Heroes of the past: #3

The third hero in this informal series of postings was a very humble figure, one clearly not aspiring to fame - nor did he plan to be involved in what eventually propelled him to notoriety. His name was Telemakos, and he is credited with having ground the bloodshed inside Roman circuses to an absolute halt.

Telemakos lived at a time when the Roman emperors preferred to stifle opposition and discontentment within Roma proper by staging lavish festivals involving e.g. the crude, senseless butchering of human lives in front of an excited, frenzied crowd. The panem et circenses (bread and circus) strategy worked fabulously well in that the emperors managed to cling on to absolute power for hundreds of years.

One the eve of one of these less than refined festivals, our hero found himself vacuumed into the circus arena by the massive crowd bent on enjoying another spectacle of manslaughter. Absolutely in the blue as to what to expect, once inside Telemakos gave up any attempt of escape and quietly found himself a seat some distance away from where the action was to take place.

The spectators had come to see blood, and they got what they longed for. Within a matter of minutes Telemakos was the helpless witness to murder on demand, one lifeless, battered and bloodied body heaped upon the other. His tiny voice of horrified protest drowned in the deafening roar of the agitated crowd. What could he do? Just look at this sickening thing?

No one noticed him at first, too preoccupied with the carnage going on inside the ring. But all of a sudden, almost lightning-struck, people craned their necks barely half-believing what their eyes were telling them: a small man was venturing into the melee of fighting, hands raist in protest.
But presenting himself as an easy target, Telemakos was soon pierced by a gladiator's sword, his body collapsing onto the arena floor.

Somehow the spell was finally broken. In an instant it seemed that the ordinary citizen, so accustomed to lives being thrown away, so numbed by the repeated vision of blood mingled with sand, at long last recognized this atrocity for what it was: men, created in the image of God, sacrificed for absolutely no reason at all.

Telemakos died, and in so doing, saved thousands from having to experience the same fate. Soon the Roman authorities would outlaw such brutality as a common form of entertainment.