Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit A Day in the Life of a Gladiator About this episode Step into the roaring arena of ancient Rome, where every sunrise could be a gladiator's last... From brutal training and hard-won fame to the thunderous spectacle that captivated an empire, discover what life was really like for history's greatest prizefighters.
Joining us is Harry Sidebottom, author of 'Those Who Are About To Die'.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Natasha Hughes.
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1:05 Dan Snow? A gladiator, a lone warrior standing in the blazing sun of the arena. The roar of 50,000 spectators echoing around the stone seats of the Colosseum. One fighter raises his sword, the other waits for the crowd's verdict. A thumbs up or a thumbs down? It's a powerful image, but it's also, in many ways, a myth. In reality, many gladiators were highly trained professionals. They lived in specialist schools, they followed strict diets, they trained under coaches, and they fought in quite carefully organised matches, designed as much for spectacle as for bloodshed and survival.
1:47 Dan Snow? Some were enslaved prisoners of war, yes, but others were volunteers. They were chasing fame and prize money, excitement, sex, and the possibility of glory in front of tens of thousands of spectators. So what was a typical day actually like for a gladiator? What do they eat? How do they train? And how often did they really face death in the arena? And how much of what we think we know from the dramatic thumbs down executions to constant mortal combat is actually true? Today, we're joined by Harry Sidebottom, author of We Who Are About to Die. We're going to step beyond the Hollywood version of the arena. We're going to enter the daily reality of the Roman gladiator.
2:32 Dan Snow? This is the real life of Rome's most famous fighters.
2:41 Dan Snow? Harry, good to have you on.
2:42 Speaker 03 Thank you very much for asking me.
2:44 Dan Snow? I mean, crowds have often paid to watch men beat each other up. And I imagine that that is, it's been going on a long time. When do we first identify something we can say, no, that's, that is, those are gladiators? And what makes that special?
2:57 Speaker 03 Okay, well, the Romans identified it very precisely. It's 264 B.C., when six gladiators fought at the funeral of a senator.
3:06 Dan Snow? Really?
3:06 Speaker 03 But this is recorded almost two centuries later, so it may not be true.
3:12 Dan Snow? Okay.
3:12 Speaker 03 The problem is that the Romans themselves had no idea when gladiatorial combat really started, and equally, they had no idea where it was from.
3:21 Dan Snow? Okay.
3:22 Speaker 03 So, I mean, Roman sources have two stories. We adapted, adopted it and adapted it either from the south, from Campania, or from the north, Etruria. But they're two different stories.
3:34 Dan Snow? Yeah. Well, that's the problem with Rome. Can't be east or west because it's a very narrow peninsula. So it's got to come from one direction or another.
3:39 Speaker 03 Absolutely. And we might think that, you know, they're trying to distance themselves morally from this, to us, shocking, ghastly spectacle. Create a little bit of moral distance. It's an import. We didn't invent it. But I think it's actually the very reverse. It sort of way into a very odd, distinctive Roman mindset, which is, we've conquered the world, or the known world. And for every people we've conquered, we've taken something, the good things, and then we've made them even better. It's almost a proud boast of, look, we've conquered the world. It doesn't really matter if it's the Etruscans or the Campanians because it's now ours.
4:20 Dan Snow? And what was the, was it, is it pure entertainment? Or is there religious or political in its beginnings, do you think?
4:27 Speaker 03 There's certainly a religious element to kick off with. Um, it's a funeral and all gladiatorial contests under the Republic, which conventionally ends in thirty one B.C. because we have to periodize everything just to make it, I guess, to make that incredible span of history comprehensible. But in the Republic, all gladiatorial shows retain at least a nominal link to a funeral.
4:50 Dan Snow? Okay.
4:50 Speaker 03 But it gets more and more nominal. I'm Julius Caesar celebrating um his father's funeral with gladiatorial shows, I think it's some twenty or thirty years after his father died. So then it moves into what you suggested, which is the political. So Roman senators are putting on gladiatorial games, essentially to buy popularity with the populace.
5:12 Dan Snow? So it's being linked initially to funeral uh activities. Is there a sense of someone that that kind of blood sacrifice? Do the gladiators always shed blood or is it some stylized violence? What's going on there?
5:25 Speaker 03 It's not straightforwardly blood sacrifice. Um, various people, in antiquity, Christians said it was. It's human sacrifice. But Christians, of course, you couldn't get a more biased source.
5:37 Dan Snow? Yeah.
5:37 Speaker 03 Because they hate it.
5:38 Dan Snow? Yeah.
5:38 Speaker 03 Um, no pagan writer ever says that. Never says a blood sacrifice. Yes, in the back of their minds, when they're watching it, they may be thinking of, well, Patroclus' funeral games in Homer's Iliad, because all the Romans from the second century B.C. onwards are educated in Greek as well as Latin.
5:57 Dan Snow? So obsessed with the Iliad and the Odyssey.
5:58 Speaker 03 Absolutely obsessed with it. So, yeah, they may be thinking about that in the back of their minds, but there's no direct sort of cause this is this is a religious ceremony at all beyond the funeral link.
6:10 Dan Snow? So there you end up with men fighting each other with weapons. I mean, how is this different from wrestling and boxing and the other forms of mixed martial arts sports that we're still familiar with today?
6:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, the difference, you hit the nail on the head, is weapons.
6:24 Dan Snow? Okay.
6:24 Speaker 03 These guys have weapons. It's, I mean, they also had boxing, very brutal form of boxing, and they had wrestling. But this is a step beyond into sort of uber violence in that these people are armed and they're trained to fight. I mean, they are they are trained professionals. They're not usually, very seldom will they be, you know, just thrown into the arena, given a weapon, thrown into the arena. These guys are trained over months, if not years, in their specialities.
6:53 Dan Snow? Now, are they trained to kill or are they trained to put on a great show?
6:57 Speaker 03 The the latter, they're trying to put on a great show. And this is a very common missap- modern misapprehension about gladiators. And probably gladiators, we have getting back to what they meant to the Romans, is that we all think we know what gladiators are and they're all about. And we, the problem there is, almost everything we think we know turns out to be wrong.
7:17 Dan Snow? Yeah.
7:17 Speaker 03 Because it comes from Hollywood. And so it's just carnage, it's a slaughterhouse. They're always mass battles and yeah, only Russell Crowe's left standing at the end. So the chances of survival are actually pretty good. You only have a one in eight chance of dying.
7:31 Dan Snow? Really?
7:32 Speaker 03 Yeah. So you could have quite a career, gladiators retire at the end of it. It's it's about show, we know there were laws to gladiatorial fights. The only problem is none of our sources tell us what they were.
7:44 Dan Snow? Oh, no.
7:45 Speaker 03 So.
7:45 Dan Snow? That's agony.
7:46 Speaker 03 It's agony. There are laws. There must be rules like boxing. Even UFC has rules of sorts. And they must have existed. Everyone knows them, so they don't bother to tell us. As so often in history, if you're an insider writing for insiders, you don't need to spell it out. Unfortunately, we're not insiders. And it would have been so helpful if they had.
8:06 Dan Snow? So let's talk about some of those myths. One is that, so these were highly trained people, they were athletes, that costs a lot of money. You probably don't, you don't want to send them out to go and get butchered, do you?
8:17 Speaker 03 No, and the economics of it is sort of arguing against having them killed. We've got two bits of evidence. From the whole of the empire, for all those centuries, we have precisely two bits of evidence of the economics of it. And one is a price edict of Moxerilus, the emperor. Apparently, prices were going through the roof. And so he, as unrealistically as any government ever fixes prices, he put a price fix on what you could spend per gladiator, depending on how good they were. And it implies you buy them.
8:51 Speaker 03 Now, our problem is that we have one other source, which is roughly contemporary with that, which says, no, you don't, you rent them.
8:58 Dan Snow? Ah.
8:59 Speaker 03 And you rent them at a fixed fee. But then, most interestingly, this is a legal text by a jurist called Gaius. If the gladiator is killed or severely wounded, you, the guy putting on the show, have to pay the person who provided you with the gladiator fifty times the rental, which suddenly becomes a serious sum of money.
9:19 Dan Snow? Huge amount of money.
9:20 Speaker 03 Huge amount of money. And you don't want to risk that sum of money, usually.
9:26 Dan Snow? No, that sounds like, that's like when you rent a car and say, if you blow it up, this, this is what you owe us. I mean, that, you don't usually blow up a rental car, do you? So that's sort of.
9:34 Speaker 03 I tend not to.
9:35 Dan Snow? Yeah, we try not to.
9:35 Speaker 03 Try not to.
9:37 Dan Snow? And, and so, but renting's interesting. So, so what's a, a, a senator, or later an emperor, they, they'll just ship a lot of gladiators in to put on a big show, will they? Is that, is that how this is beginning to work?
9:48 Speaker 03 It works very much that way, um, for senators, or really, actually, in the Republic, the senators more often own their own trooper gladiators, but that's because they're at the top of the political pyramid. No one can tell them what to do, they're senators. Then, when Augustus establishes the rule of emperors, then it all changes. Because senators really, they're not legally debarred from owning gladiators in Rome, but they're not allowed to have gladiatorial shows. So they stop doing it. Out in the provinces, um, the rich local elite still put on gladiatorial shows. They're the ones who rent them.
10:26 Dan Snow? Right.
10:26 Speaker 03 From professionals, um, the Lannister, you know, the loathed, reviled figure of the gladiator trainer, of course, played by Oliver Reed brilliantly in the first Gladiator movie, the one that was good. Um, but the emperor himself owns them. Like almost everything in the Roman world, who is the biggest owner of land, ships, anything else, including gladiators? Very soon, it's the emperor. He has his own imperial schools of gladiators scattered across the empire. And you can occasionally rent from the emperor if you're, say you're a big man in Athens or somewhere, let's pick a city that was doing better at the time, Ephesus.
11:04 Dan Snow? Colchester.
11:05 Speaker 03 No, yeah, they had gladiators there, but I don't think you're going to be renting from the emperor in Colchester. I mean, the shipping from Ravenna is going to cost you a fortune. But you then rent from the procurator who runs the local, the nearest imperial school, and you will rent the gladiators, presumably with this crippling, you get them killed or wounded fifty times the rental price.
11:27 Dan Snow? Wow. So you actually, you wanna, you want to sort of look, look out, make sure, look out for them?
11:32 Speaker 03 Yes, you do, except you also, you're putting on the show to show how open-handed and generous you are to your local population. And if they demand the death of a gladiator, then if you don't order them to be killed, then you're looking mean. So it's a push-pull thing economically, no.
11:53 Dan Snow? So sometimes they die.
11:54 Speaker 03 Sometimes they die.
11:55 Dan Snow? Also, it's worth saying there, isn't it? I think lots of us get confused, lots of people did die in arenas, criminals, Christians at some stages, but that, that's sort of separate to the gladiator show, right? We're not, we're not here saying the Romans were lovely and no one died. There would be lots of, you'd see lots of blood spilled, but it wouldn't necessarily be the highly paid, highly trained gladiators.
12:15 Speaker 03 Exactly. You'd seen a lot of blood spilled, especially at lunchtime, at midday, when the executions happened.
12:21 Dan Snow? Right. So there, criminals are being killed, animals are being slaughtered.
12:25 Speaker 03 You slaughter animals mainly in the morning.
12:27 Dan Snow? Okay, morning for animals.
12:29 Speaker 03 Well, also, to be rather, you know, be fair to the Romans, yes, is it? I mean, they're much more violent worlds than ours. They're much more accustomed to bloodshed. In the morning, they did sometimes just exhibit exotic animals. But yes, it's mainly animals being hunted by professional hunters and slaughtered. Of course, they're more used to it, butcher's shops, they're in the street, they're everywhere.
12:50 Dan Snow? And then lunchtime?
12:52 Speaker 03 That's when you get a weird mixed sort of bill. You get some mimes, jugglers, acrobats, and then you get the executions. Executions, they're really strange and interesting because usually if you're condemned to be killed, capital crime, then you're either crucified, which everyone knows about because of Christianity, or you're decapitated if you're a Roman citizen. Crucifixion is for slaves. Now, if you think about it, neither of these are much good for the arena. Decapitation is too quick. Nothing particularly spectacular about it. And maybe, in a sense, almost thought too painless. On the other hand, crucifixion takes too long. Guys can live for hours, if not days, on the cross. And what if they're
13:35 Speaker 03 still alive at the end of the show? It just wouldn't work. So then the Romans mainly condemned people to be killed in the shows, either being thrown to wild beasts, or burnt to death. And then they elaborate on it in a, to us, absolutely hideous way, where the condemned criminal is made to act out a Greek myth. For example, Hercules, Heracles, um, he in myth was given a poisoned shirt by his wife, tricked into wearing it. Um, it's so painful, he burns himself to death. Now, the Romans take this and convert it into a spectacle for the arena. The tunicamolester, which I suppose roughly translates as the
14:20 Speaker 03 evil or insidious tunic. So the condemned criminal is put in a tunic, filled with inflammable stuff, suffused with it, and then someone sets fire to it. And they literally run about burning to death.
14:33 Dan Snow? So there's plenty of brutality and violence in the arena.
14:36 Speaker 03 Huge amounts.
14:37 Dan Snow? But perhaps we've always just, we've, we've just used the name gladiators almost to describe that whole thing, whereas in fact that gladiators, what they come on late in the day, sun's going down, and that's the real highlight of the day out, isn't it?
14:47 Speaker 03 Absolutely. And the gladiators are the top draw. Beasts in the morning, executions at lunchtime, but the real sort of, the top billing are the gladiators. And we presume, and there's very little evidence, that the gladiators get more famous as the afternoon goes on. You don't put the famous guys on first. It's like any boxing competition now. You have the, the non entities fight first.
15:12 Dan Snow? The undercard.
15:13 Speaker 03 Yep. And then you get, the big names appear at the end. Yeah, that's that's what the public have really come for.
15:20 Dan Snow? I'm always fascinated by the different types. The gladiators, they made them dress up and use particular weapons. There was there was strong fashions that run through gladiatorial combat.
15:29 Speaker 03 Well, the sort of big division is between big shield men and small shield men. We know that from Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations, because Marcus Aurelius was, although often cited as a modern self-help book, which is really weird, he was a very miserable guy who disliked, well, pretty much all forms of pleasure. Very anti-sex, very, very anti-drink. And he thanks one of his tutors for making sure that he never became a fan of the big shields or the small shields. But within those two big categories, there are bewildering sub-varieties. So with big shields, you would have the murmelot, a huge shield like a scutum, rather like a Roman
16:10 Speaker 03 legionary. And then you'd have a provocateur, again with a big shield but slightly different helmet, both with short swords. And against them, you'd have the small shield men usually. My personal favourite is the thracian, the thrax, with a curved sword and a little shield. Or the really famous one, the retiarius, no shield at all, just armour on the left arm and shoulder, trident net, they have to rely on speed and skill, usually matched against a murmelot. Although, you could be matched against anyone, you could be matched against your own type of performer, or any other, it all depended on the giver of the show. Because you not only, if you're giving a show, you've got to do bigger and better than
16:53 Speaker 03 the last guy who put on a show, even if it's in Colchester. But what we've also is really at a premium is novelty. You mix up the card, you you put something new in. We shouldn't get too dogmatic about the types of gladiator, because they changed over time. And I argue in my book that probably they could change within each show. As the guy putting on the show thought, I need something new, okay, well, we'll slightly alter the equipment to the murmelot to make it more interesting, and then I'll pitch him against a provocateur, whoever. You need novelty, otherwise you'd be seeing the same all the time.
17:31 Dan Snow? And do you think they're fighting much of the time with blunt weapons or with super sharp, razor sharp weapons?
17:37 Speaker 03 It varies. Some inscriptions do boast that all these fights will be with sharp weapons.
17:43 Dan Snow? So this is for real, this one?
17:44 Speaker 03 This is for real. This is a big draw in which I'm risking a lot of money. Others, they did fight with blunt weapons. Interestingly enough, we can see this in, there's a wonderful gladiatorial cemetery been excavated in Ephesus in Turkey. And a lot of the skeletons have healed injuries, bone injuries from clearly blows from either a shield or a blunt weapon. And one indeed, rather splendidly, had survived his leg being amputated. I guess he wasn't fighting anymore, unless it was a novelty act.
18:17 Dan Snow? So they would have had the scars from previous bouts, no question?
18:20 Speaker 03 The satirist juvenile even talks about their scars and how they're almost physically deformed by a sort of a humped shoulder, a wart on the nose from where the helmet might fit, and the scars. The scars, of course, of weapons and the scars of being whipped. Because a gladiator, the famous oath that they swore, free men would sometimes swear, when they became a gladiator, they'd have to swear to be bound, beaten, burnt, and killed with steel. So it's a terrifying oath.
18:54 Dan Snow? So they're swearing that oath because that's the price of being a gladiator?
18:59 Speaker 03 Yeah.
18:59 Dan Snow? Why would, I mean, so free men would do it, but many enslaved prisoners of war, who's becoming gladiators? Who's swearing that oath?
19:06 Speaker 03 Well, anyone who becomes a gladiator has to swear the oath, but you're absolutely right that they're the different sources. Source number one would be prisoners of war. Source number two, criminals condemned to fight as gladiators. Interestingly enough, the Romans regarded both of these as really quite nice, gentle penalties, because after all, the guys would otherwise just be killed. And this way, they have a chance of survival.
19:34 Speaker 03 And then you have slaves whose owners sell them to gladiatorial schools. It's not until the reign of Hadrian in the second century AD that we hear, he passes a law that before an owner can sell a slave to a gladiatorial school, he has to show the slave has done something wrong. Okay, if you step back and think about that, um, who's the court gonna believe?
20:00 Dan Snow? Yeah.
20:01 Speaker 03 The owner or the slave? And then you factor in the fact that in a court, the slave's evidence could only be taken under torture. I think I'd have just gone quietly.
20:10 Dan Snow? Yeah.
20:11 Speaker 03 Off to my gladiatorial school in Colchester, the theme of this. But turning it round, there's also ruling by Antoninus Pius, the next emperor, that any slave who has run away to a gladiatorial school and is discovered will be sent back to their owner, which is a horrible light on Roman slavery. Some guys thought the brutality of slavery was so horrible that they'd be better off risking their lives as gladiators.
20:38 Dan Snow? Well, and sometimes would they be, I mean, we hear about gladiators becoming celebrities and making lots of money, even though they're still technically enslaved, what, if they make it, what's making it look like in the Roman gladiator world?
20:50 Speaker 03 At the base level, making it enough to have, leave enough money or have connections, family, wife, in inverted commas, or friends who will put up a tombstone for you.
21:02 Dan Snow? Okay.
21:02 Speaker 03 That, then you, I think you've made it. Um, but we do hear of ones who go much further and retire from the arena and according to the poet Horace, buy landed estates somewhere in Italy. You've got prize money when you won.
21:16 Dan Snow? Does that not go to the owner, does that not go to the owner?
21:18 Speaker 03 I think 25% of it is kept by the gladiators. You have to incentivize these guys to fight. But yeah, free men volunteer. To us, it seems weird. Why would they? Again, going back to Horace the poet, he has an answer. It's because they're really morally bad people. They're just baddies. And they're young men from well-off families who've wasted their inheritance. I think if we strip out the ancient elite morality, um, yeah, poverty. If you're a gladiator, you're guaranteed that you'll be fed, indeed fed up with the amount of food you're given. And you've got a roof over your head and you have a chance of acquiring glory, you have a chance of making money, you become, if you're successful,
22:02 Speaker 03 a sex symbol, which might be a lot more appealing than working as a stevedor, yeah, on a day labourer's wage.
22:10 Dan Snow? Down at the docks.
22:10 Speaker 03 Down at the docks.
22:11 Dan Snow? Speaking of the tough lifestyle, I mean, we hear about Spartacus, the gladiator, who they rise up and they they escape from their gaiety school and start a rebellion. Some of these schools sound like they're pretty grim.
22:24 Speaker 03 Yes, it's certainly Spartacus's is, but we are also told by Plutarch, the Greek writer, that the owner of Spartacus's school was particularly cruel. He kept them chained up in cells, which kind of implies that usually they weren't. And we, archaeologists have found five gladiatorial schools and none of them really seemed to have much security arrangements.
22:47 Dan Snow? Okay.
22:48 Speaker 03 Which does open up, well, how was security maintained? In the schools owned by the emperor, that's fairly easy, soldiers. But private schools, how, and presumably, I think it was probably a system like American prisons trustees system, where the older, the veterans maybe took over security duties and possibly when they retired from the ring, as it were. Because we, we have a ruling of the Emperor Hadrian, which we always, history, we're much prone to doing this, aren't we? We have one bit of evidence and we then look at that very closely and we generalize out and go, that's how it was throughout the whole Roman world. So with that in mind, I will now do that. And one ruling of the
23:31 Speaker 03 Emperor Hadrian is actually really specific. He's asked a question, what should we do with Spanish cattle rustlers who are condemned to gladiatorial schools? And he replies, they must be condemned for five years in school, but they're only in the arena for three. Now that we tend to generalize out and that's, you know, they serve for three years if condemned. But it does show that the other two years, what are they doing then? Presumably they're trainers, they're guards, they're doing something else within the school, passing their expertise on and maybe also guarding the new influx of people who are more likely maybe to try and escape.
24:08 Dan Snow? And it also implies that there's an expectation that they might live, they've served their three years and then off they go.
24:12 Speaker 03 Yeah. Do another two years as a trainer or a guard and then off you go.
24:17 Dan Snow? Just pause you for a second there, don't go away, more gladiators coming up after this.
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26:19 Speaker 04 Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you into the ranks of the Knights Templar across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series Chasing Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must-listen. Chasing Shadows is out now on the Echoes of History podcast.
27:04 Dan Snow? Harry, the training, there are hints, aren't there? The training was quite elite. I mean, we hear about their eating and some Roman generals actually sort of used their training to try and improve the quality of their soldiers as well.
27:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, and some Roman generals, a couple we know of, hired gladiators to come and train their legionaries. Because legionaries are trained pretty well, but gladiators were thought to be better at individual swordsmanship.
27:29 Dan Snow? Makes sense.
27:30 Speaker 03 Which is kind of paradoxical, because on the few occasions when gladiators recruited to fight in real wars, they perform appallingly. Not a paradox for Romans, because Romans are happy with the idea that some barbarians are better individual fighters. But what they lack is discipline, a discipline, the group unity, they're digging your heels in and showing real true Roman virtues, which has, you know, physical courage with a moral dimension. These guys might be ferocious and skilled, but they're not Romans. So.
28:06 Dan Snow? So, okay, so sometimes they might be brought into sort of master classes in one-on-one fighting. Interesting. What are they eating? Because they've got their reputation for that, haven't they?
28:15 Speaker 03 They have. Yeah, they were fed something called sagina, which translates literally as stuffing. It's a barley and bean based stew.
28:26 Speaker 03 And it's designed to bulk them up.
28:29 Dan Snow? Does it work? Is there any science there?
28:31 Speaker 03 Um, yeah, I think there is some science there. Putting it in modern medical terms, they, it is a diet designed to build up a thick level of subcutaneous fat. So the guys can take a wound in the arena, but the blade doesn't pierce a vital organ. So they can bleed in a spectacular way.
28:53 Dan Snow? Wow. So almost fattening them up a bit.
28:55 Speaker 03 They are literally fattening them up. Obviously not all of them. The big shield guys, yes, probably the small shield guys in the main. Retiarius, he relies on speed.
29:04 Dan Snow? Nimble agility.
29:05 Speaker 03 I guess he's going to be a more nimble type and maybe his rations are a bit curtailed. But yeah, and actually as a byproduct of their diet, which came out from various pathologists who've worked on archaeological pathologists who worked on the gladiator skeletons at Ephesus. They had remarkably bad teeth compared to the general population.
29:27 Dan Snow? Bad teeth.
29:28 Speaker 03 Bad teeth and hence bad breath. These guys, as everyone knows from having seen the movies, these guys are sex symbols. Really unlikely sex symbols. They're really quite portly. They're covered in scars. And the repetitive, heavy training has quite often led to one shoulder and arm being more developed than the other, a bit like tennis players, only more so. And they have bad teeth and bad breath and yet.
29:55 Dan Snow? There's hope for all of us.
29:55 Speaker 03 There's hope for all of us. You can become a sex symbol as a gladiator.
29:59 Dan Snow? One day. Uh, is there, are there examples of actual gladiators? There's, there's one when the Colosseum opens, there's the Emperor Titus. I mean, what, what, take, take me through what we know about an actual bout that we think might have taken place.
30:11 Speaker 03 Right, that's, that's a really tricky one. Because no ancient source walks us through step by step, one fight, let alone walks us through the 24 hours of entertainment. The closest we get is a Greek, ancient Greek novel by Lucian, the Greek satirist. It's in, it's one of, I think, 10 short novellas put together in a work called Toxaris. And it talks about two people from north of the Black Sea. They, it's a wonderful story, actually. They, they, they come, they're on their way to Athens and they reach what's now Turkey, mainland Turkey, Asiatic Turkey, north shore of the Black Sea, and they get robbed.
30:54 Speaker 03 And they realise there's no point in going to the authorities because they're strangers, which I always found a really interesting insight into the supposed wonders of Roman law. No one knows us here, we won't get a fair hearing. So one of them decides to become a gladiator. And we do get a blow-by-blow account of his fight, which lasts precisely for two blows. And basically, he kills his opponent but takes a terrible wound. And that's it. And that's the nearest we get to a reportage of a fight in a Greek novel. But it's still immensely useful and interesting.
31:33 Dan Snow? And we wonder if that's representative or whether that is dramatic for the novel. Yeah, it's tough to say.
31:39 Speaker 03 And we're pretty sure that most gladiatorial bouts, well, as I said, they had laws. They had referees in the arena with them. They're always on mosaics, they're guys in white tunics with two purple stripes and a big stick, usually employed in art anyway, to restrain the victorious gladiator. So the man who's wounded and submitting will have time to appeal to the giver of the games. But yeah, it's, there were rules. We think they were short, most bouts, but that's purely based on the fact that it is very hard. Based on modern military studies, it's very hard to carry on fighting for more than 10 minutes.
32:17 Dan Snow? Exhausting.
32:18 Speaker 03 Absolutely exhausting.
32:20 Dan Snow? What about that submitting? One thing everyone thinks they know is the emperor, thumbs up, thumbs down, the crowd shouting. Was there an element of that?
32:27 Speaker 03 Well, all modern scholars go, we've got it all wrong. And actually, you know, the guy appeals to the giver of the games. The giver of the games is then expected to listen to the crowd and be influenced by their decision. But most scholars go, actually, thumbs up meant death, thumbs down meant life. And it's repeated in every book, modern book I read, published in the last 40 years researching my book. And I thought, why do we think this? I traced it back to one article written in the 1970s, which turned out to be a very strange article indeed. And the only argument they really had, apart from some weird things about phallic symbolism,
33:07 Speaker 03 which I couldn't quite see the point of, was the killing blow, according to the scholar, was up into the throat. Except it wasn't. In the gladiatorial skeletons at Ephesus, all the killing blows are down. They're administered from above and behind and it's a downward stroke, either into the throat or into the back of the neck. So ancient sources tell us about the thumb, and they even say the thumb turned, they don't tell which way. But I'm I'm going to stick with the Hollywood and popular understanding, thumbs down meant death, thumbs up did mean life. But you you have to appeal in the right way. It's no Cicero says, you never see gladiators
33:48 Speaker 03 sort of crying and begging for their lives because it'll be counterproductive. You have to submit, various rituals of submission. Obviously, throw down your weapon, cast away your shield, maybe take your helmet off, maybe kneel, or maybe you're on the ground with an injury. Maybe embrace the knees and thighs of your opponent in a ritual gesture of submission. Oh, and put one finger in the air, like a cricket umpire. And it doesn't matter which hand, despite lots of modern internet sources going, it was always the left finger. Now, sometimes it was the right. I think it's more important just to make a clear gesture, I've submitted. Then your fate is in the hands of the crowd and ultimately
34:32 Speaker 03 of the man giving the games.
34:34 Dan Snow? So at the end of the day, you've watched some exotic animals being slaughtered, you've watched some prisoners being slaughtered, you've watched the gladiators, they might have survived, but you but you've seen some kind of bat, almost balletic, quite choreographed fighting, I suppose. It's a long, it's a long day at the games. I mean, that stadium's going to be reeking, people have been drunk. What are people doing in the stands?
34:53 Speaker 03 Well, at lunchtime, they're mainly popping out for picnic outside, because not everyone wants the executions and jugglers and stuff. Yeah, it's going to be smelly. But they did have special ways of distributing saffron mixed with water or wine dribbling down onto the audience.
35:13 Dan Snow? Really?
35:13 Speaker 03 Which smells nice. And also, it's a symbol of luxury. The guys in the stands can't afford saffron. I mean, it's expensive then, it's ludicrously expensive now. I always think there may be an added element in this. The guys who get most of the saffron dribbled on them because they're in the front row, bottom seats are the senatorial elite in Rome. They have to be wearing spotless white togas. And when the emperor gives games, he then showers them with a yellow dye. Now, if that's not a way of symbolizing your control over the elite, I don't know what is.
35:48 Dan Snow? That's great. I've never heard of that. That's brilliant. What happens to the games? When, when do they, how do they die out?
35:53 Speaker 03 It's very hard to say. The last evidence we have is in about the 420s AD. I mean, later Christian writers come up with a really nice persuasive, really sort of good answer to this. Constantine comes to the throne, converts to Christianity, bans gladiators. The only problem is it isn't true. And they carried on for at least another century. There are two main explanations for why it dies. One is just economics. In the second half of the 200s AD, from 250 roughly onwards, the empire is in crisis, a political military crisis, too many emperors in too few years, lots of barbarian invasions, rampant inflation,
36:35 Speaker 03 the emperors leave Rome because they're always campaigning, and essentially the money runs out, which is one explanation. And it isn't mutually exclusive with the other, which is actually Christianity, but at one remove. Constantine comes to the throne in the early 300s. No one thought his dynasty would last another century, but it did. And with the exception of Julian, the apostate, they're all Christians. They promote Christianity amongst the elite. You get political and social advancement if you go, I'm a Christian. You get tax breaks, I'm a Christian. And let's face it, most not wildly religious people, you know, would sign up to this. Once you're professed, a professed Christian, you're
37:20 Speaker 03 not going to be putting on gladiatorial games. You're going to be showing your open-handed munificence, your generosity to the public in different ways, arms to the poor and widows and orphans, building churches. So it's kind of Christianity at one remove that kills it.
37:39 Speaker 03 And of course, the emperors aren't in Rome, so they're not putting on the big shows. So why would local elites, they always copy the emperor. If the emperor's not doing it, why would you? It doesn't make you almost emperor for a day in your little local town.
37:54 Dan Snow? Well, that, okay, so that, and that's the end of the gladiators. But I mean, they have lived on. We are obsessed with gladiators. It can't just be the movie in the, in the early noughties. I mean, so we, it modern, all throughout the modern world, we've been obsessed with gladiators for a long time. What, what do you think is that draw?
38:09 Speaker 03 I honestly think it's a mixture of the dark glamour of violence. And at the same time, we can watch films about it. People could listen to us talking about it. You can get the vicarious thrill of this dark glamour of violence, but keep a moral superiority. We can carry on thinking, oh, there's terrible Romans. Weren't they bloodthirsty compared to us?
38:31 Dan Snow? Interesting. Well, Harry, thank you very much for coming on. What's your book called?
38:34 Speaker 03 It's called Those Who Are About to Die: Gladiators and the Roman Mind.
38:38 Dan Snow? Thank you for telling me all about it.
38:40 Speaker 03 Thank you for having me on the podcast.
38:42 Dan Snow? Thank you so much to Harry for coming on to the pod. When we picture the gladiators of ancient Rome, it's easy to imagine a world defined by blood and brutality and death and biceps. But as we've seen today, the reality is far more complex. Gladiators were not simply disposable victims. Their matches were structured spectacles that carefully designed to thrill the crowd whilst preserving valuable fighters wherever possible. Some gained fame and wealth and even their freedom. Their names are written in graffiti, celebrated by fans and remembered long after the games ended. At the same time, we shouldn't go over the top. None of this erases the harsh truth behind the arena. Gladiators still
39:23 Dan Snow? lived and fought within a brutal system built on slavery and violence and spectacle. They had skill and they had fame, but that existed alongside very real danger. And particularly before modern medicine, there was the ever-present possibility that one fight, even sustaining a minor injury, it could cost you your life. Well, thanks for listening, folks. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to follow the podcast. And if you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to like and subscribe so you won't miss any future episodes. See you in one of those. Bye bye.
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