Dan Snow's History Hit - A Day in the Life of a Gladiator

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Step into the roaring arena of ancient Rome, where every sunrise could be a gladiator's last... From brutal training and hard-won fame to the thunderous spectacle that captivated an empire, discover what life was really like for history's greatest prizefighters.Joining us is Harry Sidebottom, author of 'Those Who Are About To Die'.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Natasha Hughes.We need your help! Let us know what you want from Dan Snow's History Hit by filling in our anonymous survey here: https://forms.gle/PvgayWLkWGjYT4St6Dan Snow's History Hit is now available on YouTube! Check it out at: https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcastSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. A lone warrior standing in the blazing sun of the arena. The roar of 50,000 spectators echoing around the stone seats of the Coliseum. One fighter raises his sword. The other waits for the crowd's verdict. A thumbs up or a thumbs down?

It's a powerful image, but it's also, in many ways, a myth. In reality, many gladiators were highly trained professionals. They lived in specialist schools. they followed strict diets, they trained under coaches, and they fought in quite carefully organized matches designed as much for spectacle as for bloodshed and survival. Some were enslaved prisoners of war, yes, but others were volunteers. They were chasing fame and prize money, excitement, sex,

and the possibility of glory in front of tens of thousands of spectators. So what was a typical day actually? actually like for a gladiator? What do they eat? How do they train? And how often did they really face death in the arena? And how much of what we think we know from the dramatic thumbs down executions to constant mortal combat is actually true? Today we're joined by Harry's sidebottom, author of We Who Are About to Die. We're going to step beyond the Hollywood version of the arena. We're going to enter the daily reality of the Roman gladiator. This is the real life of of Rome's most famous fighters.

Harry, good to have you on. Thank you very much for asking me. I mean, crowds have often paid to watch men beat each other up. And I imagine that it's been going on a long time. When do we first identify something we can say, no, those are gladiators, and what makes that special? Okay, well, the Romans identified it. Very precisely, it's 264 BC

when six gladiators fought at the funeral of a senator. Really? But this is recorded almost two... centuries later. So it may not be true. Okay. The problem is that the Romans themselves had no idea when gladiatorial combat really started, and equally they had no idea where it was from. Okay. So, I mean, Roman sources have two stories. We adopted it and adapted it, either from the south from Campania or from the north atroia, but they're two different stories. Yeah. Well, that's problem with Rome. It can't be east or west because it's a very narrow peninsula.

So it's got to come from one direction or other. Absolutely. And we might think that, you know, they're trying to distance themselves morally from this to us shocking, ghastly spectacle. You know, create a little bit of moral distance. It's an import. We didn't invent it.

But I think it's actually the very reverse. It's sort of way into a very odd, distinctive Roman mindset, which is we've conquered the world, or the known world. And from every people we've conquered, we've taken something, the good things, and then we've made them even better. It's almost a proud boast of, look, we've conquered the world.

It doesn't really matter if it's the Etruscans of the Campanians, because it's now ours. And what was the... Is it pure entertainment, or is there a religious or political, in its beginnings, do you think? There's certainly a religious element to kick off with. It's a funeral. And all gladiatorial contests under the Republic, which conventionally ends, in 31 BC, because we have to periodise everything, just to make it, I guess, to make that incredible span of history comprehensible.

But in the Republic, all gladiatorial shows retain at least a nominal link to a funeral. Okay. But it gets more and more nominal. I'm Julius Caesar celebrating his father's funeral with gladiatorial shows. I think it's some 20 or 30 years after his father died. So then it moves into what you suggested, which is the political. So Roman senators are putting on gladiatorial games essentially to buy popularity with the populace.

So it's being linked initially to funeral activities. Is there a sense of someone, that kind of blood sacrifice? The gladiators always shed blood or is it sort of stylized violence? What's going on there? It's not straightforwardly blood sacrifice. I mean, various people, in antiquity, Christians said it was. It's human sacrifice. But Christians, of course, you couldn't get them or biased source.

Yeah, they hate it. No pagan writer ever says that. Never says the blood sacrifice. Yes, in the back of their minds, when they're watching it, they may be thinking of, well, Petroclus' funeral games in Homer's Iliad, because all the Romans from the second century BC onwards are educated in Greek as well as Latin. So obsessed with the Iliad in the Odyssey. Absolutely obsessed with it.

So, yeah, they may be thinking about that in the back of their minds, but there's no direct sort of cause this is religious ceremony at all beyond the funeral link. So you end up with men fighting each other with weapon. I mean, how is this different from wrestling and boxing and other forms of mixed martial arts sports

that we're still familiar with today? Yeah, the difference you hit the normal head is weapons. Okay. These guys have weapons. I mean, they also had boxing, very brutal form of boxing, and they had wrestling, but this is a step beyond

into sort of Uber violence in that these people are armed and they're trained to fight. I mean, they are trained professionals. They're not usually, very seldom will they be just thrown in theory, given a weapon thrown into the arena. These guys are trained over months, if not years, in their specialities. Now, are they trained to kill or are they trained to put on a great show? The latter. They're trained to put on a great show.

This is a very common modern misapprehension about gladiators. I'm probably gladiators we have getting back to what they meant to the Romans is that we all think we know what gladiators are and they're all about. And the problem there is almost everything we think we know turns out to be wrong because it comes from Hollywood. And so it's just carnage, it's a slaughterhouse. They're always mass battles and only Russell Crowe's left standing at the end. So the chances of survival are actually pretty good.

have a one in eight chance of dying. Really? Yeah. So you could have quite a career. Gladiators retire at the end of it. It's about show we know there were laws to gladiatorial fights. The only problem is none of our sources tell us what they were. Oh no.

That's agony. It's agony. There are laws. There must be rules like boxing. Even UFC has rules of sorts. And they must have existed. Everyone knows them so they didn't bother to tell us. As so often in history, if you're an insider

a writing for insiders, you don't need to spell it out. Unfortunately, we're not insiders, and it would have been so helpful if they had. So let's talk about some of those myths. One is that, so these were highly trained people. They were athletes. That cost a lot of money. You probably don't, you don't want to send them out to go and get butcher, do you? No, the economics of it is sort of arguing against having them killed. We've got two bits of evidence. From the whole of the empire, for all those centuries, we have precisely two bits of evidence of the economics of it. And one is a price edict of Moxerrelius, the emperor. Apparently, prices were going through the roof. And so he, as unrealistically as any government

ever fixes prices, he put a price fix on what you could spend per gladiator, depending on how good they were. And it implies you buy them. Now, our problem is that we have one other source, which is roughly contemporary with that, which says, no, you don't, you rent them. And you rent them at a fixed fee, but then most interestingly, this isn't a legal text by a jurist called Gaius. If the gladiator is killed or severely wounded, you, the guy putting on the show, have to pay the person who provided you with the gladiator 50 times the rental, which suddenly becomes a serious sum of money. It's a huge amount of money. And you don't want to risk that sum of money, usually. No, that sounds like, that's like when you rent a company.

car, say if you blow it up, this is what you owe us. I mean, you don't usually blow up a rental car, do. So that's sort of... I tend not to. Yeah, we try not to. Try not to. And so, but renting's interesting. So what's a senator or later an emperor, they'll just ship a letter gladiators in to put on a big show, will they? Is that how this is beginning to work? It works very much that way for senators, or really, actually, in the Republic, the senators more often own their own troop of gladiators, but that's because they're at the top of the political primarid. No one can tell them what to do. They're senators. Then when Augustus establishes the rule of emperors, then it all changes.

Because senators really, they're not legally debarred from owning gladiators in Rome, but they're not allowed to have gladiatorial shows. So they stop doing it. Out in the provinces, the rich local elite still put on gladiatorial shows. They're the ones who rents them from professionals. The Lister, the loathed, reviled figure of the gladiator trainer. Of course, played by Oliver Reed brilliantly in the first Gladiator movie, the one that was good. But the Emperor himself owns them.

Like almost everything in the Roman world, who is the biggest owner of land, ships, anything else, including gladiators. Very soon it's the Emperor. He has his own imperial schools of gladiators scattered across the Empire. And you can occasionally rent from the Emperor. If you're, say you're a big man in Athens or somewhere. That's pick a city that was doing better at the time. Cautchester. No.

Yeah, they had gladiators there, but I don't think you're going to be renting from the emperor in Coulchester. I mean, the shipping from Ravenna is going to cost you a fortune. But you then rent from the procurator who runs the local, the nearest imperial school, and you will rent the gladiators, presumably with this crippling, you get them killed or wounded, 50 times the rental place. Wow. So you actually, you want to look up, make sure, look out for them? Yes, you do, except you're putting on the show to show how open-handed and generous you are to your local population.

And if they demand the death of a gladiator, then if you don't order them to be killed, then you're looking mean. So it's a push-pull thing economically. No, of course you go. So sometimes they die? Sometimes they die. Also, it's worth saying there, isn't it? I think lots of us get confused. Lots of people did die in arenas. Criminals, Christians at some stages. But that's sort of separate to the gladiators show, right? We're not here saying the Romans were lovely and no one died. There would be lots of, you'd see lots of blood spilt, but it wouldn't necessarily be the highly paid, highly trained gladiators.

Exactly. You'd seen a lot of blood spilt, especially at lunchtime, at midday when the executions happened. Right. So criminals are being killed. Animals are being slaughtered. You slaughter animals mainly in the morning. Okay. Morning for animals. Well, also, to be fair to the road, yes, is it? I mean, they're much more violent worlds than ours. They're much more accustomed to bloodshed. In the morning, they did sometimes just exhibit exotic animals.

But yes, it's mainly animals being hunted by professional hunters and slaughtered. Of course, they're more used to it, butcher's shops. They're in the street. They're everywhere. And then lunchtime. That's when you get a weird, mixed sort of bill. You get some mimes, jugglers, acrobats, and then you get the executions. Executions, they're really strange and interesting, because usually if you're condemned to be killed, capital crime,

then you're either crucified, which everyone knows about because of Christianity, or you're decapitated if you're a Roman citizen. Crucifixion is for slaves. Now, if you think about it, neither of these are much good for the arena. Decapitation is too quick. nothing particularly spectacular about it and maybe in a sense almost thought too painless on the other hand crucifixion takes too long

guys can live for hours if not days on the cross and what if they're still alive at the end of the show just wouldn't work so then the Romans mainly condemned people to be killed in the shows either being thrown to wild beasts or burnt to death and then they elaborate on it

in a to us absolutely hideous way where the condemned criminal is made to act out a Greek myth. For example, Hercules, Heracles. He, in myth, was given a poison shirt by his wife, tricked into wearing it. It's so painful, he burns himself to death. Now, the Romans take this and convert it into a spectacle for the arena. The tunica molester, which I suppose roughly translates as the evil or insidious tunic. So the condemned criminal is put in a tunic

filled with inflammable stuff, suffused with it and then someone sets fire to it and they literally run about burning to death. So there's plenty of brutality and violence in the arena. Huge amounts. But perhaps we've just used the name gladiators almost to describe that whole thing, whereas in fact that gladi is what they come on

late in the day, the sun's going down and that's the real highlight of the day out, isn't it? Absolutely. And the gladiators are the top drawer. beasts in the morning, executions at lunchtime, but the real sort of the top billing are the gladiators, and we presume, although there's very little evidence, that the gladiators get more famous as the afternoon goes on. You don't put the famous guys on first.

It's like any boxing competition now. You have the non-entities fight first. The undercard. Yeah, and then you get the big names appear at the end. Yeah, that's what the public would really come from. I'm always fascinated by the different types. The gladiators, they made them dress up and use particular weapons. There was strong fashions that run through gladiatorial combat.

Well, the sort of big division is between big shield men and small shield men. We know that from Marcus Aurelius in his meditations, because Marksorelius was, although often cited as a modern self-help book, which is really weird, he was a very miserable guy who disliked, well, pretty much all forms of pleasure. Very anti-sex, very anti-drink. And he thanks one of his tutors for making sure that he never became a fan of the big shields or the small shields.

But within those two big categories, there are bewildering sub-varities. So with big shields, you would have the Murmelo, a huge shield like a scutum, rather like a Roman legionary. And then you'd have a provocateur, again with a big shield, but slightly different helmet, both with short swords. And against them, you'd have the small shield men usually. My personal favourite is the Thracian, the Thrax,

with a curved sword and a little shield. Or the really famous one, the Rottiarius. No shield at all, just armour on the left arm and shoulder, trident net, they have to rely on speed and skill, usually match against a Mermelow. Although you could be matched against anyone. You could be matched against your own type of performer. or any other, it all depended on the giver of the show.

Because you're not only, if you're giving a show, you've got to do bigger and better than the last guy who put on a show, even if it's in Colchester. But what you've also is really at a premium, it's novelty. You mix up the card, you put something new in. We shouldn't get too dogmatic about the types of gladiator because they changed over time. And I argue in my book that probably they could change within,

neat show? As the guy putting on the show, thought, I need something new. Okay. Well, we'll slightly alter the equipment to the Murmolo to make it more interesting and then I'll pitch him against provocateur, whoever. You need novelty. Otherwise, you'd be seeing the same all the time. And do you think they're fighting much of the time with blunt weapons or with super sharp, razor sharp weapons? It varies. Some inscriptions do boast all these fights will be with sharp weapons. So this is for real this one? This is for real. This is a real. This is a big draw in which I'm risking a lot of money. Others, they did fight with blunt weapons.

Interesting enough, we can see this. There's a wonderful gladiatorial cemetery being excavated in Ephesus and Turkey. And a lot of the skeletons have healed injuries, bone injuries, from clearly blows from either a shield or a blunt weapon. One indeed, rather splendidly, had survived his leg being amputated. I guess he wasn't fighting anymore, unless he was. it was a novelty act. So they would have had the scars from previous bouts, no question.

They, the satirist juvenile even talks about their scars and how they're almost physically deformed by a sort of a humped shoulder, a wart on the nose from where the helmet might fit, and the scars. The scars, of course, of weapons and the scars of being whipped. Because a gladiator, the famous oath, that they swore, free men would sometimes swear when they became a gladiator they'd have to swear to be bound, beaten, burnt

and killed with steel so it's a terrifying oath so they're swearing that oath because that's the price of being a gladiator yeah why would why do I mean they all so free men would do it but many enslaved prisons of war who's becoming gladiators who's swearing that oath well anyone who becomes a gladiator has to swear the oath

but you're absolutely right that they're the different source sources. Source number one would be prisoners of war. Source number two, criminals condemned to fight as gladiators. Interesting enough, the Romans regarded both of these as really quite nice, gentle penalties, because after all, the guys would otherwise just be killed. And this way, they have a chance to survival. And then you have slaves whose owners sell them to gladiatorial schools. It's not until the reign of Hadrian in the second century AD that we hear he passes a law that before an owner can sell a slave to a glad to a school, he has to show the slave has done

something wrong. Okay, if you step back and think about that, who's the court going to believe? Yeah. The owner of the slave. And then you factor in the fact that in a court, the slave's evidence could only be taken under torture. I think I'd have just gone quietly. Off to my gladiatorial school in Colchester, the theme of this. But turning it round, there's also ruling by Antoninus Pius, the next emperor, that any slave who has run away to a gladiatorial school and is discovered will be sent back to their owner, which is a horrible light on Roman slavery. Some guys thought the brutality of slavery was so

horrible, that they'd be better off, risking their lives as gladiators. Well, and sometimes would they be, I mean, we hear about gladiators becoming celebrities and making out some money, even though they're still technically enslaved. What, if they make it, what's making it look like in the Roman gladiator world? At the base level, making it enough to have, leave enough money or have connections, family, wife, in inverted commas, or friends who will put up a tombstone for you. Okay. that then you I think you've made it

but we do hear of ones who go much further and retire from the arena and according to the Perth Horace buy landed estates somewhere in Italy you've got prize money when you won does that not go to the owner is that not go to the owner I think 25% of it is kept by the gladiator

you have to incentivise these guys to fight but yeah free men volunteer to us it seems weird why would they again going back to Horace the Purid he has an answer it's because they're really morally bad people They're just baddies. And they're young men from well-old families who've wasted their inheritance. I think if we strip out the ancient elite morality, yeah, poverty.

If you're a gladiator, you are guaranteed that you will be fed, indeed fed up, with the amount of food you're given. And you've got a roof over your head. And you have a chance of acquiring glory. You have a chance of making money. you become, if you're successful, a sex symbol, which might be a lot more appealing than working as a stevedore on a day labourer's wage, down at the docks.

Speaking of the tough lifestyle, I mean, we hear about Spartacus, the Gladiator, who they rise up and they escape from their gladiast school and start a rebellion. Some of these schools sound like they're pretty grim. Yes, it's certainly Spartacus is, but we are also told by Plutarch, the Greek writer, that the owner of Spartacus school was particularly cruel. He kept them chained up in cells,

which kind of implies that usually they weren't. And archaeologists have found five gladiatorial schools, and none of them really seem to have much security arrangements. Okay. Which does open up, well, how was security maintained? In the schools owned by the emperor, that's fairly easy, soldiers. But private schools, how, and presumably I think it was, probably a system like American prisons

trustees system where the older the veterans maybe took over security duties and possibly when they retired from the ring as it were because we have a ruling of the Emperor Hadrian which we always, we're much prone

to doing this, aren't we? We have one bit of evidence and we then look at that very closely and we generalise out and go that's how it was throughout the whole Roman world. So with that in mind I will now do that. And one ruling of the Emperor Hadrian is actually really specific. He's asked a question, what should we do with Spanish cattle rustlers who are condemned to gladatorial schools?

And he replies, they must be condemned for five years in school, but they're only in the arena for three. Now, we tend to generalise out, and that's, you know, they serve fought for three years, if condemned. But it does show that the other two years, what are they doing then? Presuming they're trainers, their guards, they're doing something else within the school, passing their expertise on and maybe also guarding the new influx of people who are more likely maybe to try and escape. And it also implies that there's an expectation they might live. They've served their three years and then off they go.

Yeah. Do another two years as a trainer or a guard and then off you go. Just pause you for a second there. Don't go away. More gladiators coming up after this. Harry, their training, there are hints, aren't there? The training was quite elite. I mean, we hear about their eating.

And some Roman generals actually use their training to try and. improve the quality of their soldiers as well. Yeah, some Roman generals were a couple we know of, hire gladiators to come and train their legionaries because legionaries are trained pretty well, but gladiators were thought to be better

at individual swordsmanship. Makes sense. Which is kind of paradoxical, because on the few occasions when gladiators recruited to fight in real wars, they perform appallingly. Not a paradox for Romans because the Romans are happy with the idea that some barbarians are better individual fighters.

But what they lack is disciplina, discipline, the group unity, they're digging your heels in and showing real true Roman virtues, which has physical courage with a moral dimension. These guys might be ferocious and skill, but they're not Romans. So. So interesting, okay, so sometimes they might be brought into sort of master classes in one-on-one fighting. Yeah. Interesting.

What are they eating? Because they got a bit of reputation for that, haven't they? They have. Yeah, they were fed something called Sagina, which translates literally as stuffing. It's a barley and bean-based stew, and it's designed to bulk them up. Because we got it work.

Is there any science there? Yeah, I think there is some science there. Putting it in modern medical terms, it is a diet designed to build up a thick level of subcutaneous fat, so the guys can take a wound in the arena, but the blade doesn't pierce a vital organ. So they can bleed in a spectacular way. Wow. So they almost fattening them up a bit.

They are literally fattening them up. Obviously not all of them. The big shield guys, yes. Probably the small shield guys in the main. Retiarius, he relies on speed. Nimble agile. I guess he's going to be a more nimble type, and maybe his rations were a bit curtailed. But yeah, and actually is a byproduct of their diet,

which came out from various pathologists who've worked on archaeological pathologists who worked on the gladiated skeletons at Ephesus. They had a remarkably bad teeth compared to the general population. Bad teeth. Bad teeth, and hence bad breath. These guys, as everyone knows from having seen the movies, these guys are sex symbols, really unlikely sex symbols. They're really quite portly.

They're covered in scars. The repetitive heavy training has quite often led to one shoulder and arm being more developed than the other, a bit like tennis players only more so. They have bad teeth and bad breath, and yet... There's hope for all of us. There's hope for all of us. You can become a sex symbol as a gladiator. One day.

Is there other examples of actual gladi? There's one when the Colosseum opens and the Embrititis. I mean, take me through what we know about an actual bout that we think might have taken place. Right, that's a really tricky one because no ancient source walks us through step by step, one fight, let alone walks us through the 24 hours of entertainment. The closest we get is ancient Greek novel by Lucian, the Greek satirist. It's one of, I think, ten short novellas put together in a work called Toxaris, and it talks about two, People from north of the Black Sea, it's a wonderful story, actually. They come, they're on their way to Athens, and they reach what's now Turkey, mainland Turkey,

Aseatic Turkey, North Shore of the Black Sea, and they get robbed. And they realize there's no point in going to the authorities, because they're strangers, which I always found a really interesting insight into the supposed wonders of Roman law. No one knows us here, we won't get a fair hearing. So one of them decides to become a gladiator. and we do get a blow-by-blow account of his fight, which lasts precisely for two blows. And basically he kills his opponent but takes a terrible wound.

And that's it. And that's the nearest we get to reportage of a fight in a Greek novel. But it's still immensely useful and interesting. And we wonder if that's representative or whether that is dramatic for the novel. Yeah, it's tough to say. And we're pretty sure that most glittorial bouts, well, as I said, they had laws. They had referees in the arena with them. They're always on mosaics.

They're guys in white tunics with two purple stripes and a big stick, usually employed in art anyway, to restrain the victorious gladiator. So the man who's wounded and submitting will have time to appeal to the giver of the games. But yeah, there were rules. we think they were short most bouts but that's purely based on the fact that it is very hard, based on modern military studies, it's very hard to

carry on fighting for more than 10 minutes. Exhausting. Absolutely exhausting. What about that? One thing everyone thinks they know is the emperor, thumbs up, thumbs down, the crowd shouting. Was there an element of that? Well, all modern scholars go, we've got it all wrong.

And actually, you know, the guy appeals to the giver of the games. The giver of the games is then expected to listen to the crowd and be influenced by their decision. But Montser-Colns go, actually thumbs-up meant death, thumbs-down meant life. And it's repeated in every book, modern book I read, published in the last 40 years researching my book. And I thought, why did we think this? I traced it back to one article written in the 1970s,

which turned out to be a very strange article indeed. And the only argument they really had, apart from some weird things about phallix symbolism, which I couldn't quite see the point of, was the killing blow, according to the scholar, was up into the throat, except it wasn't. In the gladiatorial skeletons at Ephesus, all the killing blows are down. They're administered from above and behind, and it's a downward stroke, either into the throat or into the back of the neck. So ancient sources tell us about the thumb, and they even say the thumb turned, they don't tell which way. But I'm going to stick with the Hollywood and popular understanding, thumbs down meant death.

Thumbs up did mean life. But you have to appeal in the right way. Cicero says you never see gladiators sort of crying and begging for their lives because it'll be counterproductive. You have to submit various rituals and submission. Obviously, throw down your weapon, cast away your shield, maybe take your helmet off, maybe kneel, or maybe you're on the ground with an injury. Maybe embrace the knees and thighs of your opponent in a ritual gesture of submission.

Oh, and put one finger in the air. Probably like a cricket umpah. And it doesn't matter which hand, despite lots of modern internet sources going. It was always the left finger. No, sometimes it was the right. I think it's more important just to make a clear gesture I've submitted. Then your fate is in the hands of the crowd. and ultimately of the man giving the games.

So at the end of the day, you've watched some exotic animals being slaughtered, you've watched some prisoners being slaughtered, you've watched the gladiators. They might have survived, but you've seen some kind of almost balletic, quite choreographed fighting, I suppose. It's a long day at the games. I mean, that stadium's going to be reeking,

people are being drunk? What are people doing in the stands? Well, at lunchtime, they're mainly popping out for picnic outside, because not everyone wants the executions and jugglers and stuff. Yeah, it's going to be smelly. But they did have special ways of distributing saffron mix with water or wine, dribbling down onto the audience. Really? Which smells nice.

And also it's a symbol of luxury. The guys in the stands can't afford saffron. I mean, it's expensive then. It's ludic expensive now. I always think there may be an added element in this. The guys who get most of the saffron dribbled on them because they're in the front row, bottom, seats are the senatorial elite in Rome. They have to be wearing spotless white togas. And when the emperor gives games, he then showers them with a yellow dye. Now, if that's not a way

of symbolizing your control over the elite, I don't know what is. That's a great. I've never heard of that. That's brilliant. What happens to the games? When do they, how do they die out? It's very hard to say, the last evidence we have is in about the 420s AD. I mean, later Christian writers come up with a really nice persuasive, really sort of good answer to this. Constantine comes to the throne, converts to Christianity, bans gladiators. The only problem is it isn't true, and they carried on for at least another century. There are two main explanations for why it dies. One is just economics. In the second half of the 200s AD, from 250 roughly onwards, the empire is in crisis, a political military crisis, too many emperors and two few years.

years, lots of barbarian invasions, rampant inflation, the emperors leave Rome because they're always campaigning, and essentially the money runs out, which is one explanation, and it isn't mutually exclusive with the other, which is actually Christianity, but at one remove. Constantine comes to the throne in the early 300s. No one thought his dynasty would last another century, but it did. And with the exception of Julian the apostate, they're all Christians. They promote Christianity amongst the elite. You get political and social advancement. If you go, I'm a Christian. You get tax breaks. I'm a Christian. And let's face it, most not wildly religious people would sign up to this. Once you're a professed Christian, you're not going to be putting

on gladiatorial games. You're going to be showing your open-handed munitions. You're going to be showing your open-handed munificence, your generosity to the public in different ways, arms to the poor and widows and orphans, building churches. So it's kind of Christianity at one remove that kills it. And of course, the emperors aren't in Rome, so they're not putting on the big shows. So why would local elites, they always copy the emperor. If the emperor's not doing it, why would you? It doesn't make you almost emperor for a day in your little local. town. Well, that, okay, so that's the end of the gladiators, but I mean, they have lived on. We are obsessed with gladiates. It can't just be the movie in the early noughties.

I mean, throughout the modern world, we've been obsessed to gladys for a long time. What do you think is that draw? I honestly think it's a mixture of the dark glamour of violence. And at the same time, we can watch films about it, people could listen to us talking about it. You can get the vicarious thrill of this dark glamour of violence. but keep a moral superiority. We can carry on thinking, oh, there's terrible Romans.

Weren't they bloodthirsty compared to us? Interesting. Well, Harry, thank you very much for coming on. What's your book called? It's called Those for About to Die, Gladiators and the Roman Mind. Thank you for telling me all about it. Thank you for having me on the podcast.

Thank you so much to Harry for coming on to the pod. When we picture the gladiators of ancient Rome, it's easy to imagine a world defined by blood and brutality and death and biceps. But as we've seen today, the reality is far more complex. Gladiators were not simply disposable victims. Their matches were structured spectacles. They're carefully designed to thrill the crowd whilst preserving valuable fighters wherever possible.

Some gained fame and wealth and even their freedom. Their names were written in graffiti, celebrated by fans, and remembered long after the games ended. At the same time, we shouldn't go over the top. None of this erases the harsh truth behind the arena. gladiators still lived and fought within a brutal system built on slavery and violence and spectacle. They had skill and they had fame, but that existed alongside very real danger. And particularly before modern medicine, there was the ever-present possibility that one fight,

even sustaining a minor injury, it could cost you your life. Well, thanks for listening, folks. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure to follow the podcast. And if you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to like and subscribe. so you won't miss any future episodes. See in one of those. Bye-bye. Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history?

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