Did gladiators fight to the death?

An expensive man to kill

A gladiator was an investment. Most were slaves, prisoners of war or condemned men; some were free volunteers who signed themselves over for pay. They trained for years in a school, a ludus, owned by a manager called a lanista, who hired them out to whoever was paying for the show. A Roman law textbook of the second century, the Institutes of Gaius, discusses the usual contract: a fee for every gladiator who came back unhurt, and a far larger price for every one killed or crippled (3.146). A sponsor who wanted blood paid for it.

Augustus tightened the rules. Suetonius says he banned combats sine missione, without release, where the bout went on until one man died (Augustus 45). Fighters were matched in pairs of contrasting types, the net-and-trident retiarius against the helmeted secutor, and a referee with a long staff stood by to separate them.

How a bout ended

A beaten gladiator could appeal by raising a finger. The sponsor of the games, the editor, decided his fate, usually by listening to the crowd. There were four possible results:

• Victory. The winner took a palm branch and his prize.
• Missus. The loser was “sent away” alive, to fight another day.
• Stantes missi. Both men were released standing: a draw.
• Death. The loser was killed, or died of his wounds.

Romans kept score. At Pompeii, painted notices and graffiti mark each name with a letter: V for vicit, he won; M for missus, spared; P for periit, he died. At the opening of the Colosseum in AD 80 the poet Martial describes two star fighters, Priscus and Verus, who battled so evenly for so long that the emperor Titus stopped the fight and gave both of them the palm and the wooden sword of discharge. Both won.

So how many died?

Enough to fill cemeteries. A gladiators’ graveyard found at Ephesus, in Turkey, in 1993 held the bones of dozens of young men. Many had healed wounds, a sign of good medical care, and some skulls show the blows that killed them. Historians who have counted recorded results think most first-century bouts ended without a death, and that the odds grew worse in later centuries.

Some deaths in the arena were never meant to be fights. At midday, between the beast hunts and the gladiators, condemned criminals were executed, thrown to animals or made to kill each other without armor. Seneca, who wandered into a midday show hoping for wit and relaxation, found plain murder: the men had nothing to shield them, and every blow struck home (Letters 7).

Thumbs up, thumbs down

The gesture everyone knows rests on one Latin phrase. The satirist Juvenal sneers at upstarts who stage shows and, when the mob demands it verso pollice, “with turned thumb,” kill to please the crowd (Satires 3.36–37). Turned which way? He doesn’t say. Pliny the Elder mentions a proverb that tells people to press their thumbs, pollices premere, to show favor (Natural History 28.25), so some scholars think a thumb thrust out like a blade meant death and a thumb tucked into the fist meant mercy. Nobody knows.

Thumbs down took hold much later. The fourth-century Christian poet Prudentius pictures a Vestal Virgin turning her thumb to order a fallen man’s death. Jean-Léon Gérôme painted the scene in 1872 as Pollice Verso, with Vestals in white thrusting their thumbs downward; it hangs in the Phoenix Art Museum. Hollywood took it from there, all the way to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in 2000.

“We who are about to die”

The other famous line is rarer still. Suetonius records Ave, imperator, morituri te salutant, “Hail, emperor, those who are about to die salute you,” exactly once: in AD 52, from men about to fight a mock sea battle on the Fucine Lake for Claudius. He answered “Or not,” and they took it as a pardon and refused to fight until he forced them (Claudius 21). No ancient writer says gladiators greeted the emperor this way before every show.