Gladiators: A Day in the Life

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Hey guys, I hope you're doing well.

I'm all good here.

I'm just back in from a quick food shop and about to sit down and start putting forward some ideas for the rest of the team regarding upcoming Ancients episodes going into early 2026.

I've had a look at the stats, I've seen what episodes have been really popular with you, and comments and feedback, what you've really enjoyed, and also certain suggestions that you've been sending in over the past few months, what you'd really like to see on the podcast.

So, we're going to be taking all of that into consideration when we plan out what we're going to be releasing on the podcast in the coming months into 2026 and i cannot wait to share them with you in the meantime today's episode we're going back to ancient rome and we're exploring a day in the life of a gladiator who was set to fight in one of those big spectacles of ancient rome in an arena like the colosseum a gladiatorial fight a day at the games We're exploring all of that.

What do we know about our day at the games from the viewpoint of a gladiator with our guest, Dr.

Harry Sidebottom.

He is a lecturer in ancient history at Lincoln College, Oxford.

He's also a prolific writer of historical fiction.

He's a best-selling author.

And as you're about to hear, he's a lot of fun.

I loved recording this chat with Harry, and I hope you enjoy it just as much as I did recording it.

Let's go.

The Colosseum.

One of the most majestic constructions from the Roman world.

Imagine it full to the brim with spectators, Romans of all ranks, eager to see the games.

But today, you're not one of the viewers, you're the entertainment.

You're a gladiator.

Today, gladiators are one of the hallmark symbols of ancient Rome.

These sexy yet infamous fighters who clashed in sand-covered arenas to the roars of the crowd, who fought for the pleasure of others.

So, what do we know about the gladiator's routine?

How did he prepare for an upcoming fight in the arena?

What do we know about the fights themselves?

And is there any truth behind them saying the phrase, We who are about to die salute you?

This is a day in the life of a gladiator, with our guest, Dr.

Harry Sidebottom.

Harry, it is a pleasure to have you you on the podcast today.

Thanks very much.

Pleasure to be here.

Now, when someone thinks about Rome, it is a classic image that comes straight into your mind, isn't it?

These macho fighters with sword and shield or trident and net and so on.

It has become such a clear image of ancient Rome.

Now, why do we think that?

Why is it so popular now?

Why is a gladiator the iconic image?

I think it's the alienness of it.

We watch contact combat sports, but not ones where people actually die.

And do we also get a sense both in ancient writers and with people today,

there's a fascination with gladiators, but also a revulsion at the same time?

Yeah, absolutely.

And in the ancient sources, there is this weird paradox.

They're both utterly reviled.

They're the lowest of the low.

They're slaves or free men who've reduced themselves to the status of slaves.

But at the same time, they're glamorous and indeed sexy in the ancient world.

Now, with your book, you've kind of explored the story of gladiators by plotting what 24 hours in the life of a gladiator might have looked like.

To tackle this, and also, let's say it's the night before the games, and then they're fighting in the games themselves.

What types of sources do you have available to reconstruct a day in the life of a gladiator?

Well, you have to pull them together from lots of scattered places.

Obviously, the main one, you couldn't create a story without the literary sources.

Unfortunately, we don't have a single literary source that walks us through the 24 hours of the games.

What we've got are anecdotes or stories scattered in literature.

And then we've got the archaeology, gladiatorial barracks, the Colosseum and amphitheatres.

Crucially important, a lot of visual material, lots and lots of images from the ancient world.

And do we find those visual objects much further than just Italy itself, given how far and wide the gladiator sport, it was exported across the Roman Empire?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, only this spring I was in northern Greece, in ancient Macedon, where there's a fantastic new museum in a place called Veria.

And I didn't know it was there, but there's a whole wall of gladiatorial tombstones with images.

Absolutely fantastic.

As you say, they're everywhere from York and northern Britain right across the Euphrates.

And those objects themselves, you mentioned there.

So you have things varying from gladiator tombstones to small, from what I can remember, these little gladiator figurines, almost little gift objects that you might take away from a day at the games.

Yeah, absolutely.

And people think that's what they are.

Some of the small ones and the lamps with gladiators on.

Literally, it's a souvenir of your big day out at the games.

Before we go into the 24 hours themselves, a bit of background.

Do we know much, first of all, about the origins of gladiatorial combat and how it comes to ancient Rome?

Kind of yes and no, because the ancient writers claim to know.

where it comes from and the trouble is they give us two different stories so some ancient writers go yep, it's definitely from Campania in the south, it's an import.

And others go, yes, it's an import, but it's from Etruria in the north.

And we have no real way of knowing which is actually true.

The key thing is that Romans thought gladiatorial combat was imported from somewhere else.

And that's probably not.

you know, shifting the moral responsibility as we would if we had something, you know, as violent and bloody as that.

It's actually more a weird Roman idea that we Romans, we take things from the rest of the world, people we've conquered.

We take the best things and we adopt them and adapt them.

Do you know, we make them even better.

And so do we know what the original purpose then was of these gladiatorial fights when the Romans first encountered them, whether it be further north, as you mentioned, in Etruria, like Tuscany area, or further south in Campania, so near modern-day Naples today?

Yeah, we do.

Unfortunately, none of the evidence is contemporary.

It's Romans looking back, but they're all insistent.

originally gladiators fought at funeral games, which of course opens up endless modern speculation about why are they an offering to the dead.

The ancient Romans, by the time they're writing the anecdotes, they don't know themselves.

So the odds on us finding out are pretty much, I think, entirely zero.

But yeah, there's a strong link to funerals.

I don't suppose you've ever been to Pestum, have you, Harry?

I have many years ago, yeah.

And have you seen those beautiful wall frescoes you have from that site?

And I think when you get to the Lucanian period so in the in the fourth century BC there are some beautiful images of warriors fighting each other yeah there are and they seem to be remarkably gladiator like and they seem to be matched pairs fighting each other rather than battle sequences but it's fascinating isn't it that kind of debate about where gladiators came from whether it was an ancient Greek city like Pestum or further north in Etruria but just to have that visual evidence there long before the gladiators become the dominant kind of blood sport of ancient Rome that you have it elsewhere in ancient Italy.

Yeah, absolutely.

And looking at it the other way round, it's amazing that visual images, then, as you said earlier, spread all over the empire.

They're really popular images to have.

And, you know, kind of weirdly in things like a mosaic in your dining room, which is not something probably any person want.

I mean, boxing promoters, I don't know, maybe they do have photos of boxing on the wall in their dining room, but guys and animals dying.

But I think that homes in on really why the Romans did it and how they probably altered it.

In the link with funerals remains down to the end of the Republic, down to the reign of Augustus, but it gets more and more tenuous.

What it's really about is the guy giving the games, trying to win popularity from the crowd.

I was going to ask, so what motivated senators and then later emperors to hold games?

But is it that central P-word?

Is it popularity?

I think it is.

And under the Republic, the senators really need votes of the people we often think of it as this kind of aristocratic oligarchic clique and in some ways yeah they're the guys who hold high office but we tend to forget that they only get into office because the plebs vote them there and putting on glatural shows is a way of getting votes getting that popularity you need to become the next rung up on your cursusonorum as it was called the ladder of officers you start at Questa.

See if I can remember it.

Quaesta.

Then Ideal or Tribune of the Plebs, then Praetor.

Then you get to be one of the two consuls the year.

Hey, the year's named after you, you're immortal.

Really hardwired into the psyche and self-fashioning of the senatorial elite.

And does that need for popularity from hosting gladiatorial games, does it increase when you get to the time of the emperors, even though maybe you could argue that they're safer in their position in the fact that they're not having to go to an emperor office or be elected to become emperor once a year.

Yeah, I think it increases all the way through.

I mean, under the Republic, the scale of gladiatorial fights put on, it's inflationary.

You have to put on a bigger show than the previous guy.

And you have to put on a more novel show, have different acts, different animals in the morning, different types of gladiators, more of them.

The emperors inherit that and they have to take it over because they've supplanted the senatorial elite as the patron of the Roman city plebs.

And if they don't put on games, it will not necessarily completely undermine their regime, but it will make it deeply unpopular.

So let's now start going through those 24 hours of a gladiator at one of these great games, let's say, of the early imperial period.

If we could start.

with the nights before Harry, because I've got in my notes these two words.

Cana libera.

What is this?

Right.

That's one of my favourite bits.

Kena Libera, I suppose you can translate it literally as the free dinner.

It's not free in the sense gladiators get it for nothing because their rations are probably given to them for nothing anyway.

It's unlimited dinner.

For once, they get a really, really

nice, upper-class, fine dining experience.

But the weird bit about it is the public can come in and watch them eating.

And that really is quite odd.

It's an odd social ritual.

And there are any number of modern, really sort of deep theories about it.

It's raising the status of the people who may die tomorrow.

What it was really about, I think, is actually affecting the gambling odds.

The guy who's scared, can't eat, can't choke his food down, he's out at 66ers.

Whereas the guy who's calmly ordering his affairs, eating a reasonable amount, not drinking too much, yeah, he's become the odds-on favourite.

I'm sorry, I've come from a racing family in Newmarket.

I've just slipped into the language of tattersaurs there.

But I think that's what it's really about.

It's about gambling.

What types of people do you think then would come to watch these Gladiators E?

So, would it be the people who are making the bets, who are behind the stools at the games before they fight?

Yeah, I think it's the real aficionados of the sport, you know, the die-hard fans.

There is another subgroup which is utterly bizarre to our thinking.

One of the places where we know about Kenalibre Kenelibra is Plutarch.

We know him best as, you know, the guy who Shakespeare took the stories from for the tragedies.

But what he saw himself as was a moral philosopher.

And he has this wonderful anecdote of going to the Kenalibra to watch people, the gladiators eating, as a lesson in moral philosophy.

Because you can learn about human nature.

when it's under extreme pressure.

He says something like, well, you know, any student of philosophy has done this, haven't they?

Which kind of implies there's a subgroup of people who aren't, you know, keen gamblers or keen aficionados.

They're going there to learn a life lesson.

And that really is utterly bizarre.

So you've got betting house owners, gamblers, you know, the die-hard fans standing alongside sage philosopher-like figures watching all these gladiators eat this we will find dining food.

Yeah, I think the philosophers stand out easily.

They're the guys who don't wear a tunic, have a long beard, long hair, their whole outward appearance going, look, the external world means nothing to me.

I'm all about the inner man.

Hence, I don't bother to get a haircut or wash too often sometimes.

Do we know much about the gladiators themselves that would have been partaking in this dinner?

Would they have never seen these extraordinary foods presented to them before?

Would they have come from quite a low background?

Yeah, they would have done.

Superficially, it depends how long they've survived, how many ketalibra they've gone through.

There are four sources of gladiators.

One, prisoners of war.

Two, people convicted of really nasty crimes.

And they actually, of course, being condemned to a gladiatorial school is an act of clemency because they could have just been killed outright.

They have a chance of survival.

The third type would be slaves who are sold into gladiatorial school.

And the fourth type is...

surprising to us maybe free men who volunteer and we do have a few examples of the free men who volunteer don't we?

Yeah, quite a few.

I mean, it's, well, we can't do percentages.

We just don't have the Tristan, you know, you can't really do statistics for most ancient history.

The numbers are statistically tiny.

But yeah, I mean, if you kind of pretend the sample we've got, yeah, up to maybe 25% are free men.

Wow.

And what would have motivated them to kind of throw away their freedom and become a gladiator?

Right.

You want the ancient answer.

From Horace, the poet.

Okay.

He'll tell you what it is.

He does tell you what it is.

They're morally bad people.

There you go.

They're just very bad people.

They're probably rich young men who have fritted away their fortune they've inherited on things like food, drink, women.

And they now have no choice but to be a carriage driver or become a gladiator.

A carriage driver or a gladiator.

I love those two options.

Two options, both bad.

If you're an upper-class Roman, can you get any lower?

Probably, if we strip out the moralising, grinding poverty would be damn good reason.

It's easy for us to think about the Romans as sort of terribly eating doormice brains and wearing togas and living in lovely villas.

90% of the population live on or all too often below the subsistence level.

If you volunteer as a gladiator, at least you'll be fed and really well fed for as long as it lasts.

And maybe you'll survive and come out the other end.

Maybe you'll get rewards on the way.

And maybe if you're good, you'll get adulation from the crowd.

I argue in the book, thrill seeking.

Certain young guys are addicted to extreme sports.

And what's much more extreme than fighting another guy with a bladed weapon?

I wouldn't know.

I've never done it myself.

No, we don't do that here on the Ancients podcast, at least not yet.

We haven't gone to

those extremes.

But it is interesting, though, isn't it, kind of exploring the different ways that people could become a gladiator and also hearing more about them sitting around one of these last supper ideas with this beautiful food in front of them.

Do we have much idea about how different the food was at that supper compared to what they had every day in the gladiator barracks?

Yeah, we do actually.

I mean, we don't have, which would be handy, a nice menu for the flash Kena Libre.

But what we do have, we know their diet, their normal diet.

And it's really unappealing.

It's a bean and barley stew.

And it's designed to bulk them up, to make them heavy.

The idea being, put it in modern medical terms, would be to build up a thick layer of subcutaneous fat.

So essentially, they can take a wound and bleed in a visual way, but the blade doesn't actually hit any vital organs because they're really, really chunky, heavy-set guys.

So almost like natural body armor that they're adding with the diet that they were fed.

Yeah.

It also had various other unfortunate knock-on effects.

According to the Austrian forensic pathologist who studied gladiators' remains from a cemetery in Ephesus, which is now modern Turkey, obviously, their diet also led to them having incredibly bad teeth and hence very bad breath.

And they've in a very sensible way compared it with the teeth of skeletons of the normal population of ancient Ephesus.

Gladiators, lousy teeth.

Doesn't quite add up to the very sexy nature of gladiators that we have down to the present day, that they were also sex symbols.

Yeah, they were.

They're a million miles from the ancient ideal of male beauty and desirability.

They're heavy-set, if not fat, guys with bad teeth, bad breath.

Their rigorous training ends up like tennis players, one arm and shoulder, much more developed than the other.

They're covered in scars and the sort of warts where the helmet rests on their nose.

But at the same time, they were thought of as sex symbols.

Although, the pieces of evidence that are always wheeled out in most popular books here are some graffiti from Pompeii about Ratiarius, a net and trident funiter who nets the young girls and his mate, who's a Thracian type of gladiator equipment.

And he, as he has it put, sorts out the girls in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening.

These are quite often in serious scholarly books, these words are scribbled by a breathless groupie.

Maybe not, because they're actually found in the gladiator's barracks.

These words are scribbled by these guys themselves.

This is two men indulging in sort of competitive sexual boasting.

I get more women than you do.

But having said all which, yeah, there's a lot of literary evidence that gladiators were seen as sex symbols.

And that is odd, considering they are not conventionally attractive men in the classical view.

The bites and the scars and the wounds is probably the hint.

I mean, perhaps gladiators are the ultimate bit of rough trade.

I might also ask, sorry, one last question on this supper, this Cana Libra, because it's so fascinating to hear about.

What would the Roman elites have thought about it?

Seeing, you know, these rough and tough gladiators of much lower status to them, seeing them all of a sudden eating...

the types of food that they would have been accustomed to in their own villas and great houses in the city.

That's a really good question.

I don't think they'd have been too disturbed because it's the one-off nature of the thing.

It's rather like in some British regiments, the once a year, the officers serve the men their food.

It's the world turned upside down, but by turning it upside down just once in a really defined time, you kind of reinforce what's normal.

So part of the ceremony idea, I guess, is that if it's being regulated, if it's being controlled, people perhaps are not as fussed about it than they might otherwise be absolutely unless of course you're a christian bishop sain john chrysostom the golden mouth has in one of his interminable and rather depressing homilies of being good you christian flock he says if you see gladiators not unfortunately in a canalibra but in an inn getting blind drunk and seeming to enjoy themselves don't for a minute mistake them for being happy because they will burn in hellfire and so on all right well let's move on from the cana Libra and move on in the story.

So they're going to go and fight in the arena the next day.

Do we know what would happen next?

I mean, where would they go to sleep?

What do we know about that evening and that night just before they went to the arena?

Security arrangements in those five gladiatorial barracks that have been archaeologically discovered seem actually pretty minimal.

Usually, the veterans were probably quite free to sleep anywhere they wanted, which would of course further their sex symbol ambitions.

The night before,

yeah, they're confined to the barracks and closely watched.

And presumably,

under the emperors, in a school owned by the emperor, they're guarded by soldiers.

In a private barracks, they're guarded presumably by veteran gladiators who are no longer themselves in the arena.

And yeah, they're pretty closely monitored.

There's a story in Seneca of a beast fighter who, the night before he's meant to go into the arena, actually goes into the communal latrine in the middle of the night.

It's because it's the only place he isn't observed.

And then he revoltingly chokes himself to death with the famous sponge on a stick that Romans wipe their bottoms with.

This is the famous sponge on a stick suicide story, and it's linked to a beast hunter the night before a fight.

Yeah, absolutely.

And the weird thing is that Seneca wheels this famous anecdote out as an example of extreme moral goodness.

The moral here is if you want to kill yourself, and Stoics are very keen on killing yourself if you do it rationally for the right reasons.

You know, you're intermittently ill, you're in intolerable pain, you wish to spare yourself and your family something worse.

And he's making the point.

You can always find the means.

to take your own life, even as this gladiator did.

And not only is he a beast fighter, he's a barbarian prisoner of war.

you know he's a hairy german i suppose the argument really underlying even a scum like that can show moral goodness at the ultimate test you mentioned earlier how there were five gladiatorial barracks that have been discovered so i presume one of them is in pompeii isn't it so do we know much about the the layout of these homes of the gladiators and how they were structured yeah um there are actually two in pompeii

and there's of course the famous one just over the big modern road from the Colosseum, the Ludus Magnus, which actually you can see half of is exposed.

It's wonderful.

They all tend to have a similar pattern.

They're not identical, mainly because some are converted from private houses or other buildings.

It seems to be a central courtyard, ringed by gladiatorial.

We always translate it as cells.

I mean, sleeping quarters.

Cells sound more, you know, darkness, chains, Spartacus film.

They don't seem to be much worse than the barracks of soldiers in many ways.

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So they go to sleep at the barracks the night before.

They're watched closely by, as you mentioned, either veteran gladiators or soldiers to make sure they don't kill themselves or try to run away.

And then you get the day of the games themselves.

Harry, do we know when the actual events would begin?

Do we know what would happen early in the morning, both for the gladiators and, I guess, for the spectators who are about to arrive at the arena?

Yeah, absolutely.

The whole thing kicks off, well, for the spectators, before dawn, we have anecdotes of people queuing to get in.

I think, I've also put it in the book.

Imagine yourself as a gull flying over Rome and you're looking down at the Colosseum.

All the roads around it are going to be thronged with people getting in.

Only the elite are guaranteed, you know, the right and best seat, their seat.

The spectators need to be in because the first event at dawn is a big parade.

We don't know where it went in Rome, but in Corinth and other places, we know it wounds through the town, ends up at the amphitheatre where the games are being held, and then comes onto the sand itself.

You've got musicians, you've got floats, as it were.

You've got the gladiators kitted out in their very best kit.

And you've got incense and music.

It has

it's not a religious parade per se, but it does have religious connotations too.

It's a big event.

And then after the parade, there's the testing of the weapons, a ritual testing that the swords are sharp.

We know quite about that because of two anecdotes about two supposedly good emperors.

And rather worryingly, the stories are almost identical.

The good emperor has discovered a senator or two is plotting against him.

And so when the weapons are brought up to the imperial box, he gives the sharp swords to the men who are conspiring against him.

as an act of faith and trust and then says by the way i know what you're up to as a way of pardoning them.

So, you've got this whole ritual in the morning, and

then you have, I argue, in the book, the famous gladorial oath.

Those who are about to die salute you.

Ah, okay.

So, it's sorting fact from fiction.

So, do you think that the gladiators would have said that in their ornate armor, right in the centre?

Everyone's taken their seat before any events have begun.

The first thing they would do is do that oath to the emperor.

Yeah, I'm breaking ranks with virtually every scholar who studied this recently.

They're all going, no, no, we only hear about this oath once, and we only hear about it once, because that's the one time it was ever said.

But we learn about it in an anecdote about Claudius giving some games, and Claudius ruins the whole affair by then trying a badly timed joke.

You know, they do the, you know, we are about to die, salute you, and Claudius sort of giggles and goes, or not.

And the characters go, great, it's a pardon.

Well, damn weapons and then Claudius has to bribe and threaten and limp round cajoling them to fight the anecdote's recorded because of Claudius's bad joke and that outcome rather than oh it's the only time it's said it's a wonderful act of theatre and the whole day is an actor theatre that's a great way to kick it off So almost that oath part of the story, because it's not the central message almost, it's the fumbling around by Claudius.

People who would have heard heard that story would have just kind of taken the oath as fact.

You wouldn't need to explain it any further because they just knew that happened at the beginning of every gladiatorial combat that happens at the Colosseum.

Absolutely spot on, Tristan.

It's not explained.

It's just there.

And then we get into the anecdote.

Bad jokes and limping.

I'd like to ask a bit more about this ornate armor because this also sounds really, really fascinating.

So do we think that would have been when the gladiators awoke that morning in the barracks?

I mean, we probably don't have the information available, but can we imagine almost a very ceremonial event of them donning on all of this beautiful armor that presumably they didn't wear that often when they were just training beforehand?

Presumably, either the Lanista, the man in charge, or the veterans, or their cellmates helped them arm and equip.

And no, you're absolutely right.

Of course, they wouldn't be wearing this to train.

This is the sort of stuff that's too ornate and too valuable for anything other than the ring itself.

How long do we think they would have been training for before their lanister, their master of the barracks, decided that they were ready to fight?

Hard to give a hard and fast answer, but we know how long a man could be condemned to a gladiatorial school.

And it is five years maximum, of which only three will they be fighting.

So it depends how long,

as it were, the first year they're being trained, which we don't know.

Should we also highlight, they're an economic investment, aren't they?

The fact that they're not being served the worst foods, as you highlighted earlier, they're served foods that serve a purpose of armoring them up naturally.

I mean, everything, you know, their accommodation, their food, their armor, and the cana libra that we mentioned earlier, it's all paid for, it's all covered.

But because the gladiators themselves, they're an economic investment.

Yeah, huge economic investment.

We've got an inscription from the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

Marcus Aurelius attempted a price cap on gladiators.

And the figures, obviously, people take them as if, you know, this is how much a gladiator cost.

Well, no, he's doing a price cap.

I actually presume they cost rather more.

I mean, if you're doing a price cap, austerity in the age of gladiators, you don't set it at the real high level.

But yeah, they can vary hugely.

I mean, at the cheapest level, they're a couple of thousand sesterces,

but they can go up to tens of thousands of sesterces or more.

They're a serious economic investment, and you want to make sure they do you proud in the ring.

Okay, so it's the morning.

This procession of gladiators and presuming the beast hunters, would they be there as well in the procession, Harry, at that time?

Do we think they'd all be together?

Yes, we do, but we don't have any hard and fast evidence.

The nearest we can get is some animals in the procession.

If animals are there, it's highly likely the beast fighters.

Beast fighters are kind of second string in popularity.

The gladiators are the big deal in the afternoon.

The beast fighters in the morning, they're important.

And indeed, some provincial shows, they replace gladiators altogether.

They're cheaper.

So if we've got that scene first of all, when they're all together at that procession before the events themselves begin, they do their oath to the Emperor or whoever's in the box.

You're throwing your head above the power pet there, Harry.

Happy to say.

What happens next?

Especially for those gladiators, they've got to wait until the afternoon.

So where are they led off to?

Where are they, dare I say, stored until their events take place?

Well, we think they're stored in the Coliseum or the big arenas that have sort of substructure.

We think they're stored down there.

But of course, we don't actually, we'd have no actual evidence of where they're waiting, presumably getting more and more keyed up before the event.

We can't actually definitely say.

We know the animals are stored down there.

Highly likely the gladiators, the human performers are as well.

Well, Harry, talk us through the day at the games and the events that happen.

Shall we start first of all with the events in the morning?

And these are the beast hunts.

Yep, absolutely.

Man v.

animal, trained men.

I mean,

this is not executions.

This is beast fighters, trained huntsmen fighting animals.

It's also animals v.

animals.

And the Romans really seem to delight in making species of animals fight that in nature didn't fight.

Ah.

So you can end up with some exotic mismatch.

What's going on here, of course, is the Roman Empire

symbolizing its control over nature.

And similarly, the more exotic the animals you can put in the arena, the better.

Have you a provincial show, I don't know, somewhere, somewhere in backwater like Britain, you've probably got a few bulls, maybe a couple of bears.

But the big deal in Rome and the big centers, African animals, lions.

Also from the East, you want panthers, you want tigers, you want crocodiles.

If possible, a rhinoceros would be great.

It symbolises the geographic spread of the empire.

In fact, there's even one source that claims Arctic bears in Rome.

Wow.

Yeah.

I mean,

probably means polar bears, but I guess, you know, Scotland is pretty Arctic if you're looking at it from Roman eyes.

So maybe it's just a Scottish bear, a Caledonian bear.

But yeah, the more exotic, the better for the beast fights the morning.

But not all the animals are actually going to die.

Some are just exhibited because they're so rare and exotic and unusual, or

they can do tricks.

The Romans have a soft spot for elephants.

They love elephants.

Elephants that can, like

the now long-gone chimpanzees tea party thing, elephants that can have mime human diners, a civilized dining party, elephants that can juggle, elephants that can be mock gladiators, which is rather

presumably with sort of some stage kit on and maybe balancing on their rear legs.

It's almost a bit of a circus event that you could have in the mornings, as well as, you know, the actual more gory stuff of either beast on beast or trained hunter on beast.

Yeah, absolutely.

How about elephants that can write Greek in the sand with their trunks?

No, really?

Yeah.

Is there stories of that?

Yep.

How about tightrope walking elephants?

One that walks a tightrope down from the top of it's actually actually Pompey's theatre, down to the sand.

I mean, that would add a certain frisson of, well, fear for the people in the stands under it, surely.

Harry, I don't know if you're just mocking me now or if this is actually true.

I mean, I've never ever heard those stories before.

I mean, can we, should we take them with a barrel full of salt?

Yes.

Yes, they're in ancient sources.

Did they actually happen?

Actually, the tightrope walking elephant, yeah, probably.

As always, in any ancient history, you have to judge each anecdote on the source it's in the purpose it's serving in that source and so on but yeah all the stories are in ancient writers and some might be true well let's move on then to midday because

this also feels like another gruesome part of the events but maybe one that even for romans was a bit too gruesome for lots of them to stomach.

What are we talking about?

We're talking about the executions at midday.

Dehumanized criminals being executed in bizarrely inventive ways.

I mean, usually if you're a criminal who's convicted of a capital crime, you get beheaded if you're a citizen, supposedly a nice quick death.

And if you're not, you get crucified.

Now, neither of those are very visual.

I mean, just beheading guys is not a big visual spectacle for lunchtime.

Crucifixion can take days.

So what they do is they come up with lots of other ways of killing people, throwing them to wild animals being one, burning them alive being another, and

acting out bits from Greek myth where the condemned criminal somehow or other is convinced to act out a myth.

So we have Orpheus.

Obviously in the myth he's torn apart by women who've been maddened by the god Dionysus.

The Romans, however, don't do that.

They have him torn apart by a bear.

Gosh.

Yeah, it's odd.

And then there's icarus you know you wheel him out on a crane strap some wings to him and drop him oh

god tristan that's the response of everyone i tell that anecdote to it's just pure macabre it's the blackest joke ever it's pure tarantino it's just dreadful yeah or the tunica molesta the evil or molesting tunic These are criminals acting out the death of Hercules.

Hercules in the myth, his wife is tricked into giving him a poisoned shirt.

The pain is so intolerable, he burns himself to death.

In the arena, instead, you have a man with an inflammable tunic put on, which is then set fire to, and you watch him run around.

Do I sound too much relish in the description there?

No, you don't, Harry.

This is the part that I think.

Doing a day at the games, and even before we get to the gladiators, it really highlights how different, you know, so many Romans were and what they expected at a day at one of these events.

It is not just gladiators fighting each other.

It is so much more horrific than that at times.

And I can understand why, even for some Romans, they would leave at lunchtime, right?

Because they just couldn't stomach.

It was almost, that was just one step too far for many of them.

That's what we think.

But we're basing it on just Seneca.

Right.

Okay.

And Seneca actually says they throw the criminals to the crowd at lunchtime, and it's a terrible thing.

Actually, that has led to lots of modern online nonsense about the crowd actually ripping the condemned criminals apart themselves.

No, no, no.

He means he's thrown to their base passions.

Some may well have left.

He does talk of half-empty stands.

In the same passage, he also talks about people who go specifically and enjoy the executions.

Half empty, also half full, then.

Yeah.

What else would be happening in the crowds as these events going on?

Especially if people had in mind they knew that the big event was still to come, that the gladiators were still to come out.

Would there be people going around just telling them who was about to fight and what the betting odds were and so on would there be that active economic kind of monetary aspect going on all the time yeah i think there would although they're no bookmakers there's no parimutuelle or tote they're not turf accountants as they're called it's more like i don't know 1700s horse racing in england the bets are wagers but you know there are odds involved in the wages i think there would be a lot of people putting side bets laying bets off and just talking about what was to come because the gladiators are the big draw.

And, of course, you've probably got a programme which lists, you know, at least the big name fighters who will be on this afternoon.

It's like when I went to Nebboth and you sat through a lot of lousy bands to see the good ones at the top end of the bill.

I was going to say an analogy of it's almost like a football match where you have the halftime entertainment to kind of keep you at your seats, but you're just waiting for the teams to get back out there.

Maybe slightly different, but I know what you're talking about there, Harry.

Well, then let's go on then to it's after lunch.

The moment has arrived.

The gladiatorial bouts are about to begin.

Harry, do we have any rough idea generally how long this part of the event would last?

Did it take up the whole of the afternoon?

Was it just a few hours?

Do we know anything about that?

The timings are tricky.

I think it depends how many matching pairs of gladiators are fighting.

We do know that probably didn't last longer than 10 minutes and quarter of an hour.

So it really depends how big the show is, how many gladiatorial pairs will be exhibited.

Now this is where Hollywood always gets it very wrong is that in Hollywood it's always a mass battle.

There's dozens of guys out there all at once and it's carnage, there's blood splatter everywhere, they all get hacked to bits.

Yeah, there were mass battles, but they were incredibly rare.

And the only ones we know anything about are incredibly rare ones given by emperors when they wanted to put on a particularly spectacular show.

Usually any gladiatorial contest, there are two fighters, it's a duel, there are two referees out on the sand with them.

And it's also really not necessarily about death.

The outcome isn't always death.

The intention is they should be exhibiting skill, endurance, courage, and they're quite likely to survive.

Now, Harry, you mentioned something really interesting there, which are the two referees.

This is something you normally never, ever see, but there were, alongside the two gladiators themselves, there were these officials, dare we say, keeping an eye on every sword and spear thrust and so on.

Yeah, absolutely.

Often found in visual representations.

They have a special costume, as a referee in any sport does.

So you know, absolutely sure who they are.

In their case, it's a white tunic with a couple of probably purple or coloured stripes down the front and a big stick.

It's a stick, isn't it?

They always show the big stick.

Possibly the big stick was used to kind of encourage some of the more reluctant fighters.

But in visual imagery, the referee always appears at the key moment when one gladiator has submitted.

One of the referees steps in and uses his stick to either to symbolically hold back the victorious gladiator.

So he doesn't kill the guy before the man who submitted can appeal to the giver of the games and the crowd.

Feels a pretty dangerous job if you've just got a stick and you're against two men who've been trained in their weapons for months on end, very sharp weapons, who are also in the midst of maybe the red mist has descended after fighting for so long and you're just trying to hold them back with the stick.

Mind you, I suppose we do think that most of the referees would be ex-gladiators themselves.

Ah,

these are the sort of super veterans.

So maybe there's from the gladiatorial school where some instilled respect, just like rugby players, no no matter what you say, you have to put the word sir on the end of it when talking to the referee.

Maybe there's this kind of indrilled thing, hardwired thing.

Actually, interesting, taking that slightly to one side, we only have one anecdote from the whole Roman Empire of a gladiator ever hurting a member of the audience.

Interesting.

So, what's that story?

It's from Valerius Maximus and his collection of anecdotes.

It's set in Sicily in the theatre in Syracusa.

The story is that an equestrian, second rung down in the Roman social order, has a dream the night before gladiatorial fight that he'll get killed by a Retiarius, a net and trident fighter.

And his friends go, don't be ridiculous, come along to the games.

He sits in the front row and blimey, he sees the man from his dream and he tries to leave and his friends go, oh, it's a dream, don't be silly.

And sure enough, the Retiarius mistakenly corners and doesn't kill his opponent.

He kills the spectator.

The whole story is really dubious because the Rettiarius in this anecdote kills the spectator with a sword.

Rettiari didn't carry swords.

Well, yes.

And a sword thrust has got to be pretty bad if you can miss your opponent to actually hit someone in the crowd, considering there must have been a bit of a barrier between them as well.

Yeah, it's an unlikely anecdote, but it is the only one we have.

Gladiators don't turn on the crowd or even try to because their lives depend on the crowd at this point.

You mentioned Retiarius there.

So let's explore some of the key classes of Gladiator and what types of classes they would afford, because it's normally not same against same, is it?

No, it's not normally.

I mean, the basic division is big shield fighters, small shield fighters.

It's Marcus Aurelius in his usual miserable, joyless way in his meditations.

He goes, you know, thank goodness my tutor taught me to never be a fan of either.

along with everything else that's you know having fun sex the body anything that makes human life bearable he didn't like it it's all about duty yeah so you've got the small shield fighters the hoplomachoi they're men with a spear and a small shield then you have things like the the momelo who has a big shield and a sword most are armed with sword and shield the retiari the net and trident fighters very distinctive probably included under small shields even though they don't really have a shield at all but an armed guard.

But yes, they tend not to fight the same armor type, although they can.

And you tend to get matched pairs.

Harry, is there any evidence for the Rhino Machoy, for the Rhino fighter, that I'm sure many of us might have seen recently?

Yeah, I know you're referring to Gladiator 2, even though I haven't seen it.

No, there isn't.

There's evidence for rhinos very rarely in the Coliseum, but I believe in the movie they're riding them.

No, no.

I think they've got a big flail as well.

It's quite something, but yes, maybe that's a bit too far.

But they did have mounted gladiators, didn't they?

Or chariot riding gladiators.

They could be on special occasions yep they had both esidarii are the chariot riders and equitase mounted ones they're fairly common throughout the empire because there's a super book called artimodorus's how to be a dream diviner from the second century ad

which um has lots of people dreaming about fighting gladiators the book's in greek the audience is greek and yeah it shows the type of gladiator you dream of fighting if you're an unmarried man indicates the character of your wife And then nine types of gladiator, and eight of the nine are really bad.

So you've only got one chance of having a wife who's at all agreeable.

If it's an Esidarius, the chariot-riding gladiator, your wife will be incredibly lazy.

If it's a Retiarius, unfortunately, she'll be utterly promiscuous and wanton.

And if it's a Dimarcheus, the one who fights with a weapon in each hand, this actually means your wife will be a cruel, malicious witch.

So it's almost almost like zodiac signs, but much more infamous and with different types of gladiators.

Yeah, with much more sexism and violence.

Artemidorus is such a strange source.

I think he also, a bit of a tangent, but I think he talks about

what types of sexual position were acceptable and which weren't.

And then he kind of has a hierarchy of which are worse than others as well.

He's a very bizarre source, that man.

It's a bizarre source, but what a line into popular thinking.

He claims all these dreams of case studies he's either got from books or illiterate dream diviners of the microphones.

And essentially, in the Greek half of the Roman Empire, people were dreaming some seriously weird stuff.

I mean, feeding cheese to your penis.

Oh, and by the way, these dreams could be had by women too, which makes it even odder.

Because Sigmund Freud was all over him.

You know, hence the Oedipus complex.

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If we go back to the end of the fight, so it's been going on for, let's say, 10-15 minutes.

One of the gladiators has finally been defeated.

He's on the ground, and the referee is kind of basically saying he's out for the count and holding the other guy back.

What would happen next?

Right.

The defeated gladiator then should appeal to the giver of the games.

The giver of the games, in turn, utterly expected he will listen to the opinion of the spectators and they will call you know death or life

and then the giver of the games will do the famous turning his thumb bit and he will make that decision.

And Cafe was really vague there about the turning of the thumb because modern scholars are unanimous in their view that the modern idea of thumbs up means life, thumbs down death is the wrong way around.

However, I don't agree.

Again, Harry, the two big things, you're going against the tide here.

Well, I am, yeah, in this one, because we have two sources that talk about turning the thumb and don't say which way it turns.

The modern scholars, once you've got through the seminal scholarly article, which has a lot of weird stuff about phallic imagery in it, the argument is that thumbs up means death because the killing blow would be up into the throat.

Now, the problem with that is it just doesn't fit the archaeological evidence.

Once again, back to the gladiators gladiator's cemetery in Ephesus, almost all the people who died there were killed with a blow from above and behind downwards.

So I think the modern popular image, all right, Hollywood is right.

And in this case, the scholars are wrong.

Thumbs up did mean life.

Thumbs down does mean death.

If you get the thumbs down as a gladiator, you're expected to meet that fate.

in a calm, stoical way.

Cicero says, have you ever seen a gladiator begging for his life after that?

He doesn't answer it.

It's meant to be a rhetorical question.

The answer is meant to be no.

But I guess there is no way out at that point.

So you might as well.

Maybe that goes into that idea of the referees being, you know, people that they respected, maybe veteran gladiators and so on, to potentially give them a bit of courage right at the end if they're right next to the people that they've lived alongside for so long.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's sort of in military history terms, you know, the buddy group bonding thing.

You don't at the last moment want to appear unmanned in front of the guys, as you say, you've lived with, trained with, who've trained you.

You might as well die.

And there is always hope because you might at the last minute be spared.

Cicero, again, there's always hope out on the sand.

And so the fights happen.

Some gladiators die.

Many others who are defeated are spared.

And so it seems like the majority of gladiators would survive a day at the arena.

Do we know what would happen to them next once they're taken off the sand in the arena?

The dead go out of apparently the gate of death and they are stripped of their armor.

The winners and the spared go out of the gate of life and presumably go back to the barracks and get out of their armor, have a massage, eat a normal meal of horrible bean and barley stew.

One of the weird bits is that there was a popular idea in the Roman Empire that the blood of a gladiator could cure epilepsy.

Wow.

And their liver is very good for it.

So they're kind of harvested for blood and livers, harvested for body parts, which is very strange.

And it's clearly a real idea, which was almost certainly put into practice because most of our sources are medical writers.

And of course, as doctors, they're saying this is ridiculous.

It doesn't work.

But it shows there was something they had to argue against.

So it was real.

Once again, sorting fact from fiction, if a gladiator was coming off the arena floor, you know, he's exhausted, he's tired, he's sweating.

Could we actually imagine people running up to him straight away with a vial or two, trying to collect as much sweat as possible to sell?

I love that story.

There's a brilliant article by an American scholar.

Apparently, this story goes back to an article in Sports Illustrated about 2000 AD.

No, there is no evidence at all.

So it's a legend.

Utter legends.

It's a modern myth.

It's a modern urban myth.

Rumours do odd stuff.

The hair of a bride on her wedding day should be for good luck.

Her hair should be parted with a spear that's killed a gladiator.

But no, the sweaty aphrodisiac thing.

No, not really.

Oh, well thought.

Well thought, mister.

Now let me just go and collect that sweat off your brow.

Sweat from you.

Yeah, no, it doesn't sound quite right, does it?

The final act of the games, the gladiators are off.

Is there a last big act by the organizers of the games in the crowd, by the higher echelons of society.

Oh, indeed, there is.

I mean, this is what some people have come for: ritual gift-giving, the scattering of gifts to the crowd.

And there's even a sort of mechanical device, it's like a rope-pulley thing called the line of riches.

So, ropers can be wheeled out and with purses on, or pouches in that can be emptied, and things gifts are showered down on the spectators.

Now, when emperors do it, if it's a bad emperor, Caracalla, Caligula, a Heliogabalus, the upper-class elite writers go, they just do it because they love watching people fight, fighting over the gifts.

No, everyone does.

Every giver of games does it.

And you can get sort of things like fruit or little bits of nuts or tokens.

These are the good ones.

You take the token in later and exchange it for the gift.

You don't know what it is.

And there's actually a black market in guys buying.

taking a punt speculating you know i'll give you extra sterces for that token because it might be something really valuable, like £10 of gold, or it might be a joke, like a cabbage.

Oh, so it's always like a bit of a lottery.

A raffle almost, is it?

Yeah.

There's a wonderful mosaic from North Africa, which includes an inscription.

It's after a beast fight.

It lists the gifts given, and

this is what it's all about, the gifts to the audience.

So you've got a complete day of this rounds off the day really nicely.

Although you need to get out of the amphitheatre really fast, according to Seneca, because people fight over things and you might of course get mugged on your way out in this holiday atmosphere.

Yes, exactly.

There are also cases, isn't there, from Pompeii, you have different factions in the crowd supporting different gladiators.

And if your gladiator from your city that you come from hasn't done very well, that could also breed trouble as well when you're exchanging insults.

It's like leaving a football match today and it's been quite a tense atmosphere.

And then whilst you're walking down to the station, you might actually mingle with some away fans.

And, you know, most people are absolutely fine, but there'll be a select few who try and start something.

Yeah, absolutely.

And as you pointed out, there's a famous riot in Pompeii when the Pompeians and the people, spectators from a neighboring town, end up with a massive riot in which they kill a lot of people.

Although, weirdly, most riots...

that we know of, from spectator events in the Roman Empire, aren't gladiatorial.

It's actually at the circus, the chariot racing, or at the theatre.

Especially pantomime artists who were actually kind of more like ballet than old pantomime.

They had a lot of factionalism.

I mean, it's very hard to imagine people rioting over ballet now, but once again, the alienness of the Romans.

I think the reason that the crowds tend not to riot, be a bit better behaved at the gladiatorial shows, is the high level of security that's there.

You need troops there because, let's face it, lions and trained killers pose more of a threat than a pantomime artist.

Even Menristics as well.

You know, they could even be a bit of trouble.

Well, they can give you a nasty whacking.

Oh, I can ask so many more questions.

Only a couple more.

I will ask the gladiator freedom idea.

I mean, was it regularly the case that some gladiators who won would be given their freedom, or did it really depend on who that figure was?

Well, some certainly are given their freedom there and then, which of course is incredibly generous of the giver of the games.

He's giving away an economic asset.

And we do know that they are free at the end according to a ruling of hadrian at the end of five years they are free if they survived it kind of depends how what are your odds on survival and how often do you fight i mean if you only fight once or twice a year and you're only fighting for three years and the lethality of gladiatorial combat modern estimates vary between one in four chance of dying right out to one in 20 i of course go for a middle ground because i'm english I'll go probably one in eight.

One in eight, one in 12, one or the other.

Yeah, I mean, let's do the middle ground, absolutely, because they can't accuse you of going too far one way or the other.

Exactly.

Just boring, but that's what we like.

So you have that, the end of the games.

Let's say they don't receive their freedom.

You've either won the bout or you've lost, but then you've been spared.

I mean, what would happen next?

How long do you think before they'd be thrown back into the arena again?

That's a really tough question.

We do hear of a guy who fought during some games given by the emperor trajan he fought four times in the same games but the games lasted over a hundred days and it's you know the biggest games ever in recorded roman history it's hard to tell but there is one really good tombstone put up by the gladiator's widow Of course, technically not his widow because they're slaves and they can't legally marry, but there was claimed to be the widow, the woman of the gladiator.

And this guy had been in the gladiatorial school for four years and he fought five times, once a year.

Like modern boxers, there might be months and months between actually being in the arena.

And just eating that, you know, the same food again and again, conditioning themselves to get ready for that one day in the arena.

Yeah.

Harry, this has been absolutely fantastic.

You've been on great form.

Last but certainly not least, with these gladiatorial fights, we started by exploring the mysterious origins of them.

Is it a bit more clear-cut as to why and when they end?

Well, I think it is, but again, no, not necessarily.

The most popular scholarly reason now is money.

In the third century AD, the great crisis, the Roman Empire,

money becomes short.

Yeah, I mean, an economic answer.

I actually kind of think that may well be a factor, but I think it's really Christianity.

Christianity.

Okay, yeah.

I think it's Christianity.

Not that thou shalt not kill bit of Christianity.

It's much more that in the 300s AD, after the conversion of Constantine, against all the odds, his dynasty lasts for the best part of the next century.

They're Christians, with the exception of Julian the Apostate, they offer tax breaks and advantages to the elite who will convert to Christianity, career advancement.

And once you're a Christian member of the elite,

you show your open-handedness, your munificence in different ways.

You invest in different things and you, sure as heck, don't invest in paying for gladiatorial combat.

So I think indirectly Christianity does seal the fate of gladiatorial combat.

So thou shalt not invest in gladiators.

Yeah.

Okay, there we go.

Yeah, thou shalt spend thy money in giving alms to the poor and building churches.

Harry, this has been absolutely fascinating.

Covered so much.

Last but certainly not least, your new book, All About What We've Talked About, The Life of a Gladiator, 24 Hours at the Games.

it is called it is called those who are about to die gladiators and the roman mind harry it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today tristan thank you so much for inviting me it's been fun

well there you go there was the legendary dr harry sidebottom talking you through a day at the roman games and in the life of a gladiator who was competing at one of these great spectacles of ancient Rome.

Harry, he is so much fun, and I hope you enjoyed this episode just as much as I did recording it.

No doubt we will get Harry back on the show in the future.

In the meantime, thank you for listening to this episode.

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