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
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
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