The Colosseum (11 page)

But Romans too could, on occasion, envisage the fearful plight of the arena fighter. In one of those strange rhetorical exercises through which budding Roman orators practised their skills, by arguing different sides of imaginary legal cases, the student was asked to plead on behalf of a rich young man who had been captured by pirates, sold to a gladiatorial troupe and later disinherited by his father. A polished version of this survives (rather like the ‘fair copy’ or crib of a modern school exercise), with a tear-jerking section describing the man’s initiation into the arena:

And so the day arrived. The populace had already gathered for the spectacle of our suffering, and the bodies of the doomed had already been put on display throughout the arena leading a procession that was their own death march. The show’s presenter who was hoping to curry favour with our blood took his seat … One thing made me an object of pity to some of the audience – the fact that I seemed unfairly matched. I was doomed to be the
sacrificial victim of the arena; no one did the trainer hold in lower regard. The whole place was humming with the instruments of death. One man was sharpening a sword, another was heating strips of metal in a fire [these were used to check that a gladiator was not faking death]; birch-rods were being brought out from one side, whips from another … The trumpets sounded with the wail that presaged my death, stretchers for the dead were brought on – my funeral procession was being arranged before my death. Everywhere there were wounds, groans and blood; all I could see was danger.

But then, in true rhetorical style, fate intervened. A friend of the young man appeared and bought him out, by offering himself to the trainer instead. That was fiction; reality must often have been more severe.

SOME DEADLY STATISTICS: AN INTERLUDE

Exactly how much more severe? How soon after they entered the arena did most gladiators die? How many lived into honourable retirement? We get very different impressions from the surviving evidence. Some tombstones commemorate exgladiators dying in their beds (or so we guess) at relatively ripe old ages, leaving behind loving wives, grieving children and a clutch of slaves. There is other evidence too that some gladiators were skilled survivors. There are some evocative graffiti from Pompeii which record the results of bouts at various shows, as well as the past ‘form’ of the gladiators concerned. We find an interesting selection of different styles of contest: classy bouts between experienced fighters (a 15-fight man vs a 14-fight man; 16 vs 14 and so on), newcomers
pitched against each other; the occasional newcomer versus an old-timer. But what is really surprising (although it may be more boasting) is that a handful of fighters have over fifty contests to their credit. That said, there are are a good number of memorials to gladiators who died young. A man called Glauco, we are told on his tomb, fought seven bouts and died in the eighth, aged 23 years and 5 days. His wife Aurelia and ‘those who loved him’ put the monument up, quoting the dead man’s words: ‘My advice to you is to find your own star. Don’t trust Nemesis [the goddess of Vengeance]. That is how I was deceived.’

This is haphazard information and much of it comes from outside the city of Rome itself (as always, the evidence is skewed towards Pompeii and we can only assume that, writ large, it would apply to the Colosseum too). But if we put together all the evidence from Rome and the rest of Italy about the gladiators’ life-expectancy – tombstones and graffiti – we do get a clearer glimpse into the frequency of gladiators’ fights and their chances of survival into something approaching old age. In fact some expected and unexpected conclusions emerge. The average (median) age at death of gladiators as noted on tombstones was 22.5 years. Of course, gladiators who got such a commemoration were probably an exceptional bunch. They had to have a spouse or a comrade who cared about their deaths sufficiently to set up and inscribe a memorial, which cost cash. In general terms the sample is likely to be biased towards the successful. Even so there is a striking contrast here with the life expectancy of ‘normal’ Roman males. Supposing (and it is only a guess) that gladiators entered the arena around the age of 17; then, on the basis of these figures, they could expect to live just another 5.5
years. Normal males at age 17, on the other hand, had a life-expectancy of 31 years; that is, their average age at death, if they lived to be 17 (a big if: infancy would have killed off most), was 48. Unsurprisingly perhaps, even for these successful gladiators, the chances of dying early was very high.

The tombstone records are revealing in other ways too: we know that Glauco died at 23 after 8 fights; another gladiator died at 27 with 11 fights; another at 34 with 21. These figures suggest either a late age of starting a gladiatorial career, or perhaps more probably – but also more startlingly – a low frequency of fighting, at least among elite gladiators. Assuming a starting age of 17, and assuming also that they were in continual gladiatorial service up to their death, we must reckon something under two fights a year. Were gladiators afraid to fight? More likely, their owners were reluctant to have them risk death. The second-century
AD
philosopher Epictetus tells us that gladiators belonging to the emperor had been known to complain of not being allowed to fight often enough: ‘they pray to god and pester their overseers to let them fight’. It makes a wry image to think of gladiators strenuously training every day and putting on practice bouts perhaps with wooden weapons – while fights for real were relatively rare. Though not always. In some of the biggest imperial shows (where demand perhaps outstripped the number of gladiators available) we know that individual fighters would sometimes enter the arena more than once. We saw (
p. 51
) that this was implied by the ‘half pairs’ noted in the inscriptions commemorating Trajan’s blockbuster in 117. Likewise the man who came to Rome from Alexandria, probably for later shows celebrating Trajan’s success (illustration 10,
p. 62
), fought at least three bouts in the same series:
the inscription explains that after his first bout ever, his second came just seven days later; something then took place ‘at the same games’, but as the text frustratingly breaks off at that point we do not know what that ‘something’ was – perhaps the fight that killed him.

So what were the chances of death in each fight? The figures from Italy are sparse, but suggestive, and again probably biased to the relatively successful. They under-represent the cheap ‘extras’ (gladiators sometimes referred to in Latin as ‘
gregarii
’, the ‘chorus’ or the ‘B-team’), who would surely have been likely to die sooner. One set of graffiti from Pompeii gives information on 23 bouts with 46 fighters: 21 gladiators won outright, 17 were let go without penalty and 8 were killed or died from their wounds. The sample size is ridiculously small, but it is almost all we have and it implies a death rate of about one gladiator in six in each show. This roughly fits with another index of the scale of slaughter. Notwithstanding the occasional veteran with more than fifty fights to his name, if we count up all those living gladiators from Pompeii whose fight record we know, only a quarter had over ten fights’ experience. Three-quarters had died before completing ten fights, implying a cumulative loss of about 13 per cent per fight. Gladiatorial combat, as Gérôme pictured it, with left-over corpses strewing the Colosseum’s arena must have been an expensive rarity. In fact the emperor Augustus had banned the luxury (in Roman terms) of shows in which all fights were to the death. Not that the regulation was universally obeyed: an inscription honouring a man in a small Italian town boasted: ‘over four days he put on 11 pairs, and of these he had 11 of the best gladiators in Campania killed, and also 10 bears cruelly’.

We can push these conclusions a little further, if we bring into the picture one more piece of evidence from the late second century
AD
, about a hundred years after the Colosseum was built. It is all very speculative and the calculations get rather more complicated, but that is part of the fun. At the time, it seems, aristocrats in the Roman provinces were becoming extremely worried about the cost of putting on shows (which was part of the duty of local magistrates). The central government, under the emperor Marcus Aurelius, intervened in 177, abolishing the tax on the sale of gladiators (reluctantly perhaps as the treasury netted a considerable amount from it) and fixing, or attempting to fix, the maximum prices which presenters in the provinces paid for gladiators. Surviving inscriptions give us the detailed terms of this legislation, all amounts in which are expressed in the standard unit of Roman currency, the sesterce. Five hundred sesterces was sufficient to feed a peasant family on minimum subsistence for a year; 2000 sesterces was the notional price of an unskilled slave. 1 million sesterces was the amount of wealth necessary to qualify for senatorial rank. The figures in the decree of 177, combined with what we have already seen about rates of death, allow us very roughly to estimate the total empire-wide expenditure on gladiators (excluding the big shows at Rome) and to estimate how many gladiators all the shows in the empire consumed.

The law divides gladiators into different pay bands. It insists that half the gladiators used in each show should be ‘chorus’, the maximum price for these chorus members being 1,000–2,000 sesterces each. By contrast, skilled gladiators were priced much higher, at ten levels ranging from 3,000 to 15,000 sesterces each. All the same the pyramid of differential
seems low. Opera divas today, to say nothing of football superstars, get paid fantastically more than the chorus or the pack. Perhaps these low differentials reflected the high chance of death (it was not in the owners’ interest to pay a fortune for a star with limited life expectancy) or a low skill pyramid (were the stars really that much more expert at this brutal game?) or, of course, the producers’ desire to contain the costs.

At the same time total costs for the acquisition of gladiators at each provincial show were put into five price bands, ranging from 30,000 to 200,000 sesterces – small beer indeed when compared with the metropolitan shows in the Colosseum, which were of a quite different order of grandeur (compare, for example, Hadrian reputedly spending 2 million sesterces on a show before he became emperor – though that cost would also have included beasts, gifts to the crowd and so forth). If we imagine a relatively cheap show of, say, 60,000 sesterces and remember that half the gladiators had to be ‘chorus’, that would mean twenty-four gladiators: twelve chorus and twelve stars. And even if a provincial grandee spent the maximum 200,000 sesterces and put on forty gladiators (twenty chorus, twenty stars), he could still afford only two bouts between stars of the highest grade if each gladiator fought only once (and even putting them back in the ring would not greatly increase the number of star bouts, unless he made the same pairs fight each other more than once). If these regulations were followed, all provincial shows must have been small shows.

The decree of 177 also tells us that the tax on the sale of gladiators had yielded between 20 and 30 million sesterces a year for the central government, levied at either 25 or 33 percent
of the price (the decree is unclear on both points). The total price of the gladiators traded in the empire each year was, as declared for tax purposes at least, between 60 and 120 million sesterces. If we work within the coordinates we have, simplified as they must be (half of all gladiators were chorus, one in six died at each show), we can tentatively work out how many gladiators there must have been in the Roman empire as a whole and how often shows were put on in provincial venues.

Given what we know, with half the gladiators fixed as chorus, and assuming a reasonable distribution between all ten grades of star, 16,000 gladiators traded among showpresenters would have cost the bottom figure of 60 million sesterces. Is this the right order of magnitude, for provincial shows which featured normally between twenty and forty gladiators each? The answer depends on balancing the number of shows there were in a year, the number of venues, the number of fights a gladiator undertook each year and the rate of death. If we take the number of amphitheatres firmly known (over 200), add over a hundred other venues, especially in the eastern empire, which were adapted for gladiatorial shows, plus a few more for luck (to take account of gaps in our knowledge), we can guess a total of 400 venues. Allow them to stage two shows a year with an average of thirty gladiators who each fought twice a year – this was an enterprise which could all have been launched with an initial army of 12,000 gladiators. But 12,000 gladiators (400 venues × 30 gladiators) would have generated 2000 deaths in the first show and 2000 more in the second. The total throughput of gladiators empire-wide would have been 16,000. In other words, it fits!

We have taken no account here of gladiators being sold between shows (which would have added to the treasury’s profits), of tax evasion, disobedience to the law, of changing patterns over time (some scholars, on not very good evidence, have claimed that the shows became crueller in the second and third centuries), or of other factors such as replacement costs caused by retirement of gladiators. It is all a very rough estimate. But some of the implications are striking. First of all, we must be dealing with very few shows in each venue per year. On our calculations, most amphitheatres, those iconic glories of Roman cruelty, luxury and profligacy, must have been empty, or used for something tamer, on 360 days out of 365. The functions of all those thousands of gladiatorial images must in part have been to memorialise and keep in the mind events that in real life were rather few and far between. Spectators were likely to have been much more familiar with gladiators practising than fighting in ‘real’ combat. On the other hand, 16,000 gladiators outside the capital amounts to roughly the manpower of three legions of the Roman army. Added to that, however, must be the many who were based in Rome itself (Pliny claims that before the building of the Colosseum, under Caligula, there were 20,000 in the imperial training camps – only two of whom, apparently could look danger in the eye without blinking!). We are then dealing with a gladiatorial machine perhaps equal to something like a quarter of the strength of the Roman legions combined.