Ancient Rome, Violence, and the Super Bowl

With Super Bowl Sunday fast approaching, most people look forward to the usually humorous advertisements shown as well as the game and halftime show.  What the masses do not realize is that like many other things, we take after the Romans in our approach to this event.  Despite the fact that we await Super Bowl Sunday with much eagerness, Rome was probably more excited for their weeks or months of festivals involving people killing other people.  To put it plainly, violence tends to appeal to people in one way or another.  Wars are intriguing, blood and gore are literally spattered all over the film and video game industries.  Humans seem to be satisfied in some way by watching someone get hurt.  Perhaps it reminds us of how we fought our way to the top of the food chain, or maybe it simply compliment’s man’s naturally competitive nature.

Whatever the reason for our love of violence and competition, it helped us create sports like combat or football.  Despite becoming an obviously much more accepting and peaceful society than the Roman Empire, we have still retained our love of violence.  Although football’s violence cannot be compared to that of gladiatorial combat, we can see how it draws from the same ideas.  instead of keeping violence of the Roman magnitude in arenas, we have moved them to the comfort of our own homes or small theaters.  The largest difference between the violence of gladiators and the violence of video games and movies is that modern violence is staged.  We get the pleasure of seeing all 6 quarts of someone’s blood being expelled from some sort of artificially made orifice without all the guilt (not that the Romans even had any.)  Putting differences aside, we are still attracted to the same type of entertainment that the Romans enjoyed without question.  If I were to present a comparison like this to  someone, they would probably come up with a ludicrous answer justifying their unrecognized love of violence.  They would jump immediately to the fact that we don’t actually kill people in the process of entertaining the masses.  This argument holds about as much water (or blood) as a bowl made from cotton.  This argument does nothing to discredit the fact that they find large amounts of violence as hugely entertaining.  I find it quite interesting that people immediately associate violence with evil, but they enjoy it so openly when it is created artificially.  Is guilt-free simulation really the only reason we still enjoy violence?  If so, then why do we make the associations?  The only real answer we can discern is that what we do is okay as long as no one gets hurt doing it.  Unfortunately, this answer does not speak to our hypocrisy at all.