In Our Time - The Roman Arena

Episode Date: February 26, 2026

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the countless venues across the Roman Empire which for over five hundred years drew the biggest crowds both in the Republic and under the Emperors. The shows there delighted the masses who knew, no matter how low their place in society, they were much better off than the gladiators about to fight or the beasts to be slaughtered. Some of the Roman elites were disgusted, seeing this popular entertainment as morally corrupting and un-Roman. Moral degradation was a less immediate concern though than the overspill of violence. There was a constant threat of gladiators being used as a private army and while those of the elite wealthy enough to stage the shows hoped to win great prestige, they risked disappointing a crowd which could quickly become a mob and turn on them.With Kathleen Coleman James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard UniversityJohn Pearce Reader in Archaeology at King’s College LondonAndMatthew Nicholls Fellow and Senior Tutor at St John’s College, OxfordProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:C. A. Barton, The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans: The Gladiator and the Monster (Princeton University Press, 1993)Roger Dunkle, Gladiators: Violence and Spectacle in Ancient Rome (Pearson, 2008)Garrett G. Fagan, The Lure of the Arena: Social Psychology and the Crowd at the Roman Games (Cambridge University Press, 2011)A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (University of Texas Press, 1997)A. Futrell, The Roman Games: A Sourcebook (Blackwell Publishing, 2006)Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard, The Colosseum (Profile, 2005)Luciana Jacobelli, Gladiators at Pompeii (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003)Eckart Köhne and Cornelia Ewigleben (eds.), Gladiators and Caesars: The Power of Spectacle in Ancient Rome (University of California Press, 2000)Donald Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (Routledge, 1998)F. Meijer, The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport (Souvenir, 2004)Jerry Toner, The Day Commodus killed a Rhino: Understanding the Roman Games (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014)K. Welch, The Roman Amphitheatre from its Origins to the Colosseum (Cambridge University Press, 2007)T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (Routledge, 1992)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, for over 500 years, Roman arenas staged gladiatorial combats, drawing the biggest crowds both in the Republic and unto the emperors. These events delighted the masses. No matter how low their place in society, it was a great comfort to ordinary people

that they were much better off than the gladiators about to fight or the beasts being slaughtered. But some members of the elite were disgusted. They saw this essential Roman entertainment as morally corrupting and un-Roman. Those among them wealthy enough to stage the shows could, however, win great prestige.

as long as the mob enjoyed themselves. With me to discuss the Roman arena, Kathleen Coleman, James Lope, Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, John Pierce, reader in archaeology at King's College London, and Matthew Nichols, fellow and senior tutor at St John's College, Oxford. Matthew, what can you tell us about how these arena games began?

Yes, the Romans themselves reflected on this, and they were glad that they could see an Italian origin in this very military and hard, combat, not like money of their entertainments, they borrowed from the Greeks. And they thought maybe it came from a truria or more probably from southern Italy, from Campania, where it began as a sort of ritual combat at the funerals of aristocrats, borrowed by the Romans and incorporated into their own funeral ceremonies from about the middle of the third century BC. As Rome expanded and grew more powerful, these games themselves grew bigger. We hear first of three pairs of gladiators, then 16, then 22,

then 60, so they keep getting bigger and bigger. And they begin to take on a life of their own. own, independent from the funeral and the honouring of the dead, they start to attract a large audience, and because they're given by aristocrats, they attract a sort of political power, because you're now pleasing the mob who are your electorate. So they get attached to state games, or Ludi, they get put on by prominent magistrates at Rome seeking election or re-election or just currying popular favour. And by the first century BC, that link to funerals is really getting stretched. Julius Caesar puts on a set of games in honour of his deceased father, they had actually been dead for 20 years at that point.

So I don't think anyone really believed him, but it was a convenient fig leaf. Eventually, that link to funerals drops away, and they just become games in their own right. Now, we know them, of course, because we can still see the ruins of the Coliseum, and there are other great stone arenas like those in Arles and Neim in the south of France. But that wasn't how it started, was it? No, that's right. Originally, as funeral combats, perhaps they happen near tombs or funeral pies and Campania, we think they're sometimes attached to banquets, but in Rome,

almost as soon as Roman magnates start putting these things on, they look for big areas of empty space to do it in where lots of people can see. So as early as 264, we have combat in the forum Boarium, a cattle market, actually, which is a convenient city centre open space. By 216 BC, it's in the forum itself, so the heart of Rome, which is significant, I think. And that's a sort of rectangular or trapezoidal space, surrounded by big buildings on whose rooftops and balconies, you can stand and watch, then wouldn't stand to a person.

put up, maybe some subterranean structures added to the forum to facilitate the games. It's a bit hard to tell. But always a temporary and contingent arena, put up a set of games and taken away again. And the Romans quite like these being temporary arenas, that they had a moral suspicion of entertainment, so they didn't want anything permanent disfiguring the city. They worried a bit about the seditious nature of large crowds, so better a temporary arena than something where large crowds could keep gathering. And perhaps, most importantly, Republican Rome had annually electorate magistrates. So if you were trying to bribe the electorate, it's better to spend all your money on gladiators and silver armour and dancing girls and a rickety wooden stage

to show it all. And you take that down and it's done. You don't really have a vested interest in creating an expensive permanent arena. Kathleen Coleman, despite those misgivings that Matthew alluded to about the mob and the potential sedition, these became incredibly popular. Why did they spread so fast? Well, the games themselves become a way for local magnets to show their generosity to their community. And interestingly, in terms of the stone buildings, the earliest ones we know of were actually outside Rome. And we have evidence from Campania. The most famous one, obviously, is the amphitheater at Pompeii, which dates to the 70s BC. And there were others in cities of that area. And these seem to have been associated with the spread of Roman influence.

The one in Pompeii, for example, was built on the site of an old Sam Knight section of the city leaning into the city wall. And it was built for the colonists, making a very powerful statement to the local inhabitants of Pompeii. But the earliest arenas were, as we've heard, made of wood. They were sort of portable structures, almost pop-up venues, as it were. where what was the shift to the permanent stone ones? That must have been a shift in the politics of the games as well. Well, I think because the earliest stone ones we know of are from outside Rome, it's very much the Romans putting their stamp,

a sort of permanent stamp, on the local population. You can't miss the amphitheatre at Pompeii, even today, the largest structure in the city. And interestingly, apart from what seems to be in a very important, very small structure put up in the sort of dying years of the Republic near the Tiber. We don't actually have a permanent amphitheatre until the construction of the Colosseum in Rome. Even the large thing that Nero put up was a wooden amphitheatre. So it's much later on that we see the stone arena's being built?

In the city of Rome itself, yes. But outside Rome, they date back to the first century BC. John Pierce, talking about the content of the games, you've been studying, I understand, a third-century male skeleton in York, whose pelvis appears to be bitten by a lion or a leopard around the time of the man's death. What were lions doing in York in the third century? And were they roaming free on the Dales of Yorkshire? I don't think we need to see this as part of Roman climate change that sort of saw lions transplanted to live out their lives in the Yorkshire Dales.

I think this is testimony to the spread of games across the Roman Empire, that wherever you are in the Roman world, especially in an urban setting, you're going to find gladiatorial combat and the associated spectacles, which include the use of animals as agents of execution and animals as part of those staged confrontations where humans fight animals, animals are pitted against other examples.

So finding this at York, the main surprise is that we imagine that games of these kinds spread everywhere. We see the anti-theaters across the Roman world, obviously not all as splendid as the Coliseum or Arl or Neme, sometimes simpler structures, but their ubiquitous or other kinds of spaces are adapted. But the idea that you would be able to transplant what we might have thought of as an element of Mediterranean spectacles, city of Rome, other Italian cities perhaps. Finding that in York speaks to a complex logistical structure that takes animals from North Africa across the Mediterranean, across Europe, by road and river, and then to Britain.

The challenge is knowing how frequent that was. Was that the one time this happened in Britain? Or was it a part of the recurring spectacle culture, of which we see a glimpse here? That's difficult to answer. Presumably it was a pretty punishing experience from the animals being transported from Africa to all over Europe. Yes. I mean, the best comparative light we have shed on that

is the 19th century zoological expeditions, where you look at the cargo manifest in Mombasa, what's being shipped out of East Africa, and you see what turns up in Hamburg or London or New York, and usually 90% of the animals have died by that time. So we'd have to imagine, with the Roman world, a similar, likely attritional rate. You know, we have a letter from Pliny that says,

shame about your exhibition in Verona. Luckily, the gladiators were there. Unfortunately, the Panthers didn't turn up, and you can imagine the potential obstacles that got in the way of those panthers being there. One of the best testimonies to how this worked is a book written in the first half of the 20th century from a classicist who was also zookeeper in Manchester

and talks about the different kinds of caging you need as you move an animal from the wild to its ultimate destination where you have to keep adjusting how you house it for it to adjust to the experience. The logistical implications, you know, keeping it fed, keeping it appropriately housed. A rather mind-blowing, really, for how that works

in their own world. Just to get this straight, I think you've written that the animals tended to appear in the morning. There was a whole day show going on. What was the order of service, as it were, for one of these games? So we don't have very much evidence for how that works, but we have Seneca telling us indirectly mid-first century AD that you might expect, you know, the animal games take place in the morning, executions at lunchtime, and then the gladiators as the culmination in the afternoon, where you get the skilled fighters pitted against one another. Who's being executed at lunchtime? The poor people who have been condemned,

the Roman term damn natio ad bestia. So a criminal conviction means that you're condemned to be executed, using the animal as the agent of execution, seen very vividly on mosaics in North Africa, for example. Kathleen Coleman, I want to go on to the gladiators themselves. I'd like you to tell us who these people, were, but before you do, can you tell us what the word gladiator means? Well, that's somebody who uses a gladius, which is a particular type of sword.

And these people were either slaves or assimilated to the status of a slave. In other words, what I mean by that is that these would have been free persons who voluntarily took up the gladiatorial oath and basically sold themselves, we believe, on a temporary basis, to an owner-trainer and could, after a certain number of years, have earned their freedom. I think that the majority were probably slaves. I don't know how common it was for people to voluntarily take up the role of a gladiator. But I think it's absolutely critical to realize that for the people, the free persons in the stands, there was a gulf between them and these performers in the arena, these people who really had no status.

They were objects, they were possessions. That's what a slave was. It was a human possession. And I think that explains why people could watch these things with a certain degree of equanimity and a feeling of a distance. Of course, enslaved persons, we believe, were also present in the audience,

probably feeling grateful that they weren't in the arena itself. But the paradox is that these persons, were highly trained. They had a special diet, they had special accommodation. You need to be pretty fit to fight in public like that. And so we see in occasional sources this kind of grudging admiration for the bravery and simply the skill of these performers who trained extensively for, as far as we know, quite rare appearances.

And were they all men? No, there were female gladiators. The best piece of evidence is actually sitting in the British Museum. It's a little stone plaque that shows two female combatants in fighting stance and their names are inscribed under them and those are speaking names. It must have been their professional names. One is Amazon, which is obviously very appropriate for a female fighter given the mythology of the Amazons. And the other one is Achillea. So the female version of the name Achilles, who was the most famous Greek warrior in the Trojan War. And above their heads is inscribed in Greek, they were granted a reprieve. And that, I think, explains why they're both in a fighting stance. They fought to a draw. Matthew, I want to go to the most famous arena of all the Colosseum. We've mentioned it before, but tell me who built it and why? The Coliseum was built by the Flavian dynasty of emperors, and Coliseum actually.

as a nickname for it, a later nickname, after a giant statue or colossus that stood nearby. They probably referred to it as the new amphitheatre, or just the amphitheatre. It was built by Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and then Domitian, who succeeded him as emperor between the years of 69 and 96 AD. And it was built, I think, to understand why and where it was built, we need to think about the context by which that dynasty came to power. They came in after a civil war. They swept away and replaced the hated reign of Nero, who had been in love with a high

culture and the Greek world and chariot racing and had garnered a lot of opprobrium by gobbling up large chunks of city centre real estate to build his palace the golden house and when he was swept from power and forced to suicide in 88 there was then a period of civil war and also culture wars around the legacy of the emperor and the best way to be an emperor and it was won by this gruff-grisled military vestrian vespasium who demolished nero's luxury palace and took the garden and the boating lake from that palace drained it and used it to build the colosseum so it was right in the city centre it's in the private grounds of this hated despot and it's a conspicuous gift to the people of Rome

for tough, martial, martial, vigorous Italian combat. And the loyalist poet Marshall, he writes rather sycophantic book of poetry celebrating the opening games of the Colosseum, says, what a wonderful thing this is Caesar, the private grounds of a hated autocrat have been given to the people. And it achieves its aim of being a conspicuous gesture.

So it's very much a political monument. It's right in the middle of the city, so it puts into the heart of Rome this concept of entertainment is an imperial prerogative and gesture. And it's architecturally rather elegant. It was a huge building. It goes up pretty quickly for its size.

It's lovely elegant classical architectural treatment on the facade that speaks of permanence and stability and acceptability. And it seems to have achieved instant classic status. It gets put on the coins. Rather brilliantly, we have the tomb of a Roman contracting builder called Quinter Satirius Ticichicus, who probably worked on it because he puts a little picture of the Colosseum on his tomb,

alongside his building train, to celebrate his involvement in this monument of the age. So it achieves that propagandistic aim of the Empress who set out to build it. And the Colosome, is it true that they filled it with water and had maritime battles, or is that an urban myth? Oh, it's difficult to say, I'm afraid. The source is naturally contradictory. So Dio, writing rather later, says Titus brilliantly filled the arena with water

and reenacted a famous naval battle there. But Swetonia, sues a century closer in time to those actual events, doesn't say that. and looking at the architecture of the Coliseum, it's a little bit hard to see how it could have been done. If you've seen a picture of it, it's now where the arena floor used to be. You now look down into this maze of corridors

and lifts and hoists, which are mostly later. So if at the time there was a much simpler substructure or no substructure, then maybe at the opening games it could have been flooded. There's plenty of water nearby. There are aqueducts. It's in a kind of valley of a culverted stream. It could have been filled.

It could have been drained. But it's hard to see how it could have been done that more than once after its opening games. John Pierce, this seems to me, like big business, the games, the arenas and so on. What was the day-to-day system? Because, I mean, they weren't performing in the arenas every day, were they? No, so there's a very substantial infrastructure behind gladiatorial combat.

There are two key roles in this. There's the person who pays for the games, who pays for the show. The sponsor or one of the Roman terms is the editor. And then there's the person responsible for the organization for making sure that gladiators are housed. trained, looked after and so on. Sometimes that's the same person. So when we begin to get better evidence

for how gladiators work, as it were, in the late Republic, it seems it's quite commonplace for Roman aristocrats involved in that political competition to have their own gladiatorial training school. Quite often in Campania in southern Italy, which seems to be the possible area in which the games begin sometimes in Rome. With the imperial period, there's an imperial takeover of that.

because the emperor partly is interested in making sure that the show happens, so needs a lot of gladiators for the spectacle he puts on to be appropriate to the scale of the building we've just heard about. There's also a potential political danger with gladiators that if you've got a band of armed men, trained killers, who depend on you for their housing, their feeding and so on, then they're also at your disposal, as it were, in political violence. And we see them used sometimes in the Roman Republic for that. So the emperor takes over much of that infrastructure. Then under him or under our Republican sponsor,

we have a manager, the Lanista, the figure that we kind of made familiar by Oliver Reed in the first Gladiator film. The person who seems to be responsible, if you want to put on a show, he'll hire the gladiators to you. He'll arrange the price. So what we're really looking at

is sort of big business like sport today. you have your performers, and it was interesting what Kathleen was saying about the names of the female gladiators, presumably the male gladiators all had their names. There would be stars. People would flock to this thing, adverts and things like that. Yes, there seems to be a lot of anticipation of games, and that's partly natural. You know, it's the city at rest or the city at play. People look forward to their day off, but that's partly managed. Pompeii provides us the best evidence for that kind of anticipatory buildup. We see the proclamations, the addictor, painted on the walls that say, on this day, for the magistracy of so-and-so, or for the health of the emperor, these games will take place.

It'll tell you the date. At Pompeii, they're also advertising games in neighbouring cities too, not just at Pompeii. And it will also say there will be an animal show. There will be awnings. You'll be in the shade when you're watching. and there will be a certain number of pairs of gladiators. So 10 gladiators will, 10 pairs will fight, 20 pairs will fight. So there are probably announcements in the immediate build-up.

There are indications of how this work. It may be that there's as it were a public dinner the night before where you can go and see the stars, as it were, enjoying the sort of equivalent to the condemned man's last meal. On the day itself, a procession, which will be a mixture of the circuses coming to town, plus the Lord Maz show, because the sponsor needs to be very clearly identifiable in that. He's paid for it after all.

But Kathleen, if I can bring you in on this issue, we always get the impression that these were fights to the death. But that's not actually the case. These people, the gladiators, were incredibly important assets to the people who owned them. So the last thing they wanted, I presume, is for them to be slaughtered at the end of the game. Yes, absolutely. We have a wonderful legal text from the second century where a jurist is trying to explain the difference between hire and purchase. And he says, think of a gladiator.

You rent a gladiator. You sent him back to barracks after his show in pretty okay shape. You pay 20 denari for him. But if he's either killed or severely maimed, then you pay a thousand dinari. You've basically bought him. So, you know, there was a huge markup there. And for the people renting the gladiatorial, There was obviously a strong incentive to stop the fights before a fatality.

And some of the emperors even put a ban on fights with sharp weapons, whatever precisely that means. But yes, we think that probably about 5% of fights might have ended with a very serious injury or even a death. Oh, really? That's what calculated. Of course, we're basically relying on tombstones. because gladiators, many, well, we don't know how many of them, but some of the gladiators are actually commemorated on tombstones. And they say proudly, or their tombstone says proudly,

what style of gladiator they were. There's no attempt to hide the fact that they were gladiators. They're proud of it. Sometimes, especially in the Greek East, you have a little relief of them standing proudly there next to their shield with their helmet standing on top of the shield. and all the wreaths that they've won, their distinctions, carved around them. Thanks for that, Kathleen.

And Matthew, I'd like to pick up something that John mentioned, and that's about how the games and the imperial project of Rome. So we've had the Republic, and then after Caesar we get Augustus becoming the first emperor. And things start to change in the relationship between the state, and the games. What's all that about? The emperors start to monopolise the production of games at Rome. It's too powerful and too spectacular, a gift to the people to be allowed into other hands.

So Augustus and his successor as emperor gradually acquire the sole prerogative of giving games, and by the reign of demission about a century into the imperial period, only the emperor can give games at Rome. Augustus does it three times in his own name, five times in the names of his son's 26, I think, beast hunts. So an escalating diet of violence. spectacle because it's so very popular. It's something the emperor needs to do and has done really

since the inception of the imperial project. Even Julius Caesar, Augustus's predecessor, didn't really like the games. Apparently he used to sit at the back of his box doing his correspondence and got rather bad reputations of being aloof and standoffish. So emperors not only have to do this, they have to go and they have to be seen to be enjoying it, but not too much. Some emperors get too fond of it and they attract criticism for that as well. So they need to be in among the crowns but restraining themselves. But Caesar Julius Caesar organized a lot of these games. I mean, he may not have enjoyed them, but he seemed to think that they were important.

Oh, he absolutely did. I mean, he put on a famous game with 320 pairs of gladiators, and he would have done more if the Senate hadn't stopped him, because, as John says, people were concerned about the potential for violence, and this is a kind of private army in the city of Rome. So Caesar was very well aware of the importance of games. Among many other sorts of benefaction, it has to be said, chariot racing, beast hunts, banquets, later on public bathing.

All of these are things that the emperors. gives to the people in this culture of bread and circuses. And just out of interest, is the idea of the thumbs down or the thumbs up to end the life of a gladiator? Is that nonsense or is it based in truth? It is not quite nonsense. There is one source, Juvenor's Serves satire, that says, the guy who used to play the trumpet in these arenas.

Now gives gamers himself and the mob bit him with a turned thumb, Poliqeverso, to spare the life of a gladiator. But we don't know if that means thumbs up or thumbs down. It's only one source. It's echoed later by the game. prudentious. We don't know how common it was. We don't know exactly what it means. It's not nothing, but it's not as firm as we think it might be.

John? Well, it seems quite clear, as Matthew said, we don't know which way it goes, but it seems to be almost the pivotal moment of the show. It's very often shown in Roman art when a gladiator has surrendered, holds up his finger, there's a recognisable gesture, and that

seems to be the image that's created to bring back the memory. Do you remember you were there? We were in the seats when we saw this because then you're waiting for that decision. which way will that gesture go? Either the sponsor or the sponsor extends the opportunity to the crowd to decide. So though maybe not many gladiators

die as a proportion, nonetheless this is a really high-risk moment, and so it's a very dramatic gesture. Lots depends on it. It's a moment of communication between the Emperor or the Gear of the Games and the crowd and that compact between them is part of what this arena display is. It's a chance

for the Emperor to show himself to the people, for the people in some sense to communicate with the Emperor. It's a very political moment, very communal moment. Sounds a little bit like waiting for a VAR result in the Premier League. John, another myth-busting thing here. I was brought up being told that Christians were thrown to the lions. Were they?

Certainly Christians do feature among the victims of these arena executions. There's an extraordinarily vivid account from the early 3rd century AD, a martyrdom of a Christian woman perpetua. and that describes the various ordeal she goes through in prison beforehand and in the games at the end where a combination of animals and human executioners are used to try and kill her, often to little avail. The first evidence for Christians being killed in the arena is under Nero, in one of those temporary aren't, but not by lions.

Dogs are involved, but also Christians are set alight. There aren't that many martyrdom stories that have ancient authority, The instance of perpetua in North Africa is one. There's another vivid story from Lyon in the 8170s of another. But there are many other individuals who seem to be put to death in this way. Criminals, prisoners of war quite likely as well. Kathleen Coleman, I want to drill down a little bit more on the business. Who made money out of this?

By the sounds of it, the gladiators themselves didn't make money. but presumably they got something out of it if they weren't killed. Well, we assume for the gladiators that being slaves or equivalent thereof, they would have got like a little piggy bank, as it were, for when they might ultimately be retired from the spectacle, just as ordinary domestic slaves would have got a little peculiar, some kind of nest egg for afterwards. But I think our modern concept is you want to make money out of everything,

whereas the games are very much about the acquisition of status. So for the impresario actually putting on a spectacle, this was an opportunity for him to illustrate his generosity to his community. And so far we've been talking mainly about the games in Rome itself. But we have masses and masses and masses of evidence about games in little tin-pot towns around the fringe of the empire when the local impresario, the local squire, puts on a set of games very small scale. They're boasting about having four beasts or whatever it is.

And this is cultural capital. They get recognition from their community because they could have spent their money on a donation of oil to the bars, which is the equivalent of ancient soap, or they could have had a banquet every year if they're really rich or maybe every four years to celebrate the birthday of their child or something like that, or they can put on games, and that's a big, big deal. Must have cost them a lot of money.

The people who would have imported the animals, we have fascinating evidence from North Africa, for these companies, these sodalitates, who imported animals and sent them abroad to the arenas. One of them in particular was diversified, and it also exported olive oil and things like that. So this must have been a money-making operation for them. But for the ultimate consumer in the form of the impresario, it was a money-losing operation. But you are demonstrating your free status. The root of our word liberality is the Latin for free. As a free person, you can own property and therefore you can dispense with it.

You can give it away. And that is so antithetical to the modern idea of capitalism. where we make more and more and more money all the time for ourselves. But that's not the point in antiquity. In terms of evidence, Matthew, how confident are we that the written evidence gives an accurate picture of the games and the business behind the games?

Well, as we often say as ancient historians, our literary evidence is actually rather patchy and partial. It doesn't contain a single clear description of exactly what happened in the arena because most of our surviving authors aren't really directly interested in it. The biographers want to talk about how it illuminates imperial character. The historians want to talk about how it affects politics in the city of Rome.

There are flattering poets like Marshall or Staceous or Calpaniacculus who give us pictures and anecdotes but not a clear description. As we already seen, you did some myth-busting earlier. Things that we think we know like the thumb actually turn out to rest on rather thin ice. Similarly, the famous Hail Caesar, We Who Are About to Die, Salute You, is only attested once. and then it's not in Rome at all. It's at a naval combat on a lake outside Rome

and it all goes wrong because they say that and the emperor makes a kind of feeble drake and says, oh, maybe not. And they think that they've been pardoned and refused to fight. So all of these things that we think we're sure about, actually we're not. And then our Roman writers mostly are elite male aristocrats. They're moralists.

They're rather sniffy about populist entertainment. They don't really want to describe too much what goes on in the arena. Tacitus is famously disdainful about it and says these things belong in the kind of in the Daily Gazette. they don't belong in my histories. So we don't have a very clear picture. We have anecdote and snippet.

We have moralising, like the famous bit of Seneca, where he says the famous German gladiator, who is so terrified of the arena, he chokes himself to death on the zyla spongium, the kind of sponge on a stick they're using the latrine to escape his fate in the arena. And this is a noble end. So we get those little anecdotes and tales,

but not a coherent picture. We have to piece it together, then we have to go to archaeology and material evidence too. So obviously these days would probably be pretty horrified by some of the things going on in the games, although of course hundreds, millions of people around the world watch boxing and wrestling and that sort of thing. Although there was this disgust expressed by some of the writers and the moralizers and so on, clearly these were immensely popular. I mean, the crowds coming into the arenas were absolutely,

absolutely huge. So were these writers running against the tide, as it were, of social morays? Well, we don't have an absolute moral condemnation of violence. The whole games are founded on violence, and we tend not to get authors until the Christian period saying this is simply wrong in itself. You rather get moral critique of the wrong kind of violence, or empress being capricious or mean, or executing the wrong kind of people or forcing citizens into the arena. So that's the sort of moral objection that writers make. When they talk about the games, they also show us what the appeal might have been, and there are elements of any society that likes to witness violence as an entertainment as a kind of exploration of the limits of human character. People in our society play violent

video games or watch violent movies. It's the same kind of impulse. But actually, it wasn't just endless slaughter. It was also a sport with rules and maybe a referee and special costumes and conventions, and sport is a more universal and perhaps happier point of comparison. And it was also just a great big spectacle. And Rome as a society founded on spectacle in intensely visual culture, There are processions and banquets and imperial relief archers, the emperor moving among his people, and the arena brings that to life. The emperor is there, the senators are there, Vestal virgins, the people kind of sort of arrayed and social order in the stands. And it's a microcosm of the Roman world looking at itself and feeling part of the crowd. I like in a modern sporting stadium must have been part of the appeal to people.

John, Matthews told us about the written evidence. What about the pictorial evidence? So the pictorial evidence is, again, there are the problems of the patchiness, patchiness over time, patchiness in space and so on. There are lots of mosaics from North Africa showing the games, very few from Britain, for example. The pictorial evidence tends to concentrate in the mid-imperial period. We don't have very much from the Republic. So as always, it's the ancient world.

There's that issue of gaps. One thing, for example, I think we would not really understand from the literary sources, but get a very clear understanding from visual evidence is from the different forms that gladiators take, that these are rather specialised styles of fighting. They come with their particular name, you know, the Thracian, the Murmilo, they have a very particular set of arms and armour. The animal hunters often have very kind of sparkly costumes, as it were.

So we wouldn't get a sense, really, of how does it work in practice, were it not for the visual evidence? And experimental archaeologists have built on that, say, okay, if you're using this kind of arms, if you're wearing this kind of armour, how does it work in practice? They've shown that, for example, you can't fight for very long, wearing a lot of styles of gladiatorial armour, because with these face masks very tight on your face, you can't breathe deeply, you quickly run out of oxygen. So it's very short, sharp bursts of violence, then the waiting, you know, waiting for your moment. So the show gets kind of lengthened

because of that. The visual evidence is also really important, I think, for telling us about, as Kathleen said, there are those multiple cities across the empire where it's really important to show up as the big generous donor. And you have your moment in the sun, you're there receiving the acclamation from the crowd. Next year someone else will do it. How do you make your games remembered? You create a mosaic for your reception room. On your tomb, you show the games that were shown. So it's not just what happened, but it's also the sort of the memory culture around games that visual evidence is crucial for.

Kathleen, talking about visual evidence, I think many people get most of their knowledge about gladiatorial combat from the movies. And I feel I should point out here that you were a consultant on Ridley Scott's Gladiator, and indeed Matthew, also in the studio, was a consultant on Gladiator too. So we really have great expertise here. Kathleen, how much do the movies does Hollywood get right about the games and what does it get wrong? Well, I think there are two things that really struck me as very successful

with the first gladiator movie and one was the sheer range, geographical range of the empire all the way from that forest in Germany in the opening scene, which is actually a forest in Hampshire and England, all the way down to the deserts of North Africa. I thought that was great, actually, that they showed that the Roman Empire really

extended over a huge area and was cemented, if you like, by this sort of militant gladiatorial culture. But the other thing that I thought they did really well was the camaraderie in the gladiatorial training school. And it is fascinating to think about what it must have been like to live in one of those barracks. The most famous is the Ludus Magnus. You can see a quarter of it's been excavated just next door to the Coliseum, has its little training arena, it's got cells all the way around, there would have been maybe a couple of thousand people living in there. And when gladiators were rented, they seemed to have been rented from a single training school. So you might end up fighting in the arena with someone you knew really well and that you're trained with.

So that sense of both camaraderie and rivalry, that I think is something. sometimes captured really well by Hollywood, maybe because it's, you know, something familiar to us from the locker rooms of sports events and so on. In terms of what they get wrong, where we've covered a lot of that already, that it's not a fight to the death. In fact, you're trying to avoid having people killed. The notion of a reprieve, that's when you've actually been technically defeated. But you may be misos. You may be reprieved. To go back, you've fought well enough. You reprieved and sent back to Gloucray. to gladiatorial barracks to practice for next time.

The idea that a gladiator might fight a man and then turn and fight an animal is completely erroneous. As far as we know, gladiatorial combat was very, very specialized, as has just been explained with all those different forms of armor and fighting technique and so on. And the beasts were similarly in combat with people who knew how to handle them. And it's really interesting that in the late Republic, potentate in North Africa, supplies beasts for the arena in Rome, and he supplies the fighters. Because, you know, if you were thrown into the arena in front of a lion, you wouldn't know what to do, but if you, I assume, maybe you would.

But, you know, if you're a trained hunter who spends his time hunting lions in the forests of wherever, then, you know, you know how to do it. And we see in some of these reliefs and wonderful things that John Matthew have been talking about, we see all these amazing structures put into the arena to try and fool the animals so that you could have a little kind of swivel that you stood behind. That's really, it requires a lot of technique. And as far as we are aware, the gladiators were one category of person and the beast fighters were another category of person, possibly even lower in status,

but also very skilled and experienced. Matthew, what was your experience doing Gladiator 2? I have to say I started watching it quite recently, and I was quite shocked to see the first battle between gladiators and what looked like a hybrid between a baboon and a dog. Yes, it's a striking moment, isn't it? Well, like Kathleen says, they get many things right and other things they take some artistic liberties in the making of a movie.

Later on, there are sharks in the Coliseum, for example. But what I think they do focus on, I think, successfully, is the idea of the Colosseum is an arena where the emperor comes face to face with his people. And we've all been talking about that all the way through the programme in different ways. Of course, in the film it's fictionalised. But the idea that this is an arena

where the emperor has to put on spectacle because the people demand it. And as it's been said, holding the Roman people, it's like holding a wolf by the ears. You've got to dare and let it go. You've got to keep feeding it or entertaining it. So that broader perspective, I think, is an interesting one. I think we've got time for about,

One more question, and I'm going to ask John Pierce, why did the games die out? It's probably the main factor is one we've been talking about quite a lot, which is to do with money. But gladiators are very expensive. We've talked about the investment that you need to put in to create a trained fighter who will give you a good show. Kathleen, I think alluded to the edict from the AD170s where there's an attempt to put a price cap on the rental. for gladiators because people responsible for putting on shows have been complaining that it's bankrupting them. So those urban elites seem always to be under pressure and it's likely that by the 4th century AD that pressure has become too much for many of them. That's a time when the cities of many of the Roman provinces are shrinking. They're becoming less significant as places

of ceremony, places of political theatre. People seem where they're spending their money, they're spending it on their rural, on their rural villas. So the combination of cost, Possibly availability of performers is shrinking. Those territorial wars on the margins of empire are cutting off the supply of animals, sometimes perhaps from North Africa or captives who are being fed into the arena. So performer availability goes down.

Elite incentive to invest because they're no longer so engaged with urban political process. So that probably has a sort of a gradual effect on reducing arena culture. It tends to then focus on places that are closely connected to the emperor, who is still invested or his nearby kind of political associates who remain invested in doing that. So Rome continues to see them, places like Trier, these regional capitals, continue to see them.

There is also ideological opposition to some degree. Christians are concerned, but they're much more concerned about the effect on the viewer than they're concerned for the effect on the people in the arena, because the Christians who write about the games tend to be the same kinds of people like the Ciceroes, and the tacituses, they come from that elite class. They're more worried about what it does to you. If you show up as a spectator, you lose your mind. You kind of, you're overtaken by the spirit of the crowd. By bloodlust, you stop rationalising.

It's not good for you to go to the games. So you have kind of that opposition, and then intermittent emperors who are Christians, closing off the supply to by saying AD3-25, for example, Constantine says it's no longer a penalty to send. someone to the arena. They go to the mines instead if you want to severely punish a criminal. Well, my thanks to John Pierce, Kathleen Coleman and Matthew Nichols. Next week, it's Full Staff, Hotspur and Howl, How Shakespeare explored succession

crises through Henry IV. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. Is there anything else you? you feel we'd missed here that should be mentioned? I'd love to mention that the games were accompanied by music. The main evidence for that comes from some mosaics in North Africa, some of the things that John was talking about,

where we can see sometimes the critical moment where the referee is waiting for the decision as to what is to happen to the defeated gladi. And the musicians are there with their instruments poised, the water organ, the horn, players and the trumpeters, and presumably they would play mood music to accompany the decision. Yes, I wonder if it would be upbeat if the gladiator lost or downbeat. It's hard to tell, really, isn't it? They certainly seem to enjoy the violence, these spectators. John, what about you?

To follow up Kathleen's point, I would add, you know, as part of the expense, there's this whole infrastructure of support staff. So Kathleen's just talked about there are the musicians there are also the referees, the attendants, the people who drag the bodies out, and so on. We know there are massars. Also, there are two kinds of doctor. There's the doctor in the Roman sense, who's the trainer. So each of our class of gladiators seems to have a specialised trainer, probably former gladiators, who survived their experience, who are now earning a living doing that. But also the surgeons who are keeping the bodies of the gladiators together. So one of our most famous Roman medics, Galen, serves a period of time as a doctor,

in the gladiatorial school at Pergamon and learns part of his surgery trade from that. Does he describe it at all Galen? Because, as Matthew said, we don't have that many descriptions. He doesn't describe the games themselves, but in describing some of his experiences of learning how to treat certain kinds of injuries, what you can stitch to what,

that you can stitch skin to skin, but it's not good to stitch muscles to muscles, apparently, is what he tells us. So he does, It's one and other of those frustrating things. Indirectly you see it, but they're never telling us directly what's going on in front of them. Why would

they? Their audience has all seen it and they all know it. Matthew? Well, there are some wonderful inscriptions we could talk more about. We did mention epigraphic evidence in the programme. There's, for example, the tombstone of a disgruntled gladiator from Amisus in modern Turkey who says he died because the referee

made a mistake and he resented this decision of the Sumerudus, the ref in the arena. Also, some of the the worst excesses of the gladiated loving emperors. I described it, I think, as a kind of line they had to tread between showing interest in the games, but not getting too into it, not losing control of themselves.

Colligula did, Nero did, perhaps most notoriously, the late second century emperor Commodus, went absolutely mad for gladiatorial posing. He fought hundreds of bouts. He cut the head off an ostrich and waggled it at the Senate, and they threw their laurels to stop themselves from laughing, which would have been a fatal mistake. So empress could really tip too far over

into a love of this populist entertainment and forget themselves. So that was Commodus proving what a great guy here is that he can fight with the best of them. Well, if we believe, yes, I think so, sort of physical strength and fitness to rule, but taken to a ludicrous extreme. By that day, he'd also try to rename every month of the year after himself and carved the word gladiator on the bottom of a statue

and shortly after he was assassinated. So I think we see it as a rain in decay. But interesting that gladiatorial combat, if there's any truth in those stories, is so potent a tool of imperial self-presentation that empress can lean disastrously too far into it. Kathleen, I just wanted to pick up on one thing that you've said. And that was you were pointing out that this was not like a capitalist business as say the sports industry would be today.

But nonetheless, as John was talking about the masses, the doctors, all the backup staff, the musicians, singers, dancers, whatever it is. Presumably, they're being paid for all this. Well, presumably they're mostly slaves. And so their payment would have been, you know, their board and lodging, so to speak, in the training school or in the premises of the person

who supplied them to the arena. We even have people whose job it is to rake the sand in the arena. These must have been the lowest of the low in terms of the slave hierarchy. But one thing I wanted to point out that we really don't know about, and that must be the religious aspect of this. How was religion implicated in these spectacles? We mentioned very briefly that the Vessel Virgins were present.

They were sitting in prime seating, although there's a lot of argument about where exactly their seats were, but they represented the permanence of the Roman state because they tended the fire of Vesta, the goddess, and the fire that must never go out. So to have them present, sitting very close to the emperor somewhere in those front stands, must suggest that there's a religious element here

that is holding Rome together, and that is something that we know very little about. Matthew, you wanted to come in there. Yes, that's right. I mean, there were other priestly colleges there to. The Arval Brethren had allocated seats. Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, are sometimes associated with the arena sport.

I was going to come in on the question of money and business. I mean, it must have been, I'm sure Kathleen's quite right, that many of the employees are enslaved, but the business of feeding and arming and equipping tens of thousands of people and 10,000 wild beasts in some of these games must have been very considerable. There's an anecdote that Collegular ran out of cattle to feed the beast or found it too expensive

and started randomly throwing criminals to feed the beast instead, and people thought this was poor form. So just logistics of keeping the thing running must have been extremely demanding. Well, it was Caligula, after all. One final question I've got for all of you. If you were a gladiator and you were a slave, could you win your freedom by being a great fighter? Well, it does seem that you could ultimately retire from the arena,

but whether you got that because you were very good or whether because you were very good you were kept in the household doing it is obviously an open question. The gladiations could certainly make money from the arena. We talked earlier at their tombs, and you have to have a certain amount of money to leave a tomb. We hear about gladiators who owned and freed slaves, so they could accumulate property,

and it seems if they got to the end of their career, some of them could die old, although the mean age of death on the tomb centre is actually quite young, so not many did make it. Well, with that, it's the end of the game, and thank you very much to all three of you. Here comes the producer. Tea or coffee?

Tea or coffee? Coffee would be lovely. Cup of tea would be great, thank you. I'll have a cup of tea. Brilliant, thank you very much. In our time with Misha Gleney is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. If journalism is the first draft of history,

what happens if that draft turns out to be flawed? In 1999, four apartment buildings were blown up in Russia. Hundreds killed. But 25 years on, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. Because these bombs, they're part of the origin story of one of the most powerful men in the world. Vladimir Putin. I'm Helena Merriman and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story.

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