Gladiatorial combat may seem outdated and barbaric, but it is, at its heart, a combat sport like mixed martial arts, boxing, and even professional wrestling, with very similar appeal. There were clearly defined rules, a sense of dramatic flair with costumes, and even character archetypes. It was indeed bloody, but not as nearly as fatal as many think today. Not every gladiator died in the arena, and those who made it past their first handful of matches even less so beyond. That isn’t to say that gladiator fights didn’t also come with many deaths. For example, gladiator combat was usually accompanied by other events such as parades, animal hunts, glorified prisoner executions dressed up as combat practice for gladiators, and even occasional audience fatalities. But how did the games get started, what was life actually like for a typical gladiator, and how did these ubiquitous games rather suddenly cease to be a thing after so many centuries of widespread extreme popularity?
To begin with, the first known gladiator game was held in 264 BCE in honor of a deceased Roman aristocrat, put on by the aristocrat’s sons. The gladiators in this one were slaves that seemed to be captured from outside of Rome. As to the outcome, well, unfortunately, we don’t know if the first gladiators in this event lived or died, simply that it was a three-way match between three gladiators.
While gladiator games would be held throughout Roman history for various reasons, this particular occasion of honoring someone who’d just died persisted. In fact, upon the death of a Roman aristocrat in a given region, the masses even began expecting games, and would sometimes revolt if they weren’t held after such a death. For example, Suetonius noted upon the death of one aristocrat, the people of his city refused to let the body be buried unless his family held gladiatorial games. This eventually led to a revolt that had to be put down by emperor Tiberius.
That said, it should be noted that funerary gladiator games were not held for everyone. Equestrians and plebeians, even very rich ones, did not get funerary gladiator games held in their honor, just the patricians like the senatorial class. They also did not happen frequently, and you were lucky if you had two a year in a given town. Even a city as big as Rome did not usually see that many per year.
In any event, the gladiator games’ form would start to cement as Romans spread out into the world and took the games with them. Slaves captured in wars were sometimes sold to a gladiator school, or a ludus. As Rome expanded, there was a growing pool of slaves, and new territories in which gladiatorial combat became popular as a part of the spreading Roman culture. It was a machine that fed itself and could only grow as Rome was growing. Gladiatorial schools owned a familia gladiatoria or a gladiator troupe of slaves and free men and women. On this note, there were also free volunteers, usually thrill seekers or people down on their luck. These individuals typically paid to join the school, negotiated terms with the school owner, and were treated better than their slave colleagues. They could also leave whenever they wanted if they bought out their contract. Each troupe was run by a manager or owner, called a lanista, usually a freed gladiator himself.
Training as a gladiator was harsh. So harsh that there were protocols to ensure the gladiators-in-training did not try to end their own lives. They were chained and lived in rooms devoid of anything they could hang or stab themselves with. As they fought and gained a reputation, they moved up in the hierarchy of gladiators and gained better accommodations. If you have something to gain by living, you don’t necessarily resort to ending your own life to escape a bad situation. Lower gladiators, however, were kept under lock-and-key and their movements were limited.
We do have some examples of gladiators sharing a room with their so-called “wives” such as Spartacus, keeping in mind that legally, slaves could not marry. Gladiators could have children with these women and live as a family, sometimes in private houses if the gladiator was successful enough. Groupies and prostitutes were also allowed into the gladiators’ private quarters depending on their level in the hierarchy. Gladiators could have some sort of domestic life, and often when freed, their families also became freed and paid tribute to their father in posthumous memorials.
The schools also employed experts– also freed gladiators – to train in one or more combat styles, which we’ll get into shortly. They ran drills with the recruits and showed them how to fight according to their style. The experts and trainees practiced with wooden swords approximately twice as heavy as the swords they would ultimately fight with, same for wooden shields, and on wooden posts as tall as a person. They also practiced various offensive and defensive drills known as dictata. These were seen as the basics of their style of combat, and audience members were known to call out the dictata they wanted to see, essentially exhorting the gladiators to fight in a way they found to be exciting. These drills were important to the training of a gladiator, and experienced gladiators could build off of them to have more interesting or efficient fights. The hierarchy within the gladiator class or style was based on the victory record of the fighter. Trainees who had not had their first fights were usually considered the lowest. Noteworthy on this one, many did not survive their first fight. After these beginners came four levels of hierarchy with the first two considered the lowest. The top levels were where being a gladiator got really interesting. This is when you started to be a known commodity and started building a bonafide fanbase. The hierarchy was maintained by those with the same fighting style, with the top level of each style being considered the troupe’s main draws.
As for health, their diet and conditions were regulated to ensure they were healthy as possible. For example, many cities famed for gladiator schools were coastal cities, with the fresh air supposedly healthier for the gladiators. Gladiator diet was very barley-heavy, to the point of “barley-men” becoming a nickname for these fighters. As to why such a diet, it was said that barley fattened the arteries and made it harder for the gladiators to bleed to death. However, in reality, barley was probably used because it was cheap. This was important as Gladiators ate a lot, even more than the average soldier, to the point that they could put a stress on regions undergoing famine.
To help regulate their diet and ensure the gladiators were in good health, the schools hired physicians and cooks. On the former, no greater a physician than Galen, considered by many the greatest medical researcher of his era, worked for a gladiator school for a time. Notably, Galen doubted the barley diet was optimal here, and worked to change the diet of his gladiators. In the process of his work here, he gained invaluable experience, which helped him develop his medical theories beyond.
Another facet of maintaining good health was massage, with masseuses employed by the schools to help ensure the gladiators were fighting in top form.
Going back to the schools themselves, as gladiator combat became more popular, and politicians saw its potential as a political tool, upper classes, and even the empire itself, bought schools from their original lanistae. In fact, Julius Caesar himself owned a school of about a thousand gladiators. It was such a part of his political career that other senators attempted to limit his promotions indirectly by legally limiting how many gladiators could be in combat at any given time.
Octavian inherited Caesar’s school, and it was passed on throughout the Julio-Claudian dynasty of emperors. Some emperors like Nero opened separate schools than the imperial one, while others integrated them more into their administration by placing high ranking members of the court into the school’s administration. Imperial schools could be found all over Rome in the Eastern and Western empires. They were considered a cut above the regular schools and could even be rented out just like the others for a heftier price. Roman politicians followed suit and bought their own schools. Economically, it made sense for an aristocrat to buy a school. Since politicians were usually the editor, they incurred the cost of the dead gladiators and the cost of setting up a venue. Why not own the school?
This all brings us to the types of fighters used here. As alluded to, Rome had many types of gladiators that fell in and out of style depending on era or region. However, there are some primary types of gladiators found almost in any era and place: the horsemen, who fought on white horses with golden helmets, a tunic, round shields, with lances as weapons. They also wore a single shoulder armor called a manica, which most other gladiators wore as well. Noteworthy here is that despite the name, horsemen could fight on the ground as well as on horseback.
There were also the Retiarius, usually a good looking man or woman who fought without a helmet, but with a net, trident, and small blade.
Next up different types of sword and shield wielders existed like the Myrmillo, Thracian, and Secutor. They all had helmets, swords, and shields with a distinct design for each style of fighting. A gladiator could specialize in one to three of these styles. The eclecticism was probably to remain interesting in the arena, but also to ensure a career as a trainer in several styles as one’s fighting career began to wrap up. Originally these styles, like the Thracian, were based on peoples Rome were at war with. As the Empire grew and these locals became assimilated the names changed and new styles were added to represent further foes. For example, the Myrmillo used to refer to a peoples in what is now modern France, but the name was changed to fish person to more suit the look of the armor.
We should probably also explicitly mention there were female gladiators. Female gladiators were not tied down to a singular female-only style and could also specialize in more than one style of fighting.
As for what gladiators got up to in the matches, this could be all over the map. As noted in the first game in 264 BCE, it was a three-way match between the three slave-gladiators. As the sport became more refined, however, one-on-one matches became common. That didn’t mean there weren’t, say, 74-man matches in later Roman history, because there were- massive battle royales between trained gladiators happened. However, most of the large-scale matches were between criminals whose lives were less valuable, or not at all really, rather than trained gladiators. This would eventually be a part of the experience of going to the gladiator games. Sometimes these prisoners would recreate sea battles complete with battleships, sacking of villages, and other key Roman victories. The idea was the prisoners got a chance to die like brave Roman soldiers while the masses were thoroughly entertained by their deaths. In fact, many were expected to die in these battles to the point that once during a recreation of a sea battle, emperor Claudius was misheard to be offering the prisoners a pardon; this misunderstanding caused the prisoners to revolt.
In any event, while trained gladiators did die during their less frequent multi-man battles, these were spectacles rather than the norm, at least compared to one-on-one matches.
Moving on to people who fought animals in the arena, these were not considered gladiators, though they were eventually sourced from the same pool of slaves and trained in similar schools. However, they were called venatores and they were seen as slightly more respectable than their gladiator colleagues- hunters who fought against all sorts of animals, but mostly predators.
To fit the bill, they fought wearing the clothes and equipment of a hunter: a tunic, a spear for thrusting, and a spear for throwing. Venatores could come from all over the empire, and typically were well versed in how to handle animals exotic to wherever they were fighting.
Another class of beast fighter, named – well – beast fighter, is more linked in the mind of the spectators to the gladiator. In all likelihood, these were gladiators that started to fight in events meant for venatores, sort of a crossover spectacle. That said, there is a lot of disagreement between scholars as to what the beast men were. Some scholars say they fought with heavy armor for a time, others say light armor. Some say the term is used to refer to people thrown to animals as an execution, while others say the beast men were assistants to the venatores and trained the animals.
Yet another class of beast fighter consists of the animals themselves. Some events pitted exotic animals against each other. Animals found in the arena included leopards, lions, rhinos, bulls, bears, and others. Venatores, beast men, and animals were also susceptible to the crowd’s bloodthirst, and they could be condemned or spared in the arena. Events involving animals were well regarded, and the crowds both high and low appreciated seeing animals from far off lands. In fact, so popular were these animal spectacles that hunting animals for the arena led to the extinction of some animals such as the Nile Hippopotamus.
This all brings us to what a day at the games was actually like more specifically. For starters, these were usually free events, as most expenses were paid by the person putting on the show – the editor – or by the editor splitting the bill with the city.
It was also an all-day affair beginning in the morning. A procession opened the games in which the editor and gladiators were paraded to the audience. This was usually considered the most boring part of the card and was not advertised. That said, the procession was still an important part of the games, as it was where the editor showed off for the audience, attempting to curry favor for the event they were, in essence, sponsoring. Afterwards there was typically a beast-hunt. The beast-hunts were welcomed and while they weren’t the main event, as mentioned, they were enjoyed by the high and low classes alike.
In the afternoon were the noonday spectacles, usually execution events. The editor purchased prisoners from the local prisons to be executed in various ways. Noonday spectacles could be recreations of Roman victories for larger arenas, and smaller scale combat between condemned men for smaller arenas. Usually these men were forced to fight animals, gladiators, or each other. Other times they were executed in basic ways like hanging and burning, or in more vicious and elaborate ways such as having a stake shoved through the back of the head, or quartering. The memory of the noonday spectacle lives largely in Christian lore as many early Christians were executed rather brutally during this portion of the event. Aristocrats and intellectuals usually disliked the levels of bloodshed of this part of the games and went home for lunch to return later when the gladiators came out.
In the meantime, you could buy souvenirs of your visit, and even potentially luck out in receiving giveaways from particularly wealthy editors that could span anything from free food to whole apartment buildings and farms if you were really lucky. On the not so fun side, the sweet aroma of animal feces, blood, sweat, and opened and rotting flesh was a thing. To combat these odors, perfume and water mixed with saffron were usually sprayed on the audience.
Going back to the main event, there was typically a little warm-up show where the gladiators showed off practicing and performing monologues against their opponents. From here, the first gladiators to fight were the horsemen, usually fighting other horsemen.
And just in general once the combat portion of the games started, it was pretty comparable to a modern combat sports supercard or pay per view, with the gladiator matches lasting around ten to fifteen minutes with around twelve matches to a card running around three hours, although sometimes games could be stretched into several days in this way. Between matches, decisions would be called to either break ties or decide the fate of the combatants by the editor. Viscera and blood were also cleaned off the arena as best as possible by sand or water. On this one, our term for “arena” comes from the Latin word for sand, Harena.
Matches were refereed, much like modern combat sports. This was to ensure that the fights were being fought fairly, and to make sure they didn’t get too boring. If action died down too much, gladiators could be whipped to encourage them to fight more dramatically. As alluded to, at the end of a fight, if a gladiator did not get killed, the audience voiced their decision, while the editor made the final decision on who lived and died.
As to voicing their thoughts, the fate of a gladiator, in terms of whether the audience was voting for a kill, was decided with what is known as “pollice verso”, a Latin term which roughly translates to “turned thumb”. More precisely what this means isn’t known and there are no accounts that have survived to this day that describe it in any real detail. As such, we’re unable to say for sure which way the thumb was supposed to be pointed if the audience wanted a given gladiator to be killed or if they could just wave their thumbs around at random, which it seems may well have been the case.
So that’s voting for death, what about life? The gesture to spare a given gladiator’s life seems to have been neither a thumbs up nor a thumbs down. Instead, you had to hide your thumb inside your fist, forming a gesture known as pollice compresso, “compressed thumb”.
The reasons for this has been speculated to be twofold: one, it made the decision of the crowd easier to discern, since it’s easier to tell the difference between a thumbs turned and a closed fist than a thumbs up and a thumbs down from a long ways away. And two, the gestures themselves are thought to be largely symbolic of what they represented- a pointed thumb represented the audience’s desire for the victorious gladiator to deliver his coup de grâce (stab the fallen foe), while a hidden thumb symbolised that they wished for the gladiator to stay his blade, sheathing it much in the way they’d hidden their thumbs. Hence why it’s thought “turned thumb” may well have been simply waving your thumb around in the air, perhaps in a stabbing motion.
In any event, the crowd seems to have done these gestures rather than the editor. But once their opinions were seen, the editor could decide several things: mercy for both gladiators, mercy for the defeated, ordering the winner to kill the defeated gladiator, complete manumission of one or both combatants, or giving the winner the choice to end his opponent’s life. Noteworthy here is that the editor footed the bill on any slain or freed gladiator, perhaps slightly incentivizing to keep them alive, especially if they were an accomplished fighter.
As for broad death rates, just like modern combat sports, the crowd could be more or less blood thirsty depending on the era and region, and their reactions to sparing a gladiator could vary. But it is known that gladiators tended to live after a fight much more so than media would make it seem. And these individuals often had fight records comparable to modern boxers or mixed martial arts fighters today.
That said, despite the extreme fame some of these individuals reached, gladiators never really enjoyed the respectability of their Greek athletic predecessors, or their modern combat sports antecedents, and gladiators were considered a lowly class in Roman society. And when we say low, we mean very low. For example, a common way to soothe a mother of a dead child was to assure her that at least he didn’t grow up to be a gladiator.
That said, that didn’t stop emperor Commodus from getting in the arena more than 700 times in essentially fixed matches. And gladiators did have their adoring fans, some of whom went out of their way to meet them, have spicey time with them, and even memorialize them if they died in the arena. Probably the most famous gladiator of all, Spartacus, even led a revolt against the Roman Republic in 73 BCE; the largest slave revolt in Rome.
This all may now have you wondering how exactly these incredibly popular games finally, and rather abruptly, went the way of the Dodo?
Well, remember how we mentioned Christians were rather brutally executed during gladiatorial games for the amusement of the masses? Well, a LOT of early Christians were killed this way. As you might imagine from this, Christian writers were rather hostile towards the games, either because their fellow Christians were killed in them, or because of the bloodlust the games inspired in their audience which kind of went against the whole “love your neighbor” thing and other such precepts.
As such, as Rome Christianized, church leaders put up more and more resistance to the games. In the late fourth century the church even made baptism impossible for gladiators and their trainers. Schools closed up and the games became an ever more rare part of Roman life.
Things finally ceased completely when, in 404 CE, a monk named Telemachus was stoned when he ran into one of the last active arenas to beg the crowd to disperse. His death led emperor Honorius to close the arenas for good, with the last game happening probably in 410.
This end to the gladiator games while Rome was still an entity is most likely why the games didn’t persist among the European, Byzantine, or Muslim inheritors of Rome, despite many of the old arenas and coliseums surviving in those locales, and that the human thirst for watching extreme combat existed before Rome and continues to this day… just now with less slavery, mass executions, and while crowds might scream for one opponent to destroy the other, the runners of the event aren’t deciding if the athletes live or die after a match. But otherwise, the general idea behind the thing and entertainment value is approximately the same.
Expand for References
Wiedmann, Thomas. Emperors and Gladiators. Routledge: London, 1992.
Wisdom, Stephen and Angus McBride. Gladiators: 250 BC- AD 100. Osprey Publishing: Oxford, 2001.
