Roman Entertainment
By: Alex Denton
Getting started
Theatrical festivals
The ludi scaenici which were the theatrical performances, were very much overcome by the circus games. There were far fewer festivals that saw theatre plays than circus games. The performance written by Terence throughout 185-159 BC was a festival held in honor of the deceased Lucius Aemilius Paulus in 160 BC. Later Terence's comedy The mother in law was performed, and all seemed to go well until all of the sudden someone in the audience shouted out that the the gladiatorial fights were about to begin. After a few minutes his Terence's audience had vanished.
Chariot racing
Roman people had a passion that ran very high when it came to chariot racing, and they also liked to support a certain color team, - white, green, red or blue. Though some of the people could get out of hand which would lead to violent outbreaks, and clashes between opposing supporters. There was four different parties (factiones) to support; the red (russata), the green (prasina), the white (albata) and the blue (veneta).
The chariots built to be as light as possible for speed, and were drawn by teams of two, four or sometimes even more horses. The larger the teams of horses, the greater the expertise of the driver needed to be.
Chariot racing continued
The full length of one of these races consisted of about 7 laps around the stadium of close to around 4000 meters. Each race included multiple tight turns, battling for first place, and fights breaking out between chariots. There were also substantially no rules that were asked of the gladiators. If they were skilled drivers they knew what they were doing most of the time, and there weren't problems with not having rules.
Gladiatorial fighting
In this time period along with the most barbaric types of entertainment which mostly included the games that were gladiatorial. Gladiatorial events included none other than mostly big strong angry men who found pleasure in fighting other men to the death. Most people found entertainment watching these men fight each other, and for the cost of what? There was not a price for townspeople to come and watch these fights, because it wasn't a luxury for the people but it was a right that they had to come and watch people get beat up to the death.