 80) inspired a rash of stone versions
in northern Italy and the western provinces. That at Aries is still used for bull-fights, the modern equivalents of venationes.
Even the financial situation of the landowning politicians contributed to the relative abruptness of civic life. It was in fact the fundamental cause of it, as the
landowners drew incomes in cash rentals and the sale of market produce, in a society with few banking facilities, low liquidity ('I am totally involved in farming',
said the Younger Pliny in explanation of his inability at short notice to raise 3,000,000 sesterces to purchase another estate), few possibilities for alternative
investment, and a consequent need to dispose of their surpluses in whatever ways would give them satisfaction, add lustre to their material wealth, and increase their
prestige.
The explosions of colour, pageantry, and popular demonstrations that mark ancient games and entertainments, not to mention their ritualized violence, reflect this
discontinuous pattern of life, much as the disorder and rioting in the cities often reflect the abruptness of the economic conditions that framed it. It was not easy to be
a recluse in an ancient town. Public life was conducted in specific locations, much of it out of doors in a particular area of the city (the agora, flanked by public
buildings, temples, and the senate-house), and the leaders of the society would be known by personal appearance to the population; if things went wrong it would be
known who was to blame. Famine, which could be sudden and extremely local in its incidence, could turn the affection of the people for its leaders into aggression,
when mobs demonstrated in the streets and the landowning politicians fled for safety to their well-provided country estates.
At such moments the upper classes show themselves in one of the more self-interested of their many roles, as they hoard grain supplies to secure high prices in times
of shortage, by physical obstruction and specious argument resisting governors' attempts to bring down the price. For the historian of the city of Rome above all,
social unrest and violence are to the end a central theme, their causes impressively consistent; partisanship over performers and factions in the public games and
races provided by the Emperors and (in the late Empire) the resident aristocracy of Rome, and food shortages, especially of corn and wine. A new factor may B.C.
mentioned here, though it is beyond the scope of this survey; rioting and violence (on one notorious occasion resulting in 137 dead on the floor of a Christian
basilica) over rival claims for the bishopric of the city. We might take these as the remote descendants of the late-republican battles between Clodius and Milo and
the demonstrations in favour of rival triumvirs-just as the ritualized acclamations of the late Empire in circus and theatre descend from the political demonstrations
so frequently mentioned in the Lives of Suetonius and described, with dubious political theory but fascinating examples, in the later chapters of the Pro Sestio of
Cicero. At Alexandria, a city well known for its civic disturbances, riots in the fourth century between Christians and pagans, and between rivals for the bishopric,
appear as the natural successors to the rioting of the early Empire between the Greek and Jewish communities.