The Gladiators

The word "gladiator" comes from the Latin gladius, a short sword — and most of the men who carried one had not chosen the life at all. The great majority were enslaved: prisoners taken in Rome's endless wars, people bought on the open market, or criminals condemned to the arena as a punishment. A smaller number were free volunteers who signed away their freedom for the money, the excitement or the fame; by the late Republic these auctorati may have made up a sizeable share of the fighters. Either way, once inside the system a gladiator was property, to be trained, hired out and risked as his owner saw fit.

They lived and trained in a school called a ludus, run by an owner-manager known as a lanista. Conditions were harsh and closely guarded — these were dangerous men, after all — but they were not pointlessly cruel: a trained fighter was an expensive investment, and a dead one earned nothing. The men were fed a careful diet, treated by skilled doctors, and drilled for hours against a wooden post called the palus before they were ever allowed to face another human being.

And they did not all fight alike. Gladiators were matched in contrasting styles to make the combat more interesting to watch. The murmillo was heavily armed, with a large shield, a sword and a fish-crested helmet; the retiarius fought almost naked, armed only with a net and a trident, trying to trap his opponent like a fisherman. The nimble thraex carried a small shield and a curved blade, while the secutor wore a smooth, rounded helmet designed specifically so a net could not catch on it. Each pairing was a contest of strengths and weaknesses — armour against speed, reach against agility.

The fights were known as munera — literally "duties." They began as private affairs, staged at funerals to honour a dead relative, but over time they grew into enormous public spectacles. By the imperial age the most famous of all venues had been built: the Colosseum, a vast stone amphitheatre in the heart of Rome that could hold tens of thousands of spectators. A day at the games was carefully programmed — animal hunts in the morning, public executions at midday, and the gladiators themselves saved for the main event in the afternoon.

None of this was cheap, and that was precisely the point. The games were paid for by ambitious men — politicians, magistrates and later the emperors themselves — who understood exactly what a grateful crowd was worth. The poet Juvenal famously sneered that the Roman people had traded their freedom for "bread and circuses": give them cheap food and a thrilling show, he complained, and they would ask for nothing more. A magnificent munus bought popularity, and popularity could be converted into votes, loyalty and political influence. The bloodshed in the arena was also, always, a calculated piece of politics.

For the fighters who survived, the rewards could be extraordinary. A champion gladiator became a genuine celebrity: his name was scratched as graffiti onto the walls of Pompeii, his face painted onto cups and oil lamps, and admirers — women among them — wrote of him as a heart-throb. A winning fighter could earn prize money and, after years of success, might be handed the rudis, a wooden sword that symbolised his release from the arena. A man bought as a slave could, just occasionally, fight his way to freedom and fame.

Much of what we think we know about gladiators is closer to myth than to history. The popular image — every fight a duel to the death, the crowd roaring for blood — is largely wrong. Trained fighters were costly, and an owner had no wish to see his investment killed for sport. Many contests ended the moment one man was wounded or raised a finger to admit defeat, and a brave loser was very often spared to fight again. Death happened, certainly, but it was the exception rather than the rule.

Even the most famous gesture of all is doubtful. The picture of an emperor turning his thumb down to demand a death comes mostly from a single dramatic nineteenth-century painting, not from Roman evidence. The Romans did use a thumb signal, but scholars now suspect it meant almost the reverse of the modern one — a thumb pressed away or hidden may have signalled mercy, while a raised, "hostile" thumb called for the sword. The truth is that we are not even certain which way it pointed.

What is not a myth is that these enslaved men sometimes fought back. In 73 BC a fighter named Spartacus led around seventy others in breaking out of a school at Capua, seizing kitchen knives and skewers to arm themselves. Their revolt swept across Italy and swelled into an army of tens of thousands of escaped slaves. For two years they defeated Roman force after Roman force, until the general Crassus finally crushed them in 71 BC. The reprisal was brutal: some six thousand captured rebels were crucified along the road to Rome, a line of crosses left as a warning. Spartacus himself died in the final battle — but his name has echoed down the centuries as a symbol of the enslaved refusing to stay enslaved.