…I think it’s pretty much “all there” in the thread title.
I figure this knowledge would come in handy if I a) Ever manage to visit Rome myself, or b) Want to “make a scene” while watching a romantic movie set in the Eternal City. 
Everything I’ve ever read, says that you can’t trust any estimates. It seems that gladiator’s were too highly paid to be allowed to be killed frequently, so it was a rare occurance. Generally, the accounts will give an estimate of the number of folks killed during some other guys reign, and not whomever the current Ceaser happened to be. So if you’re looking for a copy of the Roman Sporting News, ya probably ain’t gonna find it.
Of course, I fully expect one of our Doper historians to show up shortly after I post this and prove me totally wrong.
(Does 21 years count as “shortly”?)
Well, since you ask…
Keith Hopkins and Mary Beard attempted some back-of-the-envelope calculations in their 2005 book, The Colosseum. Beard completed that after Hopkins had died and, as Hopkins was always good on statistics, this was presumably one of the bits he had drafted. Their ‘best tentative guesstimate’ was that there may have been about 8,000 human deaths in total (not just gladiators) per annum in arenas across the whole empire, of which about 2,000 may have been in Rome (pp. 93-4). But that was clearly offered as not anything more than a very rough guess.
Is this just about gladiator fights? How about the Christians used as lion food?
That was my first thought as well. Interesting topic.
It was all deaths.
Not all events in the Colosseum were gladiator matches, though. There were also public executions, or fights so lopsided that they amounted to the same thing, and events that weren’t supposed to involve deaths but sometimes did accidentally. I’ve heard, for instance, that animal-tamer shows were very popular, where a performer would be showing off some dangerous animal, but just like now, sometimes the animal decides to take a bite out of the tamer.
The Perfect Master on Christians and lions:
Is it OK for me to say it is amazing to see a FQ thread that was quite the interesting topic, and it received a grand total whopping response number of ONE back in 2003! Wow!
Right- the real “professional” gladiators were too valuable to kill off- not that they didnt occasionally die.
Maybe a few, but-
CONCLUSION
Many men and women were killed by diverse beasts in Roman arenas for a diverse list of offences. Statistically, at least one of the Christians condemned to damnatio ad bestias was killed by a lion, but the very mundanity of this death from a Roman perspective meant that it has faded into historical obscurity. As for Christian sources, their bias, purpose and dating render them unsatisfactory evidence.
It is for this reason that we have rated this claim as misleading.
Right- they’d give the condemned a wood sword and sent him vs a armed and armored gladiator. IIRC this was kinda comedy act in a way.
What would happen if the intended victim prevailed by some chance? Like the guy with a wooden sword conked the gladiator on the head and killed him. Would he be released? Or would they just send out another gladiator to finish him off?
IIRC, in the earlier days, yes, he was released.