Gladiators: Myths vs Reality

Join Dan at Rome's Colosseum as he separates fact from fiction in the world of the gladiators. He traces the origins of gladiatorial fighting from funerary celebrations to elaborate spectacles in the arena, what it would take to make it to the top and what really happens when a gladiator loses the fight. With the help of expert historians, Dan explores the myths perpetuated in Hollywood movies, the role of the games in Roman political life and what you'd actually see if you got a ticket to the greatest show on earth. This is episode 2 in our 4-part mini-series 'Gladiators' Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’. We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. 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.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.

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• 2:33Dan Snow?

  The Colosseum thunders. Sixty-five thousand Romans bay for the blood of a convict in the arena below. He is forced to play a character in the morbid play of his own murder. He moves around the arena floor, which is decorated like a jungle, in a desperate attempt to flee his executioners. He's only temporarily delaying the inevitable. He will be caught and killed eventually, in a gruesome manner. The play will be over, the set cleared, and the next act will begin.

• 3:14Dan Snow?

  Equally as gruesome, the crowd just as bloodthirsty during the next round.

• 3:23Dan Snow?

  In a box above the arena floor sits the emperor, the man who chooses if and when those in the arena live or die. He watches over the executions of prisoners, convicts, slaves, and the baiting of exotic animals from across the known world: bears from Germania, hippos, rhinos, crocodiles from Egypt, lions from Libya, and wolves from Britain. And of course, the much anticipated gladiators. This is his show, a demonstration of the emperor's power

• 4:04Dan Snow?

  and his dominion over the Roman world and its enemies. And there's no greater show on earth than the Colosseum Games.

• 4:17Dan Snow?

  This is Dan Snow's History Hat, and this is my gladiators series, separating the fact from the fiction in the world of Rome's gladiatorial games. I travelled to the eternal city to discover what a day in the Colosseum would really be like. I follow in the footsteps of the mighty gladiators, from their gruelling training school to the baying crowds in the towering stands.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  You've got the crowd going mad, and then the announcer says, "And here he comes, all the way from the distant lands of Britannia, the people's champion, three times winner, Britannicus Snow."

• 4:53Dan Snow?

  I get to the bottom of what you'd actually see if you were able to snag a seat in the crowd. It's not like the movies, the reality was just as grisly, in some ways, more so.

• 5:05Speaker 06

  It's gonna be humid and hot, and it's gonna stink to high heaven. It would have been like being in hell.

• 5:12Dan Snow?

  So, collect your tickets, folks, don your finest tunic, and join me for a public spectacle like no other, at Rome's mighty Colosseum.

• 5:31Dan Snow?

  So, we all think we know what gladiator fights look like, because we've seen the Hollywood movies. In fact, if you've seen the trailer of Gladiator 2, it appears that one of the gladiators rides on the back of an enormous rhino. Let's see if there's any truth in those fever dreams. I'm gonna meet up with historian Alexander Mariotti to find out what was really going on in the Colosseum, what was going on in the arena, and what truth, if any, is there in these cinematic representations. Alex, we are sitting here, next to the Colosseum. You grew up in this neighbourhood of Rome, you played football in the Colosseum as a kid.

• 6:02Speaker 05

  I did.

• 6:03Dan Snow?

  This could not be a more legit conversation about gladiators.

• 6:06Speaker 05

  Not even if Russell Crowe was here with us.

• 6:08Dan Snow?

  I mean, he would take away from the veracity of it. So, did you really play football in the Colosseum?

• 6:13Speaker 05

  The interesting thing about the Colosseum is that nobody really bothered with it as much. There was no entrance tickets, there was no gates, until the year 2002, which is the year after Gladiator came out. It had such an impact that suddenly they decided they could make money on it. But as a boy, it was free, open, and my brother and I, my grandfather's born across the street from where we are, and we used to go play football, kick a football about.

• 6:35Dan Snow?

  Unbelievable. Speaking of Hollywood films about gladiators, have they completely corrupted and distorted our understanding of what gladiators are? Gladiators really were.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  A hundred percent. But then, you know, the point of movies is pretty much a Roman tradition. Because the games weren't really indicative of true life. You know, watching a guy fighting a tiger wasn't really a realistic example of what the wild was like. It was the movie version, it's entertainment version. Same with the gladiator fights. They weren't really indicative of what the front was like, what the battles were on the Roman front. Movies are the same. They are an entertainment version of events.

• 7:07Dan Snow?

  So, well, tell me, what was the reality?

• 7:09Speaker 05

  The reality was that it was a mixture of combat. The Romans had a philosophy called vertus. Vertus was physical and mental endurance and skill and, you know, martial skill especially. The gladiators embodied that. So, there's various factors to the games. The first is, it's a play on life. You know, you have a death at any moment, but you face death with courage. The gladiators are a symbol of that. But you also had the inspiration of a martial society. You know, war was a very big reality in antiquity. Violence is a very true part of everyday life. So to see it and to see somebody excellent at it was to be inspiring to a warrior nation. But also, it was entertainment. It was pure spectacle.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  It was shows, just, you know, violence is pretty much the order of the day. Let's make violence into sport.

• 7:58Dan Snow?

  Crowds have always enjoyed watching men wrestle.

• 8:00Speaker 05

  Always.

• 8:01Dan Snow?

  Strike each other, fight, I guess so. But is it possible to identify the birth of the gladiator?

• 8:07Speaker 05

  You know, there's certain elements of gladiatorial combat that I think are sewn into our DNA. They've been with us since the start. But, you know, the Greeks are the inventors, the Romans are the innovators. So the seedling that becomes gladiatorial combat comes from Greece. You know, this idea of men of valor fighting over the tomb of a fallen soldier or a great hero, such as you find in the Iliad. But what happens is in 105 B.C., a guy called Rutilius Rufus Has an epiphany. He sees the crowd's reaction and he realizes I can use this to purpose because he realizes that the crowd really reacts to the violence and he starts using it as a political tool. And what happens is that the Republic is born of men with

• 8:49Speaker 05

  great ambition and the gladiator became the very tool that won the crowd, that fed their power, and that then moves on to the emperors.

• 8:57Dan Snow?

  So if you're seeking power in the Roman Republic, what you put on gladiator games, people think you're impressive, rich, magnanimous, and they vote for you, they propel you into office?

• 9:06Speaker 05

  Of course. I mean, there's a real distinction between the upper class and the lower class. What's the middle ground? How do you appeal to people who have an entirely different life reality to you? The gladiators, the linchpin between the rich and the poor. It's a bit like, you know, your prime minister going to a football game, oh, he's just one of us. Look at that, he's just an average guy. He likes the sports like we do. He's human, he's normal.

• 9:26Dan Snow?

  Is there anyone in particular who's responsible for this, well, this extraordinary culture?

• 9:30Speaker 05

  Of course there is, and I don't think that name will surprise you. It was Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar was a master of marketing. He understood that the people are seduced by power and pleasure, and he gave them both. How powerful to have men fighting for you, how pleasurable to be able to watch them free because he's such a magnanimous and generous soul. And it's Caesar that sets the bar, that then, of course, Augustus, first emperor, has to continue. And then every emperor has to outdo the last, so that they're the kindest, they're the generous ones, they're the ones that you remember the most.

• 10:01Dan Snow?

  It seems that the first gladiatorial fight, or at least the first on record, took place around 264 BCE, at the funeral of Senator Junius Brutus Pera, where six warriors fought in pairs in a sort of tribute to honor the dead. Over the decades, the ritual aspect gradually faded, and what started as more irreverent custom grew into a form of popular entertainment. By around 183 BCE, it had evolved into the kind of larger public event we'd recognize. As Rome transformed from republic to empire, gladiatorial combat

• 10:42Dan Snow?

  became formalized, evolving into an organized sport hosted by wealthy patrons and emperors, moving entirely away from its roots as funerary games. And it was during this imperial era that lots of specialized gladiator schools emerged, known as Familia Gladiatoria.

• 11:01Dan Snow?

  A system where fighters trained and lived under strict discipline, with attention paid to their diet and healthcare. After all, these were the Premier League footballers of the day. If you visit Rome today, you can get an idea of what it would be like to go to gladiator school, albeit a modern one, slightly less brutal, which you can leave whenever you want. It's exactly what I'm going to do now, to see what it takes to get into the arena, because not everyone has what it takes to be a gladiator.

• 11:36Dan Snow?

  Okay, Alexander, we've come to, well, it is literally a gladiator school. Only in Rome do you have a gladiator school.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, ludus, of course. You know, it's an opportunity to learn what the sources don't tell us. That's the great thing about coming to a place like this, is you can try the weapons, you can try the helmets, and you get a physical knowledge which we are missing. When you read the sources, you don't get that part.

• 12:01Dan Snow?

  How are gladiators chosen? Are they just slaves captured in combat?

• 12:05Speaker 05

  No, absolutely not. We know that by 75 B.C., half of gladiators are freedmen. But what we also know is that there was a certain requirement of physicality to become a gladiator. You just couldn't get anybody to become a gladiator. You had to have the right stuff. You had to be physically the specimen, the right kind of specimen. But we also know that they're chosen the same way the Olympic athletes are chosen. So Philostratus tells us that when you get an athlete, you look at him, you study his body, you know what kind of athlete he's going to be. Apply that to gladiators.

• 12:32Dan Snow?

  And why? Because different styles of fighting demand different physics.

• 12:36Speaker 05

  So for example, if you're going to be a gladiator that fights with a net and trident, the retiarius, you've got a piece of armour called the galera, which is just a shoulder pad made of metal, and that's it. That's all the armour you have. So you don't have a helmet, which is wonderful if you're a good-looking guy. In fact, if you have the right attributes, also in being handsome, then you're going to be a crowd pleaser. But if you're going to be a secutor or marmella, these are the heavy sets, they've got big helmets that encompass the entire head, they've got a big shield, and they had to be physically...

• 13:05Speaker 05

  Kind of like heavyweight boxers, they have to be big guys able to sustain the weight of the armour and be able to fight effectively with it.

• 13:12Dan Snow?

  Okay, so cast your expert eye over me, which one would I have been?

• 13:17Speaker 05

  Oh, definitely Rhettiaris.

• 13:19Dan Snow?

  A tall skinny guy?

• 13:20Speaker 05

  Tall, slender, but you've got the looks as well.

• 13:23Dan Snow?

  Yes!

• 13:24Speaker 05

  The ladies are gonna love you, you might become like Caledus. Caledus is a famous heartthrob of the ladies whose writings on the walls of Pompeii have survived, telling us that he's the netter of the ladies, he's a proud favourite.

• 13:38Dan Snow?

  Yeah, I'm sure he was also a forty-six-year-old guy with a bad back. That makes absolute sense. But then I'm very lightly armed, I feel a bit naked going into that fight.

• 13:48Speaker 05

  Well, you're lightly armed, but you've got a huge advantage to yourself, which is that you don't have a helmet that is, one, obscuring your view. Secondly, it's not restricting your breathing, because the big helmet encompass the head, provides great protection, yes. But at the same time, makes it very hard to breathe and very hard to see, so that it's the advantage and the disadvantage.

• 14:08Dan Snow?

  Imagine we were back in ancient Rome, how would this gladiator school have operated?

• 14:12Speaker 05

  So you had barracks where people could stay, so obviously the slaves didn't stay there. If you're a freedman, you might actually live at home and then come and train on certain days and stay at the ludus closer to the match. You had barracks, you had a mess hall where you could eat, you had a medical centre, you actually had an infirmary, so you had an on-site doctor, and that tells us a lot about gladiators.

• 14:34Dan Snow?

  So actually, rather than condemned slaves, we think of them more as, well, premiership footballers, I mean, highly-trained athletes?

• 14:40Speaker 05

  They're the first superstar athletes of history, more so than the Olympians. The sense of a modern superstar, of a modern athlete, has a wide reach. You just have to look, if a footballer's playing, people will go to that match. Gladiators had the same draw, Olympians did not. They didn't go throughout the whole empire. The thing about gladiatorial combat is that your name was known throughout the empire. If you're a superstar in Rome, you're a superstar for sixty million people. One-third of the world's population likely knows who you are.

• 15:10Dan Snow?

  And what would the training regime have been like in these places? Pretty brutal?

• 15:14Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, what we know about it is that the training is so intense that they start using the same training for the Roman army. And we're talking in republican times. So you've got people... Like Scipio Africanus, he's using the same training they're using for the gladiators to train the soldiers. So military training and gladiatorial training is on a par, and that tells you just the high degree that these athletes were put through to make them into champions of the arena.

• 15:39Dan Snow?

  Do we have any idea how they trained?

• 15:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, the sources don't specifically mention gladiatorial training, but we're very lucky because we have Vajetius, a Roman writer, who tells us about military training. And as we know, they're symbiotic. So we know the kind of systems they used. He says in fact that no man on the arena or the battlefield can become successful without fighting against the palace. So the palace is a wooden post, like a wooden dummy, and you were taught, kind of moves as you would in any martial art, really. You're taught a series of hooks and jabs, of swipes. You're taught what we call katas in karate. But what we also know is they're using a system called the tetrad. So it's a four-day split. Already, the Greek athletes, they have training programs, yearly training programs. It's kind of like gym culture today.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  And they have diets that go along with them, so the gladiators would have been given the same thing. So they had a thing called pulse. It was like a stew, almost. You know, I always think about the stew that they give to sumo wrestlers, to sort of beefen them up, and kind of very similar, mostly barley, grains.

• 16:40Dan Snow?

  Okay, so I'm at the ludus, I'm training hard, I'm eating well.

• 16:44Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 16:44Dan Snow?

  And I've got my net and I've got my trident. Is there a tournament? Is it like a knockout? How do I advance?

• 16:50Speaker 05

  Well, you start with a couple of exhibition matches, just to get yourself known. Your ultimate goal is you want to fight in the Colosseum. The Colosseum's the big time. It's Wembley, it's the Super Bowl, it's... I mean, you've got the largest crowd. You've got more than likely about 85,000 people. That's a crowd. And how electric, the moment you walk through, they're going to cheer your name. It's intoxicating. So you have the draw as to why you want to do it. So once you've done a couple of exhibition matches, you have to become a crowd pleaser. You've got to win the crowd. So you probably learn a couple of techniques that would separate you from your opponents. But also, you'll make appearances. So there's parades three days before the fight, where the gladiators walk through the streets, and so people get to see their heroes.

• 17:33Speaker 05

  Maybe a politician's getting elected, so he's going to hire you out to appear there. And it's just about getting your name out there, so that people want to see you. They say, "I want Danikas to be in the Colosseum, because I'm only going to go to the games if he's there."

• 17:49Speaker 05

  So close your fists and get yourself, there we go, in a good position and just start swinging, almost like a figure eight.

• 17:57Dan Snow?

  Here we go, I can, I'm getting the hang of this.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Right, you've got it, you've got to keep going, swing open, open.

• 18:02Dan Snow?

  Give me the trident.

• 18:03Speaker 05

  Nice.

• 18:04Dan Snow?

  Oh, no, yikes. What am I doing now? I've lost it.

• 18:12Dan Snow?

  Okay, so I've been training really hard here in Gladiator School. I can use the net and everything. I'm set to compete on the biggest of biggest stages, the Colosseum. Meanwhile, my producer, Mariana, who you'll have heard me talk about on this podcast before, she's my biggest fan at NACH. So as I prepare for the fight of my life, she's going to find out what it would be like to go to the games and watch me compete.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  So I'm a really big fan of Dan the Gladiator and I'm going to head to the Colosseum with 65,000 other Romans to see him in the big fight this afternoon. First, I'm meeting the renowned historian, Dr Simon Elliott, to find out more about what my day at the Colosseum would be like.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  So Simon, I've settled in for a whole day of entertainment, which is great for the authorities because it means I'm not on the street causing trouble. Can you just give me a rundown of what a day at the Colosseum would be like?

• 19:11Speaker 06

  So you turn up about sort of nine o'clock, queuing with your ticket to get in and then you're settling in your seat by 10 o'clock and around 10 o'clock through one of the main gateways onto the arena floor, you'd have the procession, the big procession, which would feature a lot of the participants in all of the various activities of the day. Touring round and round and round the arena floor. And then they would all go back, getting ready to perform whatever they're going to do, all part of the theatre of the arena. And then you would have an hour or two of beast hunts, always the same in every Roman amphitheatre, anywhere in the Roman world. You'd have beasts imported from across the entirety of the Roman Empire. Remember, this is an empire that spans three continents. So you're talking about lions and tigers and bears and panthers and elephants.

• 19:57Speaker 06

  Famously ostriches, so for example, the Roman emperor Commodus, his favourite sport when he was the emperor in the arena, and he did participate in the arena fighting drugged animals and drugged gladiators, but his favourite entertainment for himself in the arena was to fire arrows with a sickle shaped head to chop the heads off running ostriches. And on one famous occasion, he chopped the heads off a hundred ostriches and then famously picked one up and waved it in front of the senators who were watching, waved the ostrich head up and down and go, if you don't behave, then this will happen to you as well. And then he laughed and all the senators had to laugh because they had to pretend he was funny because it's the emperor. So it's basically hunting beasts for entertainment. It's interesting to consider how the beasts ended up in Rome in actual fact because you're

• 20:41Speaker 06

  talking about, there's a hundred days of games, that's tens of thousands of animals. How did they get to Rome? Well, it was an industrial scale operation across the empire. Let's look at North Africa. Everywhere you go in Rome and North Africa, you can find mosaics which show beasts being hunted in the wild to get put in cages to then be sent to Rome to appear in the Colosseum. So the beast hunts were fed by an industrial scale hunting operation which was empire wide.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  And is it the case that certain factions of the Roman army were notorious for capturing different animals?

• 21:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, it all depends on where you're based. I mean, in this phase of the empire we're talking about with Titus and Domitian, it's the pre-cupate phase of empire, so that's the first half of the Roman empire. So in this phase, the military were largely based around the borders of the empire and the frontiers, either conquering new territory or defending territory. And therefore where they were based mitigated what kind of beasts that they would hunt.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  So there's a bit in Gladiator two where one of the gladiators comes in on the back of a rhino. Is that something that would have happened or is that just Hollywood?

• 21:45Speaker 06

  That's pure Hollywood, but it's interesting actually, rhinos did appear in the arena. So any animal you can think of actually on the three continents of the Roman empire, Europe, Asia, Africa, any animal you can think of, including tigers from India, they would appear in the arena. Famously, the first hyenas which appeared in the arena came from India as well. So in actual fact, they're not just coming from within the boundaries of the Roman empire, they're coming from outside the Roman empire. And we know from written sources, they had rhinos in the arena. We don't have any evidence that people were riding the rhinos. It's a bit Lord of the Rings for me, or Game of Thrones, but they did have rhinos.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  And you mentioned Commodus battling drugged animals and drugged gladiators.

• 22:23Speaker 06

  Absolutely, yes. So Commodus was the son of Marcus Aurelius, never lived up to his dad's expectations. When his dad Marcus Aurelius died and he became the emperor, his dad actually appointed forty of the leading senators to be his mentors to make sure that he stayed on the straight and narrow. And by the time Commodus was assassinated in 193, only one of them was still alive because he'd killed all the other thirty-nine. So actually, he was the real deal bad guy Roman emperor. For me, my least favourite Roman emperor in actual fact. And there is evidence that towards the end of his life, actually, he did start to consider himself to be a re-embodiment of the demigod Hercules. So he started dressing in his daily life as Hercules. He had statues of himself created dressed as Hercules, and then he appeared in the arena in the Colosseum dressed as Hercules. But of course, he's

• 23:08Speaker 06

  the emperor, so whoever's running the games on behalf of the emperor is not going to actually allow him to even remotely get into danger. So although he was fighting gladiators or beasts in the arena, they were drugged.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  So you've had the beast hunts, then what's the next thing that I can expect to see?

• 23:25Speaker 06

  Then it's the public execution. So that's basically theatrical executions to entertain the public. Remember, the Romans were like us but different, as all peoples of the past were. And one of their big differences, certainly in the Western world, is the attitude to casual violence, which is a very normal thing in the Roman world. Remember, the average life expectancy was thirty-five years because of the huge levels of infant mortality. You find with these ancient civilizations, Greece, Rome, Egypt, that they were obsessed with the afterlife. And that's because they went to the afterlife probably more quickly than they would choose to, especially if they're in the arena.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  And with those public executions, they were quite elaborate, weren't they? Dramatizations of Greek plays where the slaves are playing the Greek hero and the way that they are billed in the story.

• 24:11Speaker 06

  So the public executions, the stage would come up and it's dressed to recreate a scene from mythology, could involve a minor or have a guy with a sort of like an imitation bull's head on. They could recreate a battle of the past, the Battle of Zamaseed, have pretend elephants on the stage and the people being executed dressed as Carthaginians. Or it could be a scene from mythology, it can take any story from mythology where people are dying terrible deaths. That's what's being enacted for public entertainment.

• 24:41Dan Snow?

  This is Dan Snow's History Here, more after this.

• 24:48Dan Snow?

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• 27:27Speaker 01

  It seems like it's about more than just the execution. But watching, I guess, the psychological torture of those people, knowing that that's going to happen, being played out for a long time, really... It sounds a bit like a horror movie.

• 27:41Speaker 06

  It really is like a horror movie, especially to our sort of our sensibilities. But from a Roman perspective, you're seeing it time and again, and time and again, and time and again. So it just becomes the norm, you know? So you just think it's a normal part of life, seeing people being psychologically and then physically tortured to death. It's terrible, actually. It really sits badly with our sensibilities, certainly with my sensibilities. But, you know, for a Roman, it's normal.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  And how much influence did spectators have in the fate of those who were thrown in the ring against the lions or against other combatants?

• 28:09Speaker 06

  Difficult to tell an actual fact because we're looking at through the prism of modern portrayals of what the arena's like, sort of movies and Hollywood and things like that. So it's difficult to say, but certainly if it was a public execution, you are going to get executed. There's no way out of it, you're going to get executed for entertainment.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Okay, and another phrase that we're used to hearing is being thrown to the lions, and often that's Christians. Again, was that something that happened?

• 28:31Speaker 06

  Absolutely. So in various phases, the principate phase of the Roman Empire, the first half of the Roman Empire, you could have persecutions of minority religions certainly, and in particular Christians we see today with emperors like Nero or Diocletian as an example. The persecutions took place because something bad had happened and the emperor wanted to distract attention from the real reasons why the bad thing had happened, so they blamed, in this case, the Christians and then they were persecuted. And part of the persecution was for them being sent to the arena and executed in public.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  And is the removal of bodies done in an equally theatrical way, or is there some dignity to it?

• 29:07Speaker 06

  You're dragged off leaving a trail of blood in the sand, and then the sand's brushed to make the blood disappear and then you may as well not have existed. For the majority of people in the arena, that's exactly what it is. You've now stopped being useful to them because you can't entertain them. That might not be the case for the superstars of the arena, the gladiators. So you may well find that if it was a superstar, rock star gladiator being killed in the arena, then they may actually have a much more formal burial after the event and they may be carried out in the arena with much more dignity.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  There's lots of killing through the day, so there's obviously a lot of blood. How messy is it?

• 29:44Speaker 06

  You need a very, very regular water supply to wash everything down all the time because it's very messy. It's not just blood you're talking about, it's every kind of human and animal leprosy that you can think of. So the place would stink to hide, haven't seen, you'd need a regular supply of water just to keep the place clean enough so that people didn't die before they went into the arena.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Is there any levity in this day of... Mass death. Is anything gonna make me laugh?

• 30:09Speaker 06

  Certainly for us in our world, you would not laugh at any aspect of what is happening in the arena because you've got to remember it's people being murdered for public entertainment. So for us, no, there's nothing that will make us laugh. But for the Romans who are just seeing it hundreds of times in their lives, etcetera, if a normal part of their lives, they might find something funny, etcetera, in a way that would jar with us today.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  So no clowns, no jugglers or anything?

• 30:33Speaker 06

  Clowns and jugglers, only if they were being dressed as such for public entertainment in the public executions.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And I've heard about epic water battles. Were they real and did they happen at the Colosseum?

• 30:46Speaker 06

  Not necessarily at the Colosseum. We do know that the Romans could flood some arenas because they had aqueducts and water supply systems and drainage systems which allowed the arena to be flooded. So they could recreate a naval battle, which might be part of the entertainment in the public executions, or it could be part of the gladiator fights or the gladiators sailing various kinds of vessels. So they did do it, but to my mind, it's hugely, hideously expensive, so it didn't happen very often.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  And when it did happen, is it kind of like a swimming pool? Or is it the whole arena? And are there sources that say that, you know, there were ships and weapons and...

• 31:21Speaker 06

  It will be the whole arena. There will be probably recreations of Roman galleys, but small because it's fighting, Roman war galleys. They've got to find a way of making that watertight. And if you think about the Colosseum, it's the largest arena by a long way in the Roman world. It's absolutely enormous for 65,000 people. So making that watertight would be difficult, I think.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  And so I'm there all day, so I might want to take a break. And I actually might want to put a bet on Dan, since I believe in him so much. What would I do about that if I wanted to put a bet on Dan to win?

• 31:54Speaker 06

  I think in a Roman arena, inside and around it, everywhere, you'd have legal and illegal gambling taking place. We're talking about one of history's great, get-rich-quick societies. So there's this enormous disparity in wealth between the very rich and the very poor. Enormous disparity and most people are of the very poor moving up towards the middle classes and the difference in their wealth compared to the very, very rich is so big, it's almost indescribable. So every opportunity you can have to actually make money doing anything you would take because it will literally change your life. So a lot of people will gamble big actually to try and make a difference to their lives. They'll live it, I mean, they're in the arena in the first place to be distracted from the mundanity of their normal life anyway.

• 32:38Speaker 06

  So if you can get rich through a successful gamble, then you would do it.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  And it's a really long day. Food is synonymous with a good day out. Sports and, you know, baseball and hot dogs go together. What would I eat throughout the day?

• 32:51Speaker 06

  You'd be snacking all day. So I think the first thing you need to do before you go and see Dan in the arena is carve up yourself. So eat loads of bread and eggs and cheese for your breakfast. So you're all nicely carved up. Got to remember as well, you're going to be sitting outdoors for an entire day on a hard seat. So the next thing you want to do, if you can afford it, is take a cushion. As you enter the arena, you may buy some snacks to take in with you and then they're being sold all the time as well. So it could be a bag of olives, it could be a bruschetta, except there's no tomatoes, obviously. So a bit of bread and olive oil instead, with a bit of cheese on top maybe. But snacking all day, bread, olives, cheese, dried meats, that kind of thing.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Great. That sounds like a day for me.

• 33:32Speaker 06

  And don't forget the wine. In actual fact, you would be encouraged to drink wine because it's safer than drinking the water.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I suppose because you've got 65,000 people and they're there all day. There are logistics around that. Where do people go to the bathroom?

• 33:44Speaker 06

  Off to where they're sitting. 65,000 people.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  So people just...

• 33:49Speaker 06

  Some of them would have, yeah. Where they sat.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I can see why, you say it would smell.

• 33:55Speaker 06

  It's why it's better to be at the back if you're a lady sitting at the back because you're sitting nearest to the vella sails, the awning, so you've got more chance of being out of the sun. And there's nothing cascading down from above you, down to the front.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  Oh, so I'm full of bread, I'm drunk, I'm ready to watch Dan fight.

• 34:11Speaker 06

  You are. You're basically enjoying the two key things which a Roman emperor wants you to have to make you happy and not cause any problems. You've got your bread and you've got your circus. Or in this case, the arena.

• 34:25Dan Snow?

  The 100-day-long opening festival of the Colosseum was nothing short of spectacular in a rather grisly way. It's believed that up to 9,000 animals were slaughtered, hundreds of humans executed, and so much blood was shed that stadium staff sprayed perfume to try and cover up the smell, I'm assuming without much success. The opening games took place in AD 80 under Emperor Titus, who took on the enormous task of finishing the Colosseum after his father Vespasian died. But Titus's reign was brief, lasting only two years, and when his brother Domitian

• 35:04Dan Snow?

  rose to power, he saw the Colosseum as his chance to carve his name deeper into Rome's history. He wanted to leave his mark on the arena and make it even bigger and grander than before. But the most crucial change Domitian made was actually hidden from the public eye, but it was one that took Colosseum shows to a whole new level. I'm right next to the arena floor now. I'm at the level the gladiators would have been fighting on, and there would have been a wooden floor covered with a thick layer of sand spread on top. In fact, interestingly, it's from the Latin word 'sand', 'arena', that we get our word 'arena'. And all of these rooms and corridors beneath the arena floor were actually not in the

• 35:48Dan Snow?

  original building, they were added on to by Domitian. He ordered this to be excavated out, a huge new subterranean space created. It's called the hypergeum, which just literally means 'the underground', and it's a really complex network of tunnels, passageways, and chambers, all underneath the arena floor of the Colosseum. This was really the engine room, this was the backstage area, the engine room for what was going on the arena above, and this was a place of blood and sweat and injuries and nervous young men, condemned criminals, and terrified animals. Slaves would be wrestling those beasts into cages, wounded gladiators were coming past

• 36:30Dan Snow?

  on stretchers, treated by medical staff, and there'd be the equivalent today's stage managers bellowing orders and whipping people into shape, perhaps literally. But this wasn't just a storage area and a holding pen, it was so much more than that. Simon, this is the true magic of the Colosseum, isn't it?

• 36:49Speaker 06

  Uh, magic is an interesting word, because what you have here is a hole in the ground. The only lighting you have when the stage is up is going to be from torches and lamps, so it's going to be flickering light in the darkness. It's going to be humid and hot, and it's going to stink to high heaven. So you've got animals, you've got people, everything's been run by slaves, with the military making sure everybody does the right thing, etc. It would have been like being in hell. The stage goes up and down, and up and down, and on the stage when it goes down, it gets dressed. So let's say the public executions, they could be done in a theatrical style. So they could be used to recreate a famous battle from history. Let's say it's going to be the Battle of Zama.

• 37:31Speaker 06

  So the slaves are dressed as Carthaginians, there'll be some props looking like elephants. The stage would then look as though it's in North Africa. It would go up, and then the Carthaginians, the prisoners, will be executed. They'd lose the battle, and then it would go down. Dead bodies removed, blood washed off, so on, and then it's redressed. In this case, you'd then go up in every part of the gladiator fight afterwards.

• 37:53Dan Snow?

  How are these platforms being raised and looked?

• 37:55Speaker 06

  I'm standing on a stage, and surrounding me are hydraulic systems, so wheels and pulleys and levers, hundreds of them, which are powered by the thing that powers everything in the Roman world: slaves.

• 38:07Dan Snow?

  Okay, so there's beasts down here, there's criminals. Are there gladiators down here as well?

• 38:12Speaker 06

  So, Dan, if you were a gladiator, you'd be getting up at the crack of dawn. So as soon as the sun rises, basically, you get up and then you get a hearty breakfast. So it's going to give you all the carbs that you're going to need, and all the energy you're going to need to perform. But then, a lot of your day is spent waiting. So remember that the gladiator fights are the last of the three main events in the arena on a day. So you're not going to get into the arena until 2 or 3 in the afternoon, probably. And then, that's the first gladiators. The gladiator fights are various kinds, it could be lots, it could be only a couple, there could be beasts thrown in, and so on and so forth. You could be on at the end of the day, so you could be waiting all the time. And the place you wait is down in the hypergym, in the depths of hell.

• 38:57Dan Snow?

  If I'm a gladiator, I get a chance to, you know, warm up, go through my paces.

• 39:01Speaker 06

  As a gladiator, even though you're a slave, you're the most elite form of entertainment that you would have in the Roman world. So effectively, you're a rock star. So you are going to get looked after. You are going to be fed and watered, make sure that you're hydrated and carved, ready for your performance. You'll be doing training, you'll be stretching your muscles, you'll be getting a massage to sort of like make sure that you're sort of able to move effectively as soon as you perform. But you can't get away from the fact that actually spending most of the day waiting. And the really scariest thing is, you could be spending most of the day waiting to be killed.

• 39:40Dan Snow?

  Were the gladiators, would guests come and see them backstage?

• 39:44Speaker 06

  So as you're waiting, Dan, down in the hypergym, you wouldn't have fans coming down into hypergym, because it is like being in hell down there. It's the professional end of the arena. So people wouldn't come and see you there, but they would come and see you beforehand in the gladiator barracks. And if they're really good fans, they could bring you food and drink and entertain you in other ways.

• 40:03Dan Snow?

  So if I'm a retiaris, how am I entering the Colosseum? Because I know I'm going out feet first.

• 40:10Speaker 06

  You would be expected to entertain people all the way from the emperor in the imperial box, all the way down to the people sitting at the back, especially the women sitting at the back. And let's face it, Dan, they're the ones who really want to see you. So you're going to entertain them. And you'd be prodded and poked as you went out into the arena and reminded at every point as you walked out from the dark into the light. And then you blinked as the blinding sun smacked you in the face as you walked out of the hell of the hypergym. You will be reminded that you're there to entertain people. See, wave your arms in the air. There's your net, there's your trident, and you give through your helmet, making you look like a fish, a mighty roar.

• 40:54Dan Snow?

  You're listening to Dan Snow's History. There's more coming up.

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• 42:17Speaker 05

  This is it. The reason people traveled from across the empire to the Colosseum. The Gladiator fight. So you imagine the music's blaring because they had a full orchestra that played music to the fights, whether the beast hunts or the Gladiator fight. You've got the crowd going mad. And then the announcer says, and here he comes, all the way from the distant lands of Britannia, the people's champion, three-time winner, Britannicus Snow. And as you come through the trapdoor, 80,000 people cheer your name.

• 42:53Speaker 05

  I mean, who wouldn't want to be a Gladiator? Or alternatively, you would come from one of the entrances. And that's when you're the champion Gladiator. That's when you're the heavyweight, the title fighter. And as you're coming into the arena, there's actually someone behind you holding your stats, which I always think is fascinating when we watch boxing matches of UFC. It says, you know, wins, losses. You actually had that on a stand to tell the audience your career, your background.

• 43:18Dan Snow?

  So obviously Britannicus is a total legend. This is the main event.

• 43:22Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 43:22Dan Snow?

  Is he fighting to the death?

• 43:24Speaker 05

  No, no, no, no. We have a great description that belongs to Alexander Severus, the last of the Severan dynasty, which is of course the dynasty that will be very famous because it's the dynasty from Gladiator 2. And it says that the emperor gives special dispensation to use sharp weapons. And again, you know, there's no rule of thumb for gladiatorial combat. It's a seven hundred years span of sport. It was bound to change at different moments. But they probably would have used blunt weapons most of the time. And it isn't a fight to the death, of course not. You are a champion gladiator, you are irreplaceable. And the emperor knows that. You know, we forget that the emperor really, apart from a few exceptions, doesn't care about the sport. He cares about the crowd.

• 44:08Speaker 05

  The sport is just the way to win the crowd, so he wants the crowd to be happy. It's up to the people and your fans. Though sometimes, you know, we as fans watch our sports games. We'd like to kill one of our players. We wouldn't really like to kill them, but we think about it. You know, when they miss a goal or something. It'd be very rare for an audience to condemn a gladiator to death.

• 44:27Dan Snow?

  So it's not just a bloodbath?

• 44:28Speaker 05

  No, but there is a bloodbath, but it's not gladiators. You've got Noxai, which are prisoners of war or criminals who are condemned to death. They're fighting to the death most of the time. Or they're being executed. And what happens is later Christian writers compound Noxai prisoners, beast hunters and gladiators into one sort of figure, which is the one we see in the movies. The poor slave, the bloodbath, all these tropes that we think about gladiators are very distinct, different classes.

• 44:56Dan Snow?

  So you say the crowd condemning gladiators, how do you mean?

• 44:59Speaker 05

  Well, it's ultimately the crowd who decides. You know, again, the emperor's using the gladiator to win the crowd's favor. And ultimately, that's why gladiatorial combat died in Rome especially. Because the Roman mob had no power anymore. Once the capital was moved to Constantinople, the crowd's favor was irrelevant to the emperor, so they didn't spend the money to win them anymore. And that's why it died out as a sport. That's why the Colosseum stopped being used, because the inhabitants of Rome had no political values. So the crowd is the ones that ultimately decide. They're the most important part of the whole equation.

• 45:32Dan Snow?

  So there is truth of that sort of trope about there's a fallen gladiator and a victor has to ask permission whether or not to dispatch him. There's an element of truth to that?

• 45:40Speaker 05

  My thought is that what happened is when a gladiator was injured beyond recovery. I think it's a way of, not an execution, but putting him out, it's a dignified death. You know, they didn't torture the gladiators, even when they talk about death, they talk about a strike to the throat or to the back of the neck. So it's not torture. It's a noble and quick death, a painless death, if you will.

• 46:01Dan Snow?

  So in the arena, gladiators got different kinds of weapons as they fight in different ways.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:05Dan Snow?

  It's all about the show. You're pairing up a gladiator with one strength, but one weakness against another one with complementary or contrasting strengths.

• 46:13Speaker 05

  Exactly, and again, its origins are the battlefield, where, once you've defeated a whole bunch of people, as happened with the Samnites, for example, they're defeated, and the battlefield is strewn with this very ornate armour, some of which is in the British Museum, there's some wonderful examples. I highly suggest anyone go to the British Museum, second floor, go look at the Samnite armour, because you see the origins of gladiatorial armour. It's kind of, it's almost fantasy related, there's like big horns and waves and, and it became so exciting to see these over the top helmets, these weapons, but each weapon, each piece of armour brought with it a specific style, that was the excitement as well. It's a different combination of fighters and the different styles gives it that sort of thrilling edge as a sport.

• 46:56Dan Snow?

  How do you win and lose? In Hollywood, obviously, you get killed or mortally wounded, what's, how do you win, in your opinion, in reality?

• 47:02Speaker 05

  So you've got between three to five rounds of between three to five minutes. So they, you know, they would have stopped for illegal strikes, but also, the rounds means that you stop, give the fighter a rest, and it means that when he comes back, he's gonna fight at a more exciting intensity. If your purpose was simply to kill them, you just go, here's two swords, like in the movies, like we see Russell Crowe, we see Maximus fighting tigers, here's two swords until somebody wins. That doesn't work, and it would be pretty boring. The rounds gives you the ability to be more intense, to give these short bursts of excitement, and it also means that the fighter can give his best performance. Points, it's a point system. So maybe to disarmament, I'm sure that there was a complex series of, of rules that went along with it.

• 47:45Speaker 05

  I mean, we know that there was rules, because there's referees, to ensure that the rules are being followed, so it would have gone to points, and that's why we know, for example, of inscriptions like Fiamma, the Syrian, who, you know, wins twenty-eight, he's drawn eleven, he's lost five, and he retires at the age of thirty. So people did lose, they did draw. In fact, Verus and Priscus, the gladiators who fight on the opening of the Colosseum, they both win, they drew. So the first fight of the Colosseum was not in death. The most exciting and most important fights and most famous ends in a draw.

• 48:19Dan Snow?

  So do you think they would have known those two on that opening fight at the Colosseum? They were both going to walk away from this, hopefully, this is not to the death.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  Yes, but they also were aware of the risks. I mean, the thing is, it depends on the emperor. There are emperors who have no care for life. Caligula, you know, Nero, Claudius himself had a particularly cruel streak. So you had to be careful because you had to know that the emperor did hold sway of your life. If the emperor wants you dead, you're dead. But you take that risk. You go into the arena knowing that the emperor might say, "You didn't fight well, and I don't care what the crowd thinks, I want you to die and I want you to be executed." And then you were expected to face death with courage. But you also knew as a gladiator, are you going, what fight you're going into. So you're going in a fight with sharp weapons? Okay, you know that. It's a fight to the first blood? It's a fight to the death? You were aware of it beforehand. The risks were put before you.

• 49:07Dan Snow?

  So if I lose, if I'm disarmed, I'm tripped up, I'm getting a bit fatigued, I'm kneeling on the arena floor, either I could at one extreme face death, or I could just dust myself off and fight again the next set of games?

• 49:19Speaker 05

  More than likely, you're going to dust yourself off and fight again. The amount of money that's been invested in you has to be recouped. And so we know that when you rent a gladiator, you're actually paying an insurance. If the gladiator is injured during the fight at your exhibition, let's say you're a senator, you're putting on some games to impress people, win some votes, and the gladiator injures the other one in the fight, you're going to have to pay for that because that's a loss of earnings for the ludus.

• 49:43Dan Snow?

  And if I win, I'm a star.

• 49:45Speaker 05

  And if you win, you have the acclamation of the people of Rome. The name Britannicus will echo through the empire. All the ladies will love you. And most importantly, you will gain what everybody wants to gain: immortality. Because let's face it, here we are, talking about them at the foot of the ruins, the bones of the Colosseum, not even the full Colosseum, and we're still fascinated by them. And all we want to do is watch gladiators fight, which is why many of us will be in a cinema, watching the screens, and watching gladiators fight in the Colosseum 2,000 years later.

• 50:24Dan Snow?

  And now my name has been etched into the annals as a champion fighter, while my adoring fans have the opportunity to indulge in their obsession as they leave the arena. So Simon, I've had the best day at the Colosseum, even though I've seen some pretty harrowing things. Since Dan is my boss, I have to say that I'm glad to see that he survived another day. Now we're leaving the Colosseum, is there a gift shop? The Colosseum is surrounded by things, shops, selling trinkets. Trinkets of any kind, it could be a loyal lamp with a gladiator picture on it. It could be a vase with gladiator pictures on it. It could be a tiny little La Ries statue for your household, laurarium,

• 51:08Dan Snow?

  where you worship your household gods on a daily basis, representing one of the gods you favour, Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and military strategy, or Mars, the god of war, or Venus, the goddess of love. So it could be anything and everything. So basically, it's what we would today call merch. And if you're a modern day fan of Dan, I guess you could just follow and subscribe to his podcast. You could, and if you actually pay a little bit more, he would send you his loincloth.

• 51:41Dan Snow?

  Romans enjoyed over 300 years of Colosseum games before its decline in the 5th century AD. Gladiators fighting was banned in 404, just as the Roman Empire was reeling under existential threats. Rome was facing invasions, economic turmoil, pandemics. Not surprisingly, maintenance of the Colosseum was not their top priority. In the centuries after, it became a burial site, it became a fortress, and a source of building materials for other churches and palaces. Later, in the 18th century, the Catholic Church declared the site sacred, asserting that many Christians have been martyred there, though so far, no one's found any real evidence of that ever happening in the arena.

• 52:26Dan Snow?

  Nevertheless, the Colosseum took on a new role as a place of reverence and was left as a ruin. It was as late as the 19th and 20th centuries that efforts to restore and preserve the Colosseum started to be made. And of course, now it's one of the most famous buildings on earth, one of the wonders of the world, attracting an average of 16,000 visitors every day.

• 52:51Dan Snow?

  Those people enter the Colosseum because like millions of others around the world, they remain fascinated by that most Roman of institutions, gladiators, where sport, violence and entertainment come together.

• 53:11Dan Snow?

  I hope you've enjoyed this series on the Colosseum. You know you can share this episode with your friends and family on WhatsApp from any podcast player you use. And if you're looking for more Gladiator and Ancient Rome content, fear not, we have you covered. Our next episode in the series comes out on Friday, where I'll be dispelling more myths with the true story of the rebel gladiator, the man, the myth, the legend. Of course, it's Spartacus, and the episode will drop into your podcast app automatically.

• 53:43Dan Snow?

  This series was produced by Marianne de Forge and edited by Dougal Patmore. I'm Dan Snow in Rome, now off to find the history team and indulge in some of the world's greatest food. Arrivederci.

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• 55:13Dan Snow?

  Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.