by M. C. Bishop
of the gladiators.
family
Apart from their familia gladiatoria, some gladiators had time
to have their own families. Once they had retired and gained
their freedom, they were of course able to do this, although it is
possible that some were able to develop long-term relationships
whilst still in service. The presence of a baby in a basket in one
of the rooms of the quadriporticus might be interpreted as an
indication that families were present there too. However, the
unusual circumstances surrounding the eruption of Vesuvius,
with people fleeing all over the city, provides no guarantees that
bodies were found where they normally lived.
A number of inscriptions record family members of gladiators.
Some are coy about the nature of the relationship:
For the immortal shades, Marcus Ulpius Felix, retired murmillo,
lived 45 years, member of the Tungrian nation, Ulpia Syntyche,
freedwoman, and son Justus, set this up for her sweetest, well
deserved. ( CIL VI, 10177)
Others were more open:
For the immortal shades, for Publicia Aromata, most loved wife,
Albanus, a retired eques from the Ludus Magnus, she lived 22
years 5 months and 8 days, 3 feet in width by 8 feet in length
( CIL VI, 10167)
Both of these men were described as retired from service. Even
in the case of memorials which do not explicitly mention that a
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Gladiator graffiti from Pompeii (drawing by M.C. Bishop)
gladiator was retired it is not possible to be sure that they were
married whilst in service, or even that the term ‘wife’ or ‘husband’
was used in anything other than an unofficial capacity:
For the immortal shades, Glaucus, from Mutina, fought in seven
combats, killed in the eighth, lived 23 years and 5 days, Aurelia
and his friends (set this up) for a deserving husband. I advise you
to follow your own star, not to trust Nemesis, and be deceived as I
was. Hail and farewell. ( CIL V, 3466)
One gladiator, commemorated on a stone from Milan and
dead whilst still in service, had been with his wife, presumably
as fellow slaves, since the age of 15 and left a five-month-old
daughter:
To the immortal shades, for Urbicus, a secutor, ranked primus palus,
from Florentia, fought 13 times and lived 22 years, his daughter
Olympias, whom he left aged 5 months, and Fortunensis, his
daughter’s (slave?), and his wife [ uxsor] Lauricia (set this up) for her
well-deserving husband, with whom she lived for 7 years. I warn
you: kill whomever you defeat. His followers will take care of his
shade. ( CIL V, 5933)
There is, within this sad text, a hidden tale: the warning suggests
that one of those opponents Urbicus defeated during his career
fought him again and did not repay the debt. There are many
more pathetic epitaphs like this, but wives and lovers must
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Gladiator barracks at Pompeii (photo by M. C. Bishop)
always have known the risks involved in being a gladiator and
that the odds were not good.
fans
Gladiators were every bit as popular as modern sports stars.
Specific named warriors were celebrated on a variety of media.
A particular type of mould-blown glass cup found in the north-
western provinces of the Empire appears to celebrate a troupe of
gladiators. With a frieze running round the cup showing pairs
of gladiators, each with their name above them – Spiculus and
Columbus, Calamus and Hories, Petraites and Prudens, and
Proculus and Cocumbus – this was obviously the ultimate piece of
merchandising. In Britain, examples of this type of vessel are known
from Colchester, Dorchester, Gloucester, Leicester, London and
Wroxeter and have been dated to the middle of the 1st century AD.
Graffiti from Pompeii praise particular gladiators by name, whilst
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detailed sketches of favourite fights are known, incorporating brief
summaries of the results. Names were accompanied by letters: V
stood for victor (winner, often accompanied by a Roman numeral
denoting the number of successful combats), M for missus (lost
but spared), whilst P meant periit (died) and L libet (freed). Even
large-scale mosaics (like that from the Villa Borghese in Rome)
name individual gladiators, possibly the favourites of whoever
commissioned the pavement in the first place. Other depictions
of gladiators on lamps and on tableware such as samian may have
been bought as souvenirs.
Passions were often high at the games and in AD 62 a serious
riot broke out at Pompeii between the inhabitants of the town
and visitors from Nuceria. The Roman historian Tacitus describes
what happened:
About the same date, a trivial incident led to a serious affray
between the inhabitants of the colonies of Nuceria and Pompeii, at
a gladiatorial show presented by Livineius Regulus, whose removal
from the senate has been noticed. During an exchange of raillery,
typical of the petulance of country towns, they resorted to abuse,
then to stones, and finally to steel; the superiority lying with the
populace of Pompeii, where the show was being exhibited. As a
result, many of the Nucerians were carried maimed and wounded
to the capital, while a very large number mourned the deaths of
children or of parents. The trial of the affair was delegated by
the emperor to the senate; by the senate to the consuls. On the
case being again laid before the members, the Pompeians as a
community were debarred from holding any similar assembly for
ten years, and the associations which they had formed illegally were
dissolved. Livineius and the other fomenters of the outbreak were
punished with exile. (Tacitus, Annals 14.17)
Deprived of their games, the inhabitants of Pompeii were
probably greatly relieved when the ban was lifted three years
later, after the earthquake of AD 62.
Other passions could be aroused too. There was definitely
something about gladiators that meant their followers could
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Gladiators on a moulded glass vessel (photo by Carole Raddato)
Borghese gladiator mosaic
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Gladiators on a lamp (photo by
Gladiators on samian ware
Carole Raddato)
(photo by Carole Raddato)
take their enthusiasm to extremes. In his sixth Satire, Juvenal
tells the story of Eppia, a senator’s wife who ran off with a
gladiator:
And what were the youthful charms which captivated Eppia? What
did she see in him to allow herself to be called ‘a she-Gladiator’?
Her dear Sergius had already begun to shave; a wounded arm gave
promise of a discharge, and there were sundry deformities in his
face: a scar caused by the helmet, a huge wen upon his nose, a nasty
humour always trickling from his eye. But then he was a gladiator!
It is this that transforms these fellows into Hyacin
ths! it was this that
she preferred to children and to country, to sister and to husband.
What these women love is the sword: had this same Sergius received
his discharge, he would have been no better than a Veiento. (Juvenal,
Satires 6.103–13)
Even the audience at a gladiatorial contest might take the
opportunity to indulge in some opportunistic flirting, despite
women being banished to the upper tiers of seating by Augustus.
That could not stop the exchange of meaningful glances in
smaller amphitheatres.
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Fresco of the riot at Pompeii (photo by M. C. Bishop)
Status
For some, gladiators were the lowest of the low; for others,
they were stars to be admired. Cicero showed his utter
contempt for Catiline after his failed coup by disparagingly
referring to him in his Against Catiline speech as a ‘gladiator’
and throughout Roman writings this same lack of respect is
to be found (as has already been mentioned, he used the same
insult in his speeches against Marc Antony repeatedly). The
fact that gladiators ate barley would not have helped – the
Roman army only issued barley to animals or to men as a
punishment.
Paintings of gladiators were especially popular and had been
since the Republican period. Some of these illustrations may
even have been the inspiration for some surviving gladiatorial
mosaics (the famous Alexander mosaic from Pompeii is thought
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Pontarius (‘bridge fi ghter’)
• Armour: shoulderguard
• Special feature: on a wooden platform, armed
with a trident and rocks
• Period: Imperial
• Common opponent: arbelas; essedarius;
murmillo; secutor
to have been a copy of a Hellenistic painting). Pliny the Elder
tells of some pictures at an exhibition in Rome at the time of
Nero:
A freedman of the same prince, on the occasion of his exhibiting
a show of gladiators at Antium, had the public porticos hung,
as everybody knows, with paintings, in which were represented
genuine portraits of the gladiators and all the other assistants.
Indeed, at this place, there has been a very prevailing taste for
paintings for many ages past. Gaius Terentius Lucanus was the
fi rst who had combats of gladiators painted for public exhibition:
in honour of his grandfather, who had adopted him, he provided
thirty pairs of gladiators in the Forum, for three consecutive days,
and exhibited a painting of their combats in the Grove of Diana.
(Pliny, Natural History 35.33)
It was, incidentally, a senator by the name of Terentius Lucanus
(although not necessarily the same one) who brought the comic
playwright Terence to Rome in the middle of the 2nd century BC.
A description of such illustrations survives in a poem by Horace:
How are you less to blame than I, when I admire the combats of
Fulvius and Rutuba and Placideianus, with their bended knees,
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painted in crayons or charcoal, as if the men were actually engaged,
and push and parry, moving their weapons? (Horace, Satires
2.7.96–100)
Thus the Roman ambivalence towards gladiators is neatly bracketed
by Cicero and Terentius. Indeed, the Romans had a complex set
of snobberies that were both class and occupation based, but they
left little doubt that gladiators lay right at the bottom of the social
ladder. The problem lay in the concept of infamia, which was a
vague but pernicious notion in Roman society. There were even
formal manifestations of this prejudice. By way of example, the
Lex Acilia Repetundarum of 123 BC ruled that gladiators were
perpetually disqualified from the jury set up by that law (which
was designed to counter corruption amongst senators). This was
the main reason why it was seen as so disgraceful that free men
(and most particularly women) should voluntarily perform as
gladiators, whilst for an emperor to do so just beggared belief.
The issue of status was the principal reason why emperors
who actually fought (rather than just trained) as gladiators were
disdained. This of course was most evident with the gladiator
emperor himself, Commodus:
As far as these activities are concerned, however, even if his conduct
was hardly becoming for an emperor, he did win the approval of the
mob for his courage and his marksmanship. But when he came into
the amphitheatre naked, took up arms, and fought as a gladiator,
the people saw a disgraceful spectacle, a nobly born emperor of
the Romans, whose fathers and forebears had won many victories,
not taking the field against barbarians or opponents worthy of
the Romans, but disgracing his high position by degrading and
disgusting exhibitions. (Herodian 2.15.7)
In his rather extraordinary work of dream interpretation,
Artemidorus took what type of gladiator a man dreamed of
being and used it to predict what sort of wife he would marry.
Beyond the intriguing revelation that men had such dreams in
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As was hinted at in the epitaph of Glaucus, gladiators
had a special relationship with
Nemesis , the
goddess of divine retribution. Shrines of Nemesis are
known in a number of amphitheatres, often set into
one side of the arena wall. However, it is clear from
surviving inscriptions that not just gladiators revered
her, as is attested by an altar found in the nemeseum
of the amphitheatre outside the legionary fortress at
Chester:
For the goddess Nemesis, Sextius Marcianus, centurion,
after a dream ( RIB 3149)
Gladiators also felt a close affi nity with Hercules
(which partly explains Commodus’ obsession with
the hero). When they retired, they often dedicated
their weapons to him and a shrine to Hercules was
excavated in the amphitheatre in London.
the Roman period, this curious notion seems to provide an even
greater subtlety of diff erentiation between the types of gladiator,
in Artemidorus’ mind at least, and at a level akin to tea-leaf
reading. Infamia seems to have been nuanced.
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CHApTeR 7
THE END OF THE GLADIATORS
Th e race of gladiators has not died: every artist is one.
He amuses the public with his affl ictions.
Gustave Flaubert
THE MORALITY OF GLADIATORIAL COMBAT HAD long been
discussed by Romans, and whilst most had no problem with
the concept, it is clear that even the most learned men had time
to consider that there were indeed moral questions to answer.
Cicero, one of Rome’s greatest legal (and philosophical, or so
he liked to think) minds in the Late Republican period, saw a
particular nobility in what they did:
What wounds will the gladiators bear, who are either barbarians, or
the very dregs of mankind! How do they, who are trained to it, prefer
being wounde
d to basely avoiding it! How often do they prove that
they consider nothing but the giving satisfaction to their masters or
to the people! For when covered with wounds, they send to their
masters to learn their pleasure: if it is their will, they are ready to lie
down and die. What gladiator, of even moderate reputation, ever
gave a sigh? who ever turned pale? who ever disgraced himself either
in the actual combat, or even when about to die? who that had
been defeated ever drew in his neck to avoid the stroke of death? So
great is the force of practice, deliberation, and custom! Shall this,
then, be done by a Samnite rascal, worthy of his trade; and shall a
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man born to glory have so soft a part in his soul as not to be able
to fortify it by reason and reflection? The sight of the gladiators’
combats is by some looked on as cruel and inhuman, and I do not
know, as it is at present managed, but it may be so; but when the
guilty fought, we might receive by our ears perhaps (but certainly by
our eyes we could not) better training to harden us against pain and
death. (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 2.17)
However, as we have seen, Cicero was not above using the term
‘gladiator’ as a mischievous insult when it suited his purposes.
This was particularly so when he felt both the appearance and
behaviour of the individual matched those of the stereotypical
gladiator, as was the case with Marc Antony. This was all part
of the ambiguous position gladiators held in Roman society: to
some they were sporting heroes, to others they were the dregs of
the social strata.
Christianity
Christianity was becoming influential within Roman society well
before its official adoption under Constantine (AD 306–37). This
was particularly true in the Roman army, as is demonstrated by
the house church near the fortress at Lajjun in Israel and perhaps
in the garrison town of Dura-Europos in Syria, both dating
to the first half of the 3rd century AD. Dura even had a small
amphitheatre of its own, next to the military compound in the
north of the city. The Roman army was becoming Christianised
whilst still maintaining an interest in the games.