Watching the Gladiators

How were gladiators portrayed in ancient Rome?

It’s almost football season, so we’re about to be treated to nonstop images of burly men in helmets doing physical violence to each other for our entertainment. 

Like many Americans, I have a complicated relationship with the sport. It’s awful for many reasons, but it’s also one of the few remnants of shared American culture, and it’s one of the few things my dad and I have in common. So I’ll watch sometimes, but feel slightly queasy about it. 

I wonder if that’s how some ancient Romans felt about gladiatorial contests.

Ancient Rome and America have a lot in common, of course. They’re both big, powerful empires whose might stretched their ability to believe their founding myths. They’re both fabulously wealthy societies that nevertheless tolerated immense inequality. They’re both societies that achieved the pinnacle of power and wealth but wobbled at the top of the axis, not quite knowing what to do with all that luxury and privilege. They both have cultures that aren’t exactly subtle — they’re lovers of bigness, spectacle, and excitement.

It’s this last bit that brings us back to burly men in helmets doing violence to one another. The Romans — who staged giant naval battles in the Colosseum and once held games that lasted over 100 days, featuring 10,000 gladiators and the deaths of 11,000 animals — would have definitely understood an NFL game, with the field-size flag, the over-the-top rendition of the anthem, the military jet flyover, and the AC/DC blasting from the speakers in between plays. 

We idolize our football heroes, of course. Get ready for Peyton Manning and Pat Mahomes shilling products on your TV, and the sights and sounds of football being used to sell everything from cars to beer to insurance. 

This made me wonder: how were gladiators portrayed in ancient Rome? How would the culture of gladiatorial fighting have shown up in Romans’ everyday lives? Were they heroes and celebrities like modern football players?

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Do you have football paraphernalia in your house? Maybe a mug shaped like a helmet or a poster of a gridiron hero? Well, Romans had stuff like this in their houses, too.

Here’s a glass dating from around the year 50 CE, featuring eight gladiators in battle. Their names are written around the rim of the glass: Gamus, Merops, Calamus, Hermes, Tetraites, Prudes, Spiculus, and Columbus. These seem to be the names of real people — museum curators speculate that this may have been a souvenir cup not so different from the ones we might bring home from the stadium today.

Public domain

Here’s another, even more remarkable gladiator cup. It’s a very rare example of something that might have been quite common — a vividly painted depiction of a fighter on glass. The fragility of both glass and paint meant that objects like this very rarely survived to the present day. But this one did — despite the fact that it was painted in Egypt but found halfway across Asia in Afghanistan.

Carole Raddato, CC BY SA 2.0

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Cups weren’t the only gladiator merch. There were oil lamps, some featuring gladiators (on this one, it looks like a guy is being stabbed in the back):

Public domain

And some in the shape of gladiator helmets:

Public domain

Some people even had little gladiator statuettes (I doubt they were going for an adorable vibe here, but that’s what they got):

Public domain

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As we can see from the glass with eight gladiators above, some gladiators were famous. This may sound strange — weren’t gladiators essentially treated as disposable? Weren’t they slaves whose blood was spilled so that the crowds could have an afternoon’s entertainment?

Yes, but some of them also became heroes of a sort. What did Romans admire about them? Here’s Martial’s ode to Hermes, a famous gladiator:

Hermes, the martial pleasure of an age,
Hermes, well-learned in all arms,
Hermes, both gladiator and teacher,
Hermes, confusion and terror of his school,
Hermes, the only one whom Helius fears,
Hermes, the only one for whom Advolans fell,
Hermes, taught to conquer, not kill,
Hermes, himself his substitute,
Hermes, wealth of the scalpers,
Hermes, care and heartthrob of the slave-girls,
Hermes, warlike and arrogant with a spear,
Hermes, menacing with a sea trident,
Hermes, his plumed helmet drooping, to be feared,
Hermes, glory of all kinds of war,
Hermes, alone is all and three in one.

This is not far off from the way we might describe a star athlete at the height of his powers today.

Sometimes, people would draw graffiti of their favorites, like this image from Pompeii depicting a fight between Severus and Albanus:

Mediatus, CC BY SA 3.0

One of the most famous images of gladiators is the appropriately named “Gladiator Mosaic,” found in the Villa Borghese near Rome. This mosaic, dating from the 300s CE, shows a number of named gladiators, each fighting in his distinctive style. Here, a guy named Asiacus kills a guy named Astivus:

Public domain

And here, we see Alumnus fighting Mazicinus:

Public domain

A number of mosaics like this have been discovered in Roman ruins. Here’s another from Spain, showing Astyanax defeating Kalendio. In the bottom panel, Astyanax is caught in Kalendio’s net; on the top, he’s escaped and has Kalendio begging for mercy on the ground.

Public domain

You may have noticed a theta (ϴ) next to the names of some of these men; this is short for “thanatos” — death — indicating that this gladiator perished in a fight.

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Death was, of course, at the center of gladiator culture. Many of the images we have of gladiators are not from their victories but from their defeats. There are a lot of gladiator gravestones and funeral plaques. 

Most of them show the dead men in a battle, perhaps their last. There’s this relief of surprisingly childlike gladiators from a graveyard in Turkey. The man in the center has been disarmed (the referee is on the left with the stick he would have used to break up the fight). Is this the moment of his death?

Carole Raddato, CC BY SA 2.0

Gravestones would often focus on the positive, highlighting the number of wins that a fighter had notched before his death. These were often denoted with wreaths, as you can see in the gravestone of Penelaes (the text on the stone charmingly makes it clear that he paid for the gravestone himself):

Egisto Sani, CC BY SA 2.0

Many gladiators’ gravestones made it clear that it wasn’t a lack of skill or bravery that felled them, but bad luck. This one says, “Akhilleus killed Droseros, me, by tricks of the Goddess of fate. I, Droseros was a spectacle formerly, Akhilleus is at the arena now.”

Dosseman, CC BY SA 4.0

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Gladiators, despite the fact that they were almost always enslaved, seem to have been some of the biggest sporting celebrities of their day. Their exploits were celebrated in everything from household knickknacks to their own graves.

I find it interesting that, even on their gravestones, these men were often depicted with their helmets covering their faces. This is another similarity between American football and Roman gladiators — we celebrate the spectacles that these men create, we have the imagery of those spectacles all around us, but we don’t always see the individuals very clearly.