Timeline for Is there any reason why gladiatorial arenas couldn’t have survived into the modern era?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Oct 27, 2021 at 10:59 | comment | added | Rekesoft | Beautiful as it is, I don't think reading novels (a hobby that has never been shared by more than a marginal percentage of society, anyway) makes you a better person. When the radio was invented it was said that it would end wars, since now direct communication on real time was available. Beautiful, but naive. Blood sports are very much like novels: they were never popular but to a small segment of the population. Enough of them to fill a stadium or a public square, but not really that much people. The moment you let democracy in, it is voted out of legality. | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 20:33 | vote | accept | Z. Schroeder | ||
| Oct 26, 2021 at 16:49 | comment | added | Andrey | According to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History public executions went out of style because of the improvement to the legal system. Only really bad people started to be executes, and the crowds were getting too excited about it, instead of it being a solemn event | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 15:44 | comment | added | KeizerHarm | An ixiptla was not a criminal, that is my point. You have public lynching as the closest modern equivalent of gladiatorial combat, I think the closest equivalent of the honoured sacrifice is a high-prestige high-risk job like astronaut. | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 15:36 | comment | added | Nepene Nep | I'm not sure there's a meaningful difference between me saying gladiator fights were execution of criminals and you saying the Aztecs captured their military enemies to sacrifice in gladiator fights. Gladiators also got nice treatment in the Roman arenas, they were expensive investments. | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 15:29 | comment | added | KeizerHarm | @NepeneNep They had both kinds. The ixiptla was a honoured sacrifice, selected from the war prisoners as the perfect specimen of human perfection. They were treated as a living god for a year before being sacrificed - which was in combat for some gods. | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 15:27 | comment | added | Nepene Nep | I didn't say that the brutality lessened. I said that it became less of an entertainment. People still did it as punishment for people. | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 15:26 | comment | added | GrumpyYoungMan | Not sure that brutality was necessarily lessened after the 1700s; e.g. it wasn't until much later that dog fighting (not the aircraft kind, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_fighting) became unacceptable in the Western world and it seems to be still practiced in many places today. | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 15:25 | comment | added | AlexP | Gladiator fights were not public executions, not even similar to public executions. What is true is that sometimes (not all that often), public executions were featured as events in the games alongside gladiatorial fights and other events. | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 15:25 | comment | added | Nepene Nep | Aztecs had flower wars, where they captured rivals to sacrifice in mock gladiator fights to ensure a good harvest. Your cousin would be in another city and probablu not know what happened, and in the modern day we ensure good harvests with fertilizer, not blood sacrifices. | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 15:16 | comment | added | KeizerHarm | Good answer, but I would add one dimension - fights-to-the-death weren't always executions of criminals; I know that Aztec cultures had such fights as a holy sacrifice. You would be proud of your cousin emulating Tezcatlipoca so well in glorious combat, even if he ultimately loses his head to Quetzalcoatl. I don't think that would necessarily end with egalitarianism - maybe only with secularism. | |
| Oct 26, 2021 at 15:11 | history | answered | Nepene Nep | CC BY-SA 4.0 |