Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Gladiators' Sex Lives About this episode Who really were the gladiators of Ancient Rome?
With them once again hitting the big screens this month, we wanted to take you back a couple of thousand years to find out more about the people who fought and what their lives were really like.
What rights in society did they have? How often did they meet a gruesome end? And were they sex symbols?
Joining Kate is historian and expert in all things Ancient Rome, Emma Southon, author of A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women https://www.welbooks.co.uk/shop/p/prophet-song-by-paul-lynch-signed-bookplate-pre-order-bwwlw, to help us find out more.
This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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1:54 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here, and you are here, and everyone is here and where they need to be. But before we can keep going, I do have to tell you that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects. And you should be an adult, too. And if you're not, be off with you. We don't want you here. You are unwelcome. Only kidding, everyone's welcome here. But you might get offended if you keep listening. But for the rest of you, on with the show.
2:30 Kate Lister? Well hello betwixters! Come and sit with me in ancient Rome as we feast our eyes on a display of good old fashioned bloodsport.
2:41 Kate Lister? We are watching the gladiator fights, and as they battle it out before us, one can't help notice what fantastic shape they are in. Or at least, they're in good shape before bits of that shape get hacked off. The schools, or ludie as they are known, really do drill them into shape, don't they? No wonder they are such objects of desire around these parts. But who are the people behind the gladiatorial masks? Was it all danger and death? Or were there any perks to being a gladiator? Well, get your nets and tridents at the ready, betwixters, because we are gonna find out.
3:26 Speaker 02 What do you call a man?
3:27 Speaker 04 Oh, money, of course.
3:29 Speaker 02 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
3:31 Speaker 04 I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning him up and pushing the button.
3:43 Speaker 02 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
3:46 Speaker 05 Goodness, what a beautiful time! Goodness has nothing to do with it, darling.
3:54 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixter Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. The gladiators of ancient Rome have long fascinated us. Especially, I would hazard a guess, in the last 20 years or so since a certain Russell Crowe appeared on the big screen looking all rugged and sweaty and manly. And with a much hyped sequel coming out this month, what better time to look back and find out a bit more about who they were and the kind of lives that they lived? Joining me, of course, is our beloved friend of the show, Emma Southon, expert in all things ancient Roman. Is that gonna be a thumbs up or a thumbs down, betwixters? Let's do it.
4:39 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Emma Southon. How are you doing?
4:46 Speaker 04 I'm thrilled once again to be here. Leap upon every chance to hang out with you, Kate, as you know.
4:51 Kate Lister? For our unofficial mini-series of... Fucking hell, the Romans were horrible, weren't they?
4:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's the official tagline of my entire career. Fuck me, the Romans were grim.
5:03 Kate Lister? But as a Roman historian, when you kind of got the news that there was a new Gladiator film in the works, like, what does that do to you? Does that make you go, "Oh, yay", or does it make you go, "Oh, fucking hell"? Like, what... As someone who actually studies the history, knowing that there's going to be a big interest in Roman kind of-ish history, how do you deal with that?
5:24 Speaker 04 It's like 95% yes.
5:26 Kate Lister? Yeah.
5:27 Speaker 04 Because, one, it's always a delight to see, like, a new wave of how people are going to look at the Romans. And it's been like 15 years since we last had Rome, HBO's Rome, so we've not had any new Roman stuff in ages. And so, yeah, we get to see Ridley Scott as no one edits him anymore, so he can do what the hell he likes. So there, 95% is like, yes, this is going to be brilliant. And then 5% of you is like, there's going to be one thing that comes up in this film that I'm going to spend the next five years telling people isn't real. The thing that always comes up constantly is, "We who are about to die salute you." Like, that got embedded in Gladiator lore at some point.
6:03 Kate Lister? Oh, yes, they do that, don't they?
6:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, but they do not... That happened one time. And one time, a battle that Claudius put on. And they mention it because it was weird that it happened. Like, it got kind of embedded in Gladiator lore. And then you're going to have to spend, like, forever telling people that it didn't happen. But that's okay. That means it keeps me on a job for at least the next couple of years telling people that something that Paul Meskell's going to do that didn't happen.
6:26 Kate Lister? I feel the same way whenever Bridgerton or any kind of historical bonk fest comes out. It's sort of exactly the same thing. It's like, I'm really pleased people are interested in sex history, but I now am going to be answering endless questions about pubic hair for like the next few years.
6:42 Speaker 04 Exactly. But that's good, because that is enough people who are going to want to talk to me.
6:45 Kate Lister? This is true, isn't it?
6:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:47 Kate Lister? So, we should... I mean, obviously, you're here because I just love talking to you. And it's already given as a fantastic excuse to have a wee chat about gladiators. But what do you think it is? Before we get into the history of this, what is it about the image of the gladiator that seems to so fascinate people?
7:05 Speaker 04 I mean, I think it's not that different from the image that fascinated the Romans, which is big semi naked guys going at each other in like a highly trained manner and willingly fighting to the death, or sometimes unwillingly, but they're giving the impression that they are willingly fighting to the death. I think it just speaks to something quite kind of base about the human lizard brain. That that's just like, it's sexy, it's exciting, it's bloody, it's kind of got all of those things that triggers something in the back of the brain that you want to look at it and think about it. It's martial and there's kind of the potential for a kind of disgusting kind of glory.
7:50 Speaker 04 And also, big naked men.
7:52 Kate Lister? Naked men. It's, I mean, a lot of it does come down to big naked men, because when we think of gladiators, and I'll bet you any money when we see the new Gladiator film, they're quite jacked. You don't tend to get skinny little gladiators, or overweight gladiators, or aging gladiators.
8:09 Speaker 04 No, they don't tend to last very long into old age. And there is a time when, because a lot of them are condemned to be gladiators. So basically, if a criminal comes across a governor's desk and they're kind of young and hot and look quite strong, they'll send them to the gladiatorial schools because, and they do specifically say, like, you know, usually this happens to young men, because they're young, they train hard with heavy weapons and heavy armour, so they've got muscles. There's a few different epitaphs and reliefs of gladiators that have been put up by their wives, and they're always like real muscly, you know, pecs and abs. And they've got no tops on and they're going at each other.
8:50 Speaker 04 And it's not that different from what makes us watch boxing or wrestling or anything.
8:55 Kate Lister? No, I was gonna, I was gonna mention that. It's like, how far removed is it from, like, we still enjoy watching quite violent sports today. Okay, it's not like a fight to the death, but it is still pretty violent. There's still blood and injury and it's still pretty nasty to watch.
9:10 Speaker 04 Exactly. It's weapon based, but it is not that far removed from it. It's the same desire. To see two guys going at each other really hard.
9:17 Kate Lister? I think so. So I'm going to assume then that you've seen the original Gladiator. What are your thoughts on it as a historian?
9:24 Speaker 04 I mean.
9:25 Kate Lister? Did you enjoy it?
9:25 Speaker 04 I do.
9:26 Kate Lister? Just like, did you enjoy the film?
9:27 Speaker 04 I do. So I first saw it when I was doing my A level in ancient history. So I was like 16 or 17. And I was like such a dick about it when I was 17 in that kind of like, you know, when you first get into something and you become like a real snob about it. And I was like a proper snob. And at the time I was like, oh, everything like Marcus Aurelius would never do that. But now I'm kind of much more chill about it. And I recently rewatched it and it's just, it's balmy. And there's so much going on and like that bit where he just beheads like five people.
9:58 Kate Lister? Yes.
9:59 Speaker 04 And I mean, it's just like such a huge and magnificent and mildly balmy like vision of Rome. Like it's kind of captivating. Like, how can you not love it at least a bit? Just for the kitsch value if nothing else.
10:18 Kate Lister? It is. I watched it recently. I can't think why I did now, just, just to, just to catch up on it. And the bit that I, I got stuck on this time and I couldn't get myself past it is like, so Marcus Decimus Meridius, husband to a murdered wife. That guy, yeah, like he's commander of the armies to the north. He's a really big deal. And then he gets fucked over by commoners and he has to run all the way back to Rome to rescue his wife and his baby and his little boy. And then he, he doesn't get there in time and oh no, oh no, they're dead. It's really sad. And he buries them and then he's so sad, he like, he passes out. And then.
10:51 Speaker 04 Classic.
10:51 Kate Lister? People.
10:54 Kate Lister? This is, this is a very quick summary of the film. And then people passing by pick him up and then they go, oh, well, you're a slave now. We're going to train you as a gladiator. And I found myself looking at it going, can they do that? Like, can they just go, yeah, we found you on the floor. You weren't conscious. You're a slave now. Like, is that like, what?
11:11 Speaker 04 Not in.
11:12 Kate Lister? He's not a slave though, is he?
11:14 Speaker 04 He's not. I mean, you'd think they'd recognise him for a start, because if he's a general of anything at that time, then he's a fairly elite man. But no, that definitely can happen. And there's all kinds of like legal processes for if you get accidentally mistaken for a slave, that you can say, no, I'm not. And, you know, Rome is a surprisingly bureaucratic culture. And so this definitely would not happen. And also, everybody knows each other. Like, it would take him 10 seconds in the real world to be like, oh, actually, I'm Decimus Maximus Brutus, whatever his name is, and I, the father of a murdered one.
11:50 Kate Lister? I'm definitely not a slave.
11:51 Speaker 04 Yeah. And also, apparently Commodus knows him. And doesn't it turn out, sorry, I'm going to do spoilers, he's like the son of Marcus Aurelius.
11:57 Kate Lister? Oh, oh, I don't know. I might have missed that bit. I don't think that was, that would have been an interesting twist.
12:02 Speaker 04 But Commodus, like, knows who he is. Like, everybody knows. It would take literally 30 seconds for this to be resolved. But that would make for a much more boring film, where just a bunch of people stand around.
12:13 Kate Lister? And then, and then went through a bureaucratic system.
12:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. Just a load of people signing bits of paper.
12:21 Kate Lister? Right, okay. So that's why that didn't happen in the film, then?
12:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:24 Kate Lister? The actual gladiators. Where did this even come from as, as a custom? Like, who, when, I know, let's get some people and we'll just make them fight each other until they die for our own amusement.
12:36 Speaker 04 So it starts as a, like, funerary practice. And they believe it comes from Etruscan practice, and specifically from Capua. And it starts as, basically, people fighting on graves of prominent men.
12:51 Kate Lister? That's weird already. It's just, why would you at a funeral think, I need some men fighting?
12:58 Speaker 04 I need some men fighting. It's basically a kind of, like the Romans regularly do, it's a roundabout form of human sacrifice, is how it starts, which is that you're sacrificing a human, but you're pretending that you're not. And they do this all the time, where they sacrifice people, but have developed an elaborate structure around it, whereby they don't actually do any killing. But that's how it starts, is basically a weird form of human sacrifice on a grave. And then, as the Roman Empire gets bigger, and people get richer, and funerals get more public, they grow and grow and grow. So in like, the second century BCE, third century BCE, you start getting people, instead of just having two criminals fight against each other, they start having...
13:41 Speaker 04 Ten, then it's a thing. And then it grows and then somebody has twenty two pairs of gladiators fighting for a whole day. And like, just basically the biggest enslaved guys that they could find fighting. And then, like fifty years after that, it's like two sixteen, I think, is the first time where it goes on for a couple of days. And they have three days' worth of gladiators fighting.
14:03 Kate Lister? They were just awful people.
14:04 Speaker 04 Yeah. And basically, then it becomes a whole thing about putting on a display for people. And the more important your dad was who died, the more gladiators you have fighting. And then it stays as being a funerary ritual that you only do for funerals for a long time. And then it's Julius Caesar, because he is an innovator, good friend and shagger Julius Caesar, who starts putting on games in memory of people in his family. So they don't have to have died anymore. He can now say, this is in memory of my father, this is in memory of my daughter, and we're going to have some funerary games for it. And through that, it then gets blended into the religious games, because then people could be like, oh, well, these games are in memory of
14:47 Speaker 04 whoever. And then you can pull them in, and you can bolt them on to, this is beast fights are the other thing that they do all the time. You can start bolting them on to beast fights.
14:57 Kate Lister? Were they already doing beast fights? Or was somebody, did someone's funeral require a lion?
15:02 Speaker 04 They were already doing beast fights.
15:05 Kate Lister? They were already doing those?
15:06 Speaker 04 Because that's like ritualized hunting, basically. And then it all blurs together into, and it just gets completely divorced from funerary practice and starts just becoming a sport that people watch. And it develops, so you have these specific types of gladiator, and over time, it develops into having specific moves and specific tactics, and it becomes quite formalized.
15:29 Kate Lister? Was it popular right from the off?
15:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
15:31 Kate Lister? Was there, is there any records of anyone going, this might be a bit weird, maybe we should just send flowers?
15:38 Speaker 04 Not from the off. People are like, oh, this seems fine. People get a bit funny about the luxury aspect of it. So when they're going to criticize people having three days' worth of games because their dad died, they're just like, three days is a bit much. Isn't it? You're like showing off over there, too much luxury. Should be a perfectly reasonable five like we had back in my day. But you get people like Cicero and Seneca, who are these like stoic philosophers who just hate the whole concept. But they don't like it because they think it's very base. They think it's not reasonable.
16:11 Kate Lister? Okay.
16:11 Speaker 04 And they don't like the emotional aspect of it, basically, and the fact that everybody gets all hyped up and they think that it's quite boring. But apart from that, you do not really get, until Christianity comes along, people saying, have you ever thought maybe we shouldn't murder people in public?
16:27 Kate Lister? So the thing, right, I'm trying to get my head around here is because like it, in my mind, there are two competing images of the gladiator here. There is, there is the gladiator person on one hand, who is like a seasoned, trained fighter. They've, they've trained him in battle and you know exactly what he's gonna do. And then there's also a condemned criminal. And I just can't like, how is that, is that the same person?
16:49 Speaker 04 Because yeah.
16:49 Kate Lister? Like if I was found guilty of a crime and thrown in with the gladiators, there's no way I'd put up a good fight. I would be running in the other direction. I'd be screaming. Like, how does this, how does this work? Is it like, right, you condemned, so now we're gonna send you to gladiator school first?
17:04 Speaker 04 So they condemn them.
17:05 Kate Lister? That's how it happens.
17:06 Speaker 04 And then they would send them to gladiator school. And the same with captives. So a lot of them are also war captives. Like Spartacus, the famous one, is, he's captured in war and is sent to gladiator school. And the, the basic deal is that if you fight well, you might be able to get off and you might be able to fight your way out of this. And there's a possibility that you'll get kind of freedom again one day. And also if you fight well, then there's glory to be had and people will put your face on bottles of olive oil. But yeah, so they're sent to be trained because nobody wants to see in the gladiatorial arena, like someone just get butchered. That's not very fun. They wanna see two fighters who are good at what they do, having a good battle that goes on for a while.
17:47 Kate Lister? So that was something that the film Gladiator got wrong then, because they had plenty of people in there who were clearly not ready for this.
17:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
17:56 Kate Lister? And they, they were weaned on the floor and everything.
17:57 Speaker 04 A lot of very inexperienced people launched in there, but that's just not very fun to. See, if they're going to execute somebody in a spectacular fashion, which the Romans do like to do, then they will also give it a kind of narrative and very often they will have a leopard eat their face, which they consider to be much more fun than just watching someone get executed. That's just an execution, which is not a gladiatorial fight. A gladiatorial fight is two people that are trained, who have, there's like specific moves. And even Cicero says like, the thing about the gladiators is that they're always nice to watch. Like they are elegant in their movements and they are trained to fight attractively. You know, if you parry one way, then this counter move is specifically trained into people.
18:42 Speaker 04 So that's what they want to see. They want to see two experts who are good at fighting and then one of them.
18:47 Kate Lister? Who aren't going to run away.
18:48 Speaker 04 Exactly. Running away. No one wants to see that. Like you don't want to go and see like a bottom of the league, part-time amateur team, lancing rovers, playing, you know, Leicester City. That would just be awful.
19:01 Kate Lister? Yeah, or just a gladiator just panicking and running away. No, that's, that's not cool.
19:05 Speaker 04 Exactly.
19:06 Kate Lister? The one that always, that I always look at and just go, I think you've drawn the short straw here, mate, is the ones with the nets. Like why, who's been sent in to fight a fucking gladiator with a net?
19:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:17 Kate Lister? Why, what is that?
19:19 Speaker 04 Well, so it's all, there's a specific setups. So the net guy will always fight a guy who is lightly armed as well. So they have heavy armed and lightly armed. So they will always be, that would be like a lightly armed. So the person that they're fighting will, will have basically no armour and possibly they'll just be a guy with two daggers. So it's always going to be evenly balanced. And then what they have is that they don't have to get close up because they've got a trident, which is a big long thing. And they've got a net. So they can fight from a distance and hopefully not get. Stabbed too much with a sword.
19:53 Kate Lister? What can you do with a fucking net?
19:55 Speaker 04 Tangle her in someone's feet.
19:56 Kate Lister? And just kind of, I suppose, yeah, yeah, you could do, and then you're gonna trip them up.
19:59 Speaker 04 Exactly.
20:00 Kate Lister? But that leads quite nicely into my next question. Was it always a fight to the death? Because if you're, if you're trying to kill someone with a net, that's...
20:07 Speaker 04 He has got a trident as well. He has got something stabbing.
20:09 Kate Lister? He has a trident too. Sorry, yes, you did say that. Okay, okay.
20:12 Speaker 04 So he has got something. Yeah. So we don't really know. Definitely sometimes, there's like all kinds of estimates about how often, like whether it's 10% of the time or 90% of the time that someone dies. Definitely sometimes somebody dies.
20:26 Kate Lister? Yeah.
20:27 Speaker 04 But it doesn't make that much sense for it to be every time, mostly because gladiators are really expensive. And obviously you have to train them, you have to feed them, you have to build them up, you have to house them, you have to buy them. And people pay for their contracts to come in. So it would be a ludicrous waste of money, if nothing else, like from a purely capitalist perspective, which is how the Romans would look at it, to have one die, if you're gonna have 22 pairs, to lose 11 men every time.
20:55 Kate Lister? Yes.
20:55 Speaker 04 So probably it did not end in death every time, but it ended in death often enough that it was not unexpected. But it was considered to be, a lot of the graffiti and there's like commemorative glasses and like commemorative lamps and things that you could get of specific fights and specific gladiators. And a lot of them celebrate ones where someone died because it's obviously kind of a big thing when somebody does actually get killed in a spectacular fashion. But I think that there's a good enough chance you wouldn't necessarily expect to die when you go in. You could expect to maybe come out with a broken arm and some stab wounds and live to fight another day.
21:34 Kate Lister? But what happens to you then? Because you, gladiators were slaves, weren't they? They had a slave status.
21:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
21:41 Kate Lister? If you've gone in there and had a big old fight and your arm's been hacked off, but you lived, well, now what do you do? Is there a gladiator retirement home?
21:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, you could be retired. Some of them do have to. And the really famous story about the sexy gladiator is the woman who runs away. Her name is Epia. She runs away with a gladiator. She leaves her senatorial husband and Juvenal tells a joke about it. He's gonna have to retire because he's got an injured arm, so he's not even gonna be a gladiator anymore. And then you've just run away with an ugly man who's covered in like scars.
22:15 Kate Lister? That's quite a good joke.
22:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, but she's like, at the moment, he's a gladiator. So he's basically the hottest thing in the world. But he has got an injured arm and a weepy eye. So he's going to have to retire and then you've just married a weirdo.
22:33 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Emma after this short break.
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25:46 Kate Lister? It sounds, from what you're saying, like that there is a real big business behind this. Like, they have contracts, people are training them, there's money invested. Do we know who was doing this? Like, who owned these people? Who, like, was it like in the film Gladiator, when it was just, oh, what was his name? Oliver Reed's character? Can't remember. Yeah, that he just kinda just randomly found people asleep on the road and went, William, you're my gladiator now.
26:14 Speaker 04 I mean, yeah, basically. So you have gladiator schools and they're owned by a lanista, who's like the owner. And then he employs doctores, who are teachers of specific skills. And then he buys men and or is given them by the state when they're condemned and trains them up and then rents them out on contract. So he's basically their owner. He feeds them, he prepares them. And then people come to him when they want to put on some games. So it might be, people put on games privately quite often. And you see in Pompeii, all of the graffiti that will say, you know, Marcus is putting on two days of games with 20 gladiators. And they will have gone and negotiated a contract for some gladiators,
26:57 Speaker 04 depending on their budget. And then they get sent to wherever they're going to be fighting. And then they get to come home again. And then in their off time, when it's the off season, they're rented out as bodyguards.
27:08 Kate Lister? They've thought of everything, haven't they? They really have. You said there that most of the gladiators were slaves. That suggests that that some of them, what, volunteered for this?
27:20 Speaker 04 Yeah. You do sometimes find people who volunteer, which really freaks out most of our writers about it, who find it baffling and just do not understand why anybody would do this at all. But part of the reason is if you're very, very poor and you're a young, strong man, then if you go into the gladiatorial arena, there's a chance that like, one, you're definitely going to be fed, you're definitely going to like get good food, good bedding, and probably going to get laid loads as well. So that's always an option. If you're very poor, you can sell yourself. You are going to lose all of your rights. Like, you're no longer a citizen. You can no longer go to court. You basically, anybody can do anything to you. So it's a hell of a trade off. But you can also do it just for a period of time. You can say like, I'm going
28:05 Speaker 04 to sell myself for two years and hopefully I'll survive. But
28:08 Kate Lister? That's a gamble.
28:09 Speaker 04 Yeah. It's a whole process that you have to do. You have to go to like a government official and sign a bit of paper saying that you understand what you are doing. But there's totally something that you can do. But also, it is in terms of gambles, like in comparison to joining the army. Where you're basically going to get the same thing, but the chances of you getting the personal glory that you could get through being a gladiator, like they are celebrities in their city and can become like empire wide celebrities in some cases where people will swoon when they see you, women are going to want to have sex with you, men are going to want to be you and also have sex with you. You know, people are going to want to be around you, they'll write songs about you, they're going to do paintings of you.
28:54 Speaker 04 There is potential for you to be a real celebrity. And I always think of it as like, for me, going on like Love Island or Big Brother or anything like that, sounds like the worst thing in the world. You could not get me to do it in a million years, but loads of people do it because the trade off of what is going to happen to you, like being on the show or the things that tabloids are going to say about you is worth it for the celebrity that they get out of it. And that's basically the same calculation that a lot of free people make. Like, I might die, I'm probably going to get horribly injured, it's going to be tough work, but I might get really famous.
29:30 Kate Lister? Did the gladiators ever get rich? Because if a lot of them are enslaved, presumably they're not actually making any of this, this money, even if they are super mega famous and proper heart throbs.
29:42 Speaker 04 They actually can because there is a weird structure to the way that Roman slavery works whereby they can sort of own money. So they can get prize money and they can hire themselves out privately. And they have a thing called peculium, which they can functionally own as their own. And so they can get really rich. The most famous gladiator is a guy called Spiculus, who becomes really famous because he kills a 16 time champion on his first ever match. And there's graffiti of him in Pompeii doing it. But he then is taken to Rome, because that is such a big deal, where he does another two really big kind of upsets, basically where he kills famous other gladiators and becomes Nero's
30:27 Speaker 04 favourite gladiator. And then Nero gives him an estate, gives him money, gives him horses, gives him gold and just makes him incredibly.
30:38 Speaker 04 Rich and powerful and he gets to go and kind of retire in the countryside with loads of money up until the point where Nero is overthrown, he doesn't want to kill himself. So he sends Spiculus a letter saying, will you come and kill me? And Spiculus just never replies. He just pretends he didn't receive.
30:59 Kate Lister? Okay, no.
31:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:02 Kate Lister? So like, oh, that's thrown me now. I've completely lost what my next question was gonna be. Watching just getting that letter in the post.
31:10 Speaker 04 I know. And they're just being like, just drop it. I didn't get it. It got lost.
31:15 Kate Lister? So I've just got back from Pompeii and there's loads of graffiti about gladiators in Pompeii and a lot of them saying what massive heartthrobs they are. Is that the main evidence that we've got that gladiators were a bit, you know, like, I was gonna say women are throwing their knickers at them, but they didn't have knickers. So they're togas.
31:34 Speaker 04 They're just throwing everything at them. Yeah. I mean, there is good evidence. There's a lot of evidence that is, and all of the graffiti that they write about themselves as well. And in the gladiator barracks in Pompeii, there's all of the graffiti that's like, I am the netter of women in the night and things like that, which I think is really funny thing to write about yourself.
31:53 Kate Lister? It's a bit cringe, isn't it?
31:55 Speaker 04 Like, if somebody else is writing it, that's fair enough. But if you're writing it, it's a bit desperate.
32:00 Kate Lister? Oh, I know what I was gonna ask you. It's come back to me now. That's just prompted me. Is that true that gladiator sweat was an aphrodisiac? I've heard people say this and I think it's a myth. I think it's an internet nonsense.
32:12 Speaker 04 It is gladiator sweat, yes, and also gladiator blood was something that would be collected for magical purposes. They were considered to have a magical, I mean, they think everything is magical. Like, they think that you can cure epilepsy with poppy brains and that everything is an aphrodisiac. I once made a list of everything that the Romans thought was an aphrodisiac and it was like 35 items long.
32:35 Kate Lister? Wow. I just, the idea of people running around licking gladiators for medicinal purposes just seems a bit bonkers, even by Roman standard.
32:43 Speaker 04 It does, but you could probably make money off of it. And the one thing that Romans like to do is make money off of stuff. They are almost as much as they like people dying, but they do like making money off of things. So they do think that they are very, very sexy and very, very sexually alluring. And just being a gladiator automatically makes you an absolute heartthrob.
33:05 Kate Lister? Proper pinup stuff.
33:06 Speaker 04 Yeah. And Juvenal, when he writes about Eppia running away with her gladiator, just says, if you're a gladiator, that just automatically makes you incredibly sexy. And whenever people talk about gladiators, they always talk about how much women want to have sex with them.
33:21 Kate Lister? Of course, of course.
33:22 Speaker 04 It's just incredibly masculine and like, you know, in a very heteronormative way, but incredibly masculine. They're mostly naked, they're sweaty, they're bloody, they're kind of wrestling with each other. There is something kind of very erotic about the whole idea that means that it doesn't matter how many scars you have on your face, or how many years you have lost in the arena.
33:45 Kate Lister? It's still pretty sexy.
33:46 Speaker 04 It's still pretty sexy, just because that's what you do for a living.
33:48 Kate Lister? The thing that I find really fascinating about gladiators, just from the nature of what I study with sex history, is that they were an official legal categorization of something called infam.
33:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
33:58 Kate Lister? Which I also learnt recently, is still a really big insult in Italy today. If you call someone infam, it's really, really, I didn't know that, but it's really, really insulting. And infam, I'm going to ask you to explain it, but sex workers were also in that category of infam, which they weren't fully allowed their legal status. And as a historian, what absolutely does my tits in, is when I watch like people go around the brothel in Pompeii or doing documentaries of it, and they stand there and they go, this is absolutely awful, this is the worst place, this is the absolute hellhole. And then they'll go to the gladiator barracks and the whole narrative changes of like, yeah, it was kind of sexy and fun. It's like, look, I'm not saying any of this was good, but one of them was giving blowjobs and the other one was being hacked to death by some twat with a
34:40 Kate Lister? net. But we like, we celebrate one and absolutely denigrate the other.
34:45 Speaker 04 Yeah.
34:45 Kate Lister? I don't know why that that just irritates me a little bit. Like, you can go to school for a fancy dress, dressed as a gladiator and everyone will think it's great, but you couldn't possibly go as a Roman hooker, because that would just be fucking weird.
34:55 Speaker 04 You couldn't, although, any woman or any person who is not a member of the Roman Senate, which would be literally everybody, who has ever gone to a fancy dress party in a toga, technically has gone as a Roman sex worker, because
35:08 Kate Lister? Really?
35:09 Speaker 04 The only people other than the Roman Senate who are allowed to wear togas were sex workers, so.
35:15 Speaker 04 Technically, all of them are going as Roman sex workers.
35:18 Kate Lister? That is, that's the best piece of information that I've ever had. That's brilliant.
35:23 Speaker 04 Yes, so there you go.
35:24 Kate Lister? But, but let's talk about infam.
35:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:27 Kate Lister? What exactly does that mean? And who else was in this category?
35:31 Speaker 04 So, basically, it's people who use their bodies to please other people. So it is actors, sex workers, bar owners, and
35:39 Kate Lister? Bar owners?
35:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:41 Kate Lister? That's random.
35:42 Speaker 04 It is weird. And gladiators. So it's people who are publicly using their bodies to please a crowd, essentially. And they are essentially outside of the law, so they have absolutely no legal recourse to anything that happens to them. They have no citizenship rights, which is quite a lot, and they can't take anybody to court. So if somebody rips them off for something, they can't sue them. They can't really have legal marriages and things like that. That doesn't really stop them from having marriages and all of the rest of it, but it means that you can beat up a person who is infam is in the street, and there's nothing that they can do about it. Although, well, not within the boundaries of the law, anyway. If you probably wouldn't want to beat up a gladiator, they will come and get you.
36:26 Kate Lister? No. And this, this is regardless of whether or not they were also enslaved on top of that. Even if you were a free person, you've now got this extra label, infam.
36:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly. And it is, to the Romans, gladiatorial work and sex work are basically equivalent, and they do not see sex work in the same way that we do, which is that, you know, you can tell from Pompeii and various other places, brothels are pretty public. They have Suetonius, who wrote the Twelve Caesars, once wrote a book called Lives of Fame. Famous prostitutes because they were famous prostitutes as well as famous gladiators. And they, it's just a fact of life as far as they're concerned. If you actually do it, then you don't get to have the full benefit of being a Roman citizen. But that doesn't mean that you are spoken about in the way that we would really speak about sex work, because we now have hangups about sex that the Romans had, didn't really have in
37:19 Speaker 04 the same way.
37:20 Kate Lister? It's strange, isn't it, that they have, there's this dual position of on one hand, infam, infamous, like it's like, it's a really bad thing to be. But on the other hand, they're kind of sexy and cool and people still wanna, still wanna be them. I'm trying to like, what?
37:34 Speaker 04 It is the-
37:35 Kate Lister? Trying to think of like a modern equivalent of this.
37:36 Speaker 04 Outlawiness that kind of makes them sexy and cool. Like the fact that they are then a transgression, like having sex with a gladiator or having a girlfriend who is a sex worker then becomes kind of a deliberate act of, of transgression against the stuck up ways of mum and dad.
37:55 Kate Lister? Nice. Okay. Everyone loves a bad boy.
37:57 Speaker 04 Exactly. It's like having a boyfriend with a motorcycle.
38:08 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Emma after this short break.
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39:51 Kate Lister? Let's talk about some famous gladiators, names that I have heard but I don't know very much about. The biggest one's got to be Spartacus.
39:59 Speaker 04 Yes.
39:59 Kate Lister? I'm Spartacus, I'm Spartacus, I'm Spartacus.
40:01 Speaker 04 I'm Spartacus.
40:02 Kate Lister? Was Spartacus really a gladiator?
40:04 Speaker 04 Sort of. He never actually fought in the arena, disappointingly.
40:08 Kate Lister? He's a shit gladiator.
40:08 Speaker 04 A kind of a shit gladiator. He did not want to be a gladiator. He's a war captive and he's taken as a prisoner. He's taken to Capua as a prisoner of war and he's young and strong, so they think they'll train him as a gladiator. But what he does instead is get everybody in his gladiator school to rebel. And then is charismatic enough that he raises an army of other enslaved people in the area.
40:31 Kate Lister? That is impressive.
40:32 Speaker 04 It is very impressive. And he marches around Italy for quite a long time, causing destruction and causing the Romans quite a lot of stress. And the fact that he is a gladiator is sort of baffling to the Romans because they're like, how dare an infame like be this good at fighting? He's not supposed to be able to lead an army. He's supposed to be like have a slave mentality now. He's supposed to be good at obeying orders, not giving orders. And this, which is one of the reasons he's so famous, because it just really throws them that he can be good at this. But he never actually fights as a gladiator in the arena. He does not want to be a gladiator. He does not consider himself a gladiator. I think that if he found out that he was remembered as the most famous gladiator, he'd probably be quite cross about that.
41:16 Speaker 04 Because he thinks of himself as a great Thracian general.
41:20 Kate Lister? Oh, right. Okay. I mean, it didn't end particularly well for Spartacus, as
41:25 Speaker 04 Did not, no. They did. And this is more classic Romans agrim. They crucified 8,000 people along the Via Appia so that everybody had to pass by crucified people for a very long time as you were travelling down the road outside of Rome.
41:39 Kate Lister? I remember that from speaking to you before, is that the one thing that they would absolutely not abide or be above almost anything else is slave uprisings. And slaves killing their masters. That, above everything else, that seems to have been the real thing. No, we're going to crucify everyone and their family and all of their pets as well, if you even try it.
41:58 Speaker 04 And anyone in the vicinity. There can be no, no mercy and there can be no chance that any enslaved person thinks they can get away with this. Like, they have to know that there will be the most terrible punishment.
42:12 Kate Lister? And the other one, and I thought that this was Ridley Scott kind of making it up. Commodus. I hadn't realised, this is how shitty my Roman history is, I hadn't realised that there was an emperor called Commodus who actually fancied himself as a bit of a gladiator.
42:25 Speaker 04 He very much did fancy himself as a bit of a gladiator, yeah. And he fought, like, quite often in the arena. And this really upset all of the senators who...
42:35 Kate Lister? It must have done.
42:36 Speaker 04 Yeah. Seeing the person that they are supposed to debase themselves to, like, their job is that they have to, like, grovel to the emperor pretty much all the time. And seeing him act as the lowest in society in front of them and them having to applaud it is just, they can't handle it because it feels like an insult to them. Like, that they're now having to grovel to a gladiator who they are supposed to feel better than. They're supposed to be above gladiators, not below gladiators. This is messing with their hierarchy and they absolutely hate it. No. But Commodus thinks that gladiator is like, he's never been to war, he never really does any, like, actual stuff, but
43:18 Speaker 04 he does quite like wearing a nice, a natty costume and dressing up as Hercules and running around the arena in a perfectly safe manner because nobody's going to kill the emperor.
43:28 Kate Lister? Nobody's going to. Kill him, are they?
43:31 Speaker 04 No.
43:32 Kate Lister? Not even if he's the one with the net.
43:34 Speaker 04 No.
43:34 Kate Lister? It's like, nobody is gonna do that. So presumably, his gladiator career was flawless.
43:39 Speaker 04 His gladiator career was flawless. His gladiator career was closer to like WWE whereby everybody, there's a narrative and I'm sure that there was like some back and forth. And he did all of his training, but he was never gonna actually lose a battle ever. The skill would have been whoever had to fight him and who had to pretend he was putting up a fight, while also not in any way injuring the emperor.
44:00 Kate Lister? At all.
44:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:01 Kate Lister? It must, it must have been like when we see politicians turning up on, I'm a celebrity, get me out of here.
44:06 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:07 Kate Lister? And we just look at them a little bit and just like, I think, don't you have better things to be doing with your time than this?
44:11 Speaker 04 Exactly. Or like, how am I supposed to respect you if you're gonna be doing this? Like if.
44:16 Kate Lister? If I've, if I've now seen you eating a kangaroo testicle.
44:19 Speaker 04 Well.
44:19 Kate Lister? Yes.
44:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, I just didn't, you're supposed to be on a higher level than this.
44:24 Kate Lister? No, I, I think that I can relate to that, actually. So I suppose the final question, although, you know, I've got a million to ask you, would be, what happened to them? Because it seems like they were the most popular thing. As the Romans seem to have done, nobody was, was going, hang on a minute, maybe, maybe watching people murder each other for own amusement isn't the best idea. They, they didn't even give a shit. They were fully on board with this. So what happened to suddenly, where did they go? Why aren't we still watching gladiator battles?
44:56 Speaker 04 I mean, we're still watching them in the cinema, but what happened is Christianity. Christians and Christian writers do not like gladiatorial games at all. Initially, they don't like them because they think they are basically pagan sacrifice.
45:10 Kate Lister? Was it because they were fed to the lions in the Colosseum as well?
45:13 Speaker 04 That doesn't help. They do not like that. Although they do do their own fair amount of, of executing pagans after a while, but they don't like that. They don't like, because gladiatorial games mostly by the Christian period are happening in religious contexts. So games are held to honour gods. They see them as a kind of pagan sacrifice to the god of Mars or whatever god is being celebrated. And they don't like the, what they call the frenzy. So they don't like the big. Emotional outpourings that happen because they think that that's not what life should be about. And they think that it's basically the most mortal thing that you can be doing, which is fighting and sweating and bleeding.
45:52 Speaker 04 And Christianity becomes very much in in the third and fourth centuries about denying the body and thinking about the spirit instead. And so they just find the whole thing to be disgusting. They think that it is murder. They think that it undermines any possibility of salvation for anyone involved in it or anyone who watches it. And so.
46:12 Kate Lister? It's hard to pick a fault with that particular logic, though. I think I am siding with the early Christians with this one. It's just, no, guys, no.
46:19 Speaker 04 Yeah, it did take a while. So they banned gladiatorial games like four times or three times. So Constantine had to go, he banned them. Didn't stick. And then Onorius banned them twice. And the last gladiatorial games that we know of were in four O four C E. So it took about a century for them to actually prevent at least publicly held games from happening. But they were still popular enough with people in Rome and in the empire that people were still holding them. Even when the emperor is saying, can you stop, please?
46:53 Kate Lister? Can you not do that?
46:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:55 Kate Lister? I mean, I, in some ways, as we said earlier, they never really died out entirely because we've still got blood sports all around the world today that happened, that, you know, is is tradition. There's still bullfighting and there's still boxing and there's still. Well, endless horrible things that human beings for some reason think is okay. So I I wonder how far removed we actually are from from doing that. And if we were allowed, if somebody said, if if Keir Starmer, for reasons known only to himself, went, I'm opening the Colosseum, there'll be gladiator fights. People would go.
47:30 Speaker 04 People would go. I actually read a book last year called Chain Gang All Stars, which is about a near future whereby they reintroduce the system to American prison system. Then if you win twenty fights, I think it is, then you get your freedom. It's a very carefully written book that makes it seem very, very plausible.
47:49 Kate Lister? Wow.
47:50 Speaker 04 That they could introduce this.
47:51 Kate Lister? Final, final question then. At the time of recording, we have not yet seen the film, the new Gladiator film. It is being released. I think by the time people are listening to us having a chin wag, it will be in cinemas. But if they had come to you, Emma Southon, and said, we need to make sure that we've got this right, what would be the one bit of gladiatorial history that you would absolutely make sure that they either got in, took out, didn't fuck up?
48:18 Speaker 04 The one thing would be to not have the gladiators fighting like piss week, crying. Like, make it clear that that's an execution, not a gladiatorial fight. And I would want to have them showing them training as professionals, because very often, gladiators are shown just as guys who are thrown in with no preparation, or as, and gladiatorial fights as brawls. But they are, you know, like boxing. There is training, there is footwork, there is specific moves. It's, you know, somewhere between fencing and boxing, or fencing and wrestling. And I would, so I would want to see them be professionals who care and are well-trained
49:01 Speaker 04 experts in the field of one-to-one combat. I suspect, having seen Napoleon, we're not going to care about.
49:09 Kate Lister? I suspect the same thing too.
49:11 Speaker 04 But that's if they asked me.
49:12 Kate Lister? Pretty men.
49:13 Speaker 04 They will be. There are so many legs, so.
49:17 Kate Lister? Emma, you have been wonderful to talk to. You always are. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
49:23 Speaker 04 They can find me at emmazucker.com, or on Instagram, at Emma Southon, where everything goes, or on my podcast, which is called History is Sexy.
49:31 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been magnificent.
49:35 Speaker 04 Thank you once again for chatting to me.
49:42 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Emma for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like and review and follow along, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or you just fancied saying hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . And if you'd like to explore other stories from this period, then why not check out our sister podcast, The Ancients? We've got episodes on everything from the first in a new mini-series on the secret lives of the six wives, to gladiator women, all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets of The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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