While the bloodshed on film and TV adaptations might persuade us otherwise, leading speaker on gladiatorial life and historical consultant Alexander Mariotti insists that death in the ancient Roman arena was “an absolute rarity”.
Joining Tristan Hughes on The Ancients, the consultant on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator and Amazon Prime’s Those About to Die (in which he even has a cameo) explains that deaths, when they happened, more often followed later from injuries.
“Combat sports were very violent,” says Mariotti. “And gladiatorial combat is part of that pantheon of sports.”
However the use of weapons made it particularly dangerous. “One of the reasons they don’t wear tunics is because the linen or the wool getting stuck in a wound would kill you [from] an infection.”
Those About to Die
Image Credit: Those About to Die / NBCU
“But what we do find from modern forensics on gladiatorial skeletons is that these guys, majoritively, have medical care, so they have wounds that are then healed. So you’ve not only got a doctor that’s healing you, but you’re also paying for the time that the injured can recover. Because we see from the bones that they actually physically recover even from medical amputations.”
“There are certainly moments where gladiators were expected to, to fight to the death. But I think they’re an absolute rarity.”
Mariotti emphasises that in the arena it took skill not to kill an opponent.
“There were set rules, the training was important because combat, especially with weaponry, instigates ‘fight or flight’.”
“You’ve got the adrenaline pumping, you’ve got the noise, you’re wearing a helmet and this noise is reverberating, the discomfort. And yet they had the ability to stop at the right moment and not kill their opponents, because most of the time they didn’t kill their opponents.”
Mariotti wastes no time debunking other gladiator myths. (Did gladiators fight animals? No, but beast hunts did happen, just as the preserve of hunting specialists.) Find out more when you stream this filmed episode of The Ancients on History Hit.
