 Hey, this is Darius, R.A. of Ancient Rome Live. Today, we're gonna talk about the Gladiator, the Gladiator in Rome specifically. And this is part of our ongoing webinar series on Sundays. And everything that we do ends up on our YouTube channel, but there's even more information per lecture with bibliography with more of a write-up on the Ancient Rome Live org platforms. So do check it out because we're really enhancing it this summer and putting a lot of content as well, new videos every week. You can support us. Go right to AncientRomeLive.org slash donate, share it with your organizations, your colleagues, and if you're interested in setting up any kind of special relationship with your organization, we're happy to have a conversation. So today, again, Gladiator. And what's behind me is the famous Borghese Mosea. I thought we'd just jump forward here in time to about the middle of the 4th century AD. This is something found in about 1834. And it's on the Via Castellina, a property that's excavated. Of course, you find something magnificent like this chopped up into pieces in transfer to the Galleria Borghese. And it was originally about 28 meters in length. And what we see here are a bunch of gladiators and different kinds of breasts. And we also see their names. So immediately, we don't need just the movie Gladiator to know that gladiators became famous and become superstars. Here are some superstars from the middle of the 4th century AD. And we can see some names that stick out. So we have Atelomonius, Cupido, and Cupido is dead, because you have that theta right there and that circle with a line through it. And the guy killing him, the letter phones. And then we have, let's see over here, I'm blocking Arius and below. And then off on the side there, Meliagra, which might be Meliagra. That's gonna be an abbreviation. So here are some people, slaves, trained to be killers who are so important enough that they are recorded in a rich person's private estate. And that says already a lot about who the gladiator was. How did he come on? How did he train? What was the life of a gladiator? That's what we're talking about today. And we'll get into it in many different ways. For example, these guys are professional trained fighters. That's the whole point of being a gladiator person trained to use a gladius as sword. We know there for the most part, people that have been enslaved. So that is people that are conquered in war and then they're sold off and acquired by someone eventually trained to fight for entertainment. They're also people that are condemned criminals. So you've lost your right of being a citizen. And now you are without that status, you are property and you're sold off and you are in this case here forced to go into a school to learn how to fight to then ultimately perform for someone's entertainment is the two main ways. How long did they last? How long were you? And that's a big question. We look at some of these excavated gladiator grave sites. We got a lot of estimates, a lot of scholarship, a lot of ink has been spilled. And it's a really great open-ended question. And it goes from mortality rate in the arena, one in 10 down to one in five. And no matter what though, they're not great odds. And considering the fact that you're fighting maybe 10 times in a year, you really are staring dead in the face every time. That's what it really seems. And you have a lot of scholars that have really addressed this issue and no one can really do it with, I think any satisfactory conclusion because just like so much in archeology, we have small samples here and there. We don't have enough of a sense really of getting realistic numbers. But it is definitely something much more in the face of danger than any sport I think that we have today. I can think of stunt drivers and you can think of race car drivers and you can think of the cage fighting and wrestling and football players getting concussions and whatnot but everything is gonna pale in the face of people fighting with sharp swords and other devices. So again, the majority of people don't have a choice. They've been forced into this line of work as it were. Although we do know that on some occasions freed people do go and fight. They do this largely to gain a fortune or pay off their debt because if you imagine all the betting that surrounds this kind of activity in the amount of price they will fetch on a high level stage, something in Rome versus off in the provinces then a pretty penny you could make of course you had to live to survive to enjoy it. And then of course we do have on occasion the citation of women also fighting as gladiators. So you can think of them appearing not, it's not that they're not commonplace but it's more of the novelty. As would be an ambidextrous gladiator or a lefty and a left-handed gladiator. So there are different ways in which as we move forward in here we'll see that there's this interest in maintaining the interest and showing you something that you hadn't seen before. Okay, so we talked about people were slaves, enslaved people, people whose village, whose province, whose kingdom or whatnot lost to the Romans and then a portion of the population was sold off to slavery and some of those people, right, condemned the mines, condemned to the fields could also be forced to learn the ways of the gladiator and train. So there were gladiator schools and we'll get to that as well. Okay, let's just back up a little bit. What did they eat? How did these guys, look at these guys, these big buff men, right, looking very dangerous. So we have some ancient sources. We have plenty of the elder talking about being in a barling match. Where's that big steak diet you might be asking, right? Where's all that meat? But it seems that with recent research and looking at the sources and so forth, a lot of these guys, and actually the physician Galen, a very famous physician, the most famous physician from antiquity, starts off as a doctor, a physician for gladiators in Pergamon. He talks about, he's not in love with this kind of diet because it makes them kind of flabby. So you think about the flabbiness of that layer of fat that could come with that kind of diet would be that protective fatty layer, protecting the vital organs. That's kind of standard thing when we're talking about gladiators about what they ate and how they train and so forth. Not necessarily always what you see in the movies. And the second thing that came out recently, more recently, is the issue that they had a kind of, let's call it ancient Gatorade, which is charred plants rich in calcium, great for strengthening your bones. And we have that kind of evidence. Again, in a clinic of the elder saying, if you want to be healthy, try this drink with a lot of plant ash. It's great for you. And you can see how gladiators as well are replenished after fighting. So it's kind of like this pick me up kind of thing, but essentially it's giving you components in your diet and your regime that help promote calcium growth. So it'd be like drinking a glass of milk or something. So that's something to consider when we're thinking about these gladiators, what they're eating, not just how they're training. Let's pop in here for some questions would the estate owner have owned those gladiators? That's a great question. Yes, that's within their own possibility. Why did gladiators not continue the profession after the end of state sponsorship? And we'll get to that, but definitely it is ultimately something in the Christian era, it takes a while for this to happen, but by the beginning of the fifth century, that's when you really have real pushback about why should we have slaves fighting. So slavery is allowed for a very long time. Beyond Christianity being legalized under Constantine, but eventually it's this push from the Christian component society, the clerics saying, hey, I don't think it's as good to do to our fellow man. And that really leads the end of having men fighting against men to the death. And the final step in the sixth century is finally to eliminate the other great spectacle in the amphitheaters, which is man fighting against wild animals. So obviously no one was there in the fifth and sixth centuries for a long time saying, oh, the poor animals. First it was man against man, no good. Still kill the animals and then finally, no, we're not gonna do that either. Was it always to the death could they gain the freedom? Absolutely, it was not always to the death and they could, yes indeed, gain their freedom. Just as we talked about the enslaved peoples of the Roman Empire just the other week, again, they too, the Pruculium there, stipend they could also buy their freedom. Betany Hughes, recent program, top 10 that Pompeii talked about them being stew diet. Yep, and how fat-protected muscles and showed modern equivalent being made absolutely tasty. I'm not super thrilled at living off of something like that, but, you know, the Romans think about when we're talking about experimenting, thinking about when they're implementing something like the creation of the Pantheon. And we look at it today and say, wow, they're really exaggerated over the top. Those walls are so thick, they didn't need to be that thick to support the weight of the dome, but it's that exaggeration that led to the success of a structure that's 1900 years old. So too, we can look at something like the diet, think about how they're looking at what the gladiator, this investment over hundreds and hundreds of years. This is better, this is not better, we gave them this, this is a work. So just, again, I think when we look at these things and people are writing about on ancient times, when we're doing discoveries and we're studying the bones of the deceased and so on, there's really a lot of experimentation and evolution of a practice in the ancient Roman world and we kind of see those results. Okay, so we're just gonna zip through a number of things here. We talked about who the gladiators were, some examples we can talk about. The key ones were the man wearing a fish on his helmet, a fish helmet, that's the murmur alone and we have the Sam Knight and we'll talk a little bit more about them, but essentially it's a fighting style, they're heavily armed and have a long shield. You can see a big long shield up above my head and the Thracian has a round shield and a curved sword and then the Ritiaris is lightly armed and has a trident and you can actually see the trident right behind me as well. It looks like it will be the deceased right there, Ritiaris. So we have four main kinds and of course you've got the guys on the horseback and the guys on the chariot, the Isidari and they'll fight with different kinds of props and be forced to be in scenarios of history and mythology and so forth that add to a lot of the pageantry, but essentially it's really about a man fighting against another man. Don't think of it as football teams at all, think about it as one, predominantly one on one. Okay, where's the idea coming from? Scenes that it comes from the Etruscans, we have artwork in the sixth century that show people fighting or being put to death on the occasion of the death of someone. So funerary games and Nicholas of Damascus in the first century tells us that it's an Etruscan concept. We have Etruscan art, we have great videos on the Etruscan museum that you can look at on each one of them lives and check those out and seems to verify that, that there's a Truscan concept involved around the funerals of people and then we were told by Livy that a lot of the games, some of the earlier games are surrounding the victory against the Sammites of Sammite Wars. The Sammites were a brutal opponent of the Romans to conquer much of the peninsula of Italy and ultimately you round a lot of them up and put them to fight as entertainment for you. And when we jump into Rome and we jump into what's really happening in the city, you go to 264 BC for the first games that are recorded in the Forum Boarum and they are funerary games of Brutus Perra and then we jump to 216. And that's only three pairs of gladiators fighting and 216 BC is the funeral of Marcus Amidus Lepidus. 22 of pairs will fight and then 200 BC, Marcus Valerius Lavinius, 25 pairs will fight and 200 BC of progression here. 200 BC, funeral Pobius Likinius, 60 pairs will fight. Titus Laminius and his dad's funeral has 74 gladiators fighting over three days. It just gets to crescendo and then we get a big part of more and those are all what? Those are private individuals and they've got these obligations or duties, duties to be met, the moon or out. And they're gonna conduct them largely during the funeral of somebody, but over time by 105 BC, it's picking up and surrounding Ludi state games, festivals honoring the gods. So it's becoming something a little more official, but for the most part, it's private individuals, not officials and the real tie is gonna be with someone dead. The new add-on can be the occasional victory or triumph, but what happens is, this is the interesting thing, this is kind of like the kicker, is that when you start to honor somebody, when you're getting into the end of the republic, you can honor them, but it doesn't have to be exactly at the time of the funeral. It can be put off and it becomes implemented when it's convenient for you, when you are running for political office, when you're trying to get elected, when you're trying to get people to follow your lead and a famous case of all, most famous case of Julius Caesar. So he's bowing these games in 65, but he can't ultimately, and we don't know what kind of game exactly he was intended for his aunt, but he does ultimately have 320 pairs fighting in 45 BC to honor his daughter who had died eight years before. So again, that just really nails the lid on the coffin here, that there really was a lot of leeway in which you could implement those mooner, these obligations, I mean, I got them, poor soul of Julia waiting to be honored as it were eight years later. But let's remember, let's remember, there are a lot of slave revolts between 170, the most famous of course, Spartacus and Capua, and breaking out of a slave school for gladiators called Lutus. And let's face it that at the end of the Republic, we're really getting into about 120 and thereafter, so serious are these gladiator schools that they are becoming the blueprint from which the military, the state, the soldier is now being trained. It's not the other way around. It's not that the military school for training the Roman citizens in the army is so amazing. It's adopted by the gladiator schools. Actually, it's the entrepreneurs as it were. It's the guys that are trying to really in a cutthroat competition of having the best trained gladiators for these performances, they up the game as it were. And the military says, that's actually very good. And we know what they're doing there. They're practicing with weighted wooden swords. They have that kind of dummy, they have obstacle courses, they're doing calisthenics and so forth. This kind of boot camp is then going to be adopted. No one ever forgets the danger of the gladiators, the danger exhibited by Spartacus. We can move forward in time and we can think about Augustus and he is passing some limitations. So he says the preters, it only hold two games a year with maximum 120 participants at a time. It's further restricted by Tiberius. And when we get down to the mission, the mission who is the younger son of the Spasian who built the Colosseum, he's saying the only people that can have gladiator games in Rome, only Emperor. So it's really getting restricted and outside of the provinces. If you want to hold gladiatorial games, you need official approval. So this is something that is the ultimate, is the ultimate of display. And so you're going to regulate and you're going to monitor because whoever's going to fund this stuff and it ain't cheap, they want to be recognized, they want to be as somebody in society. So they're always a potential danger, let's say within the given social order. And when do they have these games? The big annual games really focused on December end of year and it's looking at the kind of end of year, beginning of a new one. And it's also about funerary games and remembering the dead. And of course you have the Saturnalia that's also taking place. And it really is a great turning of the page. So let's kind of clean out house and start anew. Of course, there can also be the funerary occasions, there can be the state triumph, but it really isn't something ever like a football schedule. And it's something that really depends upon victories and anniversaries of the emperors, when they want to hold games and of course December is the big one of the year. So the inauguration of the Colosseum was huge under Titus, with 9,000 animals killed and 10,000 gladiators fighting. But the most of all, the most massive gladiator spectacles ever under Trajan for his Dacian triumph in 107,000, 10,000 gladiators and 11,000 animals were killed. So we spent quite a bit of time talking about man against man, but of course man against animal is a whole other conversation, the bestiarehi. And it's a big deal, very exciting. And when we think of the four gladiator schools surrounding the Colosseum, we have the Lutus Madness, the Dacian school, the Gallic school and the Matutinas Lutus. So that is the morning show. So you have the bestiarehi, finding the wild animals in the morning. Noontime is execution of criminals and the gladiators that made events after lunch. So you have the trainers, the Lannista. You have the gladiator schools. You have such a popular event that people go to the Lutus Madness. It's large enough to hold several thousand people to watch kind of spring training and to see these superstars practice. And then you go right across the street or through the tunnel into the Colosseum to watch it all. Now, before any match, there's a pompa, which is a big kind of parade through the city. So it's kind of like a tic-a-tac parade for these guys that are facing death. And of course, when they go on the arena, there is going to be a, there's going to be always a referee, the Sumerutus. And it not long sticks to kind of direct and break up the fighting and so forth. So how long does it last? Maybe 10, 15, 20 minutes, something like that. They don't last very long because they're wearing a lot of heavy armor and they're joining themselves a lot. And then what happens when the event is over? So you've either outright killed somebody or you can acknowledge that you've lost by raising a finger, and then the editor, the person who's funding the games, the private individual decides whether or not they're put to death. Of course, the crowd is in it as well. And there's the issue of, is there going to be an opportunity of missio? Is there going to be an opportunity to spare the life of the gladiator or not? And as we move forward in the period of time, there's more of this advertisement for, hey, there's not going to be any missio, scene ain't missio without missio. So you really, when the guy loses, he's going to die. So you're upping the ante over and over and over again. And of course, when the editor says, yes, this guy is going to die, it's the famous Pauli Giverso, the turn of thumb, and of course in the movies, we all see this, but it doesn't seem to be the case in Latin. And in ancient times, that's how the movies are given to us, but they definitely turn the thumb in some way it's turned. So we have some conjecture about that, maybe even like this, right, the jubilatio. So we're not exactly sure. And of course, there's entertainment to the max, music is playing a lot. So we even have some great mosaics that show there's music accompaniment kind of crescendoing as the battle moves forward and so forth. So there's a lot of really interesting, a lot of interesting details that we get from mosaics from the ancient sources themselves from funerary release of gladiators and so forth. Now, again, there are famous amperes that participate in these games, Coligula Titus, maybe even Hadrian, Lucius Verus, Catacannala, and of course, our buddy, Commodus, is going to be like a gladiator in the Coliseum itself, killing bears, decapitating ostriches and stuff like that, not killed by Russell Crowe and gladiator, but he is strangled by one of his gladiator friends in the bands in his villa, either on the Via Appia, the Via de Quintiri, or on the Palatine Hill, and essentially, it is a bad way to go. So you probably don't want to be frequenting and hanging out with your buddy gladiators because they can be very deadly, but that's what Commodus apparently did. And when there's an all-end again, we said in 4.23, that's pretty much the end of the gladiator game, the end of the Pagan Munara in Rome. Thank you very much, Theodosius. And it really is, and the Norris, it is a push, it is a struggle, but ultimately, the games are finished and the gladiator is no more. Was the average gladiator better trained fighter than a legionary? That is an absolutely great question, but let's definitely say that ultimately, their fighting preparation and training was going to be very similar. Of course, we're talking about the big bolting up of the gladiator versus, I could think about, the marching and the running and the horseback riding that the legionary does. I probably want to think that the legionary guy is in better shape. Electrolyte Drink was diluted vinegar. Was that reserved for soldiers in the ashrink for gladiators or the interchange or even mixed? Yeah, I've heard of both as well, exactly. The gladiator, to say it, collection of the little board of gaze is great. Why are there so many in that one side? What's the history of the collection? Pretty much they're all found of one time in 1834 from that one property in the Casalina and sliced up and brought into Galeria Borghese. I remember in the 19th century then, in 1834, so much had been robbed out by Napoleon. So this is like a late addition to kind of replenish the Galeria Borghese and eventually a lot of the work spark, you know, come back. Yeah, they've got their underwear. You can see what we're really focusing on right now in these mosaics is a lot of armor, shoulder armor, and shin greaves and stuff like that. But a lot of the body is exposed, so there will be blood. Yeah, so yeah, this whole Yugo Latio thing is one other idea with that. Yes, I note them up, them down, per se. We don't think, we know it's turned, but we do not think, right? It's like in the movies. That's just something that's made up. But, you know, hey, that's Hollywood. And of course, from these great movies, Spartacus, Gladiator and so forth, we can be entertained and we can be engaged. And, you know, they're thinking of making a Hollywood movie of talking to your contemporary audience as well to make it resonate. And that cuts both ways to be as accurate as possible and not. And that's the reality we get from movies, but a lot of them are great, even if they're not the most accurate. So thank you guys very much for joining me. It's been great to have you here today in Rome Do check out ancientromelive.org. We've got videos dropping every week. We're filling in ancient Rome live content as well on the website. And you'll see more of that in the coming months. And do take a look at Darius R.A. Diggs and my YouTube channel. Today, happy Father's Day again. I was inside the pantheon for the solstice and it was a beautiful view. I hope you guys enjoy what we're offering you. So many different views on Rome. I don't think honestly anyone else is anywhere near what we're doing for you with the webinars and with what we're sharing on social media and then the videos, the ancient Rome live platform. We do hope you can share this and we hope you continue to share your enthusiasm. Thanks a lot.