A Day in the Life of a Gladiator

0:00Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far we've covered the English Reformations, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com slash subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.

0:32This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2 % daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market.

1:02Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2 % daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most.

1:37Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like. And that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability.

2:14And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood.

2:57There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org. That's redcrossblood.org.

3:24A gladiator, a lone warrior standing in the blazing sun of the arena. The roar of 50 ,000 spectators echoing around the stone seats of the Coliseum. One fighter raises his sword, the other waits for the crowd's verdict. a thumbs up or a thumbs down it's a powerful image but it's also in many ways a myth in reality many gladiators were highly trained professionals they lived in specialist schools they followed strict diets they trained under coaches and they fought in quite carefully organized matches designed as much for spectacle as for bloodshed and survival some were enslaved prisoners of war yes but others were volunteers they were chasing fame and prize money excitement sex and the possibility of glory in front of tens of thousands of spectators so what was a typical day actually like for a gladiator what do they eat how do they train and how often did they really face death in the arena and how much of what we think we know from the dramatic thumbs down executions to constant mortal combat is actually true.

4:40Today we're joined by Harry Sidebottom, author of We Who Are About To Die. We're going to step beyond the Hollywood version of the arena. We're going to enter the daily reality of the Roman gladiator. This is the real life of Rome's most famous fighters.

5:01Harry, good to have you on. Thank you very much for asking me. I mean, crowds have often paid to watch men beat each other up. And I imagine that it's been going on a long time. When do we first identify something we can say, no, those are gladiators, and what makes that special? Okay, well, the Romans identified it very precisely. It's 264 BC when six gladiators fought at the funeral of a senator. Really? But this is recorded almost two centuries later, so it may not be true. Okay. The problem is that the Romans themselves had no idea when gladiatorial combat really started, and equally they had no idea where it was from.

5:41So, I mean, Roman sources have two stories. We adopted it and adapted it, either from the south, from Campania, or from the north, Etruria. But they're two different stories. Well, that's the problem with Rome. It can't be east or west, because it's a very narrow peninsula, so it's got to come from one direction or another. Absolutely. And we might think that they're trying to distance themselves morally from this, to us, shocking, ghastly spectacle. Create a little bit of moral distance. It's an import. We didn't invent it. But I think it's actually the very reverse. It's sort of a way into a very odd, distinctive Roman mindset, which is we've conquered the world, or the known world, and from every people we've conquered, we've taken something, the good things, and then we've made them even better.

6:31It's almost a proud boast of, look, we've conquered the world. It doesn't really matter if it's the Etruscans or the Campanians, because it's now ours. And what was the... Is it pure entertainment? Or is it religious or political in its beginnings, do you think? There's certainly a religious element to kick off with. It's a funeral. And all gladiatorial contests under the Republic, which conventionally ends in 31 BC, because we have to periodize everything just to make it, I guess to make that incredible span of history comprehensible. But in the Republic, all gladiatorial shows retain at least a nominal link to a funeral.

7:09Okay. But it gets more and more nominal. Julius Caesar is celebrating his father's funeral with gladiatorial shows, I think it's some 20 or 30 years after his father died. So then it moves into what you suggested, which is the political. So Roman senators are putting on gladiatorial games, essentially to buy popularity with the populace. So it's being linked initially to funeral activities. Is there a sense of someone, a kind of blood sacrifice? Do gladiators always shed blood or is it some stylized violence? What's going on there? It's not straightforwardly a blood sacrifice. I mean, various people, in antiquity, Christians said it was.

7:52It's human sacrifice. But Christians, of course, you couldn't get a more biased source. Yeah, they hate it. Because they hate it. No pagan writer ever says that. Never says the blood sacrifice. Yes, in the back of their minds, when they're watching it, they may be thinking of, well, Patroclus' funeral games in Homer's Iliad, because all the Romans from the 2nd century BC onwards are educated in Greek as well as Latin. So obsessed with the Iliad and the Odyssey. Absolutely obsessed with it. So yeah, they may be thinking about that in the back of their minds, but there's no direct sort of cause, this is religious ceremony at all, beyond the funeral link.

8:30So you end up with men fighting each other with weapons. I mean, how is this different from wrestling and boxing and other forms of mixed martial arts sports that we're still familiar with today? Yeah, the difference you hit the nail on the head is weapons. These guys have weapons. I mean, they also had boxing, very brutal form of boxing. And they had wrestling. But this is a step beyond into sort of uber-violence in that these people are armed and they're trained to fight. I mean, they are trained professionals. They're not usually, very seldom will they be just thrown into the arena, given a weapon, thrown into the arena.

9:08These guys are trained over months, if not years, in their specialities. Now, are they trained to kill or are they trained to put on a great show? The latter. They're trained to put on a great show. And this is a very common modern misapprehension about gladiators. And the problem with gladiators we have, getting back to what they meant to the Romans, is that we all think we know what gladiators are and they're all about. And the problem there is almost everything we think we know turns out to be wrong because it comes from Hollywood. And so it's just carnage. It's just slaughterhouse. There are always mass battles and only Russell Crowe's left standing at the end.

9:46So the chances of survival are actually pretty good. You only have a one in eight chance of dying. Really? Yeah. So you could have quite a career. Gladiators retire at the end of it. It's about show. We know there were laws to gladiatorial fights. The only problem is none of our sources tell us what they were. Oh, no. That's agony. It's agony. There are laws. There must be rules like boxing. Even UFC has rules of sorts. And they must have existed. Everyone knows them, so they don't bother to tell us. As so often in history, If you're an insider writing for insiders, you don't need to spell it out.

10:22Unfortunately, we're not insiders, and it would have been so helpful if they had. So let's talk about some of those myths. One is that, so these were highly trained people. They were athletes. That cost a lot of money. You probably don't want to send them out to go and get butchered, do you? No, the economics of it is sort of arguing against having them killed. We've got two bits of evidence. From the whole of the empire, for all those centuries, is we have precisely two bits of evidence of the economics of it. And one is a price edict of Marcus Aurelius, the emperor. Apparently, prices were going through the roof, and so he, as unrealistically as any government ever fixes prices, he put a price fix on what you could spend per gladiator, depending on how good they were.

11:08And it implies you buy them. Now, our problem is that we have one other source, which is roughly contemporary with that, which says, no, you don't, you rent them. And you rent them at a fixed fee. But then, most interestingly, this is a legal text by a jurist called Gaius. If the gladiator is killed or severely wounded, you, the guy putting on the show, have to pay the person who provided you with the gladiator 50 times the rental, which suddenly becomes a serious sum of money. It's a huge amount of money. Huge amount of money. And you don't want to risk that sum of money, usually. No, that sounds like, that's like when you rent a car and say, if you blow it up, this is what you owe us.

11:51I mean, you don't usually blow up a rental car, do you? So that's sort of... I tend not to. Yeah, we try not to. Try not to. But renting's interesting. So what's a senator or later an emperor, they'll just ship a load of gladiators in to put on a big show, will they? Is that how this is beginning to work? It works very much that way for senators, or really, actually. In the Republic, the senators more often own their own trooper gladiators, but that's because they're at the top of the political primaried. No one can tell them what to do. They're senators. Then when Augustus establishes the rule of emperors, then it all changes because senators really, they're not legally debarred from owning gladiators in Rome, but they're not allowed to have gladiatorial shows.

12:36So they stopped doing it. Out in the provinces, the rich local elite still put on gladiatorial shows. They're the ones who rent them from professionals. The Nista, the loathed, reviled figure of the gladiator trainer, of course played by Oliver Reed brilliantly in the first gladiator movie, the one that was good. But the emperor himself owns them. Like almost everything in the Roman world, who is the biggest owner of land, ships, anything else, including gladiators, very soon it's the emperor. He has his own imperial schools of gladiators scattered across the empire. And you can occasionally rent from the emperor.

13:16Say you're a big man in Athens or somewhere. Let's pick a city that was doing better at the time. Ephesus. Colchester. No. Yeah, they had gladiators there, but I don't think you're going to be renting from the emperor in Colchester. I mean, the shipping from Ravenna is going to cost you a fortune. But you then rent from the procurator who runs the local, the nearest imperial school, and you'll rent the gladiators. Presumably, with this crippling, you get them killed or wounded, 50 times the rental place. Wow. So you actually, you want to look up, make sure, look out for them. Yes, you do, except you also, you're putting on the show to show how open-handed and generous you are to your local population.

14:00And if they demand the death of a gladiator, then if you don't order them to be killed, then you're looking mean. So it's a push-pull thing. Economically, no, of course you don't. So sometimes they die. Sometimes they die. Also, it's worth saying there, isn't it, that I think lots of us get confused. Lots of people did die in arenas, criminals, Christians at some stages, but that's sort of separate to the gladiator show, right? We're not here saying the Romans were lovely and no one died. There would be lots of, you'd see lots of blood spilt, but it wouldn't necessarily be the highly paid, highly trained radiators.

14:34Exactly. You'd seen a lot of blood spilt, especially at lunchtime, at midday, when the executions happened. Right. So criminals are being killed, animals are being slaughtered. You slaughter animals mainly in the morning. Okay. Morning for animals. Well, also, to be fair to the road, yes, is it? I mean, they're a much more violent world than ours. They're much more accustomed to bloodshed. In the morning, they did sometimes just exhibit exotic animals. But yes, It's mainly animals being hunted by professional hunters and slaughtered. Of course, they're more used to it. Butchers' shops, they're in the street.

15:09They're everywhere. And then lunchtime. That's when you get a weird mixed sort of bill. You get some mimes, jugglers, acrobats, and then you get the executions. Executions, they're really strange and interesting because usually if you're condemned to be killed, capital crime, then you're either crucified, which everyone knows about because of Christianity, or you're decapitated if you're a Roman citizen. Crucifixion is for slaves. Now, if you think about it, neither of these are much good for the arena. Decapitation is too quick. Nothing particularly spectacular about it. And maybe, in a sense, almost thought too painless.

15:48On the other hand, crucifixion takes too long. Guys can live for hours, if not days, on the cross. And what if they're still alive at the end of the show? It just wouldn't work. So then the Romans mainly condemned people to be killed in the shows, either being thrown to wild beasts or burnt to death. And then they elaborate on it in a, to us, absolutely hideous way, where the condemned criminal is made to act out a Greek myth. For example, Hercules. Heracles he in myth was given a poison shirt by his wife tricked into wearing it it's so painful he burns himself to death now the Romans take this and convert it into a spectacle for the arena the tunica molesta which I suppose roughly translates as the evil or insidious tunic so the condemned criminal is put in a tunic filled with inflammable stuff suffused with it and then someone sets fire to it and they literally run about burning to death.

16:52So there's plenty of brutality and violence in the arena. Huge amounts. But perhaps we've just used the name gladiators almost to describe that whole thing, whereas in fact that gladiators, what, they come on late in the day, the sun's going down, and that's the real highlight of the day out, isn't it? Absolutely. And the gladiators are the top draw. Beasts in the morning, executions at lunchtime, but the real sort of, the top billing are the gladiators, and we presume, although there's very little evidence, that the gladiators get more famous as the afternoon goes on. You don't put the famous guys on first.

17:26It's like any boxing competition now. You have the non-entities fight first. The undercard. Yeah, and then you get the big names appear at the end. Yeah, that's what the public have really come for. I'm always fascinated by the different types. Gladiators, they made them dress up and use particular weapons. There was strong fashions that run through gladiatorial combat. Well, the sort of big division is between big shield men and small shield men. We know that from Marcus Aurelius in his meditations, because Marcus Aurelius was, although often cited as a modern self-help book, which is really weird, he was a very miserable guy who disliked, well, pretty much all forms of pleasure.

18:09Very anti-sex, very anti-drink. And he thanks one of his tutors for making sure that he never became a fan of the big shields or the small shields. But within those two big categories, there are bewildering sub-varieties. So with big shields, you would have the Mermelo, a huge shield like a Scutum, rather like a Roman legionary. And then you'd have a Provocator, again with a big shield, but slightly different helmet, both with short swords. And against them, you'd have the small shield men usually. My personal favorite is the Thracian, the Thrax, with a curved sword and a little shield. or the really famous one, the Retiarius.

18:50No shield at all, just armour on the left arm and shoulder. Trident net, they have to rely on speed and skill, usually matched against a Mermelo. You could be matched against anyone. You could be matched against your own type of performer or any other. It all depended on the giver of the show because if you're giving a show, you've got to do bigger and better than the last guy who put on a show, even if it's in Colchester. but what you've also is really at a premium it's novelty you mix up the card you put something new in we shouldn't get too dogmatic about the types of Gladiator because they changed over time and I argue in my book that probably they could change within each show as the guy putting on the show thought I need something new okay well we'll slightly alter the equipment of the Mermelo to make it more interesting and then I'll pitch him against a provocateur or whoever.

19:46You need novelty. Otherwise, you'd be seeing the same all the time. And do you think they're fighting much of the time with blunt weapons or with super sharp, razor sharp weapons? It varies. Some inscriptions do boast all these fights will be with sharp weapons. So this is for real, this one? This is for real. This is a big draw in which I'm risking a lot of money. Others, they did fight with blunt weapons. Interestingly enough, we can see this in. There's a wonderful gladiatorial cemetery being excavated in Ephesus in Turkey and a lot of the skeletons have healed injuries, bone injuries from, clearly, blows from either a shield or a blunt weapon.

20:28One, indeed, rather splendidly, had survived his leg being amputated. I guess he wasn't fighting anymore, unless it was a novelty act. So they would have had the scars from previous bouts, no question. Satirist Juvenile even talks about their scars and how they're almost physically deformed by a sort of a humped shoulder, a wart on the nose from where the helmet might fit, and the scars. The scars, of course, of weapons and the scars of being whipped. Because a gladiator, the famous oath that they swore, free men would sometimes swear, when they became a gladiator, they'd have to swear to be bound, beaten, burnt, and killed with steel.

21:11So it's a terrifying oath. So they're swearing that oath because that's the price of being a gladiator. Yeah. Why would, I mean, so free men would do it, but many enslaved prisoners of war. Who's becoming gladiators? Who's swearing that oath? Well, anyone who becomes a gladiator has to swear the oath, but you're absolutely right that they're the different sources. Source number one would be prisoners of war. Source number two, criminals condemned to fight as gladiators. Interesting enough, the Romans regarded both of these as really quite nice, gentle penalties, because after all, the guys would otherwise just be killed.

21:49And this way they have a chance of survival. And then you have slaves whose owners sell them to gladiatorial schools. It's not until the reign of Hadrian in the second century AD that we hear he passes a law that before an owner can sell a slave to a gladiatorial school, he has to show the slave has done something wrong. Okay, if you step back and think about that, who's the court going to believe? Yeah. The owner or the slave? And then you factor in the fact that in a court, the slave's evidence could only be taken under torture. I think I'd have just gone quietly. Yeah. Off to my gladiatorial school in Colchester, the theme of this.

22:34But turning it round, there's also a ruling by Antoninus Pius, the next emperor, that any slave who has run away to a gladiatorial school and is discovered will be sent back to their owner, which is a horrible light on Roman slavery. Some guys thought the brutality of slavery was so horrible that they'd be better off risking their lives as gladiators. Well, and sometimes would they be? I mean, we hear about gladiators becoming celebrities and making lots of money, even though they're still technically enslaved. If they make it, what's making it look like in the Roman gladiator world? At the base level, making it enough to leave enough money or have connections, family, wife, in inverted commas, or friends who will put up a tombstone for you.

23:21Okay. Then I think you've made it. But we do hear of ones who go much further and retire from the arena and, according to the poet Horace, buy landed estates somewhere in Italy. You've got prize money when you won. Does that not go to the owner? I think 25 % of it is kept by the gladiator. You have to incentivize these guys to fight. But yeah, free men volunteer. To us, it seems weird. Why would they? Again, going back to Horace the poet, he has an answer. It's because they're really morally bad people. They're just baddies. And they're young men from well-off families who've wasted their inheritance.

23:59I think if we strip out the ancient elite morality, yeah, poverty. If you're a gladiator, you are guaranteed that you will be fed, indeed fed up, with the amount of food you're given. And you've got a roof over your head, and you have a chance of acquiring glory. You have a chance of making money. You become, if you're successful, a sex symbol, which might be a lot more appealing than working as a stevedore on a day labourer's wage. Down at the docks. Down at the docks. Speaking of the tough lifestyle, I mean, we hear about Spartacus, the gladiator, who they rise up and they escape from their school and start a rebellion.

24:41Some of these schools sound like they're pretty grim. Yes, certainly Spartacus's is. But we are also told by Plutarch, the Greek writer, that the owner of Spartacus's school was particularly cruel. He kept them chained up in cells, which kind of implies that usually they weren't. And archaeologists have found five gladiatorial schools and none of them really seem to have much security arrangements. Okay. Which does open up, well, how was security maintained? In the schools owned by the emperor, that's fairly easy, soldiers. But private schools, and presumably, I think it was probably a system like American prisoners' trustees system where the older, the veterans, maybe took over security duties and possibly when they retired from the ring, as it were.

25:32because we have a ruling of the Emperor Hadrian, which we always, historians, we're much prone to doing this, aren't we? We have one bit of evidence and we then look at that very closely and we generalize out and go, that's how it was throughout the whole Roman world. So with that in mind, I will now do that. And one ruling of the Emperor Hadrian is actually really specific. He's asked a question, what should we do with Spanish cattle rustlers who are condemned to gladiatorial schools? And he replies, they must be condemned for five years in school, but they're only in the arena for three. Now, we tend to generalise out, and that's, you know, they serve for three years if condemned.

26:13But it does show that the other two years, what are they doing then? Presumably they're trainers, they're guards, they're doing something else within the school, passing their expertise on, and maybe also guarding the new influx of people who are more likely, maybe, to try and escape. And it also implies that there's an expectation they might live. They've served their three years and then off they go. Yeah. Do another two years as a trainer or a guard and then off you go. Just pause you for a second there. Don't go away. More gladiators coming up after this. This episode is brought to you by TikTok.

26:45I never thought about the history of coffee. Yeah, make it. Yeah, drink it. Nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into sauces to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffle historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok.

27:18Learn more at TikTok.com slash discover more.

27:28Coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2 % daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay?

27:58is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2 % daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at applecard.com. Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean. instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life.

28:35That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average$21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0, depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality, licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability. And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average.

29:14See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you.

29:55The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org. That's redcrossblood.org. slash LGBTQ.

30:19Harry, their training, there are hints, aren't there? Their training was quite elite. I mean, we hear about their eating and some Roman generals actually used their training to try and improve the quality of their soldiers as well. Yeah, some Roman generals, a couple we know of, hired gladiators to come and train their legionaries because legionaries are trained pretty well, but gladiators were thought to be better at individual swordsmanship. Makes sense. Which is kind of paradoxical because on the few occasions when gladiators recruited to fight in real wars, they perform appallingly. Not a paradox for Romans because the Romans are happy with the idea that some barbarians are better individual fighters.

31:03But what they lack is disciplina. Discipline, the group unity, digging your heels in and showing real true Roman virtues, which has physical courage with a moral dimension. These guys might be ferocious and skilled, but they're not Romans. So, interesting. Okay, so sometimes they might be brought into sort of masterclasses in one-on-one fighting. Yeah. Interesting. What are they eating? Because they've got a bit of a reputation for that, haven't they? They have. Yeah, they were fed something called sagina, which translates literally as stuffing. It's a barley and bean-based stew, and it's designed to bulk them up.

31:44Does it work? Is there any science there? Yeah, I think there is some science there. Putting it in modern medical terms, it is a diet designed to build up a thick level of subcutaneous fat so the guys can take a wound in the arena, but the blade doesn't pierce a vital organ. so they can bleed in a spectacular way. Wow. So they're almost fattening them up a bit. They are literally fattening them up. Obviously not all of them. The big shield guys, yes. Probably the small shield guys in the main. Retiarius, he relies on speed and agility. Nimble, agile, yeah. I guess he's going to be a more nimble type and maybe his rations are a bit curtailed.

32:26Interesting. But yeah. And actually it's a by-product of their diet which came out from various pathologists pathologists who've worked on, archaeological pathologists who've worked on the gladiator skeletons at Ephesus, they had remarkably bad teeth compared to the general population. Bad teeth? Bad teeth, and hence bad breath. These guys, as everyone knows from having seen the movies, these guys are sex symbols, really unlikely sex symbols. They're really quite portly, They're covered in scars. The repetitive heavy training has quite often led to one shoulder and arm being more developed than the other, a bit like tennis players only more so.

33:08They have bad teeth and bad breath, and yet... There's hope for all of us. There's hope for all of us. You can become a sex symbol as a gladiator. One day. Are there examples of actual gladiators? There's one when the Colosseum opens, the Embratitis. I mean, take me through what we know about an actual bout that we think might have taken place. Right, that's a really tricky one because no ancient source walks us through step by step, one fight, let alone walks us through the 24 hours of entertainment. The closest we get is an ancient Greek novel by Lucian, the Greek satirist. It's one of, I think, 10 short novellas put together in a work called Toxaris, and it talks about two people from north of the Black Sea.

33:58It's a wonderful story, actually. They're on their way to Athens and they reach what's now Turkey, mainland Turkey, Asiatic Turkey, north shore of the Black Sea, and they get robbed. And they realize there's no point in going to the authorities because they're strangers, which I always found a really interesting insight into the supposed wonders of Roman law. No one knows us here, we won't get a fair hearing. So one of them decides to become a gladiator. And we do get a blow-by-blow account of his fight, which lasts precisely for two blows. And basically, he kills his opponent but takes a terrible wound.

34:37And that's it. And that's the nearest we get to a reportage of a fight in a Greek novel. But it's still immensely useful and interesting. And we wonder if that's representative or whether that is dramatic for the novel. Yeah, it's tough to say. And we're pretty sure that most gladiatorial bouts, well, as I said, they had laws. They had referees in the arena with them. They're always on mosaics. They're guys in white tunics with two purple stripes and a big stick, usually employed in art anyway, to restrain the victorious gladiator so the man who's wounded and submitting will have time to appeal to the giver of the games.

35:21But yeah, there were rules. We think they were short, most bouts, but that's purely based on the fact that it is very hard. Based on modern military studies, it's very hard to carry on fighting for more than 10 minutes. Exhausting. Absolutely exhausting. What about that? One thing everyone thinks they know is the emperor, thumbs up, thumbs down, the crowd shouting. Was there an element of that? Well, all modern scholars go, we've got it all wrong. And actually, you know, the guy appeals to the giver of the games. The giver of the games is then expected to listen to the crowd and be influenced by their decision.

35:56But modern scholars go, actually, thumbs up meant death, thumbs down meant life. And it's repeated in every book, modern book I read, published in the last 40 years researching my book. And I thought, why do we think this? So I traced it back to one article written in the 1970s, which turned out to be a very strange article indeed. And the only argument they really had, apart from some weird things about phallic symbolism, which I couldn't quite see the point of, was the killing blow, according to this scholar, was up into the throat, except it wasn't. In the gladiatorial skeletons at Ephesus, all the killing blows are down.

36:35They're administered from above and behind, and it's a downward stroke, either into the throat or into the back of the neck. So ancient sources tell us about the thumb and they even say the thumb turned. They don't tell which way. But I'm going to stick with the Hollywood and popular understanding. Thumbs down meant death. Thumbs up did mean life. But you have to appeal in the right way. Cicero says you never see gladiators sort of crying and begging for their lives because it'll be counterproductive. You have to submit various rituals of submission. Obviously, throw down your weapon, cast away your shield, maybe take your helmet off, maybe kneel.

37:19Well, maybe you're on the ground with an injury. Maybe embrace the knees and thighs of your opponent in a ritual gesture of submission. Oh, and put one finger in the air. Probably like a cricket umpire. And it doesn't matter which hand, despite lots of modern internet sources going, it was always the left finger. No, sometimes it was the right. I think it's more important just to make a clear gesture I've submitted. Then your fate is in the hands of the crowd and ultimately of the man giving the games. So at the end of the day, you've watched some exotic animals being slaughtered. You've watched some prisoners being slaughtered.

37:54You've watched the gladiators. They might have survived, but you've seen some kind of almost balletic, quite choreographed fighting, I suppose. It's a long day at the games. I mean, that stadium's going to be reeking of people who've been drunk. What are people doing in the stands? Well, at lunchtime, they're mainly popping out for a picnic outside because not everyone wants the executions and jugglers and stuff. Yeah, it's going to be smelly. But they did have special ways of distributing saffron mixed with water or wine, dribbling down onto the audience. Really? Which smells nice. And also, it's a symbol of luxury.

38:32The guys in the stands can't afford saffron. I mean, it's expensive then. It's ludicrously expensive now. I always think there may be an added element in this. The guys who get most of the saffron dribbled on them because they're in the front row, bottom seats, are the senatorial elite in Rome. They have to be wearing spotless white togas. And when the emperor gives games, he then showers them with a yellow dye. Now, if that's not a way of symbolizing your control, over the elite, I don't know what is. That's great. I've never heard of that. That's brilliant. What happens to the games? How do they die out?

39:09It's very hard to say. The last evidence we have is in about the 420s AD. I mean, later Christian writers come up with a really nice, persuasive, really sort of good answer to this. Constantine comes to the throne, converts to Christianity, bans gladiators. The only problem is it isn't true. And they carried on for at least another century. There are two main explanations for why it dies. One is just economics. In the second half of the 200s AD, from 250 roughly onwards, the empire is in crisis, a political-military crisis, too many emperors in too few years, lots of barbarian invasions, rampant inflation, the emperors leave Rome because they're always campaigning, and essentially the money runs out, which is one explanation, and it isn't mutually exclusive with the other.

40:00which is actually Christianity, but at one remove. Constantine comes to the throne in the early 300s. No one thought his dynasty would last another century, but it did. And with the exception of Julian the apostate, they're all Christians. They promote Christianity amongst the elite. You get political and social advancement if you go, I'm a Christian. You get tax breaks, I'm a Christian. and let's face it, most not wildly religious people would sign up to this. Once you're a professed Christian, you're not going to be putting on gladiatorial games. You're going to be showing your open-handed munificence, your generosity to the public in different ways, arms to the poor and widows and orphans, building churches.

40:49So it's kind of Christianity at one remove that kills it. And of course, the empires aren't in Rome, so they're not putting on the big shows. So why would local elites, they always copy the emperor. If the emperor's not doing it, why would you? It doesn't make you almost emperor for a day in your little local town. Well, that, okay, so that's the end of the gladiators. But I mean, they have lived on. We are obsessed with gladiators. It can't just be the movie in the early noughties. I mean, throughout the modern world, we've been obsessed with gladiators for a long time. What do you think is that draw?

41:24I honestly think it's a mixture of the dark glamour of violence. And at the same time, we can watch films about it. People could listen to us talking about it. You can get the vicarious thrill of this dark glamour of violence, but keep a moral superiority. We can carry on thinking, oh, there's terrible Romans. Weren't they bloodthirsty compared to us? Interesting. Well, Harry, thank you very much for coming on. What's your book called? It's called Those Who Are About To Die, Gladiators and the Roman Mind. Thank you for telling me all about it Thank you for having me on the podcast Thank you so much to Harry for coming onto the pod When we picture the gladiators of ancient Rome it's easy to imagine a world defined by blood and brutality and death and biceps but as we've seen today the reality is far more complex Gladiators were not simply disposable victims their matches were structured spectacles carefully designed to thrill the crowd whilst preserving valuable fighters wherever possible Some gained fame and wealth and even their freedom.

42:26Their names were written in graffiti, celebrated by fans, and remembered long after the games ended. At the same time, we shouldn't go over the top. None of this erases the harsh truth behind the arena. Gladiators still lived and fought within a brutal system built on slavery and violence and spectacle. They had skill and they had fame, but that existed alongside very real danger. And particularly before modern medicine, there was the ever-present possibility that one fight, even sustaining a minor injury, it could cost you your life. Well, thanks for listening, folks. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to follow the podcast.

43:03And if you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to like and subscribe so you won't miss any future episodes. See you in one of those. Bye-bye.

43:32This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. because Apple Card holders earn 2 % daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market.

44:03Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2 % daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch. Terms and more at AppleCard.com. Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood.

44:40There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org slash LGBTQ. That's redcrossblood.org slash LGBTQ.

45:17and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries plus new releases every week and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe.