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Collections: On Bread and Circuses

Coming off of some of the discussion of Gladiator II (I, II), this week I want to discuss the place of ‘bread and circuses’ in the narrative of Roman decadence and decline. This is one …

iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nullivendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olimimperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc secontinet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,panem et circenses. So the surface reading seems clear: he is putting the Roman people on blast for letting their authority over public affairs be taken away, usurped by emperors who promise them bread and circuses (we’ll come to if this is an accurate representation of the history in a moment). If the listener (or reader) is left in any doubt as to how Juvenal imagined that process to proceed, he clarifies thirty lines later: “What was it that overthrew Crassus and Pompey and he[ illum] who having broken the Romans subjected them to his whip?” Leaving ‘he’ without an antecedent is a bit of careful obfuscation, as naming either Caesar or Augustus in this space might be taken as a veiled critique of the sitting emperor.

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