Gladiator

• 1. Introduction

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  A gladiator was an armed combatant who fought for the entertainment of Roman crowds. They faced other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals in violent confrontations. Some entered the arena willingly, gambling their lives and their standing in Roman society. Most were slaves, despised, schooled under harsh conditions, and segregated even in death. Yet a fighter who died well could earn admiration and popular acclaim from the same crowd that watched him bleed.

  This is a story that ran for nearly a thousand years, peaking between the 1st century BC and the 2nd century AD. It reaches from funeral rites during the Punic Wars to a Syrian named Flamma whose gravestone still records 34 fights. Along the way it touches a politician drowning in debt who fielded 320 pairs of fighters, an emperor who beheaded an ostrich and gestured at the Senate, and a woman who left her senator husband for a scarred man with a bad arm. Why did Rome love this so much, and why did it argue with itself about loving it at all? Those questions sit at the heart of what follows.

• 2. Sacred Debt

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  Livy placed the first Roman gladiator games in 264 BC, when Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva had three pairs of gladiators fight to the death in Rome's cattle market, the Forum Boarium, to honor his dead father, Brutus Pera. Livy called this a munus, a gift owed to the manes, the spirit of a dead ancestor, by his descendants. The arena began not as sport but as an offering to the dead.

  Nicolaus of Damascus, writing in the late 1st century BC, believed the games were Etruscan. A generation later Livy traced them instead to the Campanians, who he said first held them in 310 BC after defeating the Samnites. The 7th century writer Isidore of Seville derived the Latin word lanista, the manager of gladiators, from an Etruscan word for executioner. He linked the arena official called Charon to Charun, the psychopomp of the Etruscan underworld.

  Tomb frescoes from the Campanian city of Paestum, dated to the 4th century BC, show paired fighters with helmets, spears, and shields in a funeral blood-rite. Some modern scholars read these images as evidence of a Campanian origin for the games. The frescoes may continue a much older tradition, possibly inherited from Greek colonists of the 8th century BC. Compared with Paestum, the Etruscan tomb-paintings look tentative and late.

  The earliest fighter type was named the Samnite, after one of Rome's enemies. Livy described how the Campanians, in hatred of the Samnites, dressed the gladiators at their feasts in the splendid armour of that defeated people and gave them the Samnite name. The munus became a kind of historic enactment, in which the only honourable choice for the gladiator was to fight well or else die well.

• 3. Blood And The Ballot

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  In 65 BC the newly elected aedile Julius Caesar held games he justified as a munus to his father, dead for 20 years. Despite enormous personal debt, he fielded 320 gladiator pairs in silvered armour. The Senate, fearful of the recent Spartacus revolt and of Caesar's rising popularity, capped at 320 pairs the maximum any citizen could keep in Rome. Caesar had staged a memorial rather than a true funeral rite, blurring the line between munus and the state games called ludi.

  Gladiatorial games gave their sponsors expensive but effective self-promotion, and gave voters thrilling entertainment at little cost. A politically ambitious private citizen might postpone his dead father's munus until election season. Those in power needed the support of the plebeians and their tribunes, and a generous show could win it. Sulla, during his term as praetor, broke his own sumptuary laws to give the most lavish munus yet seen in Rome, for the funeral of his wife, Metella.

  In 105 BC the ruling consuls offered Rome its first taste of state-sponsored barbarian combat, performed by gladiators from Capua as part of military training. It proved immensely popular. Afterward, contests once limited to private munera were folded into the state ludi that accompanied major religious festivals. Anti-corruption laws of 65 and 63 BC tried and failed to curb the political usefulness of the games.

  After Caesar's assassination, Augustus took imperial control of the munera and formalised them as a civic and religious duty. His revised sumptuary law capped spending and restricted gladiator munera to the festivals of Saturnalia and Quinquatria. An imperial praetor's official munus was allowed a maximum of 120 gladiators at a ceiling of 25,000 denarii. Between 108 and 109 AD, Trajan celebrated his Dacian victories with a reported 10,000 gladiators and 11,000 animals over 123 days.

• 4. The Cast Of The Arena

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  The Samnite, the Thracian, and the Gaul were the earliest gladiator types, each named for an enemy of Rome. Once those peoples were conquered and absorbed, the Samnite was renamed secutor and the Gaul became the murmillo. The heavily armed Samnite, elegantly helmed, was probably the most popular of all.

  The retiarius, or net-man, fought bareheaded and nimble, armoured only at the left arm and shoulder. He pitted his net, trident, and dagger against the heavily armoured, helmeted secutor. Other novelties included fighters mounted on chariots, carts, or horseback. At an unknown date, cestus fighters arrived in Roman arenas, probably from Greece, armed with potentially lethal boxing gloves.

  The trade in gladiators reached across the whole empire and was supervised by officials. Rome's military victories produced soldier-prisoners who were sold or sent to mines and amphitheatres. After the Jewish Revolt, the schools received an influx of Jews, with those rejected for training sent straight to the arena as noxii, the hurtful ones. The best and most robust were sent to Rome.

  Paid volunteers, the auctorati, may have made up roughly half of all gladiators by the late Republic, and possibly the most capable half. For the poor and for non-citizens, a gladiator school offered a trade, regular food, housing of a sort, and a chance at fame. Mark Antony chose a troupe of gladiators as his personal bodyguard. Tiberius offered several retired gladiators 100,000 sesterces each to return to the arena, and Nero gave the gladiator Spiculus property equal to that of men who had celebrated triumphs.

• 5. Women In The Sand

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  In 66 AD Nero had Ethiopian women, men, and children fight at a munus to impress King Tiridates I of Armenia. From the 60s AD female gladiators began appearing as rare and exotic markers of exceptionally lavish spectacle. Romans found the idea novel, entertaining, or downright absurd.

  Juvenal teased his readers with a woman named Mevia, hunting boars in the arena with spear in hand and breasts exposed. A munus of 89 AD, during Domitian's reign, featured a battle between female gladiators described as Amazons. At Halicarnassus a 2nd-century relief shows two female combatants named Amazon and Achillia, whose match ended in a draw. In the same century an epigraph praises one of Ostia's elite as the first to arm women in the history of its games.

  Roman morality demanded that all gladiators come from the lowest social classes. Cassius Dio took pains to note that when the admired emperor Titus used female gladiators, they were of acceptably low class. Some Romans viewed female fighters of any rank as a sign of corrupted appetites and womanhood. Septimius Severus tried to give Rome a dignified display of female athletics, but the crowd answered with ribald chants and cat-calls. Probably as a result, he banned the use of female gladiators in 200 AD.

• 6. Emperors In The Ring

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  Commodus was a fanatical participant at the ludi, and he compelled Rome's elite to attend his appearances as gladiator, bestiarius, or venator. Most of his gladiator matches were bloodless, fought with wooden swords, and he invariably won. He restyled Nero's colossal statue in his own image as Hercules Reborn, dedicating it to himself as Champion of secutores and the only left-handed fighter to conquer twelve thousand men.

  Caligula, Titus, Hadrian, Lucius Verus, Caracalla, Geta, and Didius Julianus were all said to have performed in the arena, though the risk to them was minimal. Claudius, described by his historians as morbidly cruel and boorish, fought a whale trapped in the harbor in front of spectators. Commentators invariably disapproved of such performances by emperors.

• 7. Day Of The Munus

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  Games were advertised on billboards giving the reason, the editor, the venue, the date, and the number of paired gladiators. A detailed program, the libellus, was handed out on the day, listing names, types, match records, and order of appearance. Left-handed gladiators were advertised as a rarity, trained to fight right-handers for an unorthodox advantage. The night before, the fighters were given a banquet that the scholar Futrell compared to a ritual last meal.

  A procession entered the arena led by lictors bearing the fasces that signified the editor's power over life and death. Trumpeters followed with a fanfare, then images of the gods carried in to witness the proceedings. The entertainments often opened with beast hunts and beast fighters, then the ludi meridiani, which usually involved executions of noxii in fatal re-enactments of Greek or Roman myth. A crude Pompeian graffito hints at a burlesque of musicians dressed as a flute-playing bear and a horn-blowing chicken.

  Lightly armed fighters such as the retiarius tired less quickly than their heavily armoured opponents. Most bouts lasted 10 to 15 minutes, or 20 at most, and between 10 and 13 matches might be fought in an afternoon. A match winner might face a fresh tertiarius, the third-choice gladiator, or an unadvertised substitute called a suppositicius. Caracalla once tested a skilled fighter named Bato against one substitute, whom he beat, and then another, who killed him.

  Music accompanied the combats, building to a frenzied crescendo during a gladiator's appeal. The Zliten mosaic in Libya, dated around 80 to 100 AD, shows musicians playing a long straight trumpet, a large curved horn, and a water organ. A senior referee called the summa rudis, usually a retired gladiator, could caution opponents, separate them, or stop a bout to allow rest and a rub-down.

• 8. Honour In Defeat

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  Flamma chose to remain a gladiator even after being awarded the wooden rudis sword of freedom four times. His gravestone in Sicily records that he lived 30 years, fought 34 times, won 21, drew 9, and was defeated 4, a Syrian by nationality. His comrade Delicatus made the stone for his deserving comrade-in-arms.

  A defeated gladiator could raise a finger to appeal to the referee, who referred the decision to the editor, whose choice usually rested on the crowd's response. Martial described a match between Priscus and Verus, who fought so evenly that when both acknowledged defeat at the same instant, Titus awarded a rudis to each. For a man condemned ad ludum, the greatest reward was manumission, symbolised by that wooden training sword. Under Augustus, matches sine missione, without reprieve for the loser, were officially banned as demand for gladiators began to outstrip supply.

  To die well, a gladiator should never ask for mercy nor cry out. Seneca wrote that the fighter, however faint-hearted during the bout, offers his throat to his opponent and directs the wavering blade to the vital spot. That spot seems to have been the neck, a detail confirmed by gladiator remains from Ephesus. The body was placed on a couch of Libitina and removed to the arena morgue, where it was stripped of armour and probably had its throat cut as confirmation of death.

  Many gladiator epitaphs blamed Nemesis, fate, deception, or treachery for a fighter's death, never the skill of the man who beat him. One Victor, left-handed, from Thessalonica, left a stone declaring that Doom killed him, not the liar Pinnas, and that his fellow gladiator Polyneikes avenged him by killing Pinnas. George Ville, using 1st-century headstones, calculated an average age at death of 27 and a mortality of 19 in every 100 who entered the arena. Hopkins and Beard tentatively estimated 400 arenas across the empire at its height, with a combined 8,000 deaths a year from executions, combats, and accidents.