S10E4 - Roman Around with Gladiators

The stories featured in Greaking Out are usually original adaptations of classic Greek myths.

This week's story features old-school graffiti, historical facts, enslaved people, volcanic eruptions, self-unaliving, unaliving other people willy-nilly, talk of animal cruelty, Geneva conventions, and cosplaying emperors.

This one's a bit gnarly, folks, so listen with caution.

Greaking out the greatest stories in history were told in Greek mythology.

Breaking out gods and heroes, amazing feats.

Listen, and you'll see it's breaking

out.

Okay, yes, it's that time again.

Once again, we are roaming around to tell you some stories of the ancient Roman Empire.

And we got a big one for you today.

Actually, it's a couple of different stories.

It's all about gladiators.

Now, gladiators were actually...

Actually, it's pronounced gladiators.

Wait, what really really it's gladiotter yes in the original latin gladiotor that sounds like a a river animal that's a happy river mammal or and i saw this movie right and it was all about gladiators and they actually did gladiators

okay well fair enough we're we're so we're talking about gladiator gladiators today which is an occupation of sorts that was popular in Rome for over 600 years from around 260 BCE to about 400 CE.

Ancient Romans flocked to gladiator otter, yeah, gladiator games to watch spectacles of fighters in one-on-one or small group combat.

And we're going to dig into what being a gladiator in ancient Rome was really like, and we're going to meet five of the empire's most notable gladiators.

You're just putting this in there.

Yeah, it's just in the script extra, isn't it?

Yeah, okay.

Anyway, first, we have to kind of set the stage.

Now, if you remember our episode Roaming Around with Romulus and Remus, we talked about the legendary start of the city of Rome.

Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves.

And as they were building the city of Rome, Romulus killed Remus.

Yeah, thanks, Oracle.

But obviously, after the city was founded, Rome grew to be kind of a big deal.

For about 250 years, Rome was ruled by a series of kings like Romulus.

Yeah, I remember something about this from school.

The Romans overthrew the last king and then they started the Roman Republic, right?

Correct.

A republic means that citizens vote for their leaders.

In the Roman Republic, women and enslaved people including gladiators, were not allowed to vote.

Only male Roman citizens could vote.

Gotcha.

So like most of the population couldn't vote.

That is correct.

And even that small amount of representative government didn't last long, right?

It lasted for about 500 years.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So that's like

two Americas long.

Are we measuring time in Americas again?

Yeah, it helps me think and do math, which, you know, is not my strong suit.

See, America will be 250 years old in 2026, so it's a nice round number, right?

Anyway, in the grand scheme of the Roman civilization, which lasted well over a thousand years, the first America was kings.

The two Americas in the middle were a republic.

And the tail end, you know, the final two Americas, if you will.

I will not.

Okay, but I will.

The final two Americas were all unelected emperors expanding the Roman Empire until it basically imploded.

So the gladiator thing started in Rome's Republic era and ended right before its downfall, although the exact dates on that change depending upon who you ask.

At one point,

one out of every four people in the world lived under Rome's control.

Which is wild to think about.

And of course, because the Romans had such a big imprint on the world, not only do we think a lot about them, okay, some more than others but we also have been influenced a lot by them lasting over a thousand years the ancient roman civilization contributed to modern languages government architecture and more and perhaps one of ancient rome's most enduring symbols is the gladiator otter gladiator

Gladiator, which literally means swordmen, were trained fighters, sort of like the boxers or mixed martial artists of their time, who engaged in combat for the entertainment of crowds of fans.

Many towns across Rome's vast empire had their own amphitheaters which could be packed with thousands of spectators.

The Colosseum, which held ancient Rome's largest gladiator arena, could seat some 50,000 spectators.

Gladiator games were sort of like a certain global sporting event happening this year that shall remain nameless for legal reasons.

Except, unlike that certain global sporting event and the athletes participating in it, many gladiators didn't really have the choice to take part in the games.

These men were forced to do it.

There were also female gladiators.

Today, we call a female gladiator a gladiatrix, and she would have fought with the same armor and weapons as the men.

Oh, I did not know that.

Was that a common thing?

I mean, I was thinking that, like, with the whole no votes for women deal, I assume that Romans weren't exactly cool with women in public combat.

It was not common.

Romans did not think of being a gladiator as a respectable thing.

And so, eventually, all women were banned from doing it because it exposed upper-class women to ridicule.

Okay, let me get this straight.

Because being a gladiator or gladiatrix was not considered to be respectable, when women did it.

The fancy ladies got made fun of, and so no.

That is the recorded reason for the ban.

Okay, got it.

Anyway, as gladiator games grew in popularity, some freeborn Romans volunteered to enter the arena.

But whatever rank of society they came from, all these people gave up their rights and respectability while under contract as a condition to becoming gladiators.

The risks were huge.

They could be wounded or on rare occasions, even killed in the arena.

For every 10 gladiators who entered the ring, about nine lived to fight again.

Huh, I just thought someone died in every match, so that's interesting to know.

So these were basically showy staged fights for the most part, and the goal wasn't to kill someone, it was to make money.

Gladiators trained in schools called Ludi, where they received housing, food, and medical medical care in order to keep them healthy so they could make more money.

Yeah, as nice as free rent and health care sounds, it might be a good time to remember that most people who were gladiators weren't doing it willingly.

Most of these fighters were prisoners of war or people who had committed a crime and were condemned to fight in the arena.

In fact, enslaved people brought back to Roman cities from the front lines or conquered territories were sometimes bought by rich Romans for the purpose of becoming gladiators.

These folks were sent to the gladiator schools called the Ludi where they were trained.

When a gladiator won a fight, he didn't just win cash for himself.

Money also went to his ludis and its investors.

Plus, even a losing gladiator could live to fight and make money another day.

Even though gladiators weren't dying every day, they could still be seriously injured.

That's right.

Protection was important when you were fighting in the arena, and your protection depended upon what kind of gladiator you were.

For example, a fighter called a Retiarius wore little clothing but was armed with a net and a trident or a dagger.

They typically faced mermilos, fighters who carried long shields and long narrow swords and wore up to 45 pounds of protective gear.

They had helmets, they had body armor, the whole nine yards.

So a marmilo had more protection, but a ratiarius could be quicker on his feet.

These matches were hard to predict, which made the fights more exciting to the ancient Romans.

Whatever their fighting style, many gladiators would leave their backs exposed.

A cut to the shoulder, for example, would allow spectators to see some blood, but it wouldn't injure a vital organ.

That allowed the gladiators to put on a good show and still live to see another fight.

Your vital organs are the main organs inside the body, such as the heart, lungs, and brain, that are necessary for life.

And gladiators didn't just fight other gladiators.

A type of fighter called a bestiarius faced off against an animal.

Now, these fights were more like staged hunts, and they served as sort of an appetizer to the main gladiator games later.

No snakes were harmed in these events.

Well, now, I mean, we can't say for sure that snakes weren't involved, but most of these hunts featured bigger wild animals ranging from lions and leopards to bears and bulls, sometimes even animals like deer and ostriches.

This doesn't seem very fun to me.

Yeah, I'm not gonna lie, unlike the ancient Romans, I don't really have a desire to see these fights go down in person.

According to the Geneva Conventions, which is a set of agreements on conduct during wartime, prisoners of war should be protected from acts of violence and public curiosity and be treated humanely.

Right, those are the rules that we have today, but unfortunately, we didn't have them back in the Roman Republic.

One of the most famous gladiators of all time was Spartacus, an enslaved man forced to become a gladiator.

Spartacus escaped gladiator school even before entering the arena, and instead he led a rebellion of fellow enslaved men against the Roman Republic.

You might have heard of him because of the famous phrase, I am Spartacus.

This is a bait and switch.

We are not talking about Spartacus today.

Yeah, you're right.

Yes, yeah.

History is pretty complicated, so we're going to have to come back to Spartacus another day.

Sorry.

But Spartacus wasn't ancient Rome's only fascinating gladiator.

Allow us to present, in no particular order, a few of ancient Rome's less famous fighters who did spend some time in the arena.

First up,

Marcus Aetilius.

Unlike most gladiators, Marcus wasn't forced to fight.

He was a freeborn Roman who volunteered to be a gladiator.

Historians think he likely signed away his freedom because he needed the money to pay off old debts.

But either way, when Marcus stepped into an arena in the city of Pompeii for the first time as a Tiro or a new gladiator, he faced some pretty scary competition.

Hilaris, a longtime fighter who had won most of the matches in his career and probably wasn't stressing too much about facing a new inexperienced fighter.

Oh, look, a newbie.

This should be easy.

Except it wasn't.

In a shocking performance, newcomer Marcus fought Hilaris to a surrender.

A surrender?

Wait, can they do that?

Can they surrender?

Historians think referees probably stopped fights when a gladiator submitted to his opponent or was too tired or injured to go on.

Okay, so one major battle down, but a lot of people were wondering if maybe Marcus just got lucky.

Nope.

Because in his very next battle, Marcus Aetilius defeated another champion gladiator.

Look, gladiator lifestyle wasn't exactly glamorous, but these fighters were sort of like celebrities in their day.

So Marcus, this new gladiator who came out of nowhere to take down two champion fighters, started to get a lot of attention.

And making a lot of money.

Right.

And Marcus's performance in the arena did inspire local graffiti artists of the time to make records of his victories.

In fact, these records are one of the main reasons that Marcus is among the gladiators that history remembers.

Graffiti is when someone writes or draws on something they aren't supposed to, like walls, desks, or chairs.

Yeah, that's right.

And most of the time it gets cleaned up or it disappears over the years.

But do you remember where I said Marcus Aetilius was from?

He was from Pompeii.

Yes, he was.

So Pompeii was a bustling, beautiful city in what's now southern Italy, but its beauty isn't what it's remembered for, unfortunately.

The famous thing about Pompeii is that the whole city was preserved by the ash of a violent volcanic explosion.

On August 24th, in the year 79, just a few decades after Aetilius' first fights, a nearby volcano called Mount Vesuvius erupted, shooting ash and smoke some 20 miles into the air.

Almost overnight, Pompeii and most of its residents vanished under a blanket of ash and lava.

The layers of ash helped preserve buildings, artwork, and even the forms of bodies.

Today, visitors to the city can see kitchens with pots left on the stove and bakeries with loaves of bread, now turned to charcoal, still in the oven, as well as the outlines of the bodies of people who died there.

And of course, they can see the centuries-old graffiti showing victories and failures of gladiators like Marcus Aetilius.

Historians don't know exactly what happened to Marcus, but thanks to Pompey's graffiti artists, he's typically counted amongst some of history's more memorable gladiators.

So, way to

blow up, Marcus.

Yeah, that was probably a poor choice of words.

The eruption near Pompeii was a particularly destructive kind of eruption that is relatively rare.

But a similar kind of eruption did happen in 1980 at Mount St.

Helen in Washington state.

You know what I'm thinking?

I'm thinking it's time for a break.

This is a good time to just regroup for a second.

We're going to take a break.

We'll be back with more greaking out right after this.

Hey there!

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See, that wasn't so bad.

Okay, we're back to greaking out.

This brings us to our next fighter,

Spiculus.

Like Marcus Aetilius, Spiculus was a new fighter who got people buzzing when he beat a veteran gladiator in his first ever match.

And by beat, we mean, well, killed.

This victory gained the attention of Rome's then-emperor, Nero.

Now, you might remember that we talked about Nero a couple of years ago when we did an ancient Olympics episode.

He was the

difficult emperor who had the Olympics delayed for a whole year so that he had extra time to train for them and could participate.

You know, a totally low-maintenance dude.

Nero became emperor in the year 54 and was considered a decent ruler for the early years of his reign.

He reduced taxes, gave permission for enslaved people to bring complaints against their enslavers, and promoted poetry and theater.

Yeah, and then things kind of took a turn for the wacky and Nero started behaving,

well, badly.

He was said to have condemned his own mother to death and later killed one and maybe more of his wives.

Another example of Nero's erratic behavior is when he gave Spiculus an entire palace after his win in the arena.

Well, Spiculus was probably thrilled to receive such a present, but it put the Glaudiator in a weird social position.

Technically, he was a slave, but he was living in luxury and Spiculus now had servants who were also enslaved.

to a slave, which was just the whole thing was weird.

In the year 68 CE, the Romans were getting really tired of this Nero dude and they began to rebel.

Nero figured he was likely to die soon, so rather than being killed by an angry mob, he asked his friend Spiculus to execute him instead.

This seems like a very Roman thing to do in general, and either Spiculus didn't get the message or it was all like hard pass because Nero eventually had to take his own life.

Later, Roman citizens protesting Nero's awful reign began toppling and destroying any statues of the late emperor.

Some people even say the angry mob used some of these statues to squash Nero's friend Spiculus to death.

Yikes, okay.

Well, speaking of bad emperors, that brings us to our next gladiator, Commodus.

A commode is a piece of furniture containing a concealed chamber pot or toilet.

No, no, no, no, no, no, Oracle, I said commodus, commodus, not commode.

Though the two words sound the same, they are actually

not from the same root.

Commode comes from the French word for convenient or suitable.

Ah, okay, well, commodus has the distinction of being known as one of ancient Rome's worst emperors, which is really saying something, especially after we just heard about Nero's exploits.

Sometimes called the mad emperor, Commodus' rule marked the end of Rome's golden era.

Commodus took the head off of one of Nero's surviving statues and replaced it with his own head.

Well, obviously, he was just trying to get ahead.

Get it ahead.

He was because of the he was.

Anyway, Commodus was co-emperor with his father at first, but eventually he rose to power power on his own when his father died from a mysterious illness.

Possibly from disease, possibly by murder.

Who can say?

Certainly not Commodus' father because he was dead.

We have heavily implied that Commodus murdered his father, but that happened in the movies and probably not in real life.

In real life.

It was probably a contagious disease.

Listen, I prefer to live in a dramatic world and when we don't know what happened, I'm gonna speculate wildly, okay?

I know this about you.

Anyway, at this point, Commodus basically considered himself a god, which was pretty typical for Roman emperors.

And he thought he was the second coming of Hercules slash Heracles, which was not pretty typical for Roman emperors.

He often walked around his palace in Hercules' signature look, a lion skin.

And a big surprise, Commodus also considered himself a gladiator, despite living a much, much better life than any of the actual gladiators.

According to his own account, Commodus allegedly entered the ring about 12,000 times, battling other gladiators and sometimes animals.

Other historians say it was more like 700 to 1,000, but it was still a lot.

Like we talked about before, being a gladiator was not exactly a respectable occupation, so folks couldn't believe an emperor emperor would willingly enter an arena in this way.

Turns out Commodus was apparently pretty bad in the arena, but no rival would dare to hurt, let alone kill a reigning emperor.

I mean, even scratching Commodus seemed like a pretty good way to get yourself killed.

But even if his challengers were brave enough to take a swipe at Commodus, he made it really hard for them to do so.

He really stacked the odds in his own favor by entering the arena fully armed every time and only allowed his combatants to carry wooden weapons.

In animal fights, he always kept the creatures in a cage and was armed with a bow.

So, you know, really not a fair fight.

But Nemesis eventually caught up to Commodus.

That would be Nemesis, the goddess of retributive justice.

This is the same concept of payback, or what goes around comes around.

Exactly.

Or in Commodus' case, when you sentence your own advisors to death and they find out about it and then they have you poisoned and killed while you take a bath.

Geez, these Roman emperors seem to have pretty bloody ends.

Okay, so pivoting from a rather embarrassing gladiator to a kind of happy ending for the finale, let's meet Priscus and Verus.

Two gladiators, one story.

That's right.

It's the year 80 CE and Emperor Titus has had a pretty disastrous start to his reign.

He had just become emperor the year before, the same year as the devastating Mount Vesuvius eruption.

Titus was touring the city of Pompeii to see how much damage the Mount Vesuvius eruption had done to the area, a lot, when a massive fire broke out in Rome and destroyed much of the city.

So things were not exactly going great for Titus.

A bit of a bad vibe in ancient Rome circa 80 CE.

So Titus decided to cheer himself and his subjects up with a massive sporting event.

First, he decided to finally complete a brand new arena to stage the event in called the Flavian Amphitheater.

Of course, named after his family because, you know, why not?

Today, the Flavian Amphitheater is better known as the Colosseum in Rome.

Right.

Titus completed the Colosseum and opened it with ceremonies and gladiator games lasting for more than a hundred days.

He hoped that booking two of the most famous gladiators of the day would help him get more subjects on his side.

Enter Priscus and Verus.

Both men had trained at gladiator school and were probably considered to be the best fighters of the time.

Massive crowds turned out to see these two gladiators at the top of their sport go head to head in the arena.

It would be sort of like watching two of the biggest boxers face off against each other in a match, except that one or both of them could die at the end of the match, you know.

Yikes.

Indeed.

Anyway, Priscus and Verus were very good at what they did.

They purposely kept the fight going on for a while to appease Titus.

They knew he was trying to win over the crowd at the Coliseum, so they battled for hours in front of an enthusiastic audience.

Each fighter was clearly impressed by the other's stamina and skill, so the pair decided to draw or tie at the end of their battle.

Well, the crowds loved this, cheering wildly for their new favorite athletic duo.

But the crowd wasn't the only one impressed by Priscus and Virus.

I declare you both victors!

Emperor Titus didn't just make both men winners, he also granted them each their freedom.

And this did exactly what Titus had hoped it would.

It made the crowd crazy for him.

Priscus and Verus, who?

What?

The famous poet Marshall documented the battle in a poem saying, To both, Titus sent wooden swords.

This has happened under no leader but you, Titus.

Two fought, and both won.

Priscus and Verus had done all the work, but Titus was hailed as a hero that day.

He was seen as benevolent for bestowing freedom on not one, but two gladiators.

What a swell guy.

Benevolence is an act of kindness or a generous gift.

Yeah, however selfish Titus's intentions were, we can imagine that Priscus and Verus were likely thrilled to be granted freedom.

This didn't happen to gladiators often, and it almost never happened to two gladiators at the same time.

Thus ended Priscus and Verus's time as gladiators.

They were among the lucky few who got to leave an arena alive and never return.

Well, eventually, gladiator matches fell out of fashion and were outlawed in Rome.

I mean, after hundreds of centuries of bloodshed and violence, you know, it's about time.

Thank you for your service.

Gladiators.

Well, that kind of makes it sound like they signed up to serve in the military or something.

And as we've discussed, there wasn't a lot that was voluntary about gladiatorial life.

Sorry, that happened to you, gladiators.

Yeah, that feels more fitting.

And maybe a thanks-for-nothing emperors?

Gladiators rule.

Emperors drool.

Or that?

Okay, I'll take that.

Thanks for listening to today's episode.

We'll come back to Rome again, but for now, it's time to move on.

Stay tuned next week for a callback to the Trojan War.

Listen, and you'll see it

out.

National Geographic Kids Greaking Out is written by Kay Boatner, a Nat GeoKids magazine editor, and hosted by Kenny Curtis, with Tori Kerr as the Oracle of Wi-Fi, audio production and sound design by Scotty Beam, and our theme song was composed by Perry Gripp.

Dr.

Meredith Safron is our subject matter expert, Emily Burkett and Laurie Broda are our producers, and Emily Everhart is our senior producer.