Status: Available. Usually ships business days after receipt of order. Trim Size: 6" x 9". Illustrations: 6 halftones, 2 line drawings. Series: Witness to Ancient History. Request Examination Copy ». With great living conditions which they were able to leave at will. The majority of the gladiator fights required huge amounts of training and effort, fighters were only expected to fight at most 5 times a year which gave them plenty of free time to enjoy their winnings. Probably one of the most well-known gladiators in history.
Spartacus started off as a Thracian soldier who was captured by Roman soldiers and sold into slavery. He began his career as a gladiator, all the while secretly turning other gladiators against their fate. In the end, he and 70 other fighters escape out of the gladiator school, revolting against their owner.
His rebellion grew, only ending after they sent 50, well-trained soldiers to kill Spartacus, leaving six thousand of his followers crucified. Marcus Attilius He started off as a free man, choosing to join the gladiator school due to the massive debt he had accumulated over the years.
Despite this unfair advantage, Attilius surprisingly was victorious and continued to defeat some of the toughest warriors throughout his career. His legendary spirit goes down in history mainly due to his battle over Prudes.
The battle was the first gladiator fight ever to be fought in the Flavian Amphitheatre. They love whom they lower; they despise whom they approve; the art they glorify, the artist they disgrace" De Spectaculus , XXII. The blood lust of the spectators, populus and emperors alike, the brutality of the combat, and the callous deaths of men and animals still disturb modern sensibilities.
Certainly, Rome was cruel. Defeated enemies and criminals forfeited any right to a place within society, although they still might be saved servare from the death they deserved and be made slaves servi.
Because the life of the slave was forfeit, there was no question but that it could be claimed at any time. The paterfamilias of the family had absolute control over the lives of his slaves and little less over those of his wife and children. In the army, decimation was the consequence of cowardice. Beyond the city walls and the pomerium a religious demarcation of the city's boundary , nature threatened. The gladiatorial shows were part of this culture of war, discipline, and death.
The public execution of those who did not submit to Rome, betrayed their country, or were convicted of heinous crimes vividly demonstrated the consequences of those actions. In a society that was deeply stratified including seating in the Colosseum , the usurpation of undeserved rights could be rectified only by public degradation and death.
Having rejected civilized society, the criminal no longer could claim its protection from the forces of nature and so is given up to them: to the wild beast ad bestias or to consuming fire ad flammas. As Martial writes, "His lacerated limbs lived on, dripping gore, and in all his body, body there was none.
Finally he met with the punishment he deserved; the guilty wretch had plunged a sword into his father's throat or his master's, or in his madness had robbed a temple of its secret gold, or laid a cruel torch to Rome" De Spectaculus, IX. In publicly witnessing such punishment, citizens were reassured that the proper social order has been restored and they, themselves, deterred from such actions. In this display, the games reaffirmed the moral and political order of things, and the death of criminals and wild animals, the real and symbolic re-establishment of a society under threat.
In the arena, civilization triumphed over the wild and untamed, over the outlaw, the barbarian, the enemy. The gladiator demonstrated the power to overcome death and instilled in those who witnessed it the Roman virtues of courage and discipline. He who did not fight and die bravely dishonored the society that sought to redeem him. There was little sympathy, therefore, for the gladiator who valued his life too highly and flinched at the point of the sword. If not to have triumphed over his opponent, the defeated gladiator was expected, at least, to master the moment of his death.
Not to do so reduced the gladiator to victim and the audience to onlookers at a sordid spectacle. If, in the morning venationes , there was the transition from life to death, so in the afternoon munera was the possibility of passing from death to renewed life. Earlier in the day, the threat outside society was overcome; in the afternoon, the threat of those who were no longer part of society. In their mutual defeat, the order of things was reasserted and death, itself, conquered.
In witnessing how men faced the necessity of dying, in viewing the fate they feared, themselves, Romans confronted their own mortality and triumphed. In fighting courageously and skillfully, the gladiator might demonstrate sufficient valor to win salvation; in a death accepted without protest, he could acquire it as well. For the gladiator, the measure of his valor was a measure of the desperation of the circumstances in which it was acquired, and, paradoxically, if he could fight in contempt of life and glory, there was the possibility that he could regain them both.
Indeed, Christian unease with the games was due not so much to their cruelty as to the fact that the gladiator could be saved by his own virtus. At the time, only Seneca protested the carnage of the arena; most other Roman authors were silent or approving. But they continued, in one form or another, until AD , when Honorius finally abolished munera altogether, prompted, says Theodoret Ecclesiastical History , V.
For I have written about the Coliseum, and the gladiators, the martyrs, and the lions, and yet have never once used the phrase 'butchered to make a Roman holiday. Barney, W. Lewis, J. Beach, and Oliver Berghof. Visually, no one can do better than to see the first hour of Stanley Kubrick's film Spartacus As spectacular as is Ridley Scott's Gladiator , Commodus, of course, did not allow himself to be killed in the arena but just as melodramatically was strangled in his bath on New Year's Eve.
The historians Cassius Dio and Herodian both were contemporaries of Commodus, Dio actually witnessing the antics of Commodus in the arena. Hollywood movies and television shows often depict gladiatorial bouts as a bloody free-for-all, but most fights operated under fairly strict rules and regulations.
Contests were typically single combat between two men of similar size and experience. Referees oversaw the action, and probably stopped the fight as soon as one of the participants was seriously wounded.
A match could even end in a stalemate if the crowd became bored by a long and drawn out battle, and in rare cases, both warriors were allowed to leave the arena with honor if they had put on an exciting show for the crowd. Since gladiators were expensive to house, feed and train, their promoters were loath to see them needlessly killed.
Trainers may have taught their fighters to wound, not kill, and the combatants may have taken it upon themselves to avoid seriously hurting their brothers-in-arms.
Nevertheless, the life of a gladiator was usually brutal and short. Most only lived to their mids, and historians have estimated that somewhere between one in five or one in 10 bouts left one of its participants dead.
If a gladiator was seriously wounded or threw down his weapon in defeat, his fate was left in the hands of the spectators. In contests held at the Colosseum, the emperor had the final say in whether the felled warrior lived or died, but rulers and fight organizers often let the people make the decision.
Some historians think the sign for death may have actually been the thumbs up, while a closed fist with two fingers extended, a thumbs down, or even a waved handkerchief might have signaled mercy. By the time the Colosseum opened in 80 A.
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