Here I stand, amidst the weathered stones of an ancient Carthaginian amphitheatre—the very stage where venationes and gladiatorial spectacles once held the restless crowds in a fever pitch. I have taken the liberty of posing as a spectator, though, as you might discern, a dissatisfied one. My thumb is firmly directed downwards, a classic pollice verso in the true Latin tradition.
Standing amidst those weathered stones that have outlived both the victors and the vanquished, one cannot help but feel a touch of irony. We project our modern sensibilities onto these Roman ruins, treating history as a theatre of our own moral convictions. Yet, the great irony is that our most enduring mental images of antiquity are so often modern inventions dressed in a toga.
Take the infamous pollice verso. While mentioned in classical texts—such as by the satirist Juvenal—the exact mechanics of the gesture remain a subject of ongoing scholarly debate. The familiar, absolute image of the downward thumb as a death sentence is largely a product of nineteenth-century academic art. A massive role in cementing this myth into popular culture was played by Jean-Lérôme Gérôme’s famous 1872 painting Pollice Verso, which depicted a gladiator awaiting the crowd’s lethal verdict. Thanks to Gérôme’s striking composition, the gesture became a visual cliché, even though actual historical signals in the amphitheatres were far more nuanced, often tied to the metaphor of a drawn or sheathed blade (such as pollicem premere, where pressing the thumb was likely a sign of mercy).
The stones of the amphitheatre are indifferent to our cinematic and artistic tropes; they simply outlast the crowds, the emperors, and our own shifting convictions about a gesture lost to time.
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