Now, in your book, you are obviously following this 24 hour in the life of a gladiator kind of format, and I'm curious to know how much you think it's possible to really understand or know about what the gladiators themselves felt about their profession.

Yeah, that's a really good point, um, because, um, as you know, all, all our literary texts aren't written by gladiators.

They're written by members of the elite who are looking down on, observing gladiators.

In the book, I try and use tombstones of gladiators as a way into their mentality.

Um, we have about 250, 300 surviving ones.

And they're not...

Um, only a few, the, the, the inscription on them was actually composed by the dead gladiator himself.

Sure.

People have been waiting for that.

Some people are.

Well, from Seneca, the philosopher, he claims that a lot of people aren't waiting for this.

They go out and have lunch instead.

And possibly to keep the crowds there, the execution has become ever more spectacular.

In the Roman world, there are two ways of executing someone, usually.

If it's a high-status person, you behead them.

Is that correct?

Were these men trained like soldiers or were they trained differently?

Yeah.

Well, we have very bad sources.

Our sources, they couldn't be more sort of oblique.

We've got a satire by the Latin writer Juvenal mocking women who train as gladiators.

So we learned something from that.

And the other one is a really late source, a guy called Vegetius, who, despite knowing nothing about warfare or the army, wrote a book advising the then emperor how to reform his army.

What did suicide represent to them? A good thing? A bad thing?

Now, was a good entertaining gladiator an actor?

Essentially, yes.

We got scattered little bits of evidence of gladiators actually engaging with the spectators, talking to them, calling things out, doing particularly fancy moves.

Yeah, I think you had to be a crowd...

Well, it was a matter of life or death being a crowd pleaser because...

Most fights don't end in a kill.

They end in one of the gladiators submitting, either because the guy's wounded or because he's exhausted or because he's completely outmatched by his opponent.

I mean, you set fire to yourself.

What is going on here, and what's happening the night before the gladiatorial games?

Yeah.

The cena libera, this sort of free supper, it translates literally as free supper, is a really odd cultural institution with the Romans, that the, the public are allowed in to see the gladiators eating their meal the evening, afternoon, evening before they fight.

Why they do it is, you know, very hard for us to tell.

There's also an element of, well, the German word, I suppose, Schadenfreude, the shadow fear, that the spectators who come in and watch these guys eat know that a percentage of the gladiators eating will be dead by that time tomorrow, and of course, the spectators won't.

What it might also actually be all about is gambling, because Plutarch, the Greek philosopher, has a fascinating passage on this meal, and he talks about watching people.

It's almost an exercise in philosophy and action.

What does a gladiatorial contest look like?

So how do we know that now? Like, how is that something we can actually discuss with regard to gladiators?

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

We can discuss it now, and the answer we come to is very different from the Hollywood answer.

These guys, you know, young, thin, ripped.

No, we've got a lot of ancient literature which talks about their body shape and their diet, and these guys were fed up on a, a unique diet.

It was called sagina in Latin, which means stuffing.

It's got connotations of animal feed.

Yeah, well, so that's something I wanna ask you about, is why does this appeal so deeply to the Romans? How does this become the medium for competition between ambitious town councilors who wanna look good to the, the people of their city? How does this become the way that they show off their wealth and sophistication and, and interest in the wellbeing of the populace?

But how dangerous was it, and how, what was your risk of death as a gladiator?

Much, much lower than it is in a Hollywood film about them.

I mean, in Hollywood, all the battles are mass battles, and almost everyone seems to end up being chopped to bits.

There were mass battles.

They're incredibly rare.

Usually a gladiatorial combat is a matched duel, carefully matched between two opponents of similar expertise and skill.

The chance of survival are actually modern estimates working from tombstones and other inscriptions, is actually quite high.

Obviously, we can't go through the whole book, but if you were going to have a stab at walking our listeners through a day in the life of a gladiator, how would a twenty-four-hour window for them unfold?