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The aims, scope, structure and cultural background of the present volume are outlined here. It aims to present progressive current thought in the field and indicate directions for future work. It also juxtaposes Greek and Roman games and spectacle, to shed light on similarities and differences in the two cultures, and also to suggest parallels in other cultures, including our own. It aims to facilitate research and provoke thinking in particular aspects of Greek sport and Roman spectacle. The focus of the collection is to an extent in the social contexts of games, namely the evolution of sport and spectacle diachronically and geographically across cultural and political boundaries, and how games are adapted to multiple contexts and multiple purposes, reinforcing, for example, social hierarchies, performing shared values, and playing out deep cultural tensions. This chapter also interrogates the terms for sport today and in antiquity, and presents the high value placed on sport by ‘following the money’ in both eras.

It is axiomatic that the Roman emperor attempted to control the city populace through an ideology of ‘bread and circuses’ (free grain and public entertainment). Yet a riot during a food crisis in 189 ce, which began in the circus and spread to the streets, shows that spectators could be the agents of political interaction at public spectacles rather than merely passive participants, that public spectacles could be organizing events for the non-elite population. It has been argued that crowds in order to form require a ‘notion of legitimation’. Indeed, the crowd at this riot was engendered in part through the long-standing conventions of spectatorship at Roman public spectacles, including 1) public spectacles as venues for popular protest and interactions with the emperor; 2) the custom of arranged seating, including claques, factions, and trade guilds (collegia); 3) common forms of spectator response, such as acclamations.

As the Roman world became increasingly influenced by the spread of Christianity, contemporary social and political practices both shaped and were shaped by the new religion. For Christians the realm of public spectacle was marked by ambiguities, as religious authority figures strove to reconcile these cultural expressions, their origins embedded in commemorations of the pagan state, with their own evolving notions of what it was to be Christian. As Christian emperors co-opted the consolidated circus organization and the racing factions that spread from it, late antique public spectacles became a key venue for the formation of Christian identity.

This article analyses the decline and fall of most forms of Roman spectacle in Late Antiquity, as the empire contracted in some places and collapsed in others. It explores the evolution and development of various other spectacles—especially equestrian games like tournaments, hunting, and palii—in Rome’s medieval and early modern Latin, Byzantine, and Islamic successor societies, which shared many of the characteristics of ancient spectacle in terms of function if not necessarily form. It also examines the privatization of public spectacle and sites of spectacle in the Middle Ages, as well as the enduring impact of the images of Roman spectacle—especially those associated with the hippodrome in Constantinople—as expressions of political power in medieval and early modern Europe.

e (including bull-catching, bull-leaping, and bull-sacrifice), Minoan and Mycenaean frescoes, vase paintings, and stone relief vases depict boxing and wrestling, and competitions with special clothing, protective gloves, and physical restraints or handicaps. Less well known are the depictions of archers, foot-racers, and acrobats. Competition may arguably include artistic representations of game boards and gaming, dance performances, and processions, and descriptions of poetry and musical contests in Homer and Hesiod and of discus throwing in mythology. There is also architectural evidence for enclosing the central courts in the Minoan palaces for protection and seating of spectators. Depictions on eighth-century-bce pottery testify to chariot-racing, musical performances, horsemanship, and the hunt. We also consider passim the participation of women in sport and competition, drawing upon Aegean Bronze Age representations of women archers, hunters, and charioteers, and upon classical mythology for their participation in early foot-races, wrestling, and the hunt.

Despite the bounty of evidence, iconographic and architectural, for spectacles in the Roman provinces, there is surprisingly little information about their organization and presentation by political elites. This evidence does suggest that the mounting of spectacles by elected officials was in effect an obligatory form of payment in return for the power and prestige of high office; these could be considered ‘statutory’ events, responsibilities required for office holders. For this reason, the surviving epigraphic evidence for the marshalling of official spectacles is very limited, as these standard financial obligations were not considered acceptable foci for public praise. Inscriptions and other material that document private spectacles, however, make it clear that the act of organizing and mounting shows was a highly valued benefaction by Roman provincial elites.

Chapter 4 examines the distinctive history of the U.S. Patent Office gallery, which combined national repository, bureaucratic office, and public museum. Its collections included the models submitted by inventors with their patent applications, which offered tangible examples of new legal standards for novelty and utility. Tourists marveled at the model machines on display, connecting them to ideals of national progress and ingenuity, and the gallery’s collections sparked wider discussions of the relationship between nation, invention, and spectacle. Ralph Waldo Emerson drew on an imagined collection of machines to contemplate the relationship between technological novelty and literary originality, while Walt Whitman’s description of the gallery as a temporary Civil War hospital examined the social and human implications of such a strange spectacle. These accounts highlight broader debates about the place of new ideas in a national museum and how such contributions would be defined.

Long before mirrored sunglasses were adopted as a fashion in the 20th century, spectacles with dark green glass lenses were a popular fad in the 19th. We look at several examples, cited in the writings of famous authors of the period. Dark Green lenses were not only viewed as providing relief for bright light, were held to project a certain sophistication of appearance, and they had novelty value that made them popular. But why did dark glasses become such an affectation in the 19th century, and not earlier? What did it suggest?

The 1951 epic Quo Vadis, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, is the most famous adaptation of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel and eclipsed all earlier and later versions made between 1912 and 2001. This chapter is intended to illustrate the complexity of the Quo vadis (novel)/Quo Vadis (film) phenomenon by examining a few representative strands. To a large extent, credit for the impact of Quo Vadis belongs to actor Peter Ustinov, who made Rome’s most notorious emperor more familiar to viewers than any other actor has managed to do, especially through his portrayal of Nero as poet and musician. Ancient sources commenting on Nero as performer differ from what cinemagoers saw and heard in 1951. The spectacular climax of novel and film is set in the arena. Quo Vadis radically changed Sienkiewicz’s conception, which had been preserved, albeit in abbreviated form, in earlier films and would be presented at length only in 2001. By contrast, the Italian television adaptation of 1985 is a variation on the MGM version. The parallels to Sienkiewicz’s strongman Ursus in and beyond all these films are particularly illuminating. The title of Sienkiewicz’s novel, which quotes the Apostle Peter’s question to an apparition of his Lord, became a household phrase and has been applied in countless contexts since; a few telling instances are considered here. The chapter concludes with brief comments on the recent parody-plus-homage to Quo Vadis in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! (2016).

Starting from the premise that colonialism begat the racial systems that continue to undergird hierarchies of power and privilege, the chapter argues that colonial time-spaces (chronotopes) remain productive of racial orders. Even in ostensibly postcolonial contexts, colonial-era racial logics have long half-lives and often continue to circulate through performances that represent or re-enact colonial time-spaces. The chapter traces the semiotic workings of racial performances, from mundane everyday interactions to staged spectacles (and back), in order to examine how they selectively highlight or erase the genealogies connecting past and present and performatively enact configurations of racializing signs that can mark physical bodies, social types, locations, voices, dispositions, and practices, usually in overdetermined, if not necessarily consistent ways. The chapter draws upon critical theory and ethnographies of performance in the Americas to discuss the case of Cuban bozal, a figuration of “untamed” African presence in contemporary Cuban religious and folklore performances.

What others think matters for internal deliberation. Perceptions of public opinion—of the distribution of opinions across the entire community—are important for the same reason. Informal networked deliberation can give citizens only a partial view of the support any opinion or claim enjoys community-wide. This chapter discusses one important deliberative contribution mass media can make to citizens’ internal deliberations: providing information about the incidence of opinion and stakes in society at large. I discuss different ways in which the media can more accurately convey frequency information through its design of public spectacles. The selection of arguments and opinions they feature, how they feature them, as well as the selection of public speakers to voice them, all matter in this respect.

The reception of Amadis changes in the eighteenth century, with a play (Granville’s The British Enchanters (1706) ) and an opera (Handel’s Amadigi di Gaula (1715) ) presenting the romance for theatrical consumption and emphasizing its overt spectacularism in a revivified Amadisian aesthetic. In a parallel development, Amadis was mined by Shakespearean editors, Hispanists, and literary historians such as Isaac Reed, John Bowle, and Thomas Warton as indicative of early modern taste and a means of elucidating the works of Cervantes and Shakespeare. The chapter closes with an account of the ‘spectral’ relationship of Amadis to early Gothic fiction, arguing that the ‘ancient romances’ invoked in the preface to the second edition of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1765) are none other than the libros de caballerías, and showing how Lewis’s The Monk (1796) takes the traditions of peninsular ‘fancy’ in an entirely new direction.

This chapter takes as its starting point William Wordsworth’s ascent of Snowdon in 1791 and Keats’s ‘fag & tug’ up Ben Nevis in 1818 to show how the writers participated in the period’s developing mountaineering culture. It investigates the visual dimension of the two poets’ ascents, locating their climbs within the optically-motivated culture of Romantic-period climbing and showing how ascent made possible new ways of seeing. To trace the developing aesthetics of elevated viewing, the chapter examines a wide range of travel texts by writers including the following: Thomas Pennant, John Brown, William Hutchinson, Charles Moritz, Ann Radcliffe, James Denholm, Adam Walker, John Stoddart, William Green, Jonathan Otley, and Edward Baines. Within the context of this developing literature of mountaineering, it argues that Wordsworth’s and Keats’s mountain-top experiences can be best understood within the evolving framework of ‘the spectacle of Nature’.

This chapter argues that normative orders are not simply represented but made through visualities. Rather than just having a subversive purpose, images, symbols, gestures, and performative actions are able to generate legal meaning; this has been discussed since early Renaissance. The reason for the troubled relationship between law and visuality is connected to the long history of skepticism toward the authenticity of images. This chapter looks into the ties between the law and image history and shows that visual media have to be counted as a crucial part of the legal sphere. Both aesthetic knowledge and aesthetic signification of legal normativity have a long historical record. The chapter argues that since the law deploys visual media in different contexts, critical instruments and theoretical approaches must be able to deal with the epistemological qualities of images.

Consumption is one of the key processes in the emerging materialist culture. Keeping in view the fact that consumer forms the central axis in modern economy, this chapter focusses on the interface between commodity, social values, and the consumer. It begins with an analysis of the meaning of the notion of consumption and explication of the construction of the identity of Indian consumer. Then it brings out the dynamics of marketing strategies of branding and product identity. In particular, the present analysis highlights how the media constructs the meaning and uses symbolism for product promotion. The relation of materialism and commodity fetish is also discussed. Finally, the chapter highlights some of the initiatives exhibiting the process of cultural resistance to uncontrolled consumption in the context of Indian value system.

The concepts of spectacle and détournement are closely associated with the Paris-based postwar avant-garde movement known as the Situationist International. Spectacle is meant to work as a concept that critiques not this or that aspect of media culture, but its totality. It reveals the spectacle as the double, in the world of consumption, of capitalist commodity production. Détournement is the practice which opposes spectacle by refusing all forms of private property in the production of cultural works. While the Situationist International expired as a movement in 1972, these concepts were subsequently taken up by others, although most often shorn of the revolutionary impulse their linkage was meant to forge. This is why it is important to stress the origins of these concepts in both Western Marxism and also in the radical avant-garde movements of the prewar period. Guy Debord, a central animating presence in the Situationist International, was drawing on militant Marxist thinkers such as Georg Lukács and Henri Lefebvre, as well as the lesser-known Belgian branch of the Surrealist avant-garde. Understood as keys to a unified critical theory and practice, spectacle and détournement can be retrieved from merely descriptive studies of literature and media, and also from more narrowly formalist avant-garde literary practices.

Chapter 2 explores how the Olympians and the Iliad’s audience are positioned as viewers for the warfare in Books 1–4, and their roles defined. The first section focuses on the gods. Homer initially defines the gods’ role as viewers by drawing on two specific paradigms of live event: entertainment at a daïs (banquet), and the formal duel. Each of these paradigms carries its own suggestions as to the nature of the event, its stakes, and the relationship between viewer and action. As entertainment accompanying a daïs, the warfare may generate pleasure (terpein) for viewers whose critical role is to praise or blame the dramatic figure pulling the strings. As a spectacle modelled on the formal duel, the warfare is observed by implicated, partisan viewers, who are themselves a part of the conflict, and can become actors by entering the central space. Rich tension is generated by the combination of these paradigms. The chapter’s second section reads the opening of Book 4, in which the gods watch a duel from their daïs, as a mise en abyme of the spectacle experience offered by the Iliad to its listeners. On the one hand, the combination of duel and daïs shapes audience understanding of the kind of spectacle that they, too, are witnessing, and their own relationship to the action. On the other hand, the gods’ particular responses—both to the events on the ground and to their staging and direction—dramatize possible responses on the part of Homer’s audience.

Chapter 3 focuses on the two major episodes of Book 7, both of which have often been criticized as ill-motivated and disconnected, and both of which feature prominent scenes of divine viewing and discussion: the formal duel between Hector and Aias; and the truce for the burial of the dead, during which the Achaeans build a defensive wall. The chapter shows that the two episodes can in fact be read as both well-motivated and connected, if seen in metaperformative terms: as an extended reflection on how the Iliad’s battlefield spectacle ends. The second duel offers a mise en abyme, by which the poet dramatizes tension between two types of response to the conflict at this point: desire for Achaean victory, and pity for the doomed Trojans. The duel is normally seen as the second of two formal duels, but is best understood as the second of three ‘spectacular duels’, the third being between Hector and Achilles in Book 22. Then, through the building of the Achaean wall as viewed by the gods, the poet reflects upon tension between (a) the Iliad’s insistence that its central spectacle is playing out in real time, before our eyes, and (b) its equally powerful investment in the idea that its action is not ephemeral, but permanent.

The term détournement is most associated with a European, mainly Paris-based avant-garde group called the Situationist International (SI), which was founded in 1957, went through three distinct phases, played a key role in the May ’68 massive general strike in France, and eventually dissolved in 1972. Guy Debord was the SI’s singular leader and its most important theorist. Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle is the best-known work produced by an SI member. In it, Debord develops his theorization of what he called the Spectacle, which is capitalism in its economic, political, social, and cultural totality. Debord argued that culture—especially visual and popular culture—played a central role in transforming citizens into consumers and passive spectators in all spheres of their lives. In societies saturated by seductive visual representations and permeated by an endless staging of spectacles, all that matters to those in power is that people consume commodities and become politically malleable and stupefied. The Spectacle works to transform everyday life into a continuous experience of alienation, passivity, mindless consumption, and political non-intervention. An apt cinematic reference for the Spectacle is the film The Matrix. Debord’s theory seems to preclude any possibilities for challenging or contesting the Spectacle, but Debord also theorized that such possibilities (situations) could be created in everyday life, and détournement was the critical anti-art that Debord and his friends practiced for the purpose of critiquing and challenging the alienating, pacifying, spectator-inducing, socially controlling forces of the Spectacle. For Debord, détournement was by definition an anti-spectacular action and creation that sought to subvert the debilitating effects of the Spectacle’s life-draining power. During the SI’s first phase (1957–1962), members of the SI created many détournements that contested the dominance of what they believed was a crucially important sphere within the Spectacle—that of the Art World. The SI’s détournements took many forms, including films, comics, paintings, graffiti, novels, and public interventions and scandals. Eventually, during its second phase (1962–1968), the SI called for a détournement of the streets and of everyday life through strikes and protests. Of their role in the events of May’68, the SI wrote that it brought fuel to the fire. During those events, ten million people walked off the job, engaged in wildcat strikes, and brought the country—and the Spectacle—to a standstill. For Debord and the SI, May ’68 was the ultimate construction of a revolutionary situation in which détournement contributed to the radical transformation of everyday life, if only for a brief time. So détournement is an important practice in the service of combatting the Spectacle and dismantling capitalism. In terms of qualitative research, détournement has a set of resemblances to several qualitative methods and perspectives, including the aesthetic and arts-based research approaches of bricolage, collage, critical media literacy, and public pedagogy, to name a few.

This chapter maps the reception of John Hawkesworth’s theatrical adaptation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1760s, explaining how the literary representation of what Ramesh Mallipeddi calls the enslaved person’s “spectacular suffering” shaped both anti-slavery sentiment and the appropriation of that sentiment by Anglo-American patriots complaining of being enslaved by Britain. It situates this contextualization within the central space of reading in the city, the Salem Social Library, a proprietary subscription library founded by men made wealthy by the slave trade and related enterprises like fish, sugar, molasses, and rum distilling. The reading habits of these men are mapped by reference to the library’s surviving 1760s circulation ledger. Methodologically, it argues that sequential borrowings of volumes of a title, and the velocity of their circulation to members, should count as evidence of the reception of works. It also discusses Massachusetts patriot and abolitionist activity in the 1760s.