Farnese Bull, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, inv. no. 6002. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen from Wikisource.
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Violence and Health in Imperial Rome
Violence and Health in Imperial Rome
by Colin Webster
September 9, 2024
Colin Webster examines the iconography and architecture of the Baths of Caracalla, as well as the texts of Galen, to outline how men's fitness in the Roman Empire could be constructed as the capacity to cause harm. He reflects on longstanding interconnections between health and violence.
Colin Webster is an Associate Professor in the Classics Program at UC Davis. His research has explored how tools structure ancient Greek and Greco-Roman conceptions of the body, as well as other aspects of ancient science, medicine, and technology. He is a current co-editor of the Rootcutter.
If you spend any time on TikTok or Instagram reels, you can try an experiment. Because of the ways that algorithms group things together, even a few minutes watching exercise tips or strength training videos aimed at men will mean that you will likely start receiving follow up clips on boxing techniques, martial arts bouts, or, in extreme cases, street fights. The algorithms controlling these videos do not make any explicitly ideological connections between getting healthy and causing physical harm, nor do they even take into consideration what is being shown. They simply bundle content that has grabbed the attention of the same users, thereby revealing an implicit affiliation between exercise, strength, men's fitness, and the capacity to exert violence in the contemporary online world.
Screenshot, Instagram Reels
Such associations are not unique to the subconscious of the moden internet. Martial ideals have long been integrated within masculine conceptions of health at least as far back as the development of the gymnasium itself, where Greek athletes competed in activities derived from the practices of warfare. Nevertheless, the pairing between health and violence has intensified and diminished at various times within different systems of self-care and management. At the beginning of the third century CE in the Roman Empire, the ability to hurt people in an appropriate manner seemed tightly wedded to idealized conceptions of health. Thinking about this moment can help us unpack why ideals of men's health bleed so easily into violence, and how the gendered construction of fitness can incorporate the capacity to harm others, even, or perhaps especially, at a cost of one’s own body. Men's health can then transform into the control over force, whether dolling it out, or absorbing it oneself.
In 216 CE, the imposing Baths of Caracalla were inaugurated, only a year before the emperor's assassination. In design, they followed the pattern of previous thermae such as those of Trajan, with a central axis of natatio, frigidarium, tepidarium, and caldarium, and a transverse axis leading to palaestrae for exercise. Yet the Baths of Caracalla were constructed on a far grander scale. These thermae were the largest imperial baths built at that time, spreading over around 62 acres, SE of Palatine Hill, with the ceiling of the central halls at 125 feet (38m) at their highest points. Visiting today still gives an overwhelming sense of awe at this cathedral of health and hygiene.
Baths of Caracalla, Photo by author.
The power of the architecture was met with equally forceful interior decorations. Although previous baths tended to be decorated with statues of Aesculapius, Bacchus, and Venus that marked the thermae as places of health and enjoyment, the Baths of Caracalla displayed statues of Hercules and Mars, as well as monumental statuary with violent themes. Gone were the frequent invocations to bene lava written on bath walls, or the ideology espoused in the epitaph of Tiberius Claudius Secundus, which exclaims, “Baths, wine, and sex corrupt our bodies, but baths, wine, and sex make life worth living.” ("balnea vina Venus / corrumpunt corpora / nostra se<t> vitam faciunt / balnea vina Venus.” Instead, at the entrance to the western palaestra, bathers were met with two colossal statues of Hercules (the patron deity of the Severan emperors), who was wearily resting after the completion of his labors, the apples of Hesperides visible in his enormous hands for viewers who wander to the statue’s reverse. Carved reliefs also contained the same exhausted Hercules motif on the walls. Other statues included a gladiator (possible Diomedes) armed with a sword and Achilles with the murdered child Troilos slung over his shoulder. In addition, the largest statue from antiquity, the so-called Farnese Bull (shown above), depicted Amphion and Zethus tying Dirce to a bull as punishment for her mistreatment of their mother. These sculptures did not tell you to relax, play some golf, and grab a quick schvitz.
Farneses Hercules, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. Image by Marie-Lan Nguyen from Wikisource.
Achilles and Troilus, Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli, Inv. 5999, Image by Marie-Lan Nguyen from Wikisource
The palaestra themselves were paved with mosaics that depicted a motif of Roman shields, while carved reliefs of weapons adorned the walls. Elsewhere in the bath complex, the floor of the library held dozens of portraits, which depicted athletes holding arrows, javelins, and other implements of martial-themed exercises, several with their hands wrapped for boxing. Older toga-clad judges tempered the display of fortitude with their restrained discernment. The athletes themselves appear in heroic nudity, broad shoulders and thick torsos commanding the space around them. This valorization of violence was not merely about sports, but, as Maryl Gensheimer has argued, appeared distinctly imperial, insofar as the frigidarium also included statues decorated with river gods, including the Nile in the eastern palaestra, while other features seem to allude to Caracalla’s campaigns in Britain and Parthia. In sum, spaces of health were spaces covered in images of powerful, sometimes dangerous, men, whose controlled application of violence had produced the colossal abundance of empire embodied by—and collected within—an imposing health fortress.
Mosaics of Athletes, Baths of Caracalla, 4th c. CE, Displayed at Vatican Museum
The Baths of Caracalla presented a public ideology where fitness and violence met, but this pairing was in the environment of Roman health culture long before the Severans came to power. We can see this in the texts of Galen (129–216 CE), who likely died in the year of the bath’s inauguration (or thereabouts). He himself was operating in a longer Greek tradition that made the gymnasium and its martial associations the space of health practices. In his text To Thrasybulus: Is Health a Part of Medicine or Gymnastics, Galen establishes four different grades of health: (1) illness (someone actively suffering from corporeal malfunction); (2) health “in condition” (someone who has recovered from acute danger, but is still weakened); (3) health “in comportment” (someone who is showing no signs of manifest illness, but is not in particularly great shape); and (4) “good comportment” [euexia] (someone who is in perfected physical condition) (Galen, Thrasyb. 7 = 5.816K). We might call such a person “fit” or “robust.” Galen fills out some details about what the perfected health of “good comportment” looks like, and it embodies the corporeal harmony and proportionality represented by Polycleitus' canon. Whereas our prime modern examples of fitness may be endurance athletes, callisthenic superhumans, or gold-medal-winning Olympians, Galen thinks these extreme examples of human prowess are unhealthy physical comportments to possess, since the compulsive exercise required to achieve these feats damages the body. As John Wilkins has previously discussed, Galen argues that too much exercise can be very bad for you, especially as part of regimens designed to increase bulk and mass, which can lead someone to loss of voice, spitting out blood, or complete paralysis (Thrasyb. 37 = 5.877K). Instead, Galen promotes a physique that is more balanced. Despite his invocations of harmony and proportionality, though, the exercises that he promotes are not easy, light, and melodious. Rather, they still invoke some version of a masculine, martial ideal.
Mosaic from the Villa at Nennig, Germany, c. 2nd–3rd century CE, Photo Wikisource
To gain euexia, Galen prescribes “natural exercises,” including running, jumping, riding, hunting on horseback and armed combat. In other words, it is far better to ride a horse or go hunting than to go to the gym to engage in facsimiles of these tasks (Thrasyb. 41 = 5.885–886K; cf. Thrasyb. 44 = 5.891K). Don’t lift weights. Pick up rocks. Don’t get on a stair climber. Run up a hill. In addition to acknowledging the preference for natural over artificial tasks, we should note what types of exercises Galen promotes, most of which have martial or quasi-martial association. Riding on horseback is great for cavalry maneuvers, while hunting animals can be seen as a variant of campaigns against human opponents. We should note how embedded militaristic values are in Galen’s conception of health if armed combat is deemed an ideal activity to reach peak physical fitness. One might have suspected that an activity presenting a high risk for life-altering (or life-ending) injury would be bad for longevity, rather than promote it.
Galen links health and the capacity for violence in other places as well. In his text On Exercise with the Small Ball, he adopts a more positive view towards the gymnasium (perhaps he got a better deal on a membership), but his construction of fitness in this text still involves martial prowess. Here, he promotes the health benefits of “the game with the small ball,” a sport resembling contact capture the flag. It seems to have involved wrestling, dodging, pushing and leaping. Galen claims that this game trains both the body and soul, insofar as players must learn how to attack at the right time, seize opportunities, take the property of their enemy by force or surprise, and protect what they’ve won (Small Ball 3 = 5.904K). He explicitly likens these skills to the capabilities of soldiers and generals. Galen even revises his earlier praise of running, complaining that not only does running thin the body too much, but it also facilitates retreat in battle, not courage (Small Ball 3 = 5.906K). That is, training for a marathon is not healthy, since it will make you a coward in war. In short, Galen’s notion of euexia is rooted in a militarized corporeal ideal situated within an imperial Roman world. His “good comportment” or “fitness” means being able to mete out violence, albeit in a strategic, effective, and properly controlled manner. His version of perfected health means embodying the capacities of a soldier and general (rather than, say, a grunting gladiator), and if you must, you can mimic war by using a tiny, harmless ball.
Linen Ball from Roman Egypt, British Museum EA46709
Baths of Caracall, Shield-Motif Mosiac Floor, 3rd c. CE, Photo by author.
Perhaps, in the contemporary world, the popularity of superhero films and Bourne Identity-inspired action movies, makes the association between masculine fitness and martial prowess tighter and more attractive. Fighting styles, like boxing and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, have also been popularized as both self-defence methods and great cardiovascular workouts, with competition only a small part of the training goals, if at all. There is a temptation to suspect that the further an audience gets from actual violence and its physical consequences, the more likely they are to see health in martial terms. After all, how many TikTok users—even among the subset interested in strength exercises—are engaging in boxing matches, let alone street fights? At the beginning of the third century CE, though, how many of readers of On Exercise with a Small Ball would have seen combat or been required to exert real violence in their lives?
Surely some of the Romans using Caracalla’s baths would have seen the sharp end of a sword pointed at them, especially in light of the civic conflicts that brought the Severans to power. It is arguably quite bad for your health to possess no ability to defend yourself in an atmosphere of such violence. Still, those who had suffered through violent encounters or military campaigns might have been less likely to view exposure to armed combat as unequivocally good for their health. Perhaps this is why weariness and exhaustion seem to be on display at the baths, most notably in the repeated Hercules figures. The iconography seems to give space for the damage that this version of health implies for those practicing it. This wearied herioc nude transforms the violence exerted by men into violence absorbed by them. It diffuses the tension at the heart of this martial version of good comportment, although only by instituting a bit of a paradox, wherein euexia wearies those who possess it.
Reduction of the Farnese Hercules, After a model by Pietro da Barga (Italian, Florence, active 1574–88), MET Museum 64.101.1462
But what were bath-goers supposed to feel when they saw Dirce tied to a bull? Or the lifeless Troilus slung over Achilles’ shoulder. In these statues, the male figures do not seem as exhausted by their actions as Hercules. It is easy for modern viewers to focus on the victims and to see Dirce and Troilus as the central figures, such that sympathy is the dominant emotion elicited. But in a structure suffused with shield motifs and allusions to imperial campaigns, built by an emperor who had ordered the assassination of his brother and the massacre of tens of thousands of his supporters, perhaps bath goers saw a power that they wanted for themselves rather than their enemies, whether domestic or foreign. Perhaps they laid their gaze on Amphion and Zethus’ bare hands subduing a bull in performance of a harsh but (in their eyes) justified punishment. Perhaps they focused the stone physique of Achilles who has just completed an awful, but required murder. For such viewers, these men inflict cruelty, but that of a supposedly necessary kind. Health in these spaces may not be as perfect and harmonious as Galen espouses, but becomes something that may not feel good, that comes with exhaustion, that is literally hard fought. Men playing the game with the small ball, seeing portraits of boxers, having walked past the battered Hercules to enter the palaestra might be encouraged to see violence, power, and exhaustion as the core practices of health, male prowess, and euexia.
Dwelling on these connections helps remind us that health is a culturally situated concept, and that conceptions of fitness are oriented towards the capacity to perform culturally determined tasks and activities. Health and fitness do not always orient themselves towards longevity, feeling good, or avoiding illness, but adopt the gendered, politicized, and aestheticized ideologies of our broader cultures. Highlighting these associations reminds us that certain ideas of health can reinforce forms of harm, and as those forms of harm are valorized, its associated ideal of health can reinforced, perhaps monumentalized on a colossal scale.
Sources:
Galen. Hygiene, Volume II: Books 5–6. Thrasybulus. On Exercise with a Small Ball. Edited and translated by Ian Johnston. Loeb Classical Library 536. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Gensheimer, Maryl B. . 2018. Decoration and display in Rome's imperial thermae: messages of power and their popular reception at the Baths of Caracalla. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Singer, Peter (ed. and trans.). 2023. Galen: Writings on Health: Thrasybulus and Health (De sanitate tuenda). New York/Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.
Additional Resources:
Delaine, J. 1997. The Baths of Caracalla: A Study in the Design, Construction, and Economics of Large-Scale Building Projects in Imperial Rome. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology.
Jenewein, G. 2008. Die Architekturdekoration der Caracallenthermen, 3 vols. Historisches Institut beim Österreichischen Kulturform in Rome. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenshaften.
King, Daniel. 2023. "Galen's Thrasybulus: Medicine, Gymnastic Trainers, and the technosoma." In Body Technologies in the Greco-Roman World, edited by Maria Gerolemou and Guilia Maria Chesi, pp. 111–128.
Papakonstantinou, Zinon. 2019. Sport and Identity in Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge.
Singer, Peter and Ralph Rosen (eds.). 2024. The Oxford Handbook of Galen. New York/Oxford. Oxford University Press.
The Nikephoros Bibliography of Sport in Antiquity
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