Also by Harry Sidebottom
Warrior of Rome Series
Fire in the East
King of Kings
Lion of the Sun
The Caspian Gates
The Wolves of the North
The Amber Road
The Last Hour
The Burning Road
Falling Sky
Throne of the Caesars Series
Iron & Rust
Silence & Lies
Blood & Steel
Shadow & Dust
Fire & Sword
Smoke & Mirrors
Other novels
The Lost Ten
The Return
The Shadow King
Non-fiction titles
Ancient Warfare
The Mad Emperor
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa
Hutchinson Heinemann is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Penguin Random House UK , One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens, London SW11 7BW penguin.co.uk
First published 2025 001
Copyright © Harry Sidebottom, 2025
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes freedom of expression and supports a vibrant culture. Thank you for purchasing an authorised edition of this book and for respecting intellectual property laws by not reproducing, scanning or distributing any part of it by any means without permission. You are supporting authors and enabling Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for everyone. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Penguin Random House expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception.
Typeset in 13/15.75pt Bembo Book MT Pro by Six Red Marbles UK, Thetford, Norfolk Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
The authorised representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH68
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN : 978–1–529–15400–9 (hardback)
ISBN : 978–1–529–15401–6 (trade paperback)
Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.
The gladiator takes counsel in the sand. The air is scented with saffron, wine and flowers, almost masking the reek of close-packed humanity, recently spilled blood and the smell of his own sweat, his own fear. Just watch the blade! Shut out everything else: the blare of the trumpets, the swirl of the water organ. Ignore the two white-clad referees, let alone the emperor in his box, the crowd beyond the nets and the sheer wall topped with rollers. Just watch the blade. The gladiator is on his own. He takes his own counsel in the sand.
Diodorus drops into the first stance: left foot forward, body half-turned, chin tucked down behind the rim of his shield, sword held underarm, low at his side. Balanced and ready, his world has narrowed to the restricted view through the grill of his helmet. Nothing matters but the man he will fight, and the few feet of sand between them.
A coward dies a thousand times, a brave man once. Diodorus moves forward fast. Just within sword reach, he steps off to the right and thrusts at the thighs. The blow is turned by the shield of his opponent, who stabs down overhand at his head. Diodorus fails to get his shield up in time. The blade glances off the side of his helmet. No real impact, but the noise of the blow reverberates inside the heavy, closed helmet. Both fighters, off-balance, step back.
Diodorus knows his opponent well. They are from the same school. Cellmates, they drink and eat together, use the same bars and brothels. Identically armed – helmet, crescent-shaped breastplate covering the top of the chest, banded protection on the right arm, wide belt, tall greave on the left leg, rectangular shield and short sword – both are the type of gladiator called a provocator. They train together. No wonder Demetrius was not unsettled by the sudden attack.
Demetrius takes the initiative. He comes in cautiously, feints left, jabs to the right. Diodorus counters with his shield. They slip into the
rhythm of the training ground: strike, repost and recover. Demetrius does not want to kill Diodorus, any more than Diodorus wishes to kill Demetrius. Gladiatorial combat is about skill, courage and endurance, not about slaughter. Yet accidents happen, a man can lose control, and at the end there is always the will of the crowd and the giver of the Games.
Diodorus is panting, his breath hot and damp in the confines of the helmet. There is a tremor in his left arm from the weight of the shield. The hilt of the sword is slick in his hand. Time has lost all meaning. It seems like an age, but no fight lasts long. As if by arrangement, both men pull back, just out of reach. They circle the sands, watching for an opening: a false move, a stumble, or a misstep.
In a fight ‘to the finger’, to submission, the giver of the Games usually defers to the decision of the crowd: life or death. It is time to court the ‘Lords of the Day’, the tiered ranks of the populace. Demetrius shouts some boasts and insults, well-worn from repetition in the arena. They are muffled by his visor. Diodorus contents himself with a couple of fancy passes with his blade. They are veterans; they have done this before. It is time to end the fight. Demetrius comes in fast, using his shield as a battering ram. Diodorus had been waiting for his friend’s favourite move. He sidesteps, swings the edge of his own shield up into the grill of the other man’s helmet. Demetrius clatters to the floor; shield and sword slip from his grip. The wind knocked out of him, Demetrius pulls off his helmet and raises his right hand in submission.
It is over. Diodorus casts away his own shield and helmet, picks up Demetrius’ sword. Now he feels drained. With a blade in each hand, he turns to claim the palm branch set up for the victor. A confused roar from the crowds. They sound surprised, angry. Diodorus turns back. The Summa Rudis, the chief umpire, is handing Demetrius his helmet. The treacherous bastard is not accepting the submission. He orders Diodorus to give Demetrius his sword back. The fight will go on.
The gladiator is at the centre of our modern image of ancient Rome: a troubling figure, both fascinating and repulsive to us now. Likewise, he was in his own time a deeply ambiguous figure, by turns reviled and idealised, at the heart of Roman
culture. If we return to the ancient sources, guided by the latest modern scholarship, we can begin to understand the gladiator in his own context.
Gladiators first appeared in Rome in the third century BC . The earliest recorded contest was in 264BC . These fights, unlike chariot races, were not part of official festivals. Instead, they were privately-funded events at the funerals of senatorial families. They were munera, from munus, a gift – perhaps to the shades of the dead, certainly to the spectators. Gladiators became a key element in politics. The goodwill senators obtained from lowerclass voters by staging gladiatorial contests led to an increase in both the frequency of the bouts and the numbers of participants during the rest of the Republic (509–31BC ).
Once Augustus (31BC –AD 14) had reintroduced monarchy to Rome, after five centuries of republic, the emperors gave shows of ever-increasing elaboration and scale. The emperors replaced the traditional senatorial elite as the main patrons of the urban plebs, and the opportunities for the latter to give Games in the city of Rome were severely curtailed. Yet, in the first two centuries AD , gladiatorial shows and, in the West, the amphitheatres in which they were staged, spread across the whole empire. They were a very public, and hugely expensive, way for the provincial elites to advertise their adherence to Roman ways, to Romanitas.
Contrary to the view most of us will have encountered in Hollywood films, gladiatorial combat was not a slaughterhouse. A gladiator had a good chance of survival. The risk of death in a bout was perhaps only one in eight. Gladiators fought just once or twice a year, and a career in the arena might not extend beyond three years. Success brought financial rewards, which is why freemen volunteered to fight.
The justification for the Games remained ever the same. They were a preparation for war: if even gladiators showed spirit close to the steel, how much more would be exhibited in battle by the Roman citizens watching? Even when the professional army was stationed on distant frontiers, and with war an
unlikely prospect for most civilians, gladiatorial combat enacted virtus, or courage, a crucial foundation of Roman self-identity. Gladiators lasted some 700 years. Until changes in patterns of munificence – the types of gifts the upper classes gave to the lower – caused by the Christianisation of the elite eventually brought the demise of the Games, at some point in the mid-fifth century AD .
Gladiators were at the heart of Roman culture. They haunted people’s dreams. Elite philosophers took them as role models, even though socially they were the lowest of the low. Gladiators were sex symbols, despite being overweight, and often having bad teeth, bad breath and bodies marked and altered, sometimes to the point of deformity, by combat and their hard, repeated physical training.
This book was inspired by Colin Jones’ brilliant The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris. But the materials and the methods are very different. Jones had hundreds, perhaps thousands, of precisely dated documents, often timed to the hour – diaries, letters, government reports – to construct a minutely detailed picture of one specific night and day in Paris: 27 July 1794, or, as it was then, 9 Thermidor Year II of the Revolutionary Calendar.
We must gather our evidence from across the Roman empire, and from across several centuries, to build a composite picture of a typical night and day at the gladiatorial Games. Despite the many depictions in art and literature through the ages, we have no ancient blow-by-blow account of twenty-four hours at the Colosseum, or any other amphitheatre. The Latin poet Martial wrote a small book, On the Spectacles, to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum. It used to be thought that the order of his poems reflected the running order of the events at the first show put on by the emperor Titus in June AD 80. But there was always a problem with this idea – Titus’ Games stretched over 100 days – and now it is thought that some of the poems were composed to mark the completion of the building by
Titus’ successor Domitian (AD 81–96). The content and order of the poems reflect Martial’s interests.
A sculptural relief from the cemetery outside the Stabian Gate at Pompeii shows three phases of a gladiatorial show (Plate One). The top register depicts a procession (a Pompa ). There was a flourishing genre of fiction, in both Latin and Greek, under the Roman empire, and in one of the Latin novels, a procession opens the day’s events. Although some Roman narrative art was designed to be ‘read’ from the bottom to the top (Trajan’s Column is an obvious example), that is not the case here. Reading the Pompeiian relief top down gives a running order of procession, gladiatorial combat, then beast-hunt. We are told, however, that the emperor Commodus, now best known from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, killed wild beasts in the morning and fought as a gladiator in the afternoon, and that seems to have been the normal order. Most likely, the man who commissioned this relief to immortalise the Games he had given elevated the gladiators to the centre, and made that register much bigger, because they had been the main attraction.
Something we might expect is missing from the relief. We know from a philosophical anecdote, and a line of dialogue in a novel, that it was customary at the Games to stage both non-lethal entertainments and executions at midday. Often the executions were theatrical; the condemned acted a role from pagan myth. Christians viewed the entire day through the lens of the midday executions. But it was always in their interest to vastly inflate the number of martyrs. Most victims were pagan criminals. The man who paid for the show at Pompeii either decided to edit the executions out of the monument, or the programme did not include any.
So, our typical day at a full show in the amphitheatre had a procession first thing, wild beast hunts in the morning, executions and other entertainments at midday, and gladiators in the afternoon. But we should be aware of two things. First, only one ancient source, a Greek novella, has all the events in the
‘right’ order. Second, the programme was always flexible. Novelty was appreciated in the arena. The man giving the Games could add or subtract elements, alter the order of their appearance. Not just within one day, but across shows over several. We are told that at Lyons (Lugdunum), instead of gladiators fighting with each other, a whole day was devoted to executing Christians in inventive ways.
Our day is a composite. The Roman ordering of time was in some ways similar to ours, but in other ways different. They divided the day into twenty-four hours, but the length of the hours varied with the seasons. With precision hard to achieve, most inhabitants of the empire resorted to vaguer measures of time, and it is these we will employ – from Vesper (evening), through the four ‘Watches’ (Vigilia ) of the night, and then on through the hours of daylight, from Conticinium (just before dawn) back to the evening after the Games.
Following twenty-four hours of the Games in the amphitheatre offers many unique viewpoints, some surprising and all insightful, onto the world, and the worldview of the Romans. It offers the perfect vehicle to explore the lived realities and mentalities that shaped their ideas about freedom and servitude, diet and body shape, privacy and gambling, sex and desire, sleep and dreams, despair and suicide, music and perfume, man and the gods, status and honour, animals and the natural world, crime and punishment, pagans and Christians, Greeks and Romans, civilisation and barbarity, courage and cowardice, virtue and vice, philosophy and pain, the empire and the past, the emperor and his subjects, wounds and medicine, hope and astrology, and death and the afterlife. It illuminates everything that mattered in the Classical world, much of which still matters now. A night and a day seeing the world through the eyes of a gladiator changes how we think about both the ancient Romans and ourselves.
That is a long list of promises. It is time to start – time to go to the evening before the Games, to the ‘Last Supper’ of the gladiators.
The men reclining at the tables are heavy-set, with great rolls of flesh; very different from the stick-thin spectators watching them eat. The bodies of those dining are scarred from the edge of the blade and the track of the whip; their necks ridged with muscles; their faces lined and callused from wearing helmets. Some are almost deformed, with one arm longer than the other. They are all the subject of intense scrutiny. Some laugh and joke, talking lightly; others are calmly ordering their financial affairs; many are silent, pale and sweating, unable to choke down their food. Some drink heavily. By this time tomorrow some, perhaps one in eight of them, will have died a violent death. But no one knows which one in eight. This is the cena libera, when the public are admitted to the barracks to watch the last supper of the gladiators.
The Cena Libera
The cena libera, a kind of public meal for gladiators, was a strange ritual: thin men observing fat men eat. Like so much ancient history – like the structure of a day at the Games itself – it must be stitched together and reconstructed from scattered fragments of evidence: a line in a Latin novel, a passing example in Greek philosophy, a couple of pieces of Christian propaganda, and a humorous mosaic. It raises many questions: of diet and body shape, of privacy and dining, of courage and disgrace, of the
purpose of this odd custom and of what drew the spectators, of how the fat men became gladiators. In the cena libera the gladiators offer us our first window into the Roman mind.
The thin men watching habitually ate a vegetarian diet. This had nothing to do with modern concerns about health, or morality, or animal rights, let alone saving the planet. In antiquity vegetarianism was very much a minority choice. It was best left to eccentric philosophers, like the motley band of charlatans and wizards that liked to think of themselves as the school of Pythagoras. For the Pythagorean vegetarianism was all about the transmigration of souls. There was always the danger of eating your deceased parents. In his youth, Seneca the Younger flirted with Pythagoreanism and gave up meat, until set right by his father: vegetarianism was un-Roman and might bring accusations of adherence to one of the dubious, if not illegal, eastern cults, with their bizarre dietary restrictions.
The vegetarianism of those viewing the gladiators was caused by poverty. They existed in a time when the social pyramid was as steep as in any modern country in the developing world. The elite (maybe about 10 per cent of the population) was well-off, if not fabulously wealthy in contemporary terms, while the vast majority existed on or below the subsistence level. The plebs, or hoi polloi (respectively in Latin and Greek – both pejorative terms in elite mouths, usually coupled with adjectives like dirty or superstitious ), lived on what is often called the ‘Mediterranean triad’ of grain, olives and the vine. They also ate other vegetables – mainly beans and legumes – though they have not made it into popular understanding of the ‘triad’. Although nowadays endlessly lauded in colour newspaper supplements for the affluent middle classes, the Mediterranean triad makes for a limited and repetitious diet. When animals were sacrificed
at religious festivals the plebs gleefully seized the opportunities for a dinner of roast meat. The moral philosopher Plutarch felt the need to remind people that festivals were more enjoyable for those who attended with genuine religious belief.
The gladiators were also usually vegetarian, but they had a different and distinctive diet. Pliny the Elder said they were nicknamed the ‘Barley-men’ (hordearii ), from the stew or soup of beans and barley that was the main component of their rations. In the Roman army barley was a punishment food. Pliny goes on to say it was mainly used to feed animals. Gladiators were given large amounts of food. The emperor Vitellius, in a doomed attempt to increase the loyalty of his soldiers, increased the level of their wheat-based, better-quality rations to match the quantities given to gladiators. A member of the elite wrote that gladiators were crammed with food, which was worse than any hunger. The word used – sagina, ‘stuffing’ – was more appropriate to feeding animals. As we will see, the elite often equated gladiators, or at least most gladiators, to beasts. But there again the elite tended to see everyone except themselves – the plebs and barbarians alike – as ‘bestial’.
Gladiators not only ate different food; to strengthen their bones they drank a unique concoction of ash (either from burned wood or bone) dissolved in watered wine. Just outside the ancient Greek city of Ephesus (in modern Turkey) archaeologists have excavated a graveyard of gladiators. It contained the remains of at least sixty-seven men and one woman (we will return to this important site frequently). Scientific analysis has shown that the bones of some of the men exhibited exceptionally high levels of calcium.
Gladiators were fattened up by their barley stew ‘stuffing’ (it is all too easy for us to slip into the attitudes of the ancient elite, as they wrote all our literary texts). Those depicted on the Borghese Mosaic (named after the owners of the estate outside Rome on which the seven panels were found) look very heavy indeed (Plate Two). Why was it thought desirable for them
to be so bulky? As Cyprian, an ancient Christian bishop and opponent of the Games, put it: ‘The gladiatorial Games are prepared, that blood may gladden the lust of cruel eyes. The body is fed up with stronger food, and the vigorous mass of limbs is enriched with brawn and muscle, that the wretch fattened for punishment may die a harder death.’ In modern terms, gladiators needed a strong frame to support short bursts of intense and violent physical activity, and their carbohydrate-rich diet produced a thick layer of subcutaneous fat which shielded the vital organs. This enabled the combatants to take flesh wounds that would bleed profusely but would not prevent them from continuing to fight. Fat gladiators made a better visual spectacle.
The cena libera literally translates as the ‘free dinner’, but the gladiators’ rations probably were always provided for them free of charge. Libera could be translated as ‘unlimited’, but quantity was never an issue. It should best be understood as ‘unconstrained’, as in the type and quality of what they consumed. The Roman expression for ‘mansplaining’, spelling obvious things out in tedious detail, was to go ‘from the eggs to the apples’. Formal Roman dinners, like modern Italian ones, tended to consist of three courses. Eggs, often hard boiled, usually featured in the first, apples, fresh or dried out of season, in the last. Greeks under the empire continued to divide a meal into the sitos, the staple (almost always bread), and the opson, sometimes translated as ‘relish’, but really covering everything else: the meat, the fish, the sauces, the pies, all the good stuff. Plutarch says that gladiators about to enter the arena had set before them many expensive foods. For once, instead of stodgy stews and cheap wine that tasted of grit, the gladiators could enjoy meat and other delicacies copiously washed down with
fine wines. Perhaps among the emotions of the thin men watching them eat were hunger and envy.
Apart from the gladiators, who partook of the cena libera ? In his Apology, a defence of the Christian way of life, Tertullian writes that at the pagan festival of the Liberalia he will not feast in public, as is the custom for the beast-fighters, when those unhappy men take their last meal. The word he uses is bestiarii. Technically these were the men who managed the animals used for performances and executions, not the venatores who hunted and fought beasts in the arena. But the two roles overlapped and were often conflated. By extension bestiarii came to be applied to those who were executed by exposure to fierce animals. Unsurprisingly, given their sole role as victims in the arena, Christians tended to view the whole day of gladiatorial spectacle through the lens of the midday executions. In another work, On the Spectacles, Tertullian has the lion stand for the entirety of gladiatorial Games (munera), as the horse does for chariot racing in the Circus Maximus, bodily strength for athletics, and sweetness of voice for the theatre. Needless to say, as a Christian moralist, Tertullian is vehemently opposed to all of them.
Alongside the gladiators, the venatores and the bestiarii, some modern scholars include among the diners those condemned to execution the next day. They point to The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas. This is an important text that can yield many insights, but it is a complicated document. It recounts the last days of six Christian martyrs (four male, and the two young women of the title) in Carthage in North Africa in the spring of AD 203. This text tells its story in three voices: an unnamed narrator, supposedly a contemporary, frames what it claims are the actual words of two of those killed: Saturus, the male leader of the group, and Perpetua, the female main character. Modern readers are keen to take the narrative at its word about Perpetua. It would give us a very rare female voice from antiquity. No one seems all that bothered about the authenticity of the words of Saturus. Whether by three hands or one, the Passion is an
explicit piece of Christian religious propaganda: miracles now are as good as those in the past, if not better. Now even delicate young women endure martyrdom, and this converts many pagans. Actually, it can only convert some pagans. Martyr literature needs a baying mob. If they were all converted the divine plot would shudder to a halt as there would be no martyrdom.
The anonymous narrator claims that the martyrs transform their cena libera into an agape, the Christian ‘love-feast’ based on the last supper of Jesus and his disciples. At an agape, Christians sat, rather than reclined. It shows that the condemned could be allowed a cena libera at least in fiction if not necessarily in reality. But it is unwise to generalise from this sole piece of evidence. In the previous section, the narrator has given Perpetua strong arguments to win this privilege from the Roman officer in charge: Why do you not permit us to refresh ourselves – we, the most noble of the condemned belonging to Caesar, who are to fight on his birthday? Would it not be to your credit, if we were brought forth well fed? The implicit threat worked – the tribune was horrified and flushed – the condemned were granted a one-off privilege. It is most unlikely that those sentenced to the beasts or the flames – Christian or otherwise – were normally allowed such a treat.
Those drinking the sweet wine and eating choice meats must have wondered how they came to be at the cena libera. How did a man end up as a gladiator? What were their backgrounds?
After victorious Roman campaigns many were barbarian prisoners of war. In AD 70, having crushed the Jewish revolt and destroyed Jerusalem, Titus, son of the new emperor Vespasian, marched to the town of Caesarea Philippi, ‘where he stayed a long time exhibiting shows of every kind. Many of the prisoners perished here, some thrown to wild beasts, others forced to meet each other in full-scale battles.’ From there, Titus went
to another Caesarea – Caesarea on the Sea – and celebrated his brother’s birthday, ‘reserving much of his vengeance on the Jews for this notable occasion. The number of those who perished in combats with wild beasts or in fighting each other or by being burned alive exceeded 2,500. Yet all this seemed to the Romans, though their victims were dying a thousand different deaths, to be too light a penalty.’ At the next city, Berytus, he celebrated his father’s birthday, ‘with a still more lavish display . . . vast numbers of prisoners perished in the same way as before’. Later, ‘he passed through a number of Syrian towns, exhibiting in them all lavish spectacles in which Jewish prisoners were forced to make a show of their own destruction’. Despite having also presented great numbers of prisoners to appear in the arenas in the provinces, and sent others to hard labour in Egypt, there were thousands left – ‘the tallest and most handsome’ – to adorn a triumphal procession in Rome, then fight in the newly opened Colosseum.
The greater the number, and the more diffuse the origins, of the prisoners the better. At times the elaborations of ancient fiction give a clear picture of the values of Roman culture. A lengthy Latin historical novel, set out as a series of biographies of emperors, written about AD 400 and now known to historians as the Augustan History, says that the emperor Probus (AD 276–82) exhibited ‘three hundred pairs of gladiators, among whom fought many of the Blemmyae [from Sudan], who had been led in his triumph, besides many Germans and Sarmatians [a nomadic tribe from the Great Hungarian Plain], and even some Isaurian brigands [from Asia Minor]’. In the world created by this text Probus’ events were vastly overshadowed by the triumph and subsequent Games of the emperor Aurelian (AD 270–5), which featured 800 pairs of gladiators, as well as captives from the Blemmyae, Axomitae (from Abyssinia), Arabs, Indians, Bactrians (from Afghanistan), Iberians (from Georgia), Saracens, Persians, Goths, Alans (nomads from the Steppes), Roxolani (nomads from north of the Danube),
Sarmatians, Franks, Suebians (from the headwaters of the Rhine and Danube), Vandals, Germans, Palmyrenes (from Syria), and Egyptians. To gild the lily, among the Goths were ten women armed for war, ‘these, a placard declared, were from the race of Amazons’.
Spartacus, who had been a Roman auxiliary soldier, deserter and bandit, before being condemned to the arena, was the leader of the great slave revolt which convulsed Italy from 73 to 71BC . At funeral Games for his fallen comrades, he ordered 300 Roman captives to fight as gladiators. In about AD 117 Jewish rebels in Cyrene in North Africa, among many other outrages, including cannibalism and making belts of human entrails, were accused of giving prisoners to wild beasts and forcing others to fight as gladiators. For the Romans such a role reversal was a terrible humiliation, which, somewhat paradoxically to our eyes, marked the utter inhumanity of their enemy.
After the battle of Cannae (216BC ), Hannibal was said to have made senators and other distinguished Roman prisoners fight each other. With a refinement of cruelty, typical of Carthaginians in Roman thinking, he compelled fathers to fight sons, and brother against brother. In another version, Hannibal promised freedom to a Roman matched against an elephant. When the Roman unexpectedly won, with characteristic Carthaginian untrustworthiness (Fides Punica – Carthaginian good faith – meant the opposite in Latin), Hannibal sent horsemen to kill the victor as he left. The two sources for these tales were written long after the supposed events. As nothing of the sort appears in the earlier and more reliable Histories of Polybius, most likely they reflect Roman mentalities rather than reality. Spartacus and the Jews, of course, knew Roman customs all too well from the inside, but it is surprising that, apart from the imagined cruelties of Hannibal, we do not hear of any external enemies, the demonised barbarians beyond the frontiers, turning this powerful symbol back against Rome.
Only once, in the aftermath of the civil war between Julius
Caesar and Pompey the Great in the 40sBC , do we hear of a Roman forcing a defeated Roman into the arena. Asinius Pollio, the governor of the province of Further Spain, wrote a letter to Cicero denouncing his own quaestor (deputy in charge of finances). Among other crimes, including absconding with the pay chest, and condemning Roman citizens to the beasts, Cornelius Balbus had compelled a veteran called Fadius, who had served Pompey, to fight as a gladiator. Fadius survived two bouts, presumably winning both, as the aftermath shows that he would not have won a pardon. Having fought without pay, Fadius refused to take the oath to become a professional gladiator and appealed to the crowd. Infuriated, Balbus ordered him to be confined (‘half buried’) in the gladiatorial school. Stones were thrown by the spectators as Fadius was dragged away, and Balbus unleashed a squadron of Gallic horses on the crowd. Finally, Balbus had the unfortunate veteran burned alive. Balbus’ attitude compounded his actions: ‘while this was being done he walked about after dinner without his boots, with tunic ungirdled, and his hands behind his back, and in answer to the unhappy man crying out “I am a born Roman citizen,” he replied: “Off with you then, and appeal to the people.” ’
Criminals convicted of heinous crimes were another source of gladiators. A character in an imaginary courtroom speech, designed to teach Latin oratory, says that when in the gladiatorial barracks he was confined with men convicted of sacrilege, arson and murder. A Greek novel, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana by Philostratus (composed in the third century AD , but set in the first), talking about Athens under Roman rule, adds several categories: ‘adulterers and male prostitutes and burglars and cut-purses and kidnappers and such-like people’. It is hard to be precise about which crimes might incur this penalty. The legal texts we have were compiled in late antiquity, in the reign of Justinian (AD 527–565), when gladiatorial combat no longer existed, and largely edit the institution out of the earlier sources they quote. In all probability, application of the sentence was
flexible, and at the discretion of the judge. The passage of Philostratus perhaps suggests that there was a lack of uniformity across the empire, that different crimes might send a man to the arena in different cities.
As with prisoners of war, the number of criminals varied over time and across the empire. Sometimes supply exceeded demand. When Pliny the Younger was sent by the emperor Trajan to govern the province of Bithynia-Pontus in Asia Minor (c.AD 110–112), he was puzzled to find men who had been convicted to the arena instead working relatively comfortably as public slaves and receiving an annual salary. Investigating, he found no satisfactory reason to explain why they had been released from their original sentence. Pliny wrote to Trajan asking for advice. The emperor replied that those convicted in the previous ten years must be sent back to the arena, but if they were elderly, and tried more than ten years ago, they should be ‘employed in work not far removed from penal labour, cleaning public baths and sewers, or repairing streets and highways’. More usually, one suspects, demand outstripped supply. The emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla (AD 198–211) ruled that prisoners condemned to the arena should not be transferred from one province to another without imperial permission. Instead, those of strength and skill should be sent to be displayed in Rome.
Condemnation to fight as a gladiator was considered milder than straightforward execution. This was beheading for Roman citizens, crucifixion for slaves, while non-citizens might suffer either, until the later empire (after AD 212 everyone was a citizen) when the elite lost their heads, and the non-elite were nailed to the cross. Certainly, being sentenced to the arena was less severe than being condemned to the wild beasts, or to be burned alive, or to labour in the mines (a sort of living death sentence, where you worked in terrible conditions until you died). As we will see, the gladiator at least had a chance of surviving.
‘It is a good thing when the guilty are punished,’ noted
Tertullian. ‘Who will deny this except the guilty?’ However, the theologian, an inveterate critic of Roman customs, went on: ‘Who will vouch that it is always the guilty that are condemned to the beasts, or some other fate, and that it is never inflicted on the innocent through the vindictiveness of the judge, or the weakness of the defence, or the intensity of the torture?’ In his view ‘it is certain that innocent men are sold as gladiators to serve as victims of public pleasure’. As a Christian, Tertullian had a highly jaundiced attitude, but his doubts were shared by pagans. The impeccably traditional Roman soldier and author Varro (116–27BC ) lived through the trauma of the great slave revolt, yet a late source quotes him as saying that ‘although he was an innocent man, Spartacus was condemned to the gladiatorial school’.
Slaves were the third main source of gladiators. Aulus Vitellius owned a slave called Asiaticus. ‘As a youth Asiaticus had been his partner in libidinous disgrace but grew tired of this and ran away. Later, Vitellius found him again, working as a seller of posca in Puteoli, and threw him in chains, but quickly released him and restored him to his former position as a favourite. Then, once more angry with him because of his insolence and petty thefts, he sold him to a travelling trainer of gladiators, but, when he was held in reserve for the end of a gladiatorial show, suddenly bought him back, giving him his freedom.’ When Vitellius improbably became emperor (AD 69), he elevated Asiaticus to the equestrian order (the second rung down on the social ladder) and followed his advice on governing. This story, as presented in Suetonius’ biography of the emperor, carried a whole freight of meanings for ancient readers. It paints Vitellius as a weak, vacillating sexual deviant (mutua libidine constupratum sounds a lot worse than my translation as partner in libidinous disgrace), who hung out with lowlifes. Posca was a cheap drink of sour wine or vinegar and water; Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli) a seaport near Naples. Both were disreputable. What was Vitellius doing there? Perhaps worst of all Vitellius disrespected the
values of his class (making an ex-slave an equestrian, let alone taking advice from him), as well as being both cruel and a terrible judge of character.
For Suetonius’ readers, Vitellius was not cruel for owning a slave, but for how he treated him. The Greek philosopher Aristotle had written that ‘there are others who hold that controlling another is contrary to nature’, and the late Latin legal text called the Digest stated that slavery was contrary to the natural order. But Aristotle’s others were few and far between and the Digest upheld slavery by regulating the laws governing it. The institution was almost entirely unquestioned. In a notorious passage Aristotle described slaves as an animate piece of property, a tool that could speak. There was no ancient abolition movement, not even among the slaves who joined Spartacus’ revolt.
Under the Republic an owner could sell a slave to a gladiatorial school on a whim. According to the Digest, in 19BC a law was passed that a slave had to have committed some wrongdoing, which had to be presented in court, before his owner could hand him over to fight with wild beasts. Most likely, the Digest, compiled in the sixth century AD , with gladiatorial combat long defunct, edited out that the edict included slaves also fighting as gladiators. As we saw with Vitellius, the law did not work. The emperor Hadrian legislated again, ‘prohibiting the sale of a male or female slave to a pimp or gladiatorial trainer without the case being presented in court’. There is no reason to think that Hadrian’s prohibitions were any more effective. How was a slave to get access to the courts? If they did, whose word would the judge take – theirs or that of their owner? Most alarmingly, the evidence of a slave could only be accepted after torture. It was probably better for the slave to just go quietly to the gladiatorial school.
Some slaves decided that running away and selling themselves to a gladiatorial school was preferable to remaining with their masters. For them, the evident dangers of the arena were less bad than the continuing brutality of their servitude. A
ruling of the emperor Antoninus Pius (AD 138–161) ordered that those slaves who were discovered doing this should be restored to their owners. The grounds given were that they may have ‘embezzled money, or committed some other greater breach of the law’.
The final source of gladiators is the most puzzling to us: the free men who volunteered (the auctorati ). Why did men choose a career that was not only dangerous but degrading? To become a gladiator brought infamia (disgrace). This was a Roman legal concept which branded someone as intrinsically untrustworthy. They could not represent themselves or anyone else in court, witness a will, vote, serve in the army, act as a magistrate or juror, or go to the theatre. They had no recourse from arbitrary physical punishment by magistrates. Infamia came from specific acts: any conviction in court, bankruptcy, a soldier shirking his duty, or showing cowardice in battle, a judge taking a bribe. It also adhered in general to certain professions: prostitutes, pimps, actors, and trainers of gladiators (lanistae ). Along with gladiators, all these brought disgrace on themselves by taking money to exhibit their bodies, or the bodies of those they controlled, for the pleasure of others.
We have an eyewitness account of a free volunteer. In the mid-second century AD Toxaris and Sisinnes, two Scythians from the steppes, on their way to study Greek culture (paideia ) in Athens, stopped at the Greek city of Amastris on the southern shore of the Black Sea. They took lodgings at an inn and went shopping. While they were out, the door of their room was forced. All their possessions were stolen, and they were reduced to penury. As strangers in the town, they decided there was no point in taking legal action. (Once again Roman law appears not as accessible as it is imagined by some now.) Initially Sisinnes laboured as a stevedore at the docks, but then in the agora he saw a procession of high-spirited and beautiful young men who had enrolled in a troupe of gladiators. A herald announced a prize of 10,000 drachmas for anyone who would volunteer
to fight one of them. Two days later, in the theatre, Sisinnes stepped forward. He was given the money, which he handed to his friend. Armour was provided for Sisinnes, but he declined to wear a helmet. Sisinnes took the first wound, a cut to the back of the thigh with a curved blade. His blood flowed copiously, and in the stands Toxaris was almost dead with fright. But then the gladiator rushed forward too confidently, and Sisinnes ran him through the chest. Sisinnes collapsed onto the corpse of his opponent. Toxaris took his friend, and the prize money, back to their lodgings, where he nursed him back to health. Sisinnes travelled back to Scythia, where he married Toxaris’ sister, although he carried a limp for ever. Toxaris returned to somewhere in Greece, although not Athens or Amastris, but to an unnamed city where there were many Amastrians who remembered and could confirm his account of the fight.
Although written as straight reportage, this exciting tale turns out to be something else. It is the ninth of ten stories – five Greek, five Scythian – of friendship in the Toxaris, a skilfully crafted and playful work of literature by the Greek intellectual Lucian of Samosata. Another story in the collection in which Toxaris is a participant names two contemporary kings of the Bosporus (a Greek client kingdom of Rome based in the Crimea): Leucanor and Eubiotus. From coins and inscriptions, more than literature, we have a seemingly complete list of Bosporan kings in the second century AD ; none have these names. But a fragment of a Greek novel preserved on papyrus has a Eubiotus, ruler of the Scythians. Just like the Bosporan kings, Toxaris is an invention of Lucian. The name is not Scythian, but created from toxon, the Greek word for a bow, the typical weapon of steppe nomads. Lucian had used the name before in an earlier work for another, otherwise unattested Scythian, who was equally keen on Greek culture. Sisinnes and his friend Toxaris are inventions of Lucian. But, as we have already seen, fiction often provides a window onto the Roman mind.
Poverty – sudden and unexpected, and importantly not his
fault – drove Sisinnes to volunteer as a gladiator. It is a frequent motive in our sources. A young man down on his luck, according to the poet Horace, had three choices: become a gardener, a carriage driver or a gladiator. A speaker in a practice courtroom speech fears that lack of means might force him back to a gladiatorial school. As Seneca put it, a gladiator paid for his food and drink with his blood.
Most ancient commentators – although emphatically not Lucian on Sisinnes – believed that the descent into poverty that led to the gladiatorial school was the new gladiators’ own fault. It was caused by morally bad habits. These could be either general extravagance, or something more specific. Idleness and a whore had led the man in Horace to the point where he was forced to choose between demeaning occupations. For others, gluttony led to the frittering away of fortunes, which in turn led to the arena. The Christian Tatian, obviously no fan of the arena or its inhabitants, held that, ‘some, giving themselves up to idleness for the sake of profligacy, sell themselves to be killed; and the indigent barters himself away, while the rich man buys others to kill him’. The pervasiveness of the underlying moral dimension is demonstrated when a pagan turns it on its head. In the same fictional legal speech mentioned above, the very ‘goodness’ of a character, stepping into the arena to replace his friend, turned him into a gladiator: ‘Has anyone ever heard of such a thing?’
Idleness, extravagance, whoremongering and gluttony are unlikely to appear in any modern historian’s analysis of the motives for volunteering to fight as a gladiator. Surely, we think, they are cultural fears of the Roman elite, rather than objective realities. But modern historians are sometimes closer to Classical writers than we like to think. Things look more plausible to us if we substitute modern concerns for Roman ones: the mindless pursuit of vacuous celebrity, an addiction to the adrenaline-rush of extreme risk-taking, and, above all, the glamorisation of violence in the media, and the effect it has on
the behaviour of young men. Less morally suspect, but equally lacking in any ancient evidence: a love of adventure is sometimes advanced as a reason to step out onto the sand.
Sisinnes’ fee of 10,000 drachmas was a great deal of money. A Greek drachma was roughly equivalent to a Roman denarius. At the time the annual pay of a Roman legionary was 300 denarii. A legionary served for twenty years, plus five in the reserves, and on discharge received a bonus of some twelve years’ pay. For one fight Sisinnes collected almost the entire earnings of a lifetime in the army. Lucian’s Toxaris, of course, is a collection of fictional tales. The sum of 10,000 drachmas appears in another of the stories, this time as a gift from a governor. It means no more than ‘a very large amount of cash’.
Nevertheless, the hope of gain, rather than just escaping grinding poverty, encouraged some to become gladiators, and, away from the fiction of Lucian, we for once have relevant official documentary evidence. Sometime between late AD176 and 180, Marcus Aurelius attempted to limit the cost of gladiators. Ironically, he did so in his own name, and that of his gladiator-obsessed son and co-emperor Commodus (hence the date – between the elevation of Commodus and the death of Marcus). Two inscriptions survive recording the same debate in the Senate. Both are fragmentary. The one in better condition (the other is so damaged it adds little) preserves only part of a speech by an unnamed senator, who was replying to a now lost letter from the emperors, which had been read out. At times it is not altogether certain if the senator is quoting the emperors, and if so how accurately, or whether the senator is amending and adding to the emperors’ proposal. The many difficulties of interpreting this text have generated much debate. Whether suggested by the emperors or by the senator, the law laid out a complicated scheme of how much a lanista (a commercial dealer in gladiators) could charge the man giving the Games for fighters (almost certainly to purchase, but just possibly to lease, see below) depending on the total cost of the Games. The highest
prices were 12,000 sesterces for a freeman, and 15,000 for a slave. With four sesterces to the drachma or denarius, at 3,000 and 3,750 drachmas, this was much less than Sisinnes received in the fiction of Lucian. But it was still a lot of money: ten or twelve times the pay of a legionary (1,200 sesterces), and enough to keep a family of four for at least a dozen years, at the modern estimate of 1,000 sesterces per annum.
If the gladiator was a member of the elite, negotiating directly with the giver of the Games for a one-off performance, he would keep all the fee. The vast majority of gladiators, however, were part of a troupe, a familia. Things were not so good for them. The lanista who ran the familia took the money and passed on a proportion to the gladiator (perhaps 20 per cent to a slave, and 25 per cent to a freeman). So, for each fight, a star gladiator who was a slave got only 3,750 sesterces from the fee of 15,000, while one who was free would get 3,000 from the 12,000 paid for his participation. In reality, the sum might have been lower. Gladiators, especially in the western half of the empire, liked to see themselves as soldiers. The army kept back part of a soldier’s pay to cover their food and subsistence. Although there is no ancient evidence, and next to no modern discussion, quite possibly a lanista did the same.
Yet three factors suggest that a top gladiator’s earnings might have been considerably higher. First it must be remembered that Marcus was attempting to lower prices, evidently significantly. The inscription says that previously prices had been so flagrantly high (flagrabant, literally ‘blazing’) that priests of the imperial cult – very wealthy members of the provincial elite whose duties included providing Games – were being ruined. Marcus’ predecessor, Antoninus Pius (AD 138–61), had also attempted to fix prices. Obviously, this had not worked. Given the complexity and imprecision of the legislation, the openness to abuse, and difficulty of overseeing it, it is highly unlikely that Marcus’ attempt was any more successful.
Second, if a gladiator won a fight, there was prize money.
As far as we know, Marcus did not legislate to limit this. What survives of the inscription merely states that a slave gladiator should take 20 per cent and a free one 25 per cent of the prize (these percentages have been transferred above to also apply to the charge for a gladiator). Presumably, the amounts involved varied wildly but could be considerable at the top end.
Third, a gladiator was likely to fight more than once a year. If he survived, his fees and prizes would begin to mount up.
So far, we have been thinking about superstar gladiators. Most would have been at the other end of the scale. In Marcus’ legislation the lowest gladiators were priced at 3,000 sesterces a fight. Yet the inscription features a group of fighters who were lower still: the Gregarii. Outside the complicated price grading, and hardly ever mentioned in other sources, the Gregarii are mysterious. Presumably they were very B-list gladiators. The ‘better’ among them, Marcus decreed, were worth only 2,000 sesterces, the rest just 1,000. Any free volunteers among the latter collected at 25 per cent a miserable 250 sesterces on each occasion they risked their lives. These were slim pickings indeed – only enough to feed a family for three months. But young men did not enter the arena resigned to mediocrity or worse. They had in mind the highest fees ever charged – the 100,000 sesterces with which the emperor Tiberius tempted famous gladiators back into the ring. Young free volunteers had their eyes on the country estate to which, according to the poet Horace, a gladiator might retire.
These figures, however, illustrate only one method by which a man giving Games acquired gladiators: outright purchase. Our only other source shows something completely different. The jurist Gaius, writing a handbook for aspiring lawyers in the second century AD , set out the law on hiring gladiators. If a gladiator hired for 20 denarii (80 sesterces ) was killed or maimed, the giver of the Games (the editor ) had to pay 1,000 denarii (4,000 sesterces ): in effect turning the hiring into a (sometimes posthumous) purchase at fifty times the cost of the original renting.
We do not know if Gaius wrote before or after the decree of Marcus Aurelius. Yet as Gaius’ treatise continued to be used to train lawyers into the fifth century and beyond, it suggests the continuing relevance of his scheme, and that the decree of Marcus did not stand the test of time. If we transport from Marcus’ decree to Gaius’ text the percentages given to the gladiators, the combatants got next to nothing per fight: twenty sesterces if free, only sixteen if a slave. But if purchase prizes of gladiators were ‘blazing’ in the second half of the second century, it is likely the cost of renting was equally inflated. Gaius is setting out a legal principle, not prescriptive prices. Quite likely his figures are merely theoretical, designed to illustrate the fiftyto-one ratio of purchase to hiring.
The acclaim of the crowd, the desire to win glory, was another motive for free volunteers. A modern contention holds that over time the number of free volunteers increased. It is based on the study of two types of inscriptions: lists of gladiators, and their tombstones. There are two major problems. First, there are only seven extant lists. Two of these are from Pompeii and together number nine free men and twenty-seven slaves. The five from the rest of the empire have twenty-one free men and thirty slaves. Statistically this is an insignificant sample from which to draw any conclusions spanning centuries across an empire which stretched from modern Scotland to Iraq. Each gladiatorial troupe and every gladiatorial show was different. Second, while there are many more tombstones – 259 feature in a recent survey – the evidence they provide is skewed in significant ways. Putting up inscriptions is not a universal activity. Some cultures erect lots of inscriptions, others do not. Of those that do, the numbers can vary over time. The Romans got what is now sometimes called the ‘epigraphic habit’ (from epigraphy, the study of inscriptions) in the last century BC . It flourished in the first two centuries AD , before dropping away in the third. Some groups in society are more likely to commission inscriptions than others. To put up an inscription was to declare a
Roman identity. Only the ‘Romanised’ bought into the habit. Venationes, who hunted the wild beasts in the arena, were often imported from outlying, barbaric areas of the empire. Unsurprisingly we have very few tombstones for these men, and none from the western half of the empire. Among the gladiators, those embedded in Roman society would be more likely to receive a tombstone. Put simply, a free volunteer was more likely to be commemorated in this way than a gladiator who had begun life as a foreign slave or a barbarian prisoner of war.
The evidence from the inscriptions is insubstantial and yet it could still be true that in the first two centuries AD increasing numbers of free men chose to pursue a career in the arena. Military glory (gloria or laus in Latin) was central to Roman culture. Under the Republic it was won on the battlefield by a display of virtus, which included our concept of virtue, moral goodness (obviously without any Christian humility or mildness), but also physical courage and manliness. Rome had a rich tradition of tales of solo combat, such as Horatius holding the bridge, and Titus Manlius Torquatus winning his third name by stripping the torque from the neck of a Gallic chieftain. In Greek this was monomachia, the same word used for gladiatorial combat. From the late second century BC all elite Romans were fluent, and could think, in Greek, having learned the language in early childhood. The problems posed by unrestrained pursuit of individual glory were illustrated by stories such as Torquatus himself executing his own son for fighting a duel against orders. When the first emperor Augustus (31BC –AD 14) introduced autocracy and professionalised the army, he curtailed the opportunities for all levels of Roman society to win Gloria. As the legions were stationed on distant frontiers, their recruits came to be drawn from Roman citizens in the provinces. Only very rarely were new legions raised in Italy, so in normal times the only access to a military career for the inhabitants of Italy was in the garrison of Rome, principally in the Praetorian Guard, who protected the emperor. In AD 193 the
Praetorians were on the losing side in a civil war. The victor, Septimius Severus, disbanded the Guard, and reformed it with men from the legions based along the Danube, from where its recruits henceforth would be drawn. A contemporary, the senatorial historian Cassius Dio, was outraged: ‘it became only too apparent that he had incidentally ruined the youth of Italy, who, instead of their former service in the army, turned to brigandage and gladiatorial fighting (monomachia )’.
For some men, signing up as a gladiator was a substitute for war. ‘Now they sell their persons to provide the spectacle of death and to perish in the arena, when, warfare in abeyance, they find themselves foes to attack. ’ It was down to the stars, being born under the sign of the Scorpion, according to the poet Manilius. The Christian Tertullian took a predictably more censorious view.
Earthly glory has so great a power over the strength of body and mind, that men despise the sword, the fire, the cross, the beasts, the tortures, for the reward of the praise of men . . . How many men of leisure does a display of weapons hire to the sword! Truly they go down to the very beasts for the motive of display, and see themselves as more beautiful for their bites and their scars.
Such passages should not be dismissed as literary commonplaces. Literature and life do not operate in separate worlds. Literature not only reflects but also shapes life – never more so than in the extremely bookish culture of Classical antiquity. Elite Romans interpreted what happened to them through the lens of literature; the non-elite through the same stories told in the theatre and by street-corner storytellers. What they read or heard influenced what they did. The idea of entering the arena to prove your courage made it into legal tomes. Discussing who was ineligible to make a claim on behalf of another, the third century AD jurist Ulpian stated, in convoluted legalistic prose: ‘it is not the man who has fought against beasts who will be
liable, but only the man who has hired out his services for this purpose; accordingly, the old authorities say that those who do this without pay to demonstrate their manliness will not suffer infamia, unless they have accepted prizes in the arena’. Given that Ulpian’s words were collected in the Digest, in the sixth century AD , by which time gladiatorial combat had long been defunct, we can assume that the references to gladiators in the original text have been edited out. Demonstrating their manliness, and the prospect of glory that this could win them, encouraged some free men to choose a path that led to the cena libera.
Eating at the cena libera was a mark of disgrace, and disgrace (infamia ) mattered to the elite. They were the ones who were appointed magistrates, served as jurors, made speeches in court, and liked to be seen attending the theatre. Disgrace corroded their dignitas : the public recognition of the self-worth and influence – manifested in a slow walk, cultured accent, refined manners, ability to produce apposite literary quotations in Greek and Latin, and iron self-control – which was at the heart of their identity. Julius Caesar, famously, had said that his dignitas was more important to him than life itself. Infamia was maybe not so important to the plebs.
It is sometimes suggested that the free men who volunteered to become gladiators were shady characters from socially marginalised groups: ex-slaves, ex-gladiators, ex-soldiers. There is no evidence for the latter, and it is implausible. Veterans got comparatively large retirement bonuses; enough to set them up as a member of the local elite in most provincial settings, say as a town counsellor in a small town. Besides, even if they had enlisted at sixteen, after a quarter of a century with the standards, they would have been rather middle-aged novices in the arena.
We have already seen the emperor Tiberius luring famous
gladiators out of retirement. At a less exalted level, gladiators of servile status who had won their freedom might have found it hard to reintegrate into society. If they did not find work as a trainer in a gladiatorial school, they may well have signed on again as a volunteer. In the dinner of Trimalchio, the most famous scene from Petronius’ novel The Satyricon, one of the reasons that the rag-merchant Echion is keenly looking forward to a gladiatorial show is that the performers are freedmen for the most part. It has been suggested that the appeal is such volunteers would fight better. But interestingly Echion himself is an ex-slave. Maybe part of the anticipated thrill was ‘there but for the grace of the gods’.
The disgrace (infamia ) that came with performing in the arena was a major problem for the elite. Under the rule of the emperors the elite constructed a narrative that exculpated them. Members of the upper orders had been forced to fight by ‘bad’ emperors, those all too frequent ‘tyrants’ on the throne, who had been ‘bad’ precisely because they had been at odds with the elite. Caligula compelled a prominent equestrian to fight, on the grounds of him having insulted the emperor’s mother. When the equestrian won, he was executed anyway. Another twentysix equestrians were condemned to the arena by that emperor; some because they had practised gladiatorial combat. It was said that Nero ‘put on a show as fighters four hundred senators and six hundred equestrians, some of whom were wealthy men of good reputation . . . even those who fought the wild beasts and served as assistants in the arena were drawn from the senatorial and equestrian orders’. This narrative was an ideological construct designed to condemn certain (safely dead) emperors, and generally to make the elite feel better about the conduct of some of its members. Although almost certainly exaggerated (400 senators, out of a total of 600), there may be some truth in these tales. But they are far from telling the whole story.
Marcus Aurelius once gave sharp advice to a ‘man of abominable reputation’ who was standing for office. The candidate
replied that he saw many men who had fought with him as a gladiator serving as praetors in the senate. In a culture where children commonly played at being gladiators, and even a baby’s bottle could carry the image of a gladiator, unsurprisingly the desire to enter the arena was not confined to the socially marginalised and to those at the lower levels of the social pyramid. Some of the elite – senators, equestrians, even emperors – were prepared to face infamia to tread the sand. Far from being forced by ‘bad’ emperors, they actively wanted to fight as gladiators. When Julius Caesar was preparing a lavish series of Games, in 46BC , some equestrians and one senator volunteered. Caesar refused the senator, but allowed the equestrians to contend. General restrictions soon followed. In 38BC a law was passed prohibiting any senators or their sons from appearing as a gladiator. The emperor Augustus, in 22BC , restated the ban, extending it to the grandsons of senators, and (if it was not already in place) to the whole equestrian order. Later, in AD 11, Augustus permitted those equestrians who were flouting the law to fight, because, as Cassius Dio put it, ‘these guilty men seemed to require a greater punishment . . . they incurred death instead of disenfranchisement’. Evasions of the law continued. The emperor Tiberius decreed exile for those senators and equestrians who were deliberately acquiring infamia in order to lose their status, so that they could appear in the arena, and extended the ban to the grandchildren of equestrians, and the great-grandchildren of senators. Henceforth, those who broke the law were to be denied due burial. A minimum age limit of twenty-five was set for volunteers (presumably imagined as from the lower orders) to the arena. In AD 69 the emperor Vitellius passed unspecified further ‘strict laws’ on equestrians; ironically his own great-uncle had been notorious for fighting as a gladiator. The reiterations and evasions of the laws demonstrate the continuing desire of some of the elite to become gladiators. As the anecdote about Marcus Aurelius and the exgladiator shows, the fascination with the arena was pervasive