Absent a pending legal challenge, America's most famous address will double as an MMA octagon backdrop on June 14, when “UFC Freedom 250” lands on the White House South Lawn with a Topuria-Gaethje headliner and a crowd expected to include military personnel, dignitaries and VIP guests.
Mike Fontaine, a Cornell University classics professor and director of the Program on Freedom and Free Societies, says the event raises long-standing questions about violence and state-sponsored spectacle.
Fontaine says:
“The closest historical parallel is the gladiatorial games of Imperial Rome, where men brutalized one another for public entertainment, a spectacle that helped rulers maintain popularity and distracted citizens from actual policy decisions.
“The debate over whether society should celebrate organized violence before a cheering crowd is at least sixteen hundred years old.
“The most famous ancient critic of gladiatorial combat was a fourth-century Christian poet, Prudentius, who regarded these spectacles as a moral disgrace and appealed directly to the emperor Honorius to abolish them — and he did.”
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