Roman gladiators were idolized on souvenir lamps yet legally branded with infamia, grouped with pimps and executioners. The games began as a funeral duty called a munus. Around 264 BC Decimus Junius Brutus Scaeva honored his dead father by having three pairs of enslaved men fight in a cattle market, and after the disaster at Cannae the games grew as displays of Roman resolve. Politicians then turned them into campaign spectacles. In 65 BC Julius Caesar honored a father dead for 20 years with 320 pairs in silver armor, prompting the Senate to cap private gladiator troupes. Lanistae ran the supply business through schools such as the Ludus Magnus beside the Colosseum, where recruits swore the sacramentum to be burned, bound, beaten and killed by the sword.
Gladiators were costly assets. Galen began his career treating them at Pergamum, and a sponsor who lost a fighter could owe up to 50 times the rental fee. Bouts lasted 10 to 15 minutes, with matched styles such as the retiarius against the secutor, referees called summa rudis, water organ music and surrender by a raised finger. Up to half of all gladiators were paid volunteers. Women fought for Nero and Domitian until Septimius Severus banned them around 200 AD. Commodus fought in the arena himself. Costs and Christian objections wore the games down until Constantine’s partial ban in 325 and Honorius’s end of them around 404.
- Romans mocked gladiators as hordearii, barley eaters, and bone chemistry confirms a diet of grains and beans plus a plant ash tonic.
- The carbohydrate diet built a fat layer that bled dramatically while shielding muscles and vessels.
- Left-handed fighters were specially advertised on the walls of Pompeii.
- Commodus waved a decapitated ostrich head at the senators watching him.
- Juvenal mocked a senator’s wife, Eppia, who left her family for a scarred, aging gladiator named Sergius.
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