I’ve heard the vast majority of fights did not end in death. Is this true?
How long could a gladiator live for? what was typical for someone once they got a few fights under their belt.
What was their medical care like?
But roughly speaking : it depends on the time period and the type of fight being considered. The earliest gladiator fights were typically fought to death, but as the games became more common and prestigious the “big ticket” fights became more professional which means the gladiators themselves tried not to kill each other too much, since the demand for gladiator fights was much higher than the supply of quality gladiators. At this point there were even volunteers, and the crowd started valuing the skill and personalities of the “faces” over any bloodshed. Very WWF.
There were also mock-up fights and demonstrations of skill performed with blunted weapons. Then there were the man-against-beast fights, which *could *result in death for the man but most often did not.
Finally, a subset of the fights were straight up death penalty executions. In these cases, either the convict intended to die had significant disadvantages in the fight to ensure they lost (think “tied up Christian” versus “starving lion” or “guy with a club and leg irons” versus “dude in full military armour”) ; or they kept sending more gladiators at them until they lost. Winning was never an option.
Too late to edit :
Actually, replace “winning was never an option” with “Winning was hardly ever an option (though it did happen in exceptional cases, for people who weren’t convicted for very serious offences).”
Everything I know about gladiators, I learned from reading “Asterix The Gladiator”.
G & U always threw a lot of historical authenticity into their Asterix comics, and I learned a lot from reading them. (If one could only distinguish the accurate historical background from the silly absurdness, which wasn’t always obvious.)
Lentulus Batiatus, the lanista: Some of our graduates live for ten (quickly correcting himself) twenty years. Some of them even become trainers themselves (indicating his trainer) Marcellus.
– Peter Ustinov, in Dalton Trumbo’s script for Spartacus.
…which shouldn’t be mistaken for the Real World. But it’s the first thing I thought of when I saw the thread title.
Kobal2 good point, we should seperate out the defacto executions from ‘professional’ fights
In Mary Beard’s Pompeii, she uses sources from that site and other written Roman resources to come up with the age of death of 25.
The death rate was about 1 in 6 in each show. They only participated in shows about two or three times a year, but for most gladiators, starting at the average age of 17, that would mean death by 25.
Not all fights would end in death - gladiators were expensive to train and reprieves (in individual fights) did happen - and of course some gladiators lasted longer; there are records of one who lasted 50 fights. Still, 25 seems realistic as a life expectancy.
Bear in mind that some of the fights were against animals, so a losing gladiator couldn’t be reprieved in those fights because the animal didn’t understand the use of thumbs up.
Well, you could send some other gladiators or soldiers into the arena with good weapons to drive the animal away from the loser. I have no idea if it ever happened, or even if it would have worked all the time, but I think it would be possible to reprieve a loser that way.
Agreed, they might well have tried it. It wouldn’t work in the same way as just saying “let him live,” though. I also don’t think it would have much chance of succeeding.
Didn’t understand or pretended not to understand? :dubious: