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GLADIATORIAL GAMES

Death toll: 3.5 million¹

Rank: 28

Type: ritual killing

Broad dividing line: net and trident vs. sword and shield

Time frame: from at least 264 BCE to ca. 435 CE

Location: Roman Empire

Who usually gets the most blame: Romans

GLADIATORIAL COMBAT IS SUCH AN INCOMPREHENSIBLY ALIEN ACTIVITY that we usually turn to sports analogies in order to describe it—but just this once, let’s try not to. It’s true that some gladiators became as famous as today’s football players, but most died shamefully and anonymously. The point of the games was to celebrate the death of outcasts. A skilled fight was merely an entertaining bonus.

Gladiatorial combat began in the distant mists of time somewhere in Italy as rites to honor the dead. The Romans claimed to have picked up the practice from the neighboring Etruscan people, but there’s no other evidence for an Etruscan origin, so historians nowadays lean toward blaming another extinct Italian people, the Samnites, who did leave behind evidence of gladiatorial combat.²

Sacrificing prisoners of war and spilling their blood on the graves of great warriors was practiced worldwide. It transferred their power to the heroes and got a bit of revenge at the same time. Occasionally, however, prisoners were made to fight each other. Not only was this more entertaining than simply cutting their throats over the grave, but also it shifted the burden of killing from the priests to fellow prisoners. It allowed an ostentatious show of mercy for one lucky winner chosen by the gods to survive. Ancient murals in Mexico of prisoners fighting show that this practice developed independently outside the Mediterranean; however, only the Romans took it to such excess. In fact, the general absence of gladiatorial combat outside the Roman world suggests that it probably is not the inevitable manifestation of some sort of universal human bloodlust.

The Romans made the games an integral part of civic life, a spectacle that hardened the citizenry against the sight of blood and pain while eliminating excess prisoners of war and criminals. As a warrior people with enemies in all directions, the Romans had to become accustomed to violent death from an early age. The games taught by example how to face death with courage and dignity; they reinforced the importance of being Roman by showing hated slaves, criminals, and foreigners getting torn apart.³

Roman games were usually organized to honor the memory of a great and noble Roman. A high-ranking sponsor paid for the games and offered spectators free entry. The audience was sorted and seated by class: the imperial box, senators together in the front rows, enfranchised Roman citizens with their peers, and women in the back rows, way up at the top.

The first recorded fight was three matches among six slaves to honor Brutus Pera after a battle in 264 BCE. Over time, the size of the contests escalated. Titus Flamininus presented seventy-four matches a century later, and Julius Caesar planned 320 pairs in 65 BCE. As with anything that becomes too popular, the original purpose became diluted. As the republic declined, the games became more entertainment than ritual as ambitious politicians competed in offering flashier spectacles for the public. They hoped that an especially grand show would be remembered by the voters come election time. Julius Caesar was an expert politician and a master of pleasing the crowds. He sometimes armed fighters with outlandish weapons or gilded armor. He arranged mock battles with real bloodshed, including a reenactment of the fall of Troy. He was one of the first sponsors to reenact sea battles in artificial lakes, and the very first to display a giraffe in Rome.⁴

The arena was usually the largest building in any Roman city, and the importance of the games in Roman life was highlighted in 80 CE with the construction of the largest arena ever—the Flavian Amphitheater, or Colosseum—in Rome. The most visible and distinctive symbol of Roman magnificence, the Colosseum could seat up to sixty thousand spectators. A team of sailors hoisted a massive canopy to shade the crowd. Underground tunnels, chambers, and mechanisms positioned and lifted animals, equipment, and scenery into view. When the games were over, the Colosseum efficiently sent the audience away through seventy-six exits.

Until the Nazis built their death camps, the Colosseum may have been the smallest site of the most killings in history, with more killings per acre than any battlefield or prison. In 2007, a worldwide poll declared the Colosseum to be one of the New Seven Wonders of the World.

A Day on the Sand

The morning of a festival day usually began with interesting animals from all over the known world—crocodiles, elephants, leopards, hippos, moose, ostriches, reindeer, or rhinos—being brought into the arena to be displayed and slaughtered by dozens or hundreds. Vicious bears, bulls, lions, or wolves might be made to fight each other for the spectacle, or hunters might dispatch them for the crowd with bows and spears. Specialized performers, such as bullfighters, might fight animals face-to-face according to traditional rituals. The slaughter of animals in the arena served the extra purpose of allowing the sponsor to provide the people with a splendid feast of roasted bull, deer, or elephant. The meat was fed to the multitudes in open-air banquets after the show.⁵

Five thousand wild animals and four thousand domestic animals were killed to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum. Trajan killed eleven thousand animals to celebrate his Dacian triumph in 107 CE.⁶ The demand for more spectacles drove the most impressive species in the empire to extinction. The last European lions were killed around 100 CE. The North African elephant disappeared during the second century CE. Hyrcanian tigers, aurochs, Western wisents, and Barbary lions barely survived the Roman era in a few remote wastelands, but they never recovered and eventually went extinct in later centuries.⁷

Around midday, criminals were publicly executed, as a warning to others, often by fire or by beasts turned loose on them. Sometimes criminals were just thrown together in large batches with simple weapons and told to kill each other. At other times, Roman imagination created lively punishments that fit the crime. Some prisoners were executed by acting out some of the grislier myths: Hercules burning, Icarus falling from the sky, Hippolytus dragged by horses, Actaeon turned into a deer and ripped apart by dogs. These were considered valuable lessons on the mysterious ways of the gods.

The real show didn’t begin until the afternoon, when the skilled gladiators were brought out. Gladiators began as criminals, slaves, and prisoners of war, but they were trained in special schools, ludii, so that they would put on the best show possible. Some combat was just a matter of making one hundred Gauls fight one hundred Arabs in a mock battle, which would instruct citizen soldiers on what to expect on the frontier; however, much of the time the gladiators fought in single combat so that the audience could savor their fighting skills without distractions.

The games began with the editor checking to make sure the weapons were real. Gladiatorial armor was designed to decrease the risk of slight wounds in favor of a clean killing by protecting the arms and face while leaving the chest and neck exposed. Visored helmets hid the faces of the gladiators and kept deaths in the arena anonymous and impersonal. Fighters were outfitted like barbarians or mythical warriors in traditional styles of arms and armor such as the Samnite and the Thracian, named after enemy tribes. A secutor fought with a sword and heavy rectangular shield, his sword arm encased in an armored sleeve (manica). The trident man (retiarius) used a net to grapple with a murmillo, a gladiator who wore scaly armor and a fish-shaped helmet in a fanciful reenactment of Neptune fighting a sea monster.

When a gladiator disabled his opponent, the audience would vote on the loser’s fate from the stands by giving thumb gestures.^a If the crowd was convinced that the defeated fighter had done his best, it would often spare his life. In fact, the tombstones of successful gladiators frequently listed fight statistics that included wins, ties, and losses, so a single loss wasn’t always a career-ending calamity. It has been estimated that only 20 percent of combats resulted in death during Augustus’s era, but under some of the later emperors, 50 percent of combats resulted in death.⁸

A rare but special event was the munera sine missione, “offerings without reprieve,” a series of playoffs from which only one fighter would emerge alive. Early in the first century CE, Augustus banned the practice, considering it cruel to not allow a brave fighter the chance for a reprieve, but later emperors revived it for its dramatic appeal.

Endgame

Gladiators were trained in how to die with grace. A defeated fighter was expected to offer his neck for the final stab without a lot of embarrassing weeping, fleeing, or begging for mercy.⁹

After every fight to death, attendants disguised as underworld gods came out and made sure the dead man wasn’t faking. Mercury with a winged hat and sandals poked the loser with a hot iron to see if he flinched. Charun, an Etruscan demon with pointy ears and a vulture’s nose, whacked the forehead of the fallen with a mallet.^b Then slaves hauled the body away and sprinkled fresh sand over the pools of blood.¹⁰

Out of sight, in the arena’s morgue, attendants working under the strict eye of a supervising official stripped the valuable armor from the body and slit the dead fighter’s throat to ensure no deception. Because gladiators were slaves and criminals, their bodies were usually dumped into rubbish pits, but one of the perks of becoming a successful gladiator was the prospect of a decent burial paid for by grateful fans or sponsors, or by fighters pooling money in burial clubs.¹¹

With luck, skill, or charisma, a successful gladiator might retire from his career alive and free. Retired gladiators often became trainers or highly paid contract fighters. Others hired out as thugs, bodyguards, and enforcers.

Because Romans considered compassion a weakness, their philosophers rarely opposed the games on those grounds. Some of Cicero’s writings complain of gimmicky games he considered vulgar and sadistic, but he still approved of well-played games that illustrated traditional Roman values of strength and honor.¹² Naturally, the most unpleasant emperors (for example, Caligula and Commodus) enjoyed watching men hack each other apart and sometimes joined in the fun, but even emperors with better reputations showed proper Roman bloodlust. Emperor Claudius often ordered the loser’s helmet to be removed when the final blow was delivered so he could watch the agony on the dying man’s face. Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, disliked the fights and tried to organize games with blunted weapons and as few killings as possible.

Early Christians opposed gladiatorial fighting as a rival religious ritual that had martyred a couple of thousand Christians during the first three centuries of the Christian Era.¹³ The games lost some popularity after the empire turned Christian and compassion became a virtue. Constantine tried to abolish gladiatorial combat by edict in 325 CE, but the abolition was sporadically enforced. After the Germanic invaders dismantled the Western Roman Empire, however, there was no longer a need for Romans to toughen up by watching men die. The new barbarian kings generally put a stop to gladiatorial combat whenever they took over. The last recorded fight at the Colosseum occurred around 435 CE, although public animal fights continued there for nearly a century more.