I have a DVD set of old UFC events - I think UFC 1 to 84 or something - and I remember in one very early event in Japan the commentators talk about how silently focused the crowd is. Of course, some people do find Japanese culture extremely creepy, but many would say the same of ancient Rome.

I wouldn't actually expect to see those norms in Roman culture, given how Latin is naturally a very flowing language and I've never heard of Romans valuing silence like the Spartans (or Japanese for that matter). But I wouldn't consider it particularly strange either - to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.

Hmm. Interesting; that surprises me. Enough that I did some googling: here's a quote from reddit that sounds more like what I'd expect:

  > Japan has by far the best combat sports audience in the world. Most of the time they are so quiet that you can literally hear the corners talking and even the ring shifting as the fighters move around. But then when something cool happens they go crazy.

If the Romans regularly scribbled graffiti about gladiator fights and their outcomes, I would expect them to shout during them as well. It feels to me that such behavior naturally dovetails together: excited, rowdy, norm-breaking.

Check out old Pride events (or any older Japanese MMA.) Everybody is quiet (with a few isolated shouts of encouragement) until someone does something heroic, and then there's a polite and energetic round of applause. The only reason that Zuffa UFC sounds like it does is because they intentionally tried to steal audiences from US professional wrestling. They also spent years standing people up almost immediately when they were jiu-jitsuing each other because the wrestling audience would just start booing aggressively after about a minute, the result being that the UFC were very kickboxer and greco-roman focused and some real killers had all their weapons taken away from them by UFC's application of their "Unified Rules."

Japanese MMA was founded and branded by people who were saying that Japanese professional wrestling was too theatrical, and Zuffa UFC was branded by people who were saying that professional wrestling wasn't violent enough (if anything, they were competing with "backyard" wrestling.) UFC has improved since, but imo that's because it became a monopoly and had to absorb all the other MMA audiences (and fighters), and the wrestling fans who didn't get bored with MMA eventually got less stupid.

> to me, making noise during a tense, violent event seems far stranger.

I also don't think there's any safe assumption of how Colosseum crowds behaved other than how contemporary narratives say they did. I agree that life and death brings an atmosphere of seriousness that wouldn't often exist at the Circus.