Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Gladiators' Sex Lives

Episode Date: November 12, 2024

Who really were the gladiators of Ancient Rome?With them once again hitting the big screens this month, we wanted to take you back a couple of thousand years to find out more about the people who fought and what their lives were really like.What rights in society did they have? How often did they meet a gruesome end? And were they sex symbols?Joining Kate is historian and expert in all things Ancient Rome, Emma Southon, author of A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women, to help us find out more.This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. My lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. I am here and you are here and everyone is here and where they need to be. But before we can keep going, I do have to tell you that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. And if you're not, be off with you.

We don't want you here. You are unwelcome. I'm only kidding. Everyone's welcome here. but you might get offended if you keep listening. But for the rest of you, on with the show. But Twixters, come and sit with me in ancient Rome as we feast our eyes on a display of good old-fashioned bloodspot.

We are watching the gladiator fights, and as they battle it out before us, one can't help notice what fantastic shape they are in. Or at least they're in good shape before bits of that shape get hacked off. The schools, or Ludi, as they are in. really do drill them into shape, don't they? No wonder they are such objects of desire around these parts. But who are the people behind the gladiatorial masks?

Was it all danger and death? Or were there any perks to being a gladiator? We'll get your nets and tridents at the ready, betwixtas, because we are going to find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs

by just turning enough and pushing the fun. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, but feel so damn. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello and welcome back to Betwixta Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. The gladiators of ancient Rome have long fascinated us.

Especially, I would hazard a guess, in the last 20 years or so since a certain Russell Crow appeared on the big screen looking all rugged and sweaty, Manly. And with a much-hyped sequel coming out this month, what better time to look back and find out a bit more about who they were and the kind of lives that they lived. Joining me, of course, is our beloved friend of the show, Emma Southern expert in all things ancient Roman. Is that going to be a thumbs up or a thumbs down, betwixters? Let's do it.

Hello and welcome back to Betwixter Shates. It's only Emma Southern. How are you doing? I'm thrilled once again to be here. Leap upon every chance to hang out with you, Kate, as you know. For our unofficial mini-series of, fucking hell, the Romans were horrible, weren't they? Yeah. That's the official tagline of my entire career. Fuck me, the Romans were grim. But as a Roman historian, when you kind of got the news that there was a new gladiator film in the works, like, what does that do that do you do to make you go, oh, yeah?

Or do it make you go, oh, fucking hell? Like, what, as someone who actually studies the history knowing that there's going to be a big interest in Roman kind of ish history, how do you deal with that? It's like 95% yes. Yeah. Because one, it's always a delight to see like a new wave of how people are going to look at the Romans. And it's been like 15 years since we last had Rome, HBO's Rome. So we've not had any new Roman stuff in ages. And so, yeah, we get to see Ridley Scott as no one edits him anymore so he can do what the hell.

likes. So there 95% it's like, yes, this is going to be brilliant. And then 5% of you is like, there's going to be one thing that comes up in this film that I'm going to spend the next five years telling people isn't real. The thing that always comes up constantly is we who are about to die, salute you. Like, that got embedded in gladiator law at some point. Yeah, but they do not. That happened one time. I have one time a battle that Claudius put on. And they mention it because it was weird that it happened. Like it got kind of embedded in

gladiator law and then you're going to have to spend like forever telling people that didn't happen but that's okay that keeps me in a job for at least the next couple of years telling people that something that Paul Meskel's going to do that didn't happen. I feel the same way whenever Bridgeton or any kind of historical bonk fest comes out, it's sort of exactly the same thing is like I'm really pleased people are interested in sex history but I now am going to be answering endless questions about pubic hair for like the next few years. Exactly but that's good because that is enough people are going to want to talk to me. This is true, isn't it?

Yeah. So we should, I mean, obviously you're here because I just love talking to you. And it's already given us a fantastic excuse to have a wee chat about gladiators. But what do you think it is? Before we get into the history of this, what is it about the image of the gladiator that seems to so fascinate people? I mean, I think it's not that different from the image that fascinated the Romans, which is big semi-naked guys going at each other in, like a highly trained manner and willingly fighting to the death or sometimes unwillingly,

but they're giving the impression that they are willingly fighting to the death. I think it just speaks to something quite kind of base about the human lizard brain. That's just like it's sexy, it's exciting, it's bloody, it's kind of got all of those things that triggers something in the back of the brain that you want to look at it and think about it. It's martial and there's kind of the potential for a kind of disgusting kind of glory and also big naked men. A lot of it does come down to big naked men because when we think of gladiators and I'll bet you any money when we see the new gladiator film, they're quite jacked. You don't tend to get skinny little gladiators or overweight gladiators or aging

gladiators. No, they don't tend to last very long into old age. And there is a time went because a lot of them are condemned to be gladiators. So basically if a criminal comes across a governor's desk and they're kind of young and hot and look quite strong, they'll send them to the gladiatorial schools because, and they do specifically say like, you know, usually this happens to young men, because they're young, they train hard with heavy weapons and heavy armor. So they've got muscles. There's a few different epitaphs and reliefs of gladiators that have been put up by their wives and they're always like real musly, you know, pecks and abs. And they've got no tops on and they're going at each other. And it's not that different from what makes us watch

boxing or wrestling or anything. No, I was going to, I was going to mention that. It's like how far removed is it from, like we still enjoy watching quite violent sports today. Okay, it's not like a fight to the death. But it is still pretty violent. Yeah. It's still blood and injury and it's still pretty nasty at watch. Exactly. It's weapon based. but it is not that far removed from it. It's the same desire to see two guys going at each other really hard. I think so. So I'm going to assume then that you've seen the original gladiator.

What are your thoughts on it as a historian? Did you enjoy it? I do. Did you enjoy the film? I do. So I first saw it when I was doing my A level in ancient history. So I was like 16 or 17. And I was like such a dick about it when I was 17 in that kind of like,

you know when you first get into something and you become like a real snob about it. And I was like a proper snub. And at the time I was like, oh, everything, like Marcus Aurelius would never do that. But now I'm kind of much more chill about it. And I recently rewatched it.

And it's just, it's balmy and there's so much going on. And like that bit where he just beheads like five people. Yes. And I mean, it's just like, it's such a huge and magnificent and mildly balmy,

like vision of Rome. Like it's kind of captivating. How can you not love it at least a bit? Just for the kitsch value of nothing else. It is. I watched it recently. I can't think why I did now. Just to catch up on it.

And the bit that I got stuck on this time and I couldn't get myself past it is like, so Marcus Decimus Meridius husband to a murdered wife. That guy, yeah. Like he's commander of the armies to the north. He's a really big deal. And then he gets fucked over by communists. and he has to run all the way back to Rome

to rescue his wife and his baby and his little boy and then he doesn't get there in time and oh no, oh no, they're dead, it's really sad and he buries them and then he's so sad he like he passes out and then...

Classic. This is a very quick summary of the film and then people passing by pick him up and then they go oh well you're a slave now we're going to train you as a gladiator and I found myself looking at it going

can they do that? Like can they just go we found you on the floor you weren't conscious you're a slave now? Like is that? Like, what? Not in Rome.

He's not a slave, though, is he? I was like, what? I mean, you'd think they'd recognize him for a start because if he's a general of anything at that time, then he's a fairly elite man. But no, that definitely can happen. And there's all kinds of legal processes for if you get accidentally mistaken for a slave that you can say, no, I'm not. And, you know, Rome is a surprisingly bureaucratic culture.

And so this definitely would not happen. And also everybody knows each other. Like it would take him 10 seconds in the real world to be like, oh, actually, I'm Decimus, Maximus, Brutus, whatever his name is. And I, the father of a murdered one. I'm definitely not the slave. Yeah. And also apparently Commodus knows him.

And doesn't it turn out? Sorry, I'm going to do spoilers. He's like the son of Marcus Aurelius. Oh, I don't know. I might have missed that bit. I don't think that was, that would have been an interesting twist. But Comedus, like, knows who he is. Like everybody knows.

It would take literally 30 seconds for this to be resolved. but that would make for a much more boring film where just a bunch of people stand around. And then went through a bureaucratic system to try and establish. Just a load of people signing bits of paper. That would be shit. Right, okay, so that's why that didn't happen in the film then.

Yeah. The actual gladiators. Where did this even come from as a custom? Like who, when I know, let's get some people and we'll just make them fight each other until they die for our own amusement. So it starts as, a like funerary practice and they believe it comes from a Truscan practice and specifically from

Capua and it starts as basically people fighting on graves of prominent men. That's weird already. It is. It's just why would you at a funeral think, I need some men fighting. I need some men fighting. It's basically a kind of like the Romans regularly do. It's a roundabout form of human sacrifice is how it starts, which is that you're sacrificing human but you're pretending that you're not and they do this all the time where they sacrifice people but have developed an elaborate structure around it

whereby they don't actually do any killing but that's how it starts is basically a weird form of human sacrifice on a grave and then as the Roman Empire gets bigger and people get richer and funerals get more public they grow and grow and grow so in like the second century BC third century BC

you start getting people Instead of just having two criminals fight against each other, they start having 10. Then it's a thing. And then it grows. And then somebody has 22 pairs of gladiators fighting for a whole day. And like just basically the biggest enslaved guys that they could find fighting. And then like 50 years after that, it's like 2.16, I think it's the first time where it goes on for a couple of days. And they have three days worth of gladiators fighting.

They're just awful people. Yeah. And basically then it becomes a whole thing about putting on a display for people. And the more important your dad was who died, the more gladiators you have fighting. And then it stays as being a funerary ritual that you only do for funerals for a long time. And then it's Julius Caesar because he is an innovator, good friend and shaggar, Julia Caesar, who starts putting on games in memory of people in his family. So they don't have to have died anymore.

He can now say, this is in memory of my father, this is in memory of my daughter, and we're going to have some funerary games for it. And through that, it then gets blended into the religious games, because then people can be like, oh, well, these games are in memory of whoever, and then you can pull them in, and you can bolt them onto, it's beast fights are the other thing that they do all the time. You can start bolting them onto beast fights. Was they already doing beast fights, or was somebody,

did someone's funeral require a lion? They were already doing beast fights. fights. They were already doing those. Because that's like ritualized hunting, basically. And then it all blurs together into, and it just goes completely divorced from funerary practice and starts just becoming a sport that people watch. And it develops, so you have these specific types of gladiator.

And over time, it develops into having specific moves and specific tactics. And it becomes quite formalized. Was it popular right from the earth? Yeah. Was there any records of anyone going? This might be a bit weird. Maybe we should just send flowers. Not from the off.

People are like, this seems fine. People get a bit funny about the luxury aspect of it. So when they're going to criticise people having three days worth of games because their dad died, they're just like three days is a bit much, isn't it? Like showing off over there. Too much luxury.

It should be a perfectly reasonable five like we had back in my day. But you get people like Cicero and Seneca who are these like stoic, philosophers who just hate the whole concept, but they don't like it because they think it's very base. They think it's not reasonable. And they don't like the emotional aspect of it, basically, and the fact that everybody gets all hyped up and they think that it's quite boring. But apart from that, you do not really get, until Christianity comes along, people saying, have you ever thought maybe we shouldn't murder people in public? The thing, I'm trying to get my head around here

because in my mind there are two competing images of the gladiator here. There is the gladiator person on one hand who is like a seasoned trained fighter. They've trained him in the battle. You know exactly what he's going to do. And then there's also a condemned criminal. And I just can't like, how is that the same person? Because if I was found guilty of a crime and thrown in with the gladiators, there's no way I'd put up a good fight.

I would be running in the other direction. I'd be screaming. Like, how does this, how does this? how does this work? Is it like, right, you're condemned, so now we're going to send you to gladiator school first? So they condemn them. Oh, that's how it happens.

And then they would send them to gladiator school. And the same with captives. So a lot of them are also war captives. Like Sparicus, the famous one, he's captured in war and is sent to gladiator school. And the basic deal is that if you fight well, you might be able to get off and you might be able to fight your way out of this.

And there's a possibility that you'll get kind of freedom again one day. And also if you fight well, then there's glory to be had and people will put your face on bottles of olive oil. But yeah, so they're sent to be trained because nobody wants to see in the gladiatorial arena like someone just get butchered. That's not very fun.

They want to see two fighters who are good at what they do having a good battle that goes on for a while. So that was something that the film Gladiator got wrong then because they had plenty of people in there who were clearly not ready for this and they were wean on the floor and everything. A lot of very inexperienced people launched in there. But that's just not very fun to see.

If they're going to execute somebody in a spectacular fashion, which the Romans do like to do, then they will also give it a kind of narrative. And very often they will have a leopard eat their face, which they consider to be much more fun than just watching someone get executed. That's just an execution, which is not a gladiatorial fight. A gladiatorial fight is two people that are trained who have, there's like specific moves. And even Cicero says, like, the thing about the gladiators is that they're always nice to watch. Like, they are elegant in their movements and they are trained to fight attractively.

You know, if you parry one way, then this counter move is specifically trained into people. So that's what they want to see. They want to see two experts who are good at fighting and then one of them. They aren't going to run away. Exactly. Running away. No one wants to see that. Like, you don't want to go and see like a bottom of the league part-time amateur team.

Lansing Rovers playing, you know, Lester City. That would just be awful. Yeah, or just a gladiator just panicking and running away. No, that's not cool. Exactly. The one that always, that I always look at and just go, I think you've drawn the short straw here, mate, is the ones with the neps?

Like, who's been sent in to fight a fucking gladiator with a net? Yeah. What is that? Well, so it's all, there's a specific set-ups. So the net guy will always fight a guy who is lightly, armed as well. So they have heavy armed and lightly armed. So they will always be, that would be like

a lightly arm. So the person that they're fighting will have basically no armour and possibly they'll just be a guy with two daggers. So it's always going to be evenly balanced. And then what they have is that they don't have to get close up because they've got a trident which is a big

long thing and they've got a net. So they can fight from a distance and hopefully not get stabbed too much with a fucking net. Tangling. Tangle. in someone's feet. And just kind of, I suppose, yeah, yeah, you could do it. And then you're going to trip them up. Exactly.

But that leads quite nice into my next question. Was it always a fight to the death? Because if you're trying to kill someone with a net, that's, you're limited. He has got a trident as well. He has got something. He has got something. Sorry, yes, you did say that. Yeah.

So he has got something. Yeah. So we don't really know. Definitely sometimes. There's like all kinds of estimates about how often, like, whether it's 10% of the time or 90% of the time that someone dies. Definitely sometimes. somebody dies.

But it doesn't make that much sense for it to be every time, mostly because gladiators are really expensive. And obviously you have to train them, you have to feed them, you have to build them up, you have to house them, you have to buy them, and people pay for their contracts to come in. So it would be a ludicrous waste of money, if nothing else, like from a purely capitalist perspective, which is how the Romans would look at it, to have one die,

if you're going to have 22 pairs to lose 11 men every time. So probably it did not end in death every time, but it ended in death often enough that it was not unexpected. But it was considered to be a lot of the graffiti and there's like commemorative glasses and like commemorative lamps and things that you could get of specific fights and specific gladiators. And a lot of them celebrate ones where someone died because it's obviously kind of a big thing when somebody does actually get killed in a spectacular fashion. But I think that there's a good enough chance

You wouldn't necessarily expect to die When you go in You could expect to maybe come out with a broken arm And some stab wounds And live to fight another day But what happens to you then? Gladiators were slaves, weren't they? They had a slave status

Yeah, most of them, yeah If you've gone in there And had a big old fight And your arm's been hacked off, but you live Well, now what do you do? Is there a gladiator retirement home? Yeah, you could be retired. Some of them do have

to. And the really famous story about the sexy gladiator is the woman who runs away. She's her name is Epia. She runs away with the gladiator. She leaves her senatorial husband and juvenile tells a joke about it. He's going to have to retire because he's got an injured arm so he's not even going to be a gladiator anymore. And then you've just run away with an ugly man who's covered in like scars. That's quite a good joke. Yeah. But she's like at the moment he's a gladiator. So he's basically the hottest thing in the world. But he has got an injured arm and a weepy, so he's going to have to retire and then you've just married a weirdo.

I'll be back with Emma after this short break. From what you're saying, like, that there is a real big business behind this. Like, they have contract, people are training them, there's money invested. Do we know who was doing this? Like, who owned these people? Who, like, was it, like, in the film Gladiator when it was just, oh, what was his name? Oliver Reed's character? I can't remember.

Yeah, that he just kind of just randomly found people asleep on the road and went, well, you're my gladiator now. I mean, yeah, basically. So you have gladiator schools and they're owned by Lanista, who is like the owner. And then he employs a doctorates who are teachers of specific skills. And he buys men or is given them by the state when they're condemned and trains them up and then rents them out on contract. So he's basically their owner.

He feeds them, he prepares them, and then people come to him when they want to put on some games. So it might be people put on games privately quite often. And you see it in Pompeii, all of the graffiti that will say, you know, Marcus is putting on two days of games with 20 gladiators. And they will have gone and negotiated a contract for some gladiators depending on their budget. And then they get sent to wherever they're going to be fighting and then they get to come home again. And then in their off time, when it's the off season, they're renting. out as bodyguards. They've thought of everything, haven't they? They have. They really have. You said there that most of the gladiators were slaves. That suggests that some of them,

what, volunteered for this? Yeah. You do sometimes find people who volunteer, which really freaks out most of our writers about it, who find it baffling, and just do not understand why anybody would do this at all. But part of the reason is, if you're very, very poor and you're a young, strong man, then if you go into the gladiatorial arena, there's a chance that, like, one, you're definitely going to be fed, you're definitely going to get good food, good bedding, and probably going to get laid loads as well. So that's always an option. If you're very poor, you can sell yourself. You are going to lose all of your rights. Like, you're no longer a citizen. You can no longer go to court. Basically, anybody can do anything

to you. So it's a hell of a trade-off. But you can also do it just for a period of time. You can say, I'm going to sell myself for two years and hopefully I'll survive. That's a gamble. Yeah. It's a whole process that you have to do. So you have to go to like a government official and sign a bit of paper saying that you understand what you are doing. But there's totally something that you can do.

But also it is in terms of gambles, like in comparison to joining the army where you're basically going to get the same thing, but the chances of you getting the personal glory that you could get through being a gladiator, like they are celebrities. in their city and can become like empire-wide celebrities in some cases where people will swoon when they see you, women are going to want to have sex with you, men are going to want to be you and also have sex with you. People are going to want to be around you. They'll write songs about you. They're going to do paintings of you. There is potential for you to be a real celebrity. And I always think of it as like, for me, going on like Love Island or Big Brother

or anything like that sounds like the worst thing in the world. You could not get me to do it in a million years. But loads of people do it because the trade-off of what is going to happen to you, like being on the show or the things that tabloids are going to say about you is worth it for the celebrity that they get out of it. And that's basically the same calculation that a lot of free people make. Like, I might die. I'm probably going to get horribly injured.

It's going to be tough work, but I might get really famous. Did the gladiators ever get really? rich because if a lot of them are enslaved, presumably they're not actually making any of this money, even if they are super mega famous and proper heartthrobs. They actually can because there is a weird structure to the way that Roman slavery works, whereby they can sort of own money. So they can get prize money and they can hire themselves out privately. Interesting.

They have a thing called Peculium, which they can functionally own as their own. And so they can get really rich. The most famous gladiator is a guy called Spiculus, who becomes really famous because he kills a 16-time champion on his first ever match. There's graffiti of him in Pompeii doing it. But he then is taken to Rome because that is such a big deal where he does another two really big upsets, basically, where he kills famous other gladiators and becomes Nero's favorite gladiator. And then Nero gives him an estate, gives him. gives him money, gives him horses,

gives him gold, and just makes him incredibly rich and powerful and he gets to go and kind of retire in the countryside with loads of money up until the point where when Nero is overthrown, he doesn't want to kill himself

so he sends Spiculus a letter saying, will you come and kill me? And Spiculus just never replies. He just pretends that he didn't receive. Okay, no. Yeah. So, like, oh, that's throw me now. I've completely lost what my next question was going to be.

Watching just getting that letter in the post. I know, and they're just being like, just drop it. I didn't get it. It got lost. So I've just got back from Pompeii, and there's loads of graffiti about gladiators in Pompeii, and a lot of them saying what massive heart throbs they are. Is that the main evidence that we've got,

that gladiators were a bit, you know, Like, I was going to say women are throwing the knickers at them, but they didn't have knickers. They're just throwing everything at them, yeah. I mean, there is good evidence. It's a lot of evidence that it is, and all of the graffiti that they write about themselves as well. In the Gladiator Barracks in Pompeii, there's all of the graffiti that's like, I am the netter of women in the night and things like that, which I think is really funny a thing to write about yourself. He's a bit cringe, isn't it?

Like, if somebody else is writing it, that's fair enough. But if you're writing it, it's a bit desperate. Oh, I know what I was going to ask you. It's come back to me now. That's just prompted me. Is that true that gladiator sweat was an aphrodisiac? I've heard people say this and I think it's a myth. I think it's an internet nonsense. It's gladiator sweat, yes, and also gladiator blood was something that we'd be collected for magical purposes. They were considered to have a magical. I mean, they think everything is magical. Like they think that you can cure epilepsy with poppy brains and that everything is an aphrodisiac.

I once made a list of everything that the Romans thought was an aphrodisiac and it was like 35 items long. Wow. I just, the idea of people running around licking gladiators for medicinal purposes just seems a bit bonkers, even by Roman standard. It does, but you could probably make money off of it. And the one thing that Romans like to do is make money off of stuff.

They are almost as much as they like people dying, but they do like making money off of things. So they do think that they are very, very sexy and very, very sexually alluring. And just being a gladiator automatically makes you an absolute heart. Like proper pin-up stuff. Yeah. And Juvenal, when he writes about Epia, running away with her gladiator, just says if you're a gladiator, that just automatically makes you incredibly sexy.

And whenever people talk about gladiators, they always talk about how much women want to have sex with them. Of course. Yeah. Of course. It's just incredibly masculine and, like, you know, in a very heteronormative way, but incredibly masculine. They're mostly naked. They're sweaty. They're bloody.

They're kind of wrestling with each other. There is something kind of very erotic about the whole idea that means that it doesn't matter how many scars you have on your face or how many years you have lost in the arena. It's still pretty sexy. It's still pretty sexy just because that's what you do for a living. The thing that I find really fascinating about gladiators, just from the nature of what I study with sex history,

is that they were an official legal categorisation of something called infam. Yeah. which I also learned recently is still a really big insult in Italy today. If you call someone infam, it's really, really, really, I didn't know that, but it's really, really insulting. And infam, I'm going to ask you to explain it. But sex workers were also in that category of infam, which they weren't fully allowed their legal status. And as a historian, what absolutely does my tits in is when I watch people go around the brothel in Pompeii or doing documentaries of it, and they stand there and they go, this is absolutely awful, this is the worst place, this is the absolute hellhole.

And then they'll go to the gladiator barracks And the whole narrative changes Of like, yeah, it was kind of sexy and fun It's like, look, I'm not saying any of this was good But one of them was giving blow jobs And the other one was being hacked to death By some twat with a net But we like, we celebrate one

And absolutely denigrate the other Yeah I don't know why that just irritates me a little bit Like you can go to school for a fancy dress dressed as a gladiator And everyone all think it's great But you couldn't possibly go as a Roman hooker Because that would just be fucking weird

You couldn't Although anyone or any person who is not a member of the Roman Senate, which would be literally everybody, who has ever gone to a fancy dress party and a toga, technically has gone as a Roman sex worker. Because the only people other than the Roman Senate who were allowed to wear togas were sex workers.

So technically all of them are going as Roman sex workers. That is the best piece of information I've ever had. That's brilliant. Yes. So there you go. But let's talk about, in fact, What exactly does that mean? And who else was in this category?

So basically it's people who use their bodies to please other people. So it is actors, sex workers, bar owners. Bar owners? Yeah. That's random. It is weird. And gladiators. So it's people who are publicly using their bodies to please a crowd, essentially.

And they are essentially outside of the law. So they have absolutely no legal recourse to anything. that happens to them. They have no citizenship rights, which is quite a lot, and they can't take anybody to court. So if somebody rips them off for something, they can't sue them. They can't really have legal marriages and things like that. That doesn't really stop them from having marriages and all of the rest of it, but it means that you can beat up a person who is in the street and there's nothing that they can do about it, although we're not within the boundaries of the law anyway. You probably wouldn't want to beat up a gladiator. They will come and get you.

And this is regardless of whether or not they were also enslaved on top of that. Even if you're a free person, you've now got this extra label in fun. Yeah, exactly. And it is, to the Romans, of gladiatorial work and sex work are basically equivalent. And they do not see sex work in the same way that we do, which is that, you know, you can tell from Pompey and various other places, brothels are pretty public. They have Suetonius, who wrote the 12 Caesars once wrote a book called Lives of Famous Prostitutes, because there were famous prostitutes as well as famous cardiators.

And it's just a fact of life as far as they're concerned. If you actually do it, then you don't get to have the full benefit of being a Roman citizen. But that doesn't mean that you are spoken about in the way that we would really speak about sex work. Because we now have hang-ups about sex that the Romans had, didn't really have in the same way. It's strange, isn't it? that they have this dual position of on one hand, infamous, like it's a really bad thing to be.

But on the other hand, they're kind of sexy and cool and people still want to be them. I'm trying to like, trying to think of like a modern equivalent of this. Outlawiness that kind of makes them sexy and cool. Like the fact that they are then a transgression, like having sex with gladiator or having a girlfriend who is a sex worker,

then becomes kind of a deliberate act of transgression. against the stuck-up ways of mom and dad. Nice. Okay, everyone loves a bad boy. Exactly. It's like having a boyfriend with a motorcycle. I'll be back with Emma after this short break. Let's talk about some famous gladiators.

Names that I have heard, but I don't know very much about. The biggest one's got to be Spartacus. Yes. I'm Spartacus. I'm Spartacus. Was Spartacus really a gladiator? Sort of. He never actually fought.

in the arena, disappointingly. It's a shit gladiator. He did not want to be a gladiator. He's a war captive and he's taken as a prisoner. He's taken to Capua as a prisoner of war and he's young and strong. So they think they'll train him as a gladiator. But what he does instead is get everybody in his gladiator school to rebel. And then is charismatic enough that he raises an army of other enslaved people in the area.

That is impressive. It is very impressive. And he marches around Italy for quite a long time causing destruction. causing the Romans quite a lot of stress. And the fact that he is a gladiator is sort of baffling to the Romans because they're like, how dare an infamie, like, be this good at fighting that he's not supposed to be able to lead an army. He's supposed to be, like, have a slave mentality now.

He's supposed to be good at obeying orders, not giving orders. And this, which is one of the reasons he's so famous, because it just really throws them that he can be good at this. but he never actually fights as a gladiator in the arena. He does not want to be a gladiator. He does not consider himself a gladiator. I think that if he found out that he was remembered as the most famous gladiator, he'd probably be quite cross about that because he thinks of himself as a great ration general.

Oh, right. Okay. I mean, it didn't end particularly well for Spartacists. It did not. No, they did. And this is more classic Romans are grim. They crucified 8,000 people along the Via Appia, so that everybody had to pass by crucified people for a very long time as you were travelling down the road outside of Rome.

I remember that from speaking to you before is that the one thing that they would absolutely not abide above almost anything else is slave uprisings, slaves killing their masters. Above everything else, that seems to have been the real thing, no, we're going to crucify everyone and their family and all of their pets as well if you even try it. And anyone in the vicinity, there can be no,

no mercy and there can be no chance that any enslaved person thinks they can get away with this. Like, they have to know that there will be the most terrible punishment. And the other one, and I thought that this was Ridley Scott kind of making it up, commodess, I hadn't realised, this is how shit in my Roman history is, I hadn't realised that there was an emperor called Commodus who actually fancied himself as a bit of a gladiator. He very much did fancy himself as a bit of a gladiator, yeah, and he fought like quite often in the arena.

and this really upset all of the senators who... It must have done. Yeah. Seeing the person that they are supposed to debase themselves to, like their job is that they have to like grovel to the emperor pretty much all the time. And seeing him act as the lowest in society in front of them and them having to applaud it is just they can't handle it because it feels like an insult to them, like that they're now having to.

to grovel to a gladiator who they are supposed to feel better than they're supposed to be above gladiators not below gladiators. This is messing with their hierarchy and they absolutely hate it. No, but Comedus thinks that gladiator is like,

he's never been to war, he never really does any, like, actual stuff, but he does quite like wearing a nice, a natty costume and dressing up as Hercules and running around the arena in a perfectly safe manner because nobody's going to kill the emperor.

Nobody's going to kill him. Are they? Not even if he's the one with the net. He's like, nobody is going to do that. So presumably his gladiator career was flawless. His gladiator career was flawless. His gladiator career was closer to like WWE whereby everybody, there's a narrative,

and I'm sure that there was like some back and force, and he did all of his training, but he was never going to actually lose a battle ever. The skill would have been whoever had to fight him and who had to pretend he was putting up a fight while also not in any way injuring the emperor. At all. Yeah.

It must have been like when we see politicians turning up on, I'm a celebrity, get me out of here or something. We just look at them a little bit and just like, I don't you have better things to be doing with your time than this? Exactly. Or like, how am I supposed to respect you if you're going to be doing this? Like if I've now seen you eating a kangaroo testicle. Well, yes.

Yeah, I just didn't, you're supposed to be on a higher level than this. No, I think that I can relate to that actually. So I suppose the final question, although I, I've got a million to ask you, would be, what happened to them? Because it seems like they were the most popular thing. As the Romans seemed to have done, nobody was going, hang on a minute, maybe watching people murder each other for her own amusement isn't the best idea. They didn't even think of a shit.

They were fully on board with this. So what happened to suddenly, where did they go? Why aren't we still watching Gladiator battles? I mean, we're still watching them in the cinema. But what happened is Christianity. Christians and Christian writers do not like gladiatorial games at all. Initially, they don't like them because they think they are basically pagan sacrifice. Was it because they were fed to the lions in the Coliseum as well?

That doesn't help. They do not like that. Although they do do their own fair amount of executing pagans after a while. But they don't like that. They don't like because gladiatorial games mostly by the Christian period are happening in religious context. So games are held to honour gods. They see them as a kind of pagan sacrifice to the god of Mars or whatever God is being celebrated. And they don't like what they call the frenzy.

So they don't like the big emotional outpourings that happen because they think that that's not what life should be about. And they think it's basically the most mortal thing that you can be doing, which is fighting and sweating and bleeding. And Christianity becomes very much in the third and fourth centuries about denying the body and thinking about the spirit instead. And so they just find the whole thing to be disgusting. They think that it is murder. They think that it undermines any possibility of salvation for anyone involved in it or anyone who watches it. And so... It's hard to pick a fault with that particular lodges.

It is. I think I am siding with the early Christians with this one. It's just no, guys, no. Yeah. It did take a while. So they banned gladiatorial games like four times or three times. So Constantine had to go. He banned them.

Didn't stick. And then Onorius ban them. twice and the last gladiatorial games that we know of were in 404 CE. So it took about a century for them to actually prevent at least publicly held games from happening. But they were still popular enough with people in Rome and in the empire that people were still holding them even when the emperor is saying, can you stop, please? Can you not do that?

Yeah. I mean, in some ways, as we said earlier, is they never really died out entirely because You've still got blood sports all around the world today that happened, you know, is tradition. They're still bullfighting and they're still boxing and there's still, well, endless horrible things that human beings for some reason think is okay. So I wonder how far removed we actually are from doing that. And if we were allowed, if somebody said, if Kia Stama for reasons known only to himself, when I'm opening the Coliseum, there'll be gladiator fights, people would go. People would go. I actually read a book last year called Chain Gang All-Stars, which is about a near future whereby they reintroduce the system to American prison system.

Then if you win 20 fights, I think it is, then you get your freedom. It's a very carefully written book that makes it seem very, very plausible. Wow. That they could introduce this. Final question then. At the time of recording, we have not yet seen the film, the new Gladiator film. It is being released. I think by the time people are listening to us having a chinwag, it will be in cinemas.

But if they had come to you, Emma Southern, and said, we need to make sure that we've got this right, what would be the one bit of gladiatorial history that you would absolutely make sure that they either got in, took out, didn't fuck up? The one thing would be to not have the gladiators fighting like Piss Week, crying. Like, make it clear that that's an execution, not a gladiatorial fight. and I would want to have them showing them training as professionals because very often gladiators are shown just as guys who are thrown in with no preparation or as gladiatorial fights as brawls, but they are like boxing.

There is training, there is footwork, there is specific moves. It's somewhere between fencing and boxing or fencing and wrestling. And so I would want to see them be professionals who, care and are well-trained experts in the field of one-to-one combat. I suspect having seen Napoleon, we're not going to care that. I suspect the same thing too. But they'll still be pretty men. They will be.

There are so many legs. Emma, you have been wonderful to talk to. You always are. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can find me at emasothern.com or on Instagram at Emma Southern, where everything goes. or on my podcast which is called History is Sexy. Thank you so much for talking to me today. You've been magnificent.

Thank you once again for chatting to me. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Emma for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like and review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or you just fancied saying hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com.

And if you'd like to explore other stories from this period, then why not check out our sister podcast, The Ancients? We've got episodes on everything from the first in a new mini-series on the secret lives of the six wives to gladiator women all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.