Why would you enjoy watching a man being hacked to death in front of you? As a student of the classics, this is one of the questions I always found difficult to answer. What was it that drew the Romans, century after century, to the gladiatorial games? Why would a people whose empire brought unprecedented peace and stability to a large part of the world, whose very mission, in the words of Virgil, was ‘to impose the ways of peace, to spare the conquered and to subdue the proud’, choose to spend their leisure time face to face with the most grotesque forms of violence? 

I thought I had a hint of the answer when watching a re-­enactment of gladiatorial combat at the arena in Nîmes a few years ago. Sprightly actors wielding blunted swords, nets and tridents tumbled about comically, bashing each other with shields, falling to the sand and begging the crowd for mercy. The display was lightly amusing but ultimately failed to engage. It disturbed me to realise that were the lives of those performing in front of us actually in the balance, the spectacle would instead be viscerally compelling. 

I’m not alone in this. Even Christians can succumb to the feeling. In Those Who Are About to Die, Harry Sidebottom recounts a story told by St Augustine of a pupil who detested the games but was dragged to them by friends. He vowed to keep his eyes shut, but