ShortHand: Gladiators

**Hannah Maguire** (0:13)
Hello.

**Suruthi Bala** (0:14)
And welcome to a very special episode of ShortHand.

**Hannah Maguire** (0:17)
We who are about to die salute you. Are you not entertained?

**Suruthi Bala** (0:22)
So many quotes. Not that I can remember any.

**Hannah Maguire** (0:26)
I've got them in the back, don't worry. I've got them in the tank.

**Suruthi Bala** (0:29)
My brain is just full of 300, which is not the same film, I realize. We're not here to talk about that.

**Hannah Maguire** (0:35)
No, we're not. We're talking about what the Roman gladiatorial games were actually like. We're going to answer loads of questions for you, like did people really turn up in their thousands all over the Roman Empire to watch slaves hack each other to bits? Could honorable fighters really rise up the ranks and win their freedom? Did they really bring lions, tigers, and bears, elephants, and giraffes, and all of that shit into the arena? Were there lady gladiators? And did Maximus Decimus Meridius, husband to a murdered wife, father to a murdered son, really have his vengeance?
The answer to every single one of those questions I just posed, apart from the last one, is yes, and the reality is so much bloodier and loads more insane than it is in the films. So let's step into the arena.
Here is the ShortHand.

**Suruthi Bala** (1:27)
Before the Romans, a lot of Italy belonged to the Utricians. And when the Romans wiped them out, they borrowed from a lot of the polytheistic Utrician traditions, things like animal sacrifice to help divine the future, a bundle of sticks somehow representing divine leadership, and of course gladiatorial combat.
It actually started as a part of the Utricians' rights of death. They'd make enslaved people or condemned prisoners fight to the death at funerals. It's the same idea as human sacrifice, the idea being that spilling human blood helps to purify the dead person's soul. Somehow.
So having slaves fight to the death at your funeral was a good way to beef up your salt, ready for a great afterlife. Since killing slaves is a pretty costly business though, it would only happen for very wealthy folk. The first private Roman fight was in 264 BC, and then they carried on for years. People fucking loved it, and soon enough, they didn't want to have to wait until the next funeral to see a fight.

**Hannah Maguire** (2:36)
The spectacles were known as Munera, and they were originally held in the city's forum, which is the central plaza, the hub of Roman civic life. Temporary wooden structures were built to house more and more spectators, but they kept collapsing and killing people, not the people who were supposed to be killed. At one point, the collapse of a wooden amphitheatre killed at least 20,000 spectators.
So to solve that problem, the Romans built permanent stone amphitheatres instead, which are less likely to fall down and make you go dead. Soon enough, aristocrats and important generals were holding grand ceremonies of bloodshed to demonstrate their wealth and importance to the populace. And then they were made even more important by the most important Roman citizen of them all, the big JC, not Jesus Christ.

**Suruthi Bala** (3:28)
We're of course talking about Julius Caesar. So time for a little rewind, recap and rundown on the Roman Republic.
Rome wasn't always an empire. At the start, it had kings like everyone else. But then they lost the kings and replaced them with a Democratic Senate.

**Hannah Maguire** (3:46)
Lost is a nice way of putting killed all of.

**Suruthi Bala** (3:51)
Now this Democratic Senate was a collective of smart lads who ruled together with no one figurehead. And it stayed this way for around 500 years. But then Julius Caesar, a mastermind general who thrashed the Gauls, invaded Britain and massively expanded the empire. And well, he soon had other ideas. Him and his two mates, Crassus and Pompey, formed an alliance and started hoarding political power.
Caesar was hot shit and he knew it.
So when a bunch of nurse back at the Senate said that he had to dismantle his army and slink back to Rome, Julius Caesar said fuck that and invaded.
He won and pretty much ruled unchallenged.

**Hannah Maguire** (4:37)
And Julius Caesar absolutely loved Ammonera. To celebrate winning his civil war, he threw eight massive gladiatorial games, even throwing in a former senator to fight to the death. And then he threw another huge set of games at the tomb of his daughter, who had died in childbirth. And this one had the gladiators obviously, but also stage plays and beast fights and also age off. And then he held another one in honor of his father, who had been dead for 20 whole years. And that was the one where 320 pairs of gladiators and silver armor fought each other at once.