Affiliation: University of Arizona, Tucson
Alison Futrell is Professor of History at the University of Arizona. Her research is guided by her interest in the performance and imagery of power in the Roman Empire, with particular focus on spectacle and gender. She is also fascinated by representations of the ancient Mediterranean in modern popular culture. She has appeared in a range of public-facing media, including, most recently, for BBC History Extra, National Geographic, and as a featured expert in ‘Colosseum’, an eight-part series on the History Channel. She is the author of Blood in the Arena (1997) and Roman Games (2006) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle in the Ancient World (2021) and co-creator of the University of Arizona Enhanced Experience for Age of Empires IV.
Although popular culture has long revered the gladiators as the manliest of Romans, posturing before howling crowds of plebeians as the rockstars of their day, the sex of gladiators as constructed by Romans is rather more complicated. This talk tackles the sexualized nuances of the arena, touching on the relative masculinity of gladiators as a group, within Roman society, as well as the how the different styles of combat demonstrated different levels of virility. And what about female performers? How did spectacularization of sex enhance demonstrations of moral and political authority by imperial sponsors? Women in the arena attracted the audience’s focus and disrupted messages of imperial power and challenged audience assumptions about strength, about blood, and about humanity.
One of the key motifs in popular representations of the last of the Ptolemies is Cleopatra’s Barge, a nexus of seduction, pleasure, gratification. For the historical Cleopatra VII, the barge was a political and religious platform for shaping positive interactions with diverse audiences in the ancient Mediterranean, meant to stabilize and secure her realm and shape a vision for future authority, with power strongly founded in the past. In Egypt, Cleopatra reinforced connections with local powerbrokers and processed between ritual centers, a dynamic divine ruler enacting key functions that ensured the practical and sacred continuity of her realm. Her famous Nile Cruise with Julius Caesar was a sacred pageant that featured her newly secured strength as queen, goddess, partner and chosen of the gods. Her notorious meeting with Antony on the barque of Isis was both a ritualized performance of royal leadership and the reassertion of dynastic claims, the launch of a new Empire rising in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Empire! Taxes! Violation! Massacre! In the early years of his reign, the emperor Nero briefly considered withdrawing the legions from the new province of Britannia. Before he could do so, the stability of empire was shaken by revolt, as Boudica, a tribal queen pushed beyond her limits by the excesses of the Roman colonizers, exacted a horrifying retribution, with deaths in the tens of thousands. The revolt of A.D. 60 is presented by Romans as an example of power gone wrong during the hated Nero’s anti-empire. While Nero diverts imperial resources into spectacle, the fringes of empire are disrupted by Boudica, a barbarian who power is sustained by nobility and ancient traditions, a woman whose leadership transcends gendered physical limitations, a queen who champions the liberty Romans found antithetical to the very concept of monarchy. The meanings of Boudica shift over time with different interpretations of gendered power and of the role played by Rome in Britain’s origins.
