by M. C. Bishop
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
CHApTeR 4: AT THe peAk | 49
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
CHApTeR 4: AT THe peAk | 51
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