Gladiators Read online

  had a very shallow draft so such fl ooded sites did not need to be

  very deep). It was signifi cant because this was the occasion when

  the combatants, presenting themselves to the emperor before

  the start, proclaimed ‘Hail, Emperor, those who are about to

  die salute you!’ ( ave, imperator, morituri te salutant ). Although

  it is often thought this was repeated by all gladiators before a

  Arbelas (‘hide-scraper’) or scissor (‘cutter’)

  • Armour: helmet, mail or scale

  • Special feature: semi-circular blade on a gauntlet

  • Period: Imperial

  • Common opponent: arbelas; retiarius

  48 | GLADIATORS

  contest, this is the only time the phrase was actually used, so far

  as is known. Moreover, these were condemned men, not true

  gladiators. Less often reported is Claudius’ witty response, ‘or

  not’. Unfortunately, the combatants interpreted that remark as

  a pardon and they then took some persuading to get on with it

  and take part in the fight.

  As might be expected, Nero (AD 54–68) was very keen on

  all forms of entertainment and it was he who was credited with

  introducing women gladiators into the arena. He built a wooden

  amphitheatre on the Campus Martius to replace the less-than-

  ideal amphitheatre of Statilius Taurus, which had been used up

  until then. It was impressively big (the poet Calpurnius Siculus

  wrote a breathless, awe-struck account of it) and sumptuously

  appointed, with gems adorning the arena wall and gilded

  columns. Nero even had a man buying up as much amber as

  possible between the Baltic and the Danube, which was then

  used to adorn the nets protecting the crowd from wild animals,

  stretchers for the dead bodies, as well as some of the weapons.

  The top of the arena wall was equipped with ivory rollers to

  prevent wild animals gaining purchase if they tried to scale it. As

  was later the case with the Colosseum, there were trap doors that

  allowed scenery to be moved up from below ground.

  In AD 57, Nero banned provincial governors from providing

  gladiatorial games and wild beast hunts within the provinces.

  This not only showed that some had been doing it and thereby

  attracted his attention as potential rivals, but also that he fully

  realised the importance of patronage of the games. That same

  year he held a rather spectacular munus (which included a sham

  naval battle) in his amphitheatre:

  At the gladiatorial show, which he gave in a wooden amphitheatre,

  erected in the district of the Campus Martius within the space of a

  single year, he had no one put to death, not even criminals. But he

  compelled four hundred senators and six hundred Roman knights,

  some of whom were well to do and of unblemished reputation, to

  fight in the arena. Even those who fought with the wild beasts and

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  performed the various services in the arena were of the same orders.

  He also exhibited a naval battle in salt water with sea monsters

  swimming about in it; besides pyrrhic dances by some Greek

  youths, handing each of them certificates of Roman citizenship at

  the close of his performance. (Suetonius, Nero 12.1)

  Cassius Dio provides some extra detail which not only suggests

  he was seeking to emulate Augustus with his sea battle between

  the Persians and Athenians, but that some very sophisticated

  drainage had been provided:

  He suddenly filled the place with sea water so that fishes and

  sea monsters swam about in it, and he exhibited a naval battle

  between men representing Persians and Athenians. After this he

  immediately drew off the water, dried the ground, and once more

  exhibited contests between land forces, who fought not only in

  single combat but also in large groups equally matched. (Cassius

  Dio 61.9.5)

  To provide the entertainers for his new amphitheatre, Nero

  had his own gladiatorial training school at Capua, the Ludus

  Neronianus, formerly known as the Ludus Iulianus, which had

  been set up by Julius Caesar. By one of the many ironies of

  his reign, the new amphitheatre was burnt down in the fire of

  AD 64.

  The Flavians

  During the civil wars that followed Nero’s death in AD 68, Otho

  (AD 69) raised an force of 2,000 gladiators to supplement his

  army. It subsequently switched sides to Vitellius (AD 69), before

  ending up in the service of Vespasian (AD 69–79). Unlike many

  Romans, they clearly had a keen eye for a likely winner. Whilst

  the theory of using gladiators in the field was sound, once again

  it proved to be flawed in practice:

  50 | GLADIATORS

  Against Otho’s gladiators, too, who were supposed to have

  experience and courage in close fighting, Alfenus Varus led

  up the troops called Batavians. They are the best cavalry of the

  Germans, and come from an island made by the Rhine. A few of

  the gladiators withstood these, but most of them fled towards the

  river, where they encountered cohorts of the enemy in battle array,

  and in defending themselves against these, were cut off to a man.

  (Plutarch, Otho 12.4–5)

  The inauguration of the Flavian Amphitheatre (or Colosseum)

  in AD 80 under Titus (AD 79–81) is said to have seen 100 days

  of games held in the new structure. These were funded by the

  spoils from Vespasian’s and Titus’ war in Judaea.

  The modern visitor to the Colosseum can clearly see the

  substructures or basement beneath the arena. The sources make

  it clear that the arena could be flooded and drained to allow for

  naval battles, in much the same way as Nero’s amphitheatre on

  the Campus Martius was. Many scholars find this implausible

  but it would indeed be unusual if so many sources were wrong

  about such a fundamental detail. Some suggest this means that

  the basement in the Flavian Amphitheatre was not constructed

  until later and it had a solid floor to the arena at the start,

  whilst others think the basement was an original feature. Titus’

  inauguration of the new amphitheatre evidently did include a

  sea battle but the sources are confused over whether it was in the

  Colosseum or at a separate location.

  The main contribution of Domitian (AD 81–96), himself a

  follower of the murmillones, came in the form of regulation. It

  was he who put a stop to anybody other than emperors mounting

  games in Rome and, once done, it was never revoked. Not only

  did his measures provide an imperial monopoly on garnering the

  affections of the populace through lavish displays, it also allowed

  them to rein in its more exuberant (and expensive) excesses.

  With all the magnificence of Imperial games being help in

  Rome, it is easy to forget that smaller towns with arenas carried on

  providing their own games for their inhabitants. An inscription

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  Colosseum remains (photo by Danbu14)

  from Allifae (Italy) shows how a local magistrate provided

  30 pairs of gladiators as well as a hunt featuring an
imals from

  Africa, during the latter part of the 1st century AD. Th is duovir ,

  Lucius Fadius Pierus, then held another munus a few months

  later with the aid of a 13,000 sesterce grant from the town

  council, with another 21 pairs of gladiators and accompanying

  hunt. Naturally, the provincial munera best known to us are

  those at Pompeii, where we have so much information about the

  entertainment off ered to its inhabitants and it is easy to see how

  these events would have been mirrored across the empire.

  Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian

  Th e next emperor, Nerva (AD 96–98), was barely in offi ce long

  enough to appoint his successor, Ulpius Traianus. Trajan (AD

  98–117) was one of Rome’s great warrior emperors. His campaigns

  in Dacia (roughly modern Romania) and Mesopotamia (the region

  52 | GLADIATORS

  of Syria and Iraq between the Euphrates and the Tigris) became

  legendary for his successes and they generated both wealth and

  captives in large numbers. This inevitably provided the pick

  of new recruits for the gladiatorial schools, notably the Ludus

  Dacicus. At the conclusion of the Dacian Wars, he funded games

  in AD 107 that lasted 123 days. During these games, according to

  the historian Cassius Dio, 10,000 gladiators fought and 11,000

  animals were killed. There was almost certainly an element of

  exaggeration here, since it seems unlikely that there were that

  many gladiators in the entire empire, but if the figure included

  captives forced to fight each other and criminals publicly executed

  in the arena, as often happened at such events, the number seems

  more reasonable. Moreover, since gladiators tended to fight in

  pairs, it was physically impossible to mount 5,000 combats in 123

  days and fit in the mass slaughter of assorted interesting animals.

  Whatever the numbers, an inscription from Rome preserves the

  names of three of the men who participated in this event:

  M. Antonius Exochus, a Thracian from Alexandria, fought as a tiro

  against Araxes the imperial slave, on the second day of the games

  for the triumph of the deified Trajan in Rome, dismissed standing.

  In Rome, on the ninth day of the same games, he fought Fimbria,

  a free man who had fought nine times; Fimbria was dismissed. In

  Rome, at the same games ... ( CIL VI, 10194)

  Two years later, in 109, he provided new games in honour of

  the inauguration of the Baths of Trajan, set on the hillside next

  to the Colosseum and overlying the reviled Golden House of

  Nero. These games provided 117 days of entertainment spread

  over five months, between June and the end of October. In

  that time, 8,000 gladiators and over 10,000 wild animals were

  supplied to please the audience. Trajan was one of the last to

  hold a naumachia, digging a new basin in what is now Vatican

  City, near Castel Sant’Angelo, as part of the 109 extravaganza,

  although it was less than one fifth of the size of Augustus’

  basin.

  CHApTeR 4: AT THe peAk | 53

  Another such round of games was held by Trajan in AD 113,

  this time with 2,000 gladiators in combat over a period of four

  months. In his Panegyric, written for Trajan, Pliny the Younger

  thought he detected a purpose behind all this ceremonial death,

  seeing the witnessing of ‘glorious wounds and contempt of

  death’ as a way of enthusing the Roman population for war. This

  looks like a justification after the fact, but the same notion is

  found again later.

  Although the funerary origins of gladiatorial games had been

  superseded by entertainment and politics, it had not been

  completely forgotten, as Pliny attests when writing to his friend

  Maximus:

  You did perfectly right in promising a gladiatorial combat to our

  good friends the citizens of Verona, who have long loved, looked

  up to, and honoured you; while it was from that city too you

  received that amiable object of your most tender affection, your

  late excellent wife. And since you owed some monument or public

  representation to her memory, what other spectacle could you

  have exhibited more appropriate to the occasion? Besides, you

  were so unanimously pressed to do so that to have refused would

  have looked more like hardness than resolution. The readiness

  too with which you granted their petition, and the magnificent

  manner in which you performed it, is very much to your honour;

  for a greatness of soul is seen in these smaller instances, as well as

  in matters of higher moment. I wish the African panthers, which

  you had largely provided for this purpose, had arrived on the day

  appointed, but though they were delayed by the stormy weather,

  the obligation to you is equally the same, since it was not your fault

  that they were not exhibited. (Pliny, Letters 6.34)

  Hadrian (AD 117–38), like Trajan, was a military man through

  and through and had commanded legions and even provincial

  armies before he became emperor. His biographer noted that he

  provided six successive days of gladiatorial combat at one point,

  as well as 1,000 animals in the arena on his birthday. It was also

  recorded that he knew how to use gladiatorial weapons and liked

  54 | GLADIATORS

  to attend gladiatorial shows, although these facts did not attract

  the same opprobrium that was later the case for Commodus,

  probably because (unlike the latter) he was not performing

  publicly.

  The Antonines

  Seen by Gibbon as the pinnacle of sophistication for Roman

  civilisation, the Antonine Age witnessed no real diminution

  in the fondness for gladiators. Antoninus Pius (AD 138–61),

  however, established a maximum cost for expenditure when

  mounting gladiatorial games, although that said more about

  his keeping a careful eye on the spending than it did about his

  attitude to gladiatorial performances. He was by no means averse

  to mounting his own games:

  He held games at which he displayed elephants and the animals

  called corocottae [possibly hyenas] and tigers and rhinoceroses,

  even crocodiles and hippopotami, in short, all the animals of the

  whole earth; and he presented at a single performance as many

  as a hundred lions together with tigers. ( Historia Augusta, Life of

  Antoninus Pius 10.9)

  Marcus Aurelius (AD 161–80) was uninterested in gladiators,

  rather than actively disliking them, but his brother and co-ruler,

  Lucius Verus (AD 161–9), liked both chariot racing and

  gladiatorial combat. His coming of age at 15 was marked in AD

  145 by his adoptive father, the Emperor Antoninus Pius, putting

  on a games at which he sat between his brother and the emperor.

  Later, he was to entertain guests at his villa outside Rome with

  dinner-party gladiatorial matches, much as had been done in the

  good old days. His biographer, a rich source of nonsense and

  tittle-tattle, boasted that he even gave gladiators away to guests.

  At one point during his Marcomannic Wars north of the

  Danube, Marcus Aurelius raised a band of gladiators to
assist

  CHApTeR 4: AT THe peAk | 55

  his campaign, naming them the Obsequentes (‘The Compliant

  Ones’), a measure of how serious the situation had become.

  In AD 177, concern over the size of the various forms of games

  led to the introduction of a law limiting the spending allowed:

  the senatus consultum De Pretiis Gladiatorum Minuendiis. There

  had apparently been attempts at some sort of limit under

  Augustus and Hadrian, but Marcus Aurelius implemented a

  complex system to make it work by ranking the relative costs of

  gladiators. Interestingly, they were not valued (and thus ranked)

  by type but rather by value, so a top level retiarius was worth

  the same as a top level thraex or secutor and so on. This enabled

  the overall cost of any munus to be worked out. This ranking of

  gladiators may in fact have been equated with the palus system

  within any gladiatorial school ( primus palus, secundus palus, etc).

  Marcus Aurelius’ son, Commodus (AD 177–92), took his love

  of all things gladiatorial so far that he even liked to join in. His

  biographer said he ‘lived with gladiators’ and noted that

  He fought in the arena with foils, but sometimes, with his

  chamberlains acting as gladiators, with sharpened swords. ( Historia

  Augusta, Commodus 5.5)

  It was clearly slightly more than a hobby for him and verged on

  a dangerous obsession:

  He engaged in gladiatorial combats, and accepted the names usually

  given to gladiators with as much pleasure as if he had been granted

  triumphal decorations. He regularly took part in the spectacles,

  and as often as he did so, ordered the fact to be inscribed in the

  public records. It is said that he engaged in gladiatorial bouts seven

  hundred and thirty-five times.... It is related in records that he

  fought 365 gladiatorial combats in his father’s reign. Afterwards, by

  vanquishing or slaying retiarii, he won enough gladiatorial crowns

  to bring the number up to a thousand. He also killed with his own

  hand thousands of wild beasts of all kinds, even elephants. And he

  frequently did these things before the eyes of the Roman people.

  ( Historia Augusta, Commodus 11.10–12.12)

  56 | GLADIATORS

  Again, as with Lucius Verus, much of this may have been fiction

  later attached to a deeply unpopular emperor, but there may still