From dmeadows@idirect.com Sat Apr 29 07:26:37 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id HAA18474 for ; Sat, 29 Apr 2000 07:26:36 -0700 Received: from deimos.idirect.com (deimos.idirect.com [207.136.80.182]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id HAA12591 for ; Sat, 29 Apr 2000 07:26:35 -0700 Received: from ns.idirect.com (on-ham-a53-01-122.look.ca [216.154.51.122]) by deimos.idirect.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA39803 for ; Sat, 29 Apr 2000 10:25:15 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <4.3.1.0.20000429102158.00b00100@idirect.com> X-Sender: dmeadows@idirect.com X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Version 4.3.1 Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 10:29:05 -0600 To: classics@u.washington.edu From: David Meadows Subject: Re: Gladiators on the Screen In-Reply-To: <001901bfb1d1$d663a900$5d509318@ne.mediaone.net> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed I was actually impressed, for the most part, by the Dreamworks tie-in show and less so, unfortunately, with the one narrated by Terry Jones (outside of the unpalatable scene of the pale Brit playing gladiator-in-training, it bothered me greatly that they had the Colosseum being built by Trajan and quoted from an author called "Lactanus" -- it also dwelled mostly on 'cruelty'). The Dreamworks thing, though, had the right talking heads in it (Wallace-Hadrill, Coleman ... WH was also in the other one; he's actually become quite the media darling of late) and the first forty minutes or so (i.e. the part not tied specifically to the movie) would definitely be a suitable intro for a class. All that was really missing was some more discourse on the social aspect of the games (a la Jonathan Edmunson). In both, however, when the directors paused to compare ancient bloodlust with modern, I was plenty surprised that both programs chose American football, baseball, basketball and boxing ... not hockey ... as comparisons (although the programs were preceded by an extremely interested program on violence in sports in general). I wonder if Don Cherry was watching ... dm At 07:55 AM 4/29/00 -0400, you wrote: >TLC shows: I caught most of one of these. I'm not too interested in >Imperial history anymore, but I have to admit that the one I watched had >some interesting ideas in it (this might be commonplace, but I was >interested by the point that the gladitorial games stopped as soon as the >barbarians took over in any given community, and the suggestion that this >was because the games were a show of Roman mastery over the wild world >beyond the Empire - though it would have been more interesting if they had >followed that thought to its logical conclusion). > >PTR .