RE-AIR: Conversations: Beware of the Splash Zone! Gladiators in the Greek World w/ Alexandra Sills

This episode originally aired in September 2023. Liv speaks with Alexandra Sills who studies spectacle! and, specifically: when Gladiators went to Greece... They talk mythologizing gladiatorial games, adapting things (splash zone!) and even, the evidence for women fighting in games. Read more from Alexandra at Bad Ancient https://www.badancient.com/about/alexandra-sills/ and Working Classicists https://www.workingclassicists.com/. Help keep LTAMB going by subscribing to Liv's Patreon for bonus content! http://www.patreon.com/mythsbaby CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions http://mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about Liv's next group trips https://travelbugxlivalbert.my.canva.site/ to GREECE! Application deadline is November 30 (Subject to change due to demand). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Liv Albert?

  Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.

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• 2:19Liv Albert?

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• 3:00Liv Albert?

  I'm actually traveling in Greece right now and I have my go-to woven leather bag. I seriously use it everywhere. That's why it's with me here. It's beautiful and it's practical and it's from Quince. And I actually have a parcel to pick up when I get back home, which has some goodies in there. I got this pair of corduroy high-rise pants. I'm really excited to try those out as soon as I get home. And everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. So you can give luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. So give the gift of quality this holiday season.

• 3:41Liv Albert?

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  Hey, this is Penn and Kim Holderness from Laugh Lines.

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  Some travelers want the charm of an independent hotel. Others want the confidence of a trusted global brand. With Seres by Marriott, you get both.

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  Each property is uniquely connected to its destination, delivering local experiences and memorable stays while being backed by the quality, reliability, and Marriott Bonvoy benefits that travelers know and trust.

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  Experience the destination without the compromise.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  Seres by Marriott is part of Marriott Bonvoy. Book direct at Marriott.com or on the Marriott Bonvoy app.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department, ever, so carve up turkey and spiral-cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like Stuffing Mix and Cranberry Sauce from 365 Brand. And guess what? All their delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.

• 5:09Liv Albert?

  Oh my gods, nerds, gladiators. This is Let's Talk About Myths, baby, and I am your host Liv, who doesn't normally care about Roman things all that much. But guess what? This is Greeks doing the Roman things, so it's awesome. Today, I am joined by Alexandra Sills, who is an expert not just in gladiators, but gladiators in Greece very specifically. And by Greece right now, I just mean the Greek world, so deep into the east, the whole section, you know, Turkey, the lot of it, back then, the ancient Greek world, but as ruled by Romans. I'm rambling now.

• 5:52Liv Albert?

  That's right, today is all about the many ways that the Greek world used and adapted gladiatorial games and made them into something pretty damn special. Plus, how they regularly adapted Greek theaters, physical theaters to perform those games. And yes, I am entirely obsessed with that idea, particularly how it would almost certainly result in a splash zone. Disgusting. I know. I love it. And we even talked about the idea of women as gladiators, the idea that goes around every once in a while, little bits of virality over so-called female gladiators. We'll see. No spoilers yet on the details there. Also, today's

• 6:35Liv Albert?

  episode is seriously long, because there was so much to say about this topic and I couldn't bring myself to cut it down because it's so interesting. And Alexandra and I had so much fun. So I'm keeping this intro short and sweet. Just know that this will not be the last you hear from Alexandra, as we also recorded a bonus conversation all about gladiators on the screen, from, well, Gladiator to Star Spartacus, which I love pretty deeply. So stay tuned for that, too.

• 7:16Liv Albert?

  Conversations: Beware of the Splash Zone, Gladiators in the Greek World with Alexandra Sills.

• 7:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah, so we'll just dive right in. Like, I mean, you and I have been Twitter mutuals for a really long time. But I also realize I barely knew your name, because I just know your handle and then your little image. And I'm like, oh, right, like, you're the person behind, I don't even, is it Oizis? Beloved of Oizis? How do you pronounce it?

• 8:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, beloved of Oizis, as far as I know.

• 8:05Liv Albert?

  So, gladiators, I don't even, like, I know that you have studied a lot of Gladiator everything, but I just, I just want to hear everything. I know we were talking, you know, before the recording about, like, gladiators in Greece, because they fascinate me, like, in, like, the Roman period of Greece, and like, what, what specifically the Greeks did with that Roman practice? And I just want to hear everything, basically, but I can find real questions that I will ask you also.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, I think...

• 8:38Speaker 04

  There's this, this thing with Greek archaeology is that there aren't a lot of amphitheaters in the east. We have got literally hundreds in the west of the empire, but in the east, there's hardly any. In fact, I think, uh, if I'm right in saying Britain has more amphitheaters than Greece and Turkey combined.

• 9:01Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  Right. So these, these tiny little rain soaked islands have got more amphitheaters than this huge, already quite culturally significant area.

• 9:11Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 9:11Speaker 04

  And I think, um, there's been a tendency to kind of assume, oh, okay, well, that must mean that the Greeks just weren't interested. But it could not be more wrong. It could not be more wrong. Uh, because when you look into the other evidence, it turns out that the Greeks were crazy for gladiators. They really, really loved gladiators. And, um, when you spoke to Dan Stewart about, uh, Roman Greece, he, he spoke briefly about this. So I'm just gonna recap what he said.

• 9:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah. First, can I just, I want a point of clarification for the listeners on like, so by, by like few amphitheaters, you mean more of like that specific, like, like the Colosseum versus like the Greek traditional Greek theatre, right?

• 10:00Speaker 04

  Uh, Greek theatres are semicircles and an amphitheatre, amphitheatre is all around. So it's essentially two theatres stuck together to make an oval.

• 10:12Liv Albert?

  Is that where the word comes from? Cause I didn't register that. That makes so much sense.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so when you see someone calling a theatre, an amphitheatre.

• 10:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  It's, it's wrong because an amphitheatre, it means goes all the way around without a break. So it's, yeah, it's essentially two theatres back to back.

• 10:32Liv Albert?

  Great. I'm learning so much already and it's literally the bare minimum part of this conversation.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  So when you've got Greece and Turkey, there are a couple. So you've got one at Pergamon. You've got, um, the first one actually was in Corinth. And that was built by Julius Caesar. Uh, it's really basic kind of rock cut thing. Um, and that's only a couple of decades after the first stone amphitheatre in Pompeii. That was seventy BCE. So Julius Caesar is not long after that.

• 11:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  So the first one in the east is actually pretty soon after permanent structures were being made in the west as well. So, um, I I find it interesting that no one seems to correlate the two, starting with permanent buildings.

• 11:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  So closely together. So, yeah, you've got the one at Pergamon, you've got, uh, Mestora, which is currently being excavated as well.

• 11:33Liv Albert?

  Is that in Turkey?

• 11:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:36Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 11:36Speaker 04

  And it's huge.

• 11:38Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  And there's a lot of work being done right now. Uh, there's, uh, there's one at Anasabos, uh, there's a couple, there's one on Cyprus. There's, uh, there's one in Sisyphus. So there's, there are amphitheaters there. They're just not.

• 11:54Speaker 04

  They're not everywhere like they are everywhere else.

• 11:56Liv Albert?

  Yeah, and and not like Greek theatres.

• 11:59Speaker 04

  Exactly. Greek theatres, there's something like over seven hundred of them. But amphitheaters over there are really, really rare. If you go to somewhere like Spain or the south of France, you are tripping over amphitheaters every single place that you go. But in Greece and Turkey, they are so rare. And there's the kind of assumption has been made, oh, well, they didn't bother making them because they they just didn't want to see it.

• 12:28Speaker 04

  What's interesting, and, uh, Dan Stewart mentioned this, is what they did instead is they adapted existing buildings.

• 12:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  So.

• 12:37Liv Albert?

  This blew my mind. Like, it just felt so messy. But it's just, it's so messy. That's like all I can think about.

• 12:48Speaker 04

  You've got these buildings already, why not use them?

• 12:52Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  So they chose theatres and a stadium. If you had a stadium, why not make that, uh, multipurpose?

• 13:00Speaker 04

  By having gladiator shows there as well. So there are a few changes that you needed to make to make it safe. So you could either put a net up around the orchestra or around the uh the stadium itself to prevent animals and gladiators getting into the crowds. You could build a small wall. Quite often what they would do is take out the first kind of three to ten rows of seats. And then what you've got is the first row of seats is all of a sudden higher, is above the uh the ground where the gladiators are, just like at the Colosseum. If you were at the Colosseum, you would be looking down on the gladiators if you're in the front row. Whereas if in a theatre, if you're in the front row, you're at the same level as the actor.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  That doesn't work if the actor's, you know, wielding an axe at you. So you raise up the level of the audience by taking out those front kinds of seats. And that's been done at over a hundred venues in Turkey and Greece. So what my research uh has found, if you map all of these adapted uh theatres and stadiums

• 14:12Speaker 04

  as well as the amphitheatre in the east, all of a sudden, the east is the area with the third densest spread of spectacle venues. And it comes second only to Italy and the area which is now Tunisia. So, again, thinking of the south of France and Spain and Britain with all of our amphitheatre that we have. All of a sudden, it's the Greeks that are going really, really bananas for Roman spectacle.

• 14:45Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  And I used to think, I mean, initially you think, wh- wh- why is this? Is it just recycling? Are they lazy? Because they're they're not a poor area at all. I mean, compared to some of the provinces, they're loaded.

• 14:58Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  And I've worked out is is I don't think it is because of cost. I think it's because of a cultural thing. And again, going back to what Dan Stewart was saying, uh, the Greek cities were kind of keen to live up to their ancient reputation in the Roman period to keep their Greek-ness. And I think that that's connected. I think what they're doing is they're taking this Roman thing, but they're Greek-ifying it. They're viewing it from a Greek perspective. So why not put it in traditionally Greek venues such as sports venues like stadiums and theatres?

• 15:38Speaker 04

  And it is, they are, they are, they are making it so Greek. So the important thing with uh gladiators is across the entire empire, they all look the same. So it's the same sets of armour. You get different types. Uh, you've got like the heavyweights and the lightweights. You've got ones with big swords and little swords and ones with tridents and different levels of shield size. But they're all pretty standard across the entire area. But it's the way that they're spoken about and the way they speak about themselves that changes. And there's this huge east-west divide.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  And uh in the west, you've got things like their, their tombstones. And they will have a name, how many fights, and then their age when they died on the tombstone. And it's really boring. And their, their names are uh kind of staccato names.

• 16:46Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  Short and snappy.

• 16:48Liv Albert?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  But in Greece, it's completely different. They're choosing stage names from myth.

• 16:58Liv Albert?

  Hmm. Oh, I'm excited.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I knew you would be. So you've got, and we've got dozens of examples of, of gravestones over there. You've got Achilles, you've got Ajax, you've got Alexandra, you've got Ateocles, you've got Heracles, Hermes, Jason, Odysseus. You've got Perseus. Uh, you've got all of these names that they've chosen straight from Greek myth.

• 17:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  And from epic. And if you think about it, you've got all of these Greeks that for centuries have been brought up on a diet of the epic cycle. And they've spent, you know, years as schoolchildren, learning all of these stories and reading about all these epic one-to-one battles. And now they've finally got a chance. Yeah, you remember that fight? Now come see it live.

• 17:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah, though I have to say, I want to talk to the guy who chose the name Hermes, because like, I mean, does that make you seem that intense, like of all, of all possible characters? Yeah.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  What was Hermes' job with the underworld?

• 18:09Liv Albert?

  Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, that gets subtle. I like that. That's like, you're going deep. That's like, I'm the psychopomp Hermes. Like, I'm not just gonna, you know.

• 18:16Speaker 04

  I'm gonna take you down to the underworld.

• 18:20Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Speaker 04

  That all of a sudden becomes the most metal gladiator name you can think of.

• 18:24Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah, that's, I like that. It's got layers.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they're not even just, they're not even calling themselves names from, from Greek myth. They're constantly talking about the gods. And so you'll, you'll hear them say that I am a warrior of Ares, or I'm fighting in the stadium of Ares. And they're constantly talking about being taken down to Hades. And I have looked through literally dozens of these gravestones. And they're, they're really cool because not only are they more biographically detailed, but they're also metrical. Some of them are in the same meter as epic. And over half of them mention the fates.

• 19:08Liv Albert?

  Ah.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  So I die here because the fates decided that it was time to cut the cord.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  And it's, it's amazing how deeply embedded they've managed to place themselves in Greek tradition, doing this utterly, utterly Roman thing

• 19:28Speaker 04

  of killing each other for fun, for the entertainment of others.

• 19:32Liv Albert?

  I should have known that, like, I mean, this is just gonna go with my content. Continual um sort of running, I want to call it a joke, but it's totally honest. But like, like I just should have known that the Greeks would take something that is so distinctly Roman and then make it so much more fun and interesting even than the Romans did. Like, like, of course they would. Of course they would take this thing and be like, we're gonna make it nerdy. Cause like, I mean, I, I, they're, they're the reason, all of these things are the reason why I prefer Greece to Rome. Like, I just think it's so much more interesting, mostly mythologically. But like, it, it really says something about their relationship with the gods that's so different from the Roman relationship with the gods too.

• 20:13Liv Albert?

  Like, like the Greeks are so much more willing to like, to interact with the gods, to like, they actually kind of want them around in a way where the Romans seem to have this more like fear of the gods mentality versus like a desire to interact with them. And yeah, I love that.

• 20:33Speaker 04

  I mean, the gladiators um in the West certainly really took on the eastern goddess of Nemesis.

• 20:42Liv Albert?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  They loved Nemesis. And in a lot of amphitheaters, you'll find little shrines to her just off of the arena. And we've got things like um cursed tablets to Nemesis um that have been written. And you get little dedications and you, you can't help but imagine about this gladiator who's making one last, one last little votive before he goes in. But um in the West, it's, it's, they, they go nuts. And it's really, really interesting to me because I kind of think about

• 21:21Speaker 04

  it, it's almost like it's Homeric cosplay.

• 21:25Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 21:27Speaker 04

  And if you go in through the, the Homeric stories, the gods are so woven into those stories.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  That when you bring it into Roman spectacle in the Greek East, they're still there weaving them in hundreds of years after these epics were first come up with. And you know, it's the Greek thing of, they loved competitions, right?

• 21:51Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  The whole Argon. There's, there's competitions and, and uh contests in everything they do. So of course they're gonna love gladiatorial combat. It's another competition and the stakes are immeasurably high.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  The thing is, and this is what annoys me personally, is that this is all a bit hush hush in the academic world. Um, so for instance, all of these tombstones that I've mentioned, um, very, very few of them have been published in English.

• 22:26Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 22:27Speaker 04

  Um, they were mostly brought together in the nineteen forties by this French guy called Louis Robert.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  And even though he's collecting all of them, he is of the opinion that cartorial combat is dreadful. And he calls it a gangrene that infected the Greek world. And I think, um, there's not going to name any names, but archaeologists of Greek theatres and stadiums are usually very, very reluctant to mention any of these architectural changes that have been made for gladiators. So you can enter an archaeological library and you can look through dozens of site reports. And there might be a sentence. There was a wall built for gladiators.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  And they're so reluctant to talk about it. So none of these sites, um, have yet, yet, I hope to, uh, been collated all in one place to be published.

• 23:29Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  Because everyone seems to be desperate to kind of hide the fact that they're pure theatre where, you know, the, the great tragedies were performed. No one wants to admit that there was bloodshed there.

• 23:44Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Speaker 04

  And that's something that I think some current archaeologists share with some of the ancients. Because of course, gladiators, um, we think about it as a strange thing now. And, and we love to say, oh, the Romans universally loved gladiators. But there, there were people that criticised it. And that's true in the Greek East as well, but like so much with, uh, Greek history, a lot of it's focused purely on Athens.

• 24:15Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 24:16Speaker 04

  So.

• 24:16Liv Albert?

  I was gonna ask if, if we know if Athens took part in this, so.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:21Liv Albert?

  Clearly you're about to tell me.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  So Athens not only had one, uh, the theatre of Dionysus, that was adapted. But they adapted the stadium as well, the Panathenaic Stadium was adapted.

• 24:34Liv Albert?

  Oh shit.

• 24:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, because they loved it so much, they wanted it twice, baby.

• 24:40Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  And it wasn't without criticism. So you've got, uh. He's, uh, so Apollonius was supposed to address, uh, the locals in the theatre of Dionysus, and he refused because he said, I'm surprised that Athena hasn't vacated the Parthenon and the Acropolis.

• 24:58Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 24:59Speaker 04

  If, if this is the kind of blood that you're going to offer her as sacrifice, I'm surprised that she's not left.

• 25:06Liv Albert?

  Oh. So. Like, what's the time period then? Because that feels really early if it's Apollonius. Like.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like. It is so early.

• 25:18Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's pre-Rome, isn't it? Like, that's Hellenistic period, so Greece is still kind of Greer. Am I, this is me loving the classical period and knowing very little after the classical period. Can you tell?

• 25:31Speaker 04

  So here is the coolest part of it, is that the Romans were not the ones to introduce Romans spectacle to the east.

• 25:38Liv Albert?

  That's what it sounds like. Amazing.

• 25:42Speaker 04

  You've got Antiochus the force, okay?

• 25:46Liv Albert?

  Ah.

• 25:47Speaker 04

  From Antioch. And he was, I believe, a hostage of Rome for a little while, so he was over in Rome seeing all of this happen. And this is only a couple of decades after, uh, the Romans were fighting Hannibal, that kind of thing, I believe.

• 26:06Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  So it's all still, you know, early days for Roman spectacle as a, you know, no, the Colosseum is still centuries from being built.

• 26:15Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  He goes back to Antioch and in a hundred and sixty-six B.C., he decides to put on his own show to show the east what the Romans do, what he's learned. And, um, we've got this from Polybius. Polybius says there were two hundred and forty pairs of gladiators in his show.

• 26:39Liv Albert?

  That's a lot.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  That's a lot, and it's more than any show that had so far been shown at Rome.

• 26:46Liv Albert?

  Okay, that was gonna be my question. That sounds like an enormous number of people.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so what you've got is Hellenistic king saying, here's this Roman stuff, but I'm gonna make it bigger.

• 26:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Speaker 04

  And he absolutely does. That's an enormous amount. And he calls them monomakoi. So it's one-on-one fighters.

• 27:06Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  So he doesn't call them gladiators, and monomakoi is a word that comes up again and again.

• 27:12Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Um, so he puts on this enormous show and um.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  It's almost like he's trying to out-Roman the Romans. I think he knows they're coming.

• 27:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  He knows they're coming.

• 27:25Liv Albert?

  I mean, I feel like it wouldn't have been that hard to tell.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  So, so yeah, that's, that's a hundred and sixty-six BCE.

• 27:34Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  And then you, you get more when Caesar goes over. So he builds the amphitheaters in Corinth, and he builds an amphitheater in Antioch. Now, it's really important, um, when he goes over, he's not building them for Greeks. He's building them for Romans. He's founding colonies. Mainly for his veterans. So when you think about Corinth, you have to understand that Corinth had been razed to the ground beforehand. He's rebuilding it essentially.

• 28:08Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  So his amphitheater is quite a little plain one, if I'm honest. Uh, very little archaeological work has been done on it so far, unfortunately. I'll be the first one there with a trowel when it does. Um, so he's building that for his veterans, their families. And for any Romans who are choosing to relocate. Or, you know, just passing through. A little bit of home now that you're moving out to the provinces. Same thing in Antioch.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  But it's, it doesn't take very long at all for them to start moving it elsewhere. And this is exactly the same as what was happening in Rome and in the West. Because Colosseum, really expensive. You need a massive space to put it in.

• 29:01Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Now amphitheaters are enormous, they cost a lot. So even in Rome, they didn't have a permanent, Rome had one semi-permanent amphitheater, but it burned down. But it took until eighty CE for that to open.

• 29:21Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  So, I mean, there's permanent amphitheaters in, in the West. From Pompeii, which was seventy BCE. Colosseum eighty CE. But the East has already, already got them way before the Colosseum. Before the Colosseum in Rome, what you would do. Gladiators started off in the Forum. And you'd just put up some bleachers.

• 29:50Liv Albert?

  Oh my god.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:52Liv Albert?

  Again, messy. Like, I don't know why the first thing I think of with all of this stuff is like a splash zone, SeaWorld style. You know, like I just, it's all I can think about every time you're like, a Greek theatre, but with gladiators. I'm like, everyone would get so bloody. And I just am fascinated by that. It's so gross and wonderful.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  You know, the best thing that I've seen so far to kind of describe what I mean by it is HBO's Rome. Where Titus Pullo has to go and it's, you see it and you think, oh, he's going to go into this massive amphitheater. And it's not, it's a tiny area, it's quite small and with all wooden seating and it looks like it's been built last morning. And that's because it probably was.

• 30:33Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  Uh, so it's estimated by very clever people that you could build a wooden amphitheater in about a week.

• 30:44Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  So you could knock that up, have your show and then take it down when you need to. Or you could have benches around an open area like the Forum. And we've got evidence of that happening in the East as well. So the Holy Island of Delos.

• 31:02Liv Albert?

  Hmm. What?

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Where we, yeah, it's got, not only is it got some gladiatorial graffiti, which is great, but there's evidence that in the forum of the Italians, uh, that there were balconies that were put up specifically for this kind of event. So that you could have benches on the ground and then you could have another level of people looking down as well.

• 31:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 04

  So really, you don't need anywhere to have gladiatorial shows apart from an open space where you can stick a couple of benches. But that's what I find so interesting. They've made the decision to move this Roman thing into Greek spaces to kind of make it as Greek as possible.

• 31:43Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  They've kept a lot, they've kept the, the armour, they've kept the fighting style, they've kept the rules as far as we can tell. We don't know a lot of the rules, to be honest. We have to kind of piece together what we can.

• 31:58Liv Albert?

  Do we think there was a lot of rules? To me, it feels like it's one of those like, there are no rules, like, kind of thing.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Well, this is what I find interesting, because if you look at Greek sports, that's the ones that don't have many rules at all. So Pankration, I think the only two rules are no eye gouging and no biting, if I remember off the top of my head.

• 32:21Liv Albert?

  Seems like a fun time.

• 32:23Speaker 04

  But you, you've got stories of Pankration. I think there was one guy who won by, he didn't punch with a closed fist. So he, he went forward with his fingers extended and ended up actually puncturing into someone's torso and pulling out the intestines.

• 32:38Liv Albert?

  Bah, okay. Yeah, that sounds, okay, yeah, that sounds like there are no rules.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  So, Greek combat sports, they're utterly brutal. So, I mean, there's a bit of a precedent for violent entertainment there. But actually, from what we can tell from gladiatorial combat is there are a lot of rules. So the first thing is, is that there are usually designated pairings.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  So you've got the netman, the retiarius, for instance, he has got a trident and a net and he is usually up against a secutor. Who has got a very um plain helmet, so it does get snagged in the net. And a large shield and a sword and they are usually together. Or you'll usually see a mermillo and mermillo against each other. So there are usual pairings.

• 33:32Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 33:33Speaker 04

  It gives you something to expect as an audience member. But also, that's what they're training for. These men are training, right, this is my type, this is who I'm fighting. This is how my training is gonna go and how I'm gonna organise my techniques.

• 33:51Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 33:51Speaker 04

  You can't just throw in two random types and expect it to work because these guys are really honed. To attack and defend from a certain type.

• 34:05Speaker 04

  So there's that. Uh, we also know that there are referees. And this is one thing that gets me because the two things that you never ever see in Hollywood gladiators. You never ever see shields. Where are the shields?

• 34:22Speaker 04

  And you never ever see referees.

• 34:25Liv Albert?

  Yeah, referees seem foreign as hell. I'm trying to think of Spartacus, which is really, like, I've seen Gladiator, but not for a long time and not as often. So I'm trying to think of Spartacus is all I know. And like, they have shields in Spartacus, do they not?

• 34:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Star Series, I have to say, uses shields some of the time, not all of the time. I'm not completely happy with it.

• 34:46Liv Albert?

  At least.

• 34:46Speaker 04

  But they exist and they use them when they use them well, because it's not just a defensive thing, it's absolutely an offensive weapon. It's got that massive metal boss on the front, you can whack people, you can.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  Bring it down onto their toes, you can hit them in the head, you can do a load of things with a shield.

• 35:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Speaker 04

  It's there. And also, the thing is with gladiators is they don't have a lot of body armor on. So there's no chest piece, there's no torso. If you watch Gladiator, Russell Crowe's got this massive leather thing on. He would have been bare-chested.

• 35:21Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Now, I don't know what they were doing there. There's, there's theories about, you know, modern audiences not liking nipples and things like that. But there would have been so many nipples on display. So many nipples.

• 35:34Liv Albert?

  Can I, I mean, who is criticizing have like, okay, maybe I'm just projecting here, but like, that's the best part of Spartacus. So, and I'm always talking about Spartacus, I should say. But like, that's the best part. Like, I can't tell you the number. So I watch, I was introduced to Star Spartacus by my friends in Ancient History fangirl, Jen and Jenny. And so we watched it a lot together. And I can't tell you the number of times that we have sent gifts back and forth of either Spartacus or Ganicus, like only the first Spartacus. Um, but like, the

• 36:12Liv Albert?

  Okay, I, I could go too far. We're gonna, we're gonna talk about Spartacus later. But like, that's the best part. I'm just saying. That's wild to me. I'm giving myself away.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  I, I used to think it was the best part, and then I got really nerdy about Gladiator and ruined it for myself.

• 36:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 36:28Speaker 04

  I think the best part is the fact that they use shields and they've got helmets on.

• 36:33Liv Albert?

  Oh, I also have to say, when you talk about, I mean, no, it's great. I mean, as soon as you said, I was like, I'm, I'm pretty sure Star Spartacus also has shields. So like, they can't all be wrong. But also, um, when you said the Netman, that made me very happy because I, uh, from day one of watching that show, I started calling him Mr. Nets. Which is, i- it's a, it's a like, it's a reference to a random podcast episode of a completely, completely non, non-remotely historical topic. But I just love it. And I, now I've turned it into all.

• 37:05Liv Albert?

  Of us when we watch this show together, just call them all Mr. Nets and have like a real affinity for Mr. Nets. I feel like he's an underdog and he just does great work. Um, so yeah, just big fan of Mr.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  Well, you're not wrong. The Netmen were seen as underdogs. They were seen as the lowest form. There was the least amount of pride if you were a Netman. That's one of the reasons they had their helmets off. They had nowhere to hide their shame.

• 37:31Liv Albert?

  Oh, God.

• 37:32Speaker 04

  Because they had to show their face.

• 37:35Liv Albert?

  Well, I love them, just so I can call them Mr. Nets.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  They are so cool. If you, if you watch these shows that do the gladiatorial combat to a higher level like Spartacus.

• 37:47Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  Or, you know, the reenactment groups that are going around and around. I mean, some of these guys, it proves how fascinating it is to watch, and I love the Netmen. They are my favorite.

• 37:58Liv Albert?

  It would have been really interesting watching them wield a net like that. Yeah, like I think they're very fun.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, they are. Um.

• 38:09Liv Albert?

  Sorry, I can go off topic real easily.

• 38:13Speaker 04

  Where were we? Oh, referees. So.

• 38:15Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  So, yeah, so the referees in a gladiatorial match, they're usually gladiatorial veterans that have been, uh, given their freedom. And most of them have chosen, obviously, to stay in the culture and the profession that they know they're moving up to another level. They are now the referees.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  So it seems from what we can tell from artwork that there would be at least one referee at a time. He would have a long stick which, uh, which he could put in between the fighters to stop them at any point. So from what we can tell, there, there is a kind of, you hit him here, we're gonna pause. You know, oh, his shield's fallen down, we're gonna pause. So it does seem like it would have been quite stop, start, stop, start.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  And because you've got the shield thing as well, and this is why I'm so, so. I can't stress enough how important shields are. Because they've got the bare chests, a lot of them have only got armour on one arm. Um, it's a toss up whether you, it depends on um, on your type, whether you've got metal on one or both legs.

• 39:25Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  But your shield.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  When it's up in the defensive position, should come about one inch above the bottom of your helmet. An inch or so below the bottom of your leg guard. So when you are facing up against your opponent. You've got your defensive leg back, that's the one that's usually bare. You can just see metal and shield.

• 39:49Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  And that's why the shields are so important. It's never this kind of wild hacking that you tend to see in Hollywood fights. And you would never put your shield so far out in front and you know, you can, you see them with their arms raised high. All I'm thinking is you are le- letting your flank be so exposed right now.

• 40:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  You've got the whole of your side exposed and it's so.

• 40:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. Uh, so there, there are rules, it would have been quite stop start and I think it would have been a, a lot more. Maybe defensive than modern depictions suggest.

• 40:29Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:31Speaker 04

  So, don't get me wrong.

• 40:33Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  Hyper violent, but a little bit different from what you've seen on screen.

• 40:39Liv Albert?

  Yeah, more strategic it sounds like, much more like actually thought out about.

• 40:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:43Liv Albert?

  Best way of doing this, like more fair even, it sounds like.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Because there, there've been um, there've been attempts to kind of recreate with reenactors. You've, you've got groups that have got accurate uh armour, all of this kind of stuff. And they fight and they work out, well, this works, this technique does not work. They've worked out that a gladiator fight on average would have probably been about ten to fifteen minutes long. If you go in there hacking and slashing, you're gonna tire yourself out and you will be dead very quickly.

• 41:21Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Speaker 04

  So yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting to think that it, it is definitely more strategic and probably a bit slower than people might suspect. But that's not to say that the Greeks weren't interested in that kind of thing because they really preferred thinking, actually all Romans across the entire empire, Greek, Roman, whatever. They really loved thinking about technique and tactics.

• 41:52Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 41:54Speaker 04

  If it was a bloodbath, then that's where they start to lose a bit of interest.

• 41:59Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  It's all about skill.

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• 44:04Speaker 04

  And that's one of the things that they are talking about in their eastern gravestones is how skilled they are.

• 44:11Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  And I love their gravestones, they're so, they're so fascinating. And, you know, occasionally

• 44:20Speaker 04

  they're quite cute, which might seem the wrong word to use. So we were talking about netmen, weren't we, the retiarius? There was a retiarius called Melanippos. Uh, he was born in Tarsus, but I think he died somewhere else. He died in Alexandria Treus. And his gravestone says, uh, that they say Hercules completed 12 labors. Well, I did exactly the same because I won 12 matches, but I died on my 13th.

• 44:54Liv Albert?

  Aww.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  And you just think, wow, I love that. I love that for him, that he's, you know, a modern day Hercules. I think that's wonderful. What a, what a way to boast.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  It almost sounds, doesn't it, that he doesn't even mind that it was the 13th, as long as he beat Hercules' record.

• 45:13Liv Albert?

  Yeah, he like accomplished, I mean, it was a Herculean feat and he did it.

• 45:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 45:22Speaker 04

  So, yeah, I find it fascinating. And as I say, it's I think that there was a little bit of criticism in the ancient world about it coming from a certain type of person. And I think that the kind of, uh, reason that it's not more widely known now is because the same kind of person in the modern world is, you know, not so keen to advertise it either.

• 45:50Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 45:50Speaker 04

  But I think it's, I think it's great.

• 45:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I mean, like I was gonna guess the same thing. Like, it just sounds like it, it's so, it's so predictable. This, the fact that it isn't talked about a lot and the fact that there would have been Greeks criticizing it. Because it doesn't fit with the narrative that, particularly that like Athens wanted to portray, right? Like.

• 46:14Liv Albert?

  It doesn't fit the narrative of the super like hyper intellectual Greeks.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:21Liv Albert?

  Who were all about, you know, it it reminds me almost like of like some Euripidean plays versus the other two of like, he doesn't always fit what what this like this mentality wanted to be when it comes to Greece, like thi- this idea that they're all just like these brilliant, brilliant men making works of art and they would never stoop so low as as violence, you know, like, yeah, it's not, it's not remotely surprising and you can kind of exactly track where it's all coming from. But at the same time, it's like, I mean, it's like, why I love ancient Greece, but also like talking about specifically this kind of stuff, like

• 47:05Liv Albert?

  pushing back against this narrative that they were these like hyper intellectual, like flawless, you know, just brilliant minds, because that's far less interesting than the truth, which is that.

• 47:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:20Liv Albert?

  They had people who were super intellectual and who wrote down brilliant things and they had, you know, works of art that were all of that. And then they also were fucked up and writing dark shit and like making things weird. And like, you know, Euripides was willing to write Medea because he fucking wanted to. And and, you know, like, I think it's so much more interesting to see them as much more of like these real people who were doing everything, because I mean, I much prefer it. And I love to know that they were doing violent shit with gladiators, too.

• 47:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, because I mean, when you think about it, what is more violent than reading the Iliad?

• 47:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 47:57Speaker 04

  Where you've got, I mean, you've got spears being thrown that cut off tongues at the at the base.

• 48:03Liv Albert?

  The description in the Iliad of some of those moments. Yeah, like cutting tongues off. There's like those, there's lines where it's like the spear went in and ripped out every inch of his entrails. Like

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:17Liv Albert?

  We get such visceral, literally descriptions of what happens in battle and what can result from these weapons that they're using. So yeah, like it absolutely fits that that this would like

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 48:34Liv Albert?

  Carry forward. So much more fun.

• 48:36Speaker 04

  There's this whole kind of myth that the Greeks were all about philosophy and drama. When actually, you read the epics and you read, for instance, Thucydides. No, they really liked fighting.

• 48:53Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  So why wouldn't they enjoy watching it? And you think about modern. I mean, we've, how many things have we all men- already mentioned? We've mentioned Star Spartacus. We've mentioned the movie Gladiator. There are dozens of gladiators in modern media. Uh, so really, and you know, not even just gladiators, it's just violence in general.

• 49:17Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, you think of, I mean, like, I don't want to use three hundred as any kind of like positive example, but it's still a great example of that, like hyper violent featuring the ancient world and Troy too, like

• 49:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:29Liv Albert?

  Not quite the same, but I mean, I think better done if that's something you can say about Troy, but comparatively. But yeah, like this, like we love that. Humans, like, why wouldn't it be the same for the Greeks? But, but like it come, it all comes back to that, you know, quote unquote, Western civilization narrative, right? That like they had in order for them to be like the, the origins of all of these things that we think are better than everyone else. Like you also have to have them be above ev- above the violence and above the bloodshed. And it's like, no, and it, it's, yeah, I mean, yeah, you can link it to so many different problematic ideas, but also just like the pure and simple, like, no, it's far more interesting. That they contained these multitudes. They were intelligent and also they liked to watch people stab each other.

• 50:15Speaker 04

  So when you think about some of these Greek sites, particularly ones that a lot of tourists might visit, you'll never, well, I won't say never because I've seen it on one or two, but you will very, very rarely see any reference to gladiatorial combat, despite the fact that the remnants of the adaptations made are still very visible. So I've already mentioned the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens.

• 50:39Liv Albert?

  That blows my mind.

• 50:40Speaker 04

  There is a wall. Yeah, there's, so you'll see a wall about a metre high probably, going around the entire of the orchestra. That's Roman. That was so that gladiators didn't trip and fall and stab the people in the front row.

• 50:54Liv Albert?

  Huh.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  The Panathenaic Stadium,

• 50:59Speaker 04

  uh, that's been heavily restored now.

• 51:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  But when they were excavating it, they found that at the U-shaped end, there had been an attempt to kind of um cordon off that U-shaped end to make a mini amphitheatre, which is something that's happened in other stadiums in in the east as well. It could be temporary or it could be permanent. So Athens is what.

• 51:24Liv Albert?

  But I would like to give them less space so that they're, you know, because obviously the the Panathenaic Stadium is enormously long. So was it cordoned off to give more like a specialized area for the fighting itself?

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Exactly, to give that same oval uh shaped section.

• 51:41Liv Albert?

  Less room to run, I guess, too.

• 51:45Speaker 04

  And that's, that's also happened at Aphrodite's and Patras and Nacopolis. So you've got that in Athens. Um Ephesus, Ephesus is a hugely popular tourist spot. Uh I don't think they particularly advertise the fact that it's one of only two places in the entire Roman Empire where we have found a gladiatorial cemetery.

• 52:10Liv Albert?

  Oh, I I went there like twelve years ago, so I'm sure I wouldn't, if I'd seen something like that, I wouldn't have remembered, but like, that's so cool.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  I mean, the people that know, they really know, but

• 52:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 52:24Speaker 04

  I mean, I don't think the general public really, really know that much about it.

• 52:29Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  So Corinth as well, the amphitheatre is not open to the public, but the theatre.

• 52:36Speaker 04

  And this is really cool, because as we've said, the amphitheatre in Corinth was built by Caesar, Julius Caesar for Romans. But a couple of centuries later, they've got their massive, massive theatre. They've decided, no, we don't want to use that hokey little amphitheatre. It's super provincial. We're gonna change our massive theatre. So they took out ten rows of seats. I think it's the biggest conversion of that kind in any theatre in, in the east.

• 53:05Speaker 04

  So that's about two centuries after Julius Caesar's amphitheatre. And you can see that theatre today, and there's nothing on it to tell you why that change had been made.

• 53:16Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  You've got, uh, the theatre at Mussolini, for instance, doesn't look like a Greek theatre anymore because the front seats are so much higher on top of a wall than the orchestra. And, you know, why? Who knows? It's a mystery. It's not a mystery. So many sights though, so many of these amazing sights, and there's just, they wanna hide it.

• 53:42Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, okay, and that, uh, that reminds me of one of the things that was so interesting when, when Dan Stewart was like, well, he just like told me, I didn't have any idea that any of this had happened. And so like, that sort of started my own knowledge of this. But like, also the idea that like, amidst all these changes and amidst using these Greek theatres for these kinds of gladiatorial, gladiatorial fighting, like they were also then still performing the plays. And I find that so interesting to think about too, like this idea that you could go from some like horrifically violent

• 54:24Liv Albert?

  bloodshed-filled moment, like straight into like, you know, Oedipus, Oedipus Tyrannus or something like that is kind of fascinating in itself. And like, it adds so much to the theatre too, like, it adds a lot to the performance of these plays to think about them coming like back to back with something so violent.

• 54:45Speaker 04

  So this can actually, uh, tie up with who is it who's putting on these shows?

• 54:50Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  And why?

• 54:53Speaker 04

  It's not the Romans.

• 54:55Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  The Romans are not putting on these shows for the Greeks. And they don't care if the Greeks go or not. They could not give a toss.

• 55:04Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Speaker 04

  What it is, is the priests of the imperial cult who are putting on these shows.

• 55:10Liv Albert?

  Huh.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  And it's part of the obligation of of their their role is to provide. Uh, moonera or gifts to the locals in honour of the emperor, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 55:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  So, um, it's usually priests of the imperial cult. And they will rent out a gladiatorial family. Uh, some places like Pergamon, uh, the priests had their own family of gladiators on retainer. And the next priest along would inherit that family of gladiators. Or there were roving, uh, groups that you could hire as they were passing through. But gladiatorial combat wasn't one of the only things that you could provide as part of this obligation. You could put on a dramatic festival, you could put on an athletic festival, you could build something. Uh, so for instance, in the city of Aphroditeas.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  They, uh, changed their stadium into an amphastadium, uh, for gladiators.

• 56:17Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 56:18Speaker 04

  So Aphroditeas, they've changed their stadium for gladiators. And we've actually got a letter between, uh, we've got correspondence between them and the Emperor Hadrian.

• 56:30Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  And they're saying, we've got this budget and we're wondering, we really, really wanna spend it on gladiators, but we kind of need an aqueduct. So what do you think we should do? And Hadrian is saying, are you crazy? Build the aqueduct. It's going to be more useful in the long run. It's more pragmatic. Build the aqueduct, you idiots. Why are you wasting money on all of these gladiators? So the Roman emperors are absolutely not pushing.

• 56:55Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  For the spread of spectacle. So there's this whole myth about, uh, a rather outdated term now, romanisation. Which is this idea that the the Romans were forcing their culture on everyone. The Romans did not give a shit. About gladiators in the east.

• 57:12Liv Albert?

  It sounds more like the Greeks were Hellenizing the gladiators more than the Romans were Romanizing anything.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  If anything, I think they were too enthusiastic to the point where a couple of people were thinking, oh, okay.

• 57:26Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  Because, I mean, Hadrian, Hadrian wasn't adverse to gladiators, but he's absolutely saying, no, do not waste your money on one show. There's something that's gonna actually help people, you idiots.

• 57:39Liv Albert?

  One show or an aqueduct, which one is smarter?

• 57:46Speaker 04

  So you, you've got these priests and their, their role is to provide something. It doesn't have to be gladiatorial combat, but as we know now, from all of these adapted venues, it very, very frequently was.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  So I think just the fact that they were trying to impress the local populace as much as possible. To gain popularity and prestige for them.

• 58:15Speaker 04

  The fact that they are choosing to put on spectacle as well as or instead of these other forms of entertainment or monumental, uh, monumentalization. Is very, very telling. The Greeks weren't being forced to watch anything. The Greeks were begging for more shows to be put on.

• 58:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  Just in a very Greek setting with Greek stage names. It's, it's brilliant to me. I love it.

• 58:46Liv Albert?

  Do they do like any full blown cosplay, like, like dressing up like the gods and stuff?

• 58:55Speaker 04

  Not so much. So there, it, there is a little bit of dressing up involved, but it's not actually the gladiators and it's across the whole empire.

• 59:06Speaker 04

  And it goes back to the idea.

• 59:08Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it goes back to the idea of the psychopomp.

• 59:11Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 59:12Speaker 04

  So you'd have someone dressed as Charon.

• 59:15Liv Albert?

  Ah, that's so dark. I love it.

• 59:19Speaker 04

  If you had a gladiator who you thought might be faking death to try and sneak out, or maybe was on the brink and you really knew that the doctors weren't going to be able to save him. You'd send on Charon with a massive hammer.

• 59:36Liv Albert?

  Fuck off.

• 59:37Speaker 04

  Whack them in the head to make sure that the job was finished to send them to the underworld. And actually, when you look at the skeletons in Ephesus, a lot of them have massive cranial wounds.

• 59:52Liv Albert?

  Jesus.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  So there was a bit of dress up, but it wasn't the gladiators doing it.

• 59:59Liv Albert?

  I'm so glad I asked, though. Fuck.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there is, there is an element of dress up in the fact that, um, from the foundations of it, the different types of gladiator are kind of supposed to be, uh, uh, quite a few of them are dressed as traditional Roman adversaries.

• 1:00:23Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  And enemies. But that really only is important when you're looking at spectacle in Rome itself.

• 1:00:31Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  And when you're looking at spectacle in Rome, it's important to figure out what its job was. Because there's this whole thing about, oh, well, it's because the Romans were really bloodthirsty, but it's so much more than that. It's about considering your own mortality.

• 1:00:50Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  So the gladiators were taught to die without flinching.

• 1:00:54Liv Albert?

  Jesus.

• 1:00:55Speaker 04

  And to accept death with, uh, courage. That's a great lesson that we can all learn. But also for the audience in Rome, it's a lesson in imperialism. And when to grant mercy and when to be more pragmatic.

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  A lot of those messages about how to be an imperialist power don't really work in the provinces. Uh, so I think in the Greek East, it is more about the one on one. The, the Greeks loved the, the macho.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  The male body. What better way?

• 1:01:35Liv Albert?

  Did they?

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  I mean, I've heard rumors.

• 1:01:42Speaker 04

  You can watch them run around in the nude. Yeah, that's fine.

• 1:01:46Liv Albert?

  They never did that.

• 1:01:49Speaker 04

  Why not give each other pointy metal sticks?

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  And you know, you know.

• 1:01:57Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  You think about it, it's, it, it's the perfect amalgamation of so many Greek loves. You've got the athleticism, the competition. You've got the, the myths and epic in the sage names and in the epitaphs. And I think it shows.

• 1:02:16Liv Albert?

  Phallic messery everywhere.

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  I mean, this isn't from Greece, it's from England, but I have to mention there is a, a terracotta lamp. With a fornicating couple on it and they're both dressed as gladiators. And the girl's on top and she's, you know, she's, she's winning. She's a.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  He's sheathing his sword, but she's winning.

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  It's such a cool episode.

• 1:02:44Liv Albert?

  That sounds amazing. Also just like, for all I like to, I've made it like a joke to insult Rome compared to Greece. But like, I do have to say, the, the variations in dick lamps that Rome had. Like, just true art. I forget who, I, I feel like I've become like an utterly absurd friend to most everyone I know because in real life. I really don't have many friends who have any interest in the ancient world, except for whatever I force upon them. And like, I don't remember who I was telling, but like I, I just started talking about like the penis lamps of Pompeii. And like, I just can sometimes watch people's brains, just be like, right, I'm friends with you. Okay. Like, yeah.

• 1:03:29Liv Albert?

  Tell me more about the penis lamps and Pompeii. And like, well, some of them have wings and some of them have wings and more penis parts attached so that there's like 10 all in one. And it's like, let me tell you all about this.

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  Can I tell you about one of my favorite things?

• 1:03:48Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  I can't remember if it's from Pompeii or Herculaneum, but it was, it's from one of them. It is a metal little statuette of a gladiator who's fighting his own penis, which also happens to be a panther.

• 1:04:06Liv Albert?

  That makes me so happy and I have to see it.

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  It is in Naples Archaeological Museum. You know, the little cupboards that they've got of all the naughty things that women weren't allowed in until like a couple of decades ago. It's in there. It is the strangest piece of Roman art I think I've ever seen. I love it so much. I really wish they'd make a museum repro for the gift shop. Cause I would buy 10 and have them in a row.

• 1:04:41Liv Albert?

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• 1:06:37Liv Albert?

  I mean, we can always divert into dicks, but I was just before you get back in because I want to hear everything, but just the way you were talking about, you know, the way Greece kind of took on all of this stuff, like I really just think it also fits so beautifully. Like, I just kept thinking when you were talking about all of this, like, the way it manages to, like, still kind of connect with, or like, like, I can't think of the right word, but like, it just makes me think of, you know, the procession for the Great Dionysia and like, the dicks on sticks, as I like to call them, like, just, they had phallic, literally

• 1:07:19Liv Albert?

  everything in Greece, and it really, it all still pulls together this, oh, I think, you know, we were talking specifically about how the Greeks like a naked form, you know, it all, it really makes sense to just kind of transform what was like this, you know, like, people want to think of theater, Greek theater, you know, as we were talking about, like, as this hyper intellectual, brilliant works of art, but like, the whole damn thing started with a procession of enormous phalluses throughout the city, like, It it was never what the the western world wants it to be. It was always weird and sexual and like. And and so it just it fits so perfectly to then have them take on gladiators and and make them their own and like kind of connect them almost with.

• 1:08:05Liv Albert?

  With Dionysus and with like their theatrical roots, because like they're so tied, like one might have real bloodshed, but like. They're not so far apart, theatre and and these kinds of competitions.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you think of some of the deaths that you see. In these, but I mean, I know you didn't see them in the plays.

• 1:08:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  Mentioned by the messenger, but there is so much violence in these stories.

• 1:08:28Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  It's it's almost like the next logical step is to just show a bit of it.

• 1:08:34Liv Albert?

  Absolutely.

• 1:08:36Speaker 04

  And I think as well. Because you've got the the drama of it all, the athleticism of it all, the aesthetics of it all.

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  The way that these Greek gladiators are talking about themselves, how they're spoken about. Is so different to how they were considered in the West. And there's this thing called infamia. Which is where we get the word infamy. And.

• 1:09:06Liv Albert?

  I was willing to bet.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  It's it's a Roman kind of social class, and it's the outcasts. So that's where you get executioners, undertakers, sex workers, pimps, actors, dancers, uh. Quite a few musicians and gladiators. They're all in this social class of outcasts. They didn't have the same rights. I don't think they had many rights at all. There's. It it's difficult to talk about this because. I don't think there's enough work been done on it, really, because the Roman Empire was centuries long and it was this huge geographical span. And it's pretty difficult to say that there's this one level of outcastness that was put on.

• 1:09:54Speaker 04

  In every single province, in every single century, on every single one of those categories. But it is fair to say that they were treated differently from people with respectable professions.

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  But in the east, it's there's you can sense the pride when they talk about themselves and their tombstones. About their achievements and their fame and their skill, you can sense the pride. And there's no point putting that in your epitaph unless that's the kind of thing that's generally accepted and that other people also think the same kind of thing. And I believe, and I will go to bat saying this. I believe that gladiators in the east were treated better with more respect than gladiators in the west.

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  I think I'd be fair saying that.

• 1:10:47Liv Albert?

  I mean, that's, I mean, I was gonna say that sounds right, but all I know is what you've told me, but like. That leads directly to a question which I was wondering about. My ability to phrase words today is not going well, but.

• 1:11:07Liv Albert?

  You sound brilliant.

• 1:11:10Liv Albert?

  I'm curious about like, and I don't know enough about this historically, let alone, you know, when it gets to Greece, but like. The gladiators and whether they're always enslaved, whether some of them are choosing this life, like what is the deal there? And was it different in the east?

• 1:11:30Speaker 04

  That's really difficult to say with the information that we have, to be honest.

• 1:11:36Speaker 04

  There's there's different schools of thought amongst the academics anyway. It does seem that in the earlier days of spectacle in the west, the majority were slaves and prisoners of war. And then because gladiators kept some of their winnings and could achieve freedom. You could absolutely, as a free man, if you needed the cash, you could take the risk. So there there was definitely an upward tick in free people signing up and they were called Orctorati. They would sign up for a set amount of time, certain amount of years or a certain amount of fights and say, this is how long you've got me for.

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  I'm gonna try and not die with a bit of money.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  And that seems to be absolutely what Greeks are doing. So there is a split between the unfree and the temporarily unfree.

• 1:12:39Speaker 04

  On the other hand, we do also see, as in the West, that they absolutely could earn their freedom and a lot of them did. We've got quite a few gravestones mentioning that they've won their freedom. And that they can go on to do all kinds of other jobs. We know, for instance, one of the jobs that they could do is as a referee. And there's one, there's one epitaph I love, and it's of a gladiator complaining. That he, as far as he concerned, he'd won the match because.

• 1:13:10Speaker 04

  He had his opponent pinned down, but the referee, for whatever reason, decided that actually, no, he hadn't. And that was the only reason I'm dead is because of that referee.

• 1:13:23Speaker 04

  I mean, holding that much of a grudge that you write it in stone.

• 1:13:28Liv Albert?

  Yes.

• 1:13:31Speaker 04

  Um, but yeah, it seems to be that.

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  There was the possibility of making a lot of money if you were good. A lot of it, I think, we can't overestimate the appeal of having. A set place where you knew that you were going to have a bed, possibly not a comfortable bed. And food, not the best food in the world, but not bad either, because you were an expensive commodity as a gladiator. You were. You were expensive to maintain. They had a reason to keep you in fighting form. So for a lot of these men, I think a guaranteed roof over their head and food in their bellies would have been a pretty good reason to sign up.

• 1:14:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  Which is sad on, on many levels. But I don't, I don't think we should feel too sad for some of them because the way that they talk about themselves, they are so proud of what they achieved.

• 1:14:27Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that's what it sounds like.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, they are pleased. They are so proud of themselves to be able to call themselves warriors of, of Ares. And to fight among heroes. That's, that's how they talk about each other. And I think it's a real shame then, when you've got these ancient critics, modern critics. That like to pretend that the, the Greeks were just sat drinking wine and talking about philosophy all day. I think that's really sad, that they're the loudest voice, when actually.

• 1:15:03Speaker 04

  These, these guys, some of them were, but not all of them were victims.

• 1:15:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:09Speaker 04

  They would hate, they would hate it to be seen as victims. They're heroes.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  And I think it is difficult, um, when you, you're talking about Roman spectacle. Not to come across as bloodthirsty yourself.

• 1:15:27Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  But I think going too far in the other direction and too sanitized and pretending that you're devastated at the thought of these deaths thousands of years ago. I think that's also just as disingenuous. I think we've got to look at it from a measured perspective, somewhere in the middle. We recognise humanity's propensity to enjoy violence for violence's sake. We're fascinated by it. We can find it a bit fun.

• 1:15:56Speaker 04

  I think by demonising or sympathising with these people too much, it does them a disservice. Because every time I read what they've written. They're, they're just so proud to be gladiators.

• 1:16:12Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:13Speaker 04

  So, yeah, I, I kind of just wanna talk about them to make sure that their voices are still being heard.

• 1:16:19Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:20Speaker 04

  They're definitely not in the archaeological records.

• 1:16:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Well, and it sounds like, I mean, the level of pride involved in some of those tombstones, like, it's lovely. It's really, it's, yeah, it's really nice. And like, I mean, I just, I, I love those moments of like, real people, you know, because I think. As exactly exemplified by everything we've been talking about, like this idea of the Greeks as this one thing. These people who drink wine and talk about philosophy, like, sure, that applied to some of them. But by and large, it did not. And, and like, it's so much more interesting to look at what. An everyday person, whether they're a gladiator or not, like, you know, actually felt about their life.

• 1:17:08Liv Albert?

  And, yeah, I mean, I love that. I love hearing that they were proud of what they were doing. And like. I love the Ares connection too, because like, he's, uh, to me, he's a really fascinating figure in myth, in Greek. Mythology because like he's really not mentioned that much for somebody who was a god of something so important like Athena really gets all the credit for being the goddess of war. I think particularly because, you know, so much of our record comes from Athens, but like.

• 1:17:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Liv Albert?

  It's so, it's lovely to have these connections to Ares. Like I have a real thing for Ares and I can't totally explain and I really like it.

• 1:17:47Speaker 04

  I mean, ever since playing Immortals Phoenix Rising, I've got a bit of a thing for Ares myself.

• 1:17:54Liv Albert?

  I've considered that game before, but you've convinced me a little bit more.

• 1:17:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, you have to play it. Seriously, you're gonna get so many episodes out of that thing.

• 1:18:03Liv Albert?

  I mean, yeah, as long as I can finally tear myself away from Odyssey for once, but we'll see. I, I love Ares. Back to a part that I cut out, listeners, you'll never know.

• 1:18:22Liv Albert?

  Um, yeah, okay. I don't, I don't know where I interrupted you, so stop me if the, there's relevancy before I bring up Odyssey, because you told me to bring up Odyssey. Uh, and now I'm fascinated by it for the listeners.

• 1:18:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Liv Albert?

  Ooh, okay. Yeah. So that's the only other game I've played. Um, so to the listeners, I do mean Assassin's Creed Odyssey, because I always mean Assassin's Creed Odyssey. So please tell me everything, but that's all to say like I know enough of Origins too.

• 1:18:49Speaker 04

  So there are gladiators in Origins and Odyssey and your character can be one. And this is kind.

• 1:18:58Liv Albert?

  Can I make sure, can I make sure that I'm guessing right? Because I feel like I need to test my knowledge of Odyssey. Like, do you mean like everything that happens on Crete, like in the thing?

• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Liv Albert?

  This, I feel like it's just like.

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  They've got their kind of makeshift amphitheater, haven't they?

• 1:19:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  And that's, that's kind of, I mean, it's way too early. But that's what I kind of mean is it's the makeshift ability of just building it wherever you want.

• 1:19:23Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  That's entirely right. Way too early, centuries too early, but you know, never mind.

• 1:19:31Liv Albert?

  But origins wouldn't be if they've got something like I haven't gotten to whatever it would be in origins, but that would be time period wise. Correct, because.

• 1:19:39Speaker 04

  We know that there definitely were gladiators in Egypt. We've got evidence, literary evidence, we've got archaeological evidence. There's a wonderful glass with gladiators painted on it that came out of Egypt. It's beautiful.

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  Uh, so we do know that they were there. Again, it's a bit early. So Julius Caesar's in origins and he's.

• 1:20:00Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:00Speaker 04

  You know, he's just introducing gladiatorial combat to Greece itself. He's probably not too worried about Egypt at that point. Um, they've put an amphitheatre in Cyrene, which is, I mean, there wasn't one. But this is where it gets really interesting, because what they have done in origins is they've provided the theatre in how the Romans adapted it.

• 1:20:28Liv Albert?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:29Speaker 04

  So.

• 1:20:30Liv Albert?

  I gotta keep playing origins, I guess. We've gone very far.

• 1:20:34Speaker 04

  Cyrene's theatre, uh, started off like any other theatre on, on the side of a hill. And then what the Romans did to it was different to how they changed other theatres. And origins gets it half right. So what the Romans did is they took away the stage building. And then they carried on the front couple of rows of seats behind where the stage building would have been to make that circular, semi-circular kind of area for the gladiators to be in. So they've got some of it in and they've, they've got the fact that they uh, raised the front rows of seats up. They've got that right.

• 1:21:16Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Speaker 04

  But also, this is what I find really interesting in it. It's more in Odyssey than it is in Origins. Because archaeologists are so loathe to talk about these adaptations in detail. It's very easy for someone to go to a theatre now, look at it and think this is what a theatre is like. In the Greek period, which is why if you go to several theatres in the Odyssey game. You will see Roman adaptations for gladiatorial combat in theatres. Couple of centuries before they were actually changed, because I'm guessing the researchers went over there, took loads of photos.

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, that theatre's got a wall, we'd better stick a wall in it, and it's not, it's Roman.

• 1:22:07Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:22:11Liv Albert?

  That's so interesting.

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they've got different ones as well. Some of it, they've they've raised the front seats uh by taking away. Uh the front rows and making the fourth row the front seat. Some of them they've put in the wall.

• 1:22:24Liv Albert?

  Do you know examples of where in the game? Cause yes, I'd wanna go directly into the game. Um, cause I'm thinking like the theatre of Dionysus, they have the old one, which was smart, like it's all wooden, it's not the the later marble. But so I'm curious about where they are.

• 1:22:40Speaker 04

  Oh, I can't now. I think it's one of the ones on the Peloponnese, it's definitely got one.

• 1:22:44Liv Albert?

  Okay.

• 1:22:45Speaker 04

  I think maybe Delphi has got a wall, or it's got the the seats. And actually, I mean, Delphi.

• 1:22:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:52Speaker 04

  Was adapted by the Romans for gladiatorial combat. So again, this hugely.

• 1:22:58Liv Albert?

  The idea of doing that in Delphi.

• 1:23:00Speaker 04

  Religious plays, two adaptations.

• 1:23:05Speaker 04

  The theatre was slightly changed and the stadium that was built.

• 1:23:10Liv Albert?

  Stadium too, shit.

• 1:23:12Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's all for gladiators, because if you think about it.

• 1:23:17Speaker 04

  Greek stadiums, if they had seating at all, which was pretty rare. The people at the front were pretty much on the level of the running track.

• 1:23:27Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:23:28Speaker 04

  You don't need, as the person in the front row, to be higher, looking down, unless there's something that's gonna hit you.

• 1:23:36Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:37Speaker 04

  And you'll hear, you'll hear all the archaeologists say, oh, well, they did the beast hunts. They did the beast hunts, but they didn't, they didn't kill humans here, they just killed the beast hunts. And I'm looking at these tiny walls thinking, yeah, mate.

• 1:23:49Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it's gonna stop a lion.

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  That's not gonna stop much, really. Um, so, yeah, the Delphi, the, the, the stadium. Not only has it got, uh, higher seats, but it's, it's got everything that you need.

• 1:24:06Speaker 04

  To have gladiatorial combat in the, the holy of holies.

• 1:24:09Liv Albert?

  Yeah, so Delos and Delphi.

• 1:24:13Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:24:14Liv Albert?

  They're, that's wild, that's amazing.

• 1:24:18Speaker 04

  And you know, you, you won't ever hear it in the guidebooks.

• 1:24:22Liv Albert?

  No, no.

• 1:24:24Speaker 04

  You'll hear it in a guidebook that I eventually write, but you, so far, you won't hear it in any guidebooks. But yeah, it's all there.

• 1:24:31Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:32Speaker 04

  That's what I find so interesting, that a game that was so dedicated to historical accuracy. Has accidentally put in these Roman changes because they were there, but no one bothered explaining why.

• 1:24:46Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:47Speaker 04

  So I'm guess, I don't know, maybe they just thought, well, it's there, must have been for a reason.

• 1:24:52Liv Albert?

  Yeah, it makes sense, because, you know, if, if it is something that is so kind of like. You know, not necessarily explicitly hidden away, but like ostensibly kind of hidden away, like. That's probably the wrong word to use, but like, you know, if it's something that's not talked about a lot, and like, yes, they had historians working on that game, but like. I mean, yeah, i- if it's just one of those things where it just kind of gets like brushed under the rug, this idea of why they would have been changed. It makes perfect sense that it kind of ends up in there. And I mean, there's so many little things that they clearly just were like, you know, this needs to be because it needs to be in the game because we don't know, you know, what else would be there kind of thing. And I think about all the like,

• 1:25:35Liv Albert?

  Minoan slash Mycenaean ruins that are kind of everywhere and they all have.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:25:40Liv Albert?

  It's like they're meant to be Mycenaean, but for the most part, they, I guess if they're on the islands, they all have the like, um, the sacred horns kind of thing. So they're all like also Minoan. And any, anyway, it's just interesting, like those little things that, that are, you can see where they pulled it from part of history. And then they were like, but we got to put it here because we have to put something here.

• 1:25:59Speaker 04

  Mm hmm. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:02Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Speaker 04

  So yeah, I mean, it's interesting because they, they did get the Theatre of Dynasties, right? The fact that it was wooden to start off with. But on other theatres, it looks exactly like it would have done in the Roman period, four, 500 years later.

• 1:26:18Speaker 04

  And I, I was going around it as I was doing this research, playing the game and just thinking, oh, wow, yeah, they're everywhere.

• 1:26:29Liv Albert?

  Interesting. I'm gonna go find a bunch of theatres now.

• 1:26:32Speaker 04

  And it truly is everywhere. It's well over a hundred real life examples of these buildings being ever so slightly altered.

• 1:26:40Liv Albert?

  Yeah, I love it. Okay. You also brought up the beast hunt, which reminds me that I desperately want to hear about this woman who is often called a gladiator, but she wasn't a gladiator. But she was like, all that we know about women involved in this. So tell me everything.

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  So people love talking about female gladiators because

• 1:27:05Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Speaker 04

  it's an extraordinary profession and they are the most extraordinary of the extraordinary, right? I am so sorry to tell you that we have hardly any information at all. Which, I know, I complete Debbie Downer. So.

• 1:27:25Liv Albert?

  Sometimes it's just the truth.

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  So, sorry to upset anyone that still considers the History Channel to be, you know, a viable source of historical information. There's recently a documentary called, I think, Colosseum, eight episodes long, and one of them was about a female gladiator called Mavia.

• 1:27:48Speaker 04

  Here's the thing, Mavia wasn't a gladiator, she was a beast hunter. So you've got kind of two levels of beast hunter, you've got the besteiries, they're kind of thrown in and told to do their best. And you've got highly, highly trained beast hunters, the Venator, uh, and she's one of those. So no of her, uh, from a passage in Juvenal, there is two sentences. Uh, she hunts with bared breasts, and that's pretty much it.

• 1:28:26Speaker 04

  Now.

• 1:28:26Liv Albert?

  Priorities.

• 1:28:28Speaker 04

  The, the other thing to note with her specifically, because they've named her in this documentary and they've given her this huge autobiography. It's all bollocks because she's in two lines of Juvenal, which is a satire, so it's possible that she's not even real.

• 1:28:46Liv Albert?

  Oh.

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  But.

• 1:28:48Liv Albert?

  She's like Atlantis, I guess. She's not at all. She's not at all. I want to make that clear.

• 1:28:54Speaker 04

  I mean, it's not to say that there weren't female gladiators completely, but we have to be really conservative with how we talk about them. So, for instance, uh, there's mention of some upper-class ladies being forced to fight by Nero at the games that he put on for his mother after he murdered her.

• 1:29:19Liv Albert?

  I like, okay, I just have to point out the way you phrase that because as someone who doesn't know enough Roman history, like saying the games he put on for his mother before then adding after he kills her is magnificent.

• 1:29:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it was a, it, this is how gladiatorial games really took off, right? It was a funeral thing. It happened at funerals to honor the dead. At some point, someone said, not enough posh people are dying to have these big funerals. Shall we just have gladiatorial fights whenever we want for funsies? And everyone went, yeah, that's a great idea. But, um,

• 1:29:59Speaker 04

  it was still, you know, the thing to do when someone dies is to put on games. And Julius Caesar put on games, I think it was for his sister, I think, or maybe his dad. But it was decades after the person had died.

• 1:30:11Liv Albert?

  Right. So just like an excuse.

• 1:30:13Speaker 04

  It was absolutely an excuse. With this one, I suppose he was trying to look innocent. Oh, my poor mom, my best, you know, how some people try and kill each other.

• 1:30:25Speaker 04

  She was such an amazing mom. I'm gonna make all of her friends fight in the arena.

• 1:30:32Speaker 04

  So they're upper class women. Uh, I think it's safe to say that they weren't there by choice and they weren't professionally trained. So I'm not going to call them gladiators. Tacitus also mentions that, um, there were a couple of aristocratic ladies that might be seen in the Colosseum. But again, if they're forced to be there and they've never trained, I don't count them.

• 1:30:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah, that just sounds like it's an execution made into a show.

• 1:30:59Speaker 04

  When the Colosseum is opened in 80 CE, Marshall, uh, mentions lots and lots of things about the opening games, the inaugural games. Because he's bigging up, uh, the Flavians who built it. He mentions a couple of women. He actually says, it's so wonderful, Emperor, that even Venus serves you, meaning that there were females in the performers. But there were so many performers in the Colosseum. There were, uh, dancers, musicians, beast hunters. He doesn't actually call any of them gladiators, so I'm not counting those either. Uh, he does mention

• 1:31:41Speaker 04

  a, a woman who killed a lion, just like Hercules. But she's not a gladiator. Um.

• 1:31:49Liv Albert?

  But also like, that would be really cool. Like, if she did it, like, actually strangling a lion? Like, I wanna meet her.

• 1:31:57Speaker 04

  I mean, that would be kinda cool, wouldn't it?

• 1:31:59Liv Albert?

  It really would.

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  I would love to see those opening games.

• 1:32:01Liv Albert?

  Yes, like, fine, not a gladiator, totally fine. I wanna see it. I wanna know how that is going down.

• 1:32:08Speaker 04

  And, and, you know, we get lots of names of, uh, female beast hunters. That seems to be, you know, a great job for a woman in

• 1:32:15Liv Albert?

  That's so cool.

• 1:32:17Speaker 04

  But

• 1:32:19Speaker 04

  we really only have, uh, Suetonius mentions some female gladiators fighting by torchlight under the mission. He seems to suggest that they have had some training, so I'm counting those.

• 1:32:34Speaker 04

  We've got a poem that, uh, says that there were some brave women who fought like Amazons, uh, but they were untrained, not counting those. So actually, we've got one passage of Suetonius and we've got one, uh, inscription from Ostia about women and swords, and we've got one piece of artwork with female gladiators, and it comes from Turkey. See, I told you, the Greeks took gladiatorial combat and they ran with it. All of the fun stuff. It's happening over in the east.

• 1:33:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah. So, do we think that they, they actually had some over there then? Like

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  So here's the thing.

• 1:33:19Liv Albert?

  Real female battle. Yes, please. Tell me the thing.

• 1:33:22Speaker 04

  It's a relief. Uh, and it's currently in the British Museum. And it's been there since the eighteen hundreds. And with so many other things in the British Museum from the eighteen hundreds, there's not a lot of detail about where it comes from. All we know is Halicarnassus.

• 1:33:41Speaker 04

  So where in Halicarnassus, from the Noctropolis, from the theatre, who knows? The theatre in Halicarnassus was adapted, so we know it was used. Don't know whether it was used by these women, but it was used for gladiators. So we don't know where the stone is from, which makes it really difficult.

• 1:34:00Liv Albert?

  Give me another reason to be mad at the British Museum.

• 1:34:03Speaker 04

  Oh, as if we need another one.

• 1:34:04Liv Albert?

  Right?

• 1:34:06Speaker 04

  So, um, there's two reasons to carve reliefs of gladiators in the east. One is if it's you're a gladiator and it's your tombstone. You wanna put yourself on it, and they did that way more than gladiators did in the West. They love putting themselves full figure on their tombstones. They are showing off and flexing even in death. I love it. The other reason to have gladiators in relief is if you are one of those imperial priests or a local politician who's put on a games.

• 1:34:45Speaker 04

  The way that you make sure that no one forgets that you put on the most amazing games in the world is by making giant stone postcards of them for everyone to walk by. And we've got these from all over Turkey and Greece, and some of them, they're so cool. Some of them are like, uh, four pictures in a row, like a comic strip, so you can see the fights beginning, middle and end. I love it. So I'm going to make a slightly educated guess that this stone comes from one of those groups. It doesn't have any, uh, words on it apart from their names, which are Achillea. Yeah, Achillea and Amazonia.

• 1:35:27Liv Albert?

  Oh, fuck off. That's so cool.

• 1:35:29Speaker 04

  I know.

• 1:35:31Speaker 04

  How cool is that?

• 1:35:33Liv Albert?

  That makes me so happy.

• 1:35:35Speaker 04

  So cool. Um, so.

• 1:35:38Liv Albert?

  Also, like, eh, you're in Turkey, like, you're, I mean, Troy is right there, like, choosing to have two and name them that, just.

• 1:35:48Liv Albert?

  That's wonderful. Makes me very happy.

• 1:35:50Speaker 04

  It's pretty fucking cool, I have to say. So I think that this is, this is what it is. It's a stone, it's probably part of another set of here's a games that ran for X amount of days. I'm gonna put the top three fights from it in art so that everyone can see I'm the cool dude who put on the women fighting each other in Halicarnassus. I'm the only one that's done it so far. This is my name, which now I don't have. Vote for me.

• 1:36:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:24Speaker 04

  And um, I think because of that context, we can pretty much say there was a fight between two women in Halicarnassus and they were called Achillea and Amazonia.

• 1:36:41Liv Albert?

  That's so fun.

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  Which is really fucking cool, but it's the only, apart from that, Suetonius thing, it's the only evidence of a documented fight between women that we have for the whole Roman Empire for its entire length.

• 1:36:59Liv Albert?

  Wow.

• 1:37:00Speaker 04

  We can guess that there were more, but we've got one fight that we know about that we can say pretty much happened. From their stance, they were trained, they're in perfect fighting stance.

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

  Apart from that, I think we have to imagine tens of thousands of gladiators across the empire throughout the centuries, maybe less than zero point five percent would have been women.

• 1:37:30Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:31Speaker 04

  That's me being really, really generous.

• 1:37:34Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  The majority of people in the Roman Empire would have lived their entire lives without seeing a single woman fight.

• 1:37:43Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  Now, going back to this documentary, I mean, that's just not scandalous and salacious enough for them, so they've they've made it up.

• 1:37:54Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:54Speaker 04

  We have got no evidence, literary, artistic, nothing, nutter, for a woman fighting in the Colosseum itself. And because their documentary was Rome centric, they've had to take someone doing a different job and give them another job. But, I mean, this was a documentary that had a beast hunter cry when he killed his best friend who's also a lion and then hugged the corpse. So I don't know what to tell you. It's just.

• 1:38:21Liv Albert?

  I mean.

• 1:38:22Speaker 04

  There's one scene where him and the lion, the night before the fight, they hug while looking at the moon together. I can't.

• 1:38:31Liv Albert?

  I I'm saying words into the microphone so that the listeners understand because my face there. Um, that is absurd on like a level that, I mean, I wanna say that it it surprises me even for History Channel. It obviously doesn't because they make that show, but aliens, um, so they're dumb asses. Um, but still, that is bananas.

• 1:38:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I would love to see a documentary about that fight, possibly in the context of spectacle in the east itself.

• 1:39:10Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:11Speaker 04

  Because a lot of the fruity stuff in Gladiator Combat is happening in the east instead of the west. So some of the odder, it's like there was um, a gladiator type called a Loquarius who had a lasso.

• 1:39:27Liv Albert?

  Adorable.

• 1:39:27Speaker 04

  Instead of a net. Uh, that appears apparently only in Greece. Um, there was an arbolas type who had kind of like, um, this is really hard to describe without a picture, but a semi circular blade on the end of like a, a solid glove.

• 1:39:46Liv Albert?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:39:47Speaker 04

  So like.

• 1:39:48Liv Albert?

  I was like gonna be like, oh, like a scythe or something, but until you said glove.

• 1:39:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Liv Albert?

  So like, like, um, like Freddy Krueger, but one.

• 1:39:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:39:58Liv Albert?

  It was more circular.

• 1:40:00Speaker 04

  And they could have either one and a shield or one on each hand. They only happen in the Greek east from what we can tell. So a lot of the weird stuff. If you're looking for exotic gladiators, you're gonna go there. And I think that's, that's probably why this is the only place where we've got a definite source for female gladiators. I really hate to burst everyone's bubble about this because, I mean, the movie Gladiator had those, those arches that get chopped in half by the, the chariots, sorry spoiler alert, twenty three years later.

• 1:40:37Speaker 04

  And a lot of reenactment groups have female gladiators and I love to see them. I think they're fantastic. What I really would stress is we know about one fight, one.

• 1:40:49Liv Albert?

  Mm hmm, and nowhere near Rome.

• 1:40:51Speaker 04

  Nowhere near Rome. I mean, so Tony is mentions, he, he doesn't mention how many, but it, it, it's one instance in, in Rome. He doesn't say where exactly.

• 1:41:06Liv Albert?

  Is it clear that he's at least talking about Rome or could that even be up for debate?

• 1:41:10Speaker 04

  Ah, no, not really.

• 1:41:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:13Speaker 04

  Probably somewhere within the vicinity, but.

• 1:41:16Liv Albert?

  Right.

• 1:41:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. Again, I mean, Rome had more than one venue.

• 1:41:21Liv Albert?

  Well, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:21Speaker 04

  There were gladiators in the Circus Maximus. There were Nero built an amphitheatre that burnt down, I think.

• 1:41:30Speaker 04

  So there's more than one venue.

• 1:41:32Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Sorry, I have to pull like what little Roman history I know when I, when I need it. Um, yeah, it's so interesting. It's so like,

• 1:41:43Liv Albert?

  I mean, not to like harp on the documentary, but it just, I'm just like perpetually in awe that we can't get a documentary that's accurate. And it, it always seems to be because they want it to be more salacious and more like dramatic, but it's like, I, I just wanna scream because all I, all I wanna say to that is like, just pick one of the topics that is that because like, real history can.

• 1:42:13Liv Albert?

  Be that dramatic, like you're saying, like if they, if we just, there's a documentary about, you know, gladiatorial fights in the east, like it would be just as incredibly fascinating and you could feature all of these weird things and then also maybe talk about how there was this fight between women and like, I don't know, I have a lot of, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings on the complete lack of like really historically accurate documentaries made by popular.

• 1:42:40Speaker 04

  I mean, I've written about seven in my head. I just need someone to give me a lot of money to make them.

• 1:42:45Liv Albert?

  I mean, okay, like, yes, uh, yeah, that's the thing. There's so, there's so many possibilities out there. Yeah, I mean, uh, I like, it's so interesting because I love that people want these women to be involved in these things that are so like heavily masculine, like you, you, you want there to be women gladiators. That'd be so cool. But it's like, you can't force it. It's not there.

• 1:43:09Speaker 04

  You want to see these women kick ass in a male's field.

• 1:43:12Liv Albert?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:13Speaker 04

  Which is what most feminists want now. Unfortunately, I mean, they clearly did at least once, but

• 1:43:22Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23Speaker 04

  Not a lot. Sorry.

• 1:43:24Liv Albert?

  No, no.

• 1:43:26Speaker 04

  It would, and that's why I love that the reenactors are just, because most of them will say this is incredibly rare. I saw one in France and they actually called themselves Amazonia and Achillea to reenact that fight.

• 1:43:40Liv Albert?

  That's cool.

• 1:43:40Speaker 04

  That was, that was pretty, that was really, really awesome. Um, but yeah, it's, it's rare. Amazing, but really, really, really, really, really, really rare. And if that's one thing that everyone takes away from this episode is that they really rare.

• 1:43:58Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Liv Albert?

  But we can still talk about Achillea and, and Amazonia. Like, that's great. At least their names, you know, like we have them. That's so cool.

• 1:44:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have so many names and it's, it's so great. We, you think Polynices and the Thalys from the plays and then after the play's finished, the next day you can go and see it being reenacted.

• 1:44:23Liv Albert?

  Fuck, okay, that so that's

• 1:44:24Speaker 04

  By people calling themselves Atticus Polynices.

• 1:44:26Liv Albert?

  Yes. So that's what I was thinking about when I like, you know, mentioned the whole like them still using the theaters as theaters in addition to using them for these things. So like, would they ever have, I mean, obviously this would be really difficult for us to know. Somebody wrote it down, but like, would they have a kind of back to back situation? Like, would they be able to transform it quickly enough? Like, I don't know. Do we know anything about that?

• 1:44:50Speaker 04

  So some of the transformations were temporary. Uh, for instance, at Argos, if you visit Argos at the edge of the orchestra in a series of post holes and they just stick up a big old fence with nets around it, that could be taken up within minutes. Uh, the other changes were permanent and they were just there. From then on, that's how it was.

• 1:45:15Speaker 04

  I would be very surprised if it happened back to back. Simply because if you're having a drama festival, I think it would be a spectacle as its own event.

• 1:45:27Liv Albert?

  It's like a whole thing.

• 1:45:28Speaker 04

  It just happened to be in the same place. Um, that said, I mean, when it was Antiochus bringing in gladiators to the east in the first time in one six six, there were loads of things happening at that event. I think he had chariot racing. All kinds of things. So it's not unheard of for it to be an event within a wider program.

• 1:45:48Liv Albert?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:50Speaker 04

  But from what I can tell, it it would still be its own standalone thing, just in a venue that happens to now be a hybrid venue.

• 1:45:59Liv Albert?

  Yeah. Oh, the idea of having two named Atticus and Polynices though is like so fun. Like, that would be dramatic, you know? Like, oh, my God, doing it in Thebes too, like.

• 1:46:15Speaker 04

  Yes, can you imagine? Now, I can't, I don't think there's any evidence for a change in Thebes. I don't, I don't think that's one of the places that they changed. But wouldn't, how cool would that be?

• 1:46:27Liv Albert?

  It would be amazing.

• 1:46:29Speaker 04

  It would be phenomenal.

• 1:46:30Liv Albert?

  Then you get like five other guys coming in to, I don't know, I'm just trying to make it seven. Like, oh, it just.

• 1:46:40Liv Albert?

  That's fun. I like these mythological connections.

• 1:46:45Speaker 04

  All, all of it really reinforces the Greekness of it. There was some kind of magic in existing Greek culture that you add Roman spectacle and all of a sudden you get this glorious mishmash.

• 1:46:59Liv Albert?

  I mean, to me, it, it, it just, it makes perfect sense. It's, it's almost like, and like a little bit of a stretch, but it's like taking the Pankration and taking theater and smushing them together, you know, it's like, it's that sort of like hand to hand combat violence of the Pankration. But then with the, like, the theatrics of theater with the bloodshed, like, obviously, there isn't any, like, we're talking about, it's all in the messenger speech, but the concept is there. It's just like making the Pankration more theatrical, more violent, more bloody, but like, yeah, it's pre-existing, less naked. That's too bad, you know, but like, they, you, there, there's, they're taking something that's there.

• 1:47:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I do want to point out that on the art that we have, they are still wearing their loin cloths.

• 1:47:55Liv Albert?

  It would be very Greek.

• 1:47:56Speaker 04

  You would not want a cut in the wrong place there, would you?

• 1:48:01Liv Albert?

  Um, thank you so much for doing this. This has, uh, clearly been so much fun. I am just, I mean, fuck, I would love to hear anything about the ancient world ever, but the fact that you basically turned an episode on gladiators into why the Greeks are still cooler. Um, you know, and maybe you wouldn't say it that way, but I'm going to, uh, so I really appreciate how much Greek love was in this.

• 1:48:23Speaker 04

  Oh, it was a pleasure.

• 1:48:26Liv Albert?

  Oh, my God, I'm so glad. This is seriously so much fun. Um, we already mentioned Bad Ancient, but I'm, I don't even know actually if it will make it into the recording because of what else we were talking about. But do you want to tell my listeners like where they can read more Bad Ancient being one of them, but also just find anything more about you, follow you places, whatever you would like to share.

• 1:48:45Speaker 04

  So, yeah, I am a contributor on badancient.com, um, either proving or disproving various common misconceptions about the ancient world. I'm a regular contributor for working classicists as well. You can find both on Twitter. And you can find me on Twitter at beloved of voices. And that's also the same on Blue Sky and pretty much every other platform available, just in case Twitter just, you know, implodes.

• 1:49:13Liv Albert?

  As we all try to figure out where we're gonna go afterwards.

• 1:49:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:49:34Liv Albert?

  Nerds, nerds, nerds. Don't we love a theatrically violent show from the ancient Greeks? I mean, I am just obsessed with all of this. Like, Roman gladiators, eh, fine, you know, bloody fights that were probably pretty cool and definitely dark and fucked up. But the Greeks? Ah, man, they just made it nerdy and weird and mythological and splashy. I love it. Huge thank you to Alexandra for joining me for this episode. She reached out to me after hearing my episode with Dan Stewart from earlier this year, who talked about adapting those theaters for these games. And I am just so glad that she did, because I didn't know it, but I was absolutely dying to learn all of this. It's just so fucking cool. I've linked

• 1:50:19Liv Albert?

  to Alexandra's Articles for Bad Ancient to you, a site that you might remember, as I've referenced them a few times now. They are pretty awesome. As well as Working Class Assist, which is another amazing resource. They are lovely. You can find those links in the episode description, as always. Anyway, this was so long, so now I will leave you all just to think long and hard about just how cool the Greeks are and just how nerdy they made something as hardcore as gladiatorial games. Because of course they did. They are the best. Let's Talk About Myths, Baby is written and produced by me, Liv Albert. Michaela Smith is the Hermes to my Olympians. She is my assistant producer. The podcast is hosted and monetized by iHeart Media. Listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Help me

• 1:51:04Liv Albert?

  continue bringing you the world of Greek mythology and the ancient Mediterranean by becoming a patron, where you'll get bonus episodes and more. Visit patreon.com/ Lashmiths, baby, or click the link in this episode's description. I am Liv and I love this shit so much. Like, it's so weird and gory and gross and nerdy and, ugh, amazing. I'm never getting over this.

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• 1:53:10Liv Albert?

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