Ever wondered what it would be like to walk in the calcei of a Roman gladiator? How did gladiators pass their days? Join us and our special guest to find out more!
Harry Sidebottom
Harry Sidebottom holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Oxford and is a lecturer in Ancient History at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is the author of two well-known series, Warrior of Rome and Throne of the Caesars, as well as several non-fiction books on Roman history.
His latest book is THOSE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE: A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator.
This investigation illuminates the harsh truths about the everyday lives of men who fought to the death in the sandy arena of the Colosseum and breaks down the twenty-four-hour period between the evening before the games and the aftermath. We get to go on a journey as the gladiators train, eat their final meal, process into the arena, the formidable bloody combat, and the sunset after battle.
Things to Look Out For:
- Magic and medicine
- Provincial gladiators
- Rusty – we just stay away from you, Mr Crowe!
- The likelihood of surviving the arena
- The connection between politics and gladiatorsÂ
Be sure to grab your copy today and fill the next 24 hours in your life.
Sound Credits
Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman
Automated Transcript
Dr Rad 0:15
Welcome to the Partial Historians. We explore all the details of ancient Rome, everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles waged, and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr. Rad,
Dr G 0:33
and I’m Dr. G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.
Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Hello and welcome to a new special episode of the Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr. Rad, and I am Dr. G. And Dr. G, we’re stepping into the arena today. We are joined by Harry Sidebottom, who holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford and is a lecturer in ancient history at Lincoln College, Oxford. He is the author of two well-known series, Warrior of Rome and Throne of the Caesars, as well as several non-fiction books on Roman history. However, his latest book is Those Who Are About to Die: A Day in the life of a Roman gladiator, which is being released actually as we speak, I believe, which is mid-April 2026. For those of you listening in the future, this book investigates and illuminates the harsh truths about the everyday lives of the men who fought to the death in the sandy arena of the Colosseum, and breaks down the 24-hour period between the evening before the games and the aftermath. We get to go on a journey as the gladiators train, eat their final meal, process into the arena, the formidable bloody combat, and then the sunset after battle. So we’re very excited for this. Welcome to the show, Harry.
Harry Sidebottom 2:24
Hi, thank you for having me on.
Dr G 2:27
An absolute pleasure. We’re very excited about this topic. It is a topic that is particularly close to Dr. Rad’s heart, as I’m sure our listeners are well aware, and it’s something that over time I’ve come to know quite well through Dr. Rad, so I’m really excited to learn even more about this fantastic topic. So to get us started, who were gladiators, and where does gladiatorial combat come from?
Harry Sidebottom 2:54
Okay, who were gladiators? There’s four main pools for recruits, and the first were prisoners of war, warriors from foreign nations that the Romans had conquered. That’s really kind of straightforward. Rather than being executed or enslaved and put to work in chain gangs or whatever, they’re condemned to the arena. The second group are criminals, guys convicted of really major crimes, murder, temple robbing, sacrilege. Once again, convicted, sent to the arena. Now, one of the things that’s kind of odd in our way of thinking is that the Romans regarded sending these two groups of people to the arena as actually merciful, because they could have just been executed with 100% chance of dying, if they’re sent to the arena, which we might talk about later, they they have a reasonable chance of survival. So they’re the first two groups, and obviously prisoners of war. The numbers vary hugely over time, depending on if the Romans are fighting successful wars of conquest. The third group are slaves. Slaves sold into the arena by their owners, and they’re really quite interesting because the Emperor Hadrian enacts a law that no slave owner can sell a slave into the gladiatorial schools unless the slave has done something wrong. Now that kind of looks like a humanitarian, humane thing, and in already and in intention, it probably is. But then, when you sort of stop and think about it, you think, well, how’s this slave going to get access to Roman law? And if he does, then a horrible fact is that the evidence of a slave in Roman courts can only be taken under torture. So maybe some slaves would have just thought it was easier. Maybe most slaves would have thought it’s a hell of a lot easier just to go quietly to the gladiatorial school and hope to come out the other end. As a sort of adjunct to that, the next emperor Antoninus Pius is in the mid second century AD. He possus a very. Different law that any slaves who’ve run away from their owner to hide in a gladiatorial school, if they’re discovered, should be sent back, and that kind of I think is one of the chilling thing of just how horrible Roman slavery could be. That you know, some slaves thought their brutalized lives as slaves; they’d be better off risking their life on the sand in the arena, and the final of the four groups, I think I’ve remembered more. We got prisoners of war, we got criminals, we got slaves, and we’ve got free men who volunteer. And that, for us, is kind of a weird one. But free men did volunteer to fight, and volunteered in quite large numbers.
Dr Rad 5:39
And that’s a really interesting group to sort of get into. Can you tell us a little bit more about maybe the differences between the experience of a free man who’d volunteered to become a gladiator as opposed to someone who was already a slave?
Speaker 1 5:54
Oh, you guys ask the toughest questions. I can try. If you’re a volunteer free man from the elite, you almost certainly had a contract, and the contract specified you would fight X number of times, maybe only once. As far as how differently they were treated, the satirist juvenile does mention that free men bunked in different cells from slaves and the others. Juvenal, of course, says the these cells are, I think, not quite as revolting and obscene as the other ones. So it’s not necessarily a good thing in Juvenal’s eye. We did know the prize money. The share of the prize money was different. If you’re a slave gladiator, you get 20% of the prize, and if you’re a free man, you get 25% And your trainer, the lanista, he gets the majority. So yeah, there are different, definite differences, but actually, it’s one of those areas that’s very, very hard to tell. I mean, the thing that always fascinates me, and I think fascinates quite a lot of people, is why the hell did people volunteer in the first place?
Dr Rad 7:06
Yeah, it does seem weird.
Speaker 1 7:08
And why would you do it? The poet Horace has a really simple, straightforward answer: they’re morally bad people. There you go. They’re just bad, bad people.
Dr G 7:20
Clean cut, simple.
Harry Sidebottom 7:21
Well, he says they’re bad people, and there’s specific type of bad guy. They’re young men from rich families who just wasted their entire inheritance on all the usual things for a Roman moralist. That’ll be booze, women, gambling, food, flashy houses, whatever. They’ve run out of money and they have no choice. They can either become a carriage driver or they can become a gladiator. But I think if we strip out Horace’s elite moralizing, there is kind of a bit of a point there that grinding poverty. We tend to forget, and we think of Rome. We think of the big palaces, the marble floors, the big, the statues, whatever the togas. Yeah, that’s about the elite, the well-off. About 10% of the population, 90% are living on or below the subsistence line. The one thing that being at a gladiatorial school guarantees you is you will be fed and fed a lot of a lot of food, and you’ll be housed, and you know, grinding poverty is a way out. Not, of course, that we should necessarily think that’s the only reason. I mean, why do guys from deprived areas now try a career in boxing? It’s not just a way out of their background. It’s also glamorous. It’s also you get money, you get fame, and guys who do extreme sports. And yeah, perhaps there was a parallel there in Rome with young men who actually relished the the incredibly dangerous physicality of it all. Yeah, the sort of guys who now end up playing international rugby,
Dr Rad 9:00
adrenaline junkies, a lot of them. No, look, that’s actually a really interesting point because one of the things I did like about the Stars Spartacus series, the original one, not the House of Ashur one, is that for all its flaws, it does include a character who enters the gladiatorial school because of debt, and we get to sort of explore his rationale a bit more, and it does kind of flesh out these sorts of decisions that people might have had to make in the Roman world.
Speaker 1 9:29
Yeah, absolutely. I think too often as historians we just kind of go homogenize people’s reasons. I mean, people probably volunteered for a whole bunch of different reasons. Grinding poverty is one. Adrenaline junk is another. The glamor, yeah. They and they could, of course, all be coming together in one guy. So yeah, I mean, I’m not sure I would have volunteered, but but yeah, I can see why people did.
Dr G 9:55
Yeah, I can see as well. It’s that sort of thing where it’s like if you’re interested in. Spotlight, and you can’t see any other way to get there. It’s it’s certainly a viable option, and also if the struggle is real and you feel like you’ve had to fight for everything anyway, you might as well get paid for the fighting. And I can see the appeal in that for sure. I think this leads in nicely to thinking about some of the misconceptions that we have in the modern world about the lives and experiences of gladiators. Are there any particular bugbears that you’ve noticed along in your research?
Speaker 1 10:29
Yeah, the one that seems to catch everyone’s attention is their body shape. I mean, because our popular image of gladiators is via Hollywood, and we think Russell Crowe in his prime. We think I’ve forgotten the actor, the guy who’s in Gladiator Two, which, by the way, I’ve never seen. Everyone tells me it’s terrible, but
Dr Rad 10:48
that-that’s good for you. Yeah, that’s a good one. You’re missing Paul Macca, I think, is what you’re probably talking about. Yeah,
Speaker 1 10:53
yeah, but I’m-he’s young and ripped and muscly and thin and athletic. Gladiators weren’t. Um, they-they tended to be beefed up on a special diet. It was called Saginaw stuffing. It’s got kind of an animal food connotation. Put it out to modern medical terms, it was a and I’m not a doctor, medical doctor, so I’m going to struggle over this. It was a carbohydrate rich diet, and it was designed to build up a thick layer of subcutaneous fat. The idea is the guys. These are big B, and they’re not sumo wrestlers, but they’re big guys. And the idea is they can take a wound, they can be cut, and they can bleed in a visual, spectacular way, but the weapon has not reached a vital artery or organ, so that’s why they are. They’re big tubby guys, and this is one of the things that seems to fascinate people. I mean, I I said it in an interview in England some time ago, and it was picked up by the newspapers, and then there was this weird sort of thing on one of their online papers when all sorts of people accusing me of being a lefty body positive revisionist historian.
Dr G 12:09
Oh no! Of all the things.
Speaker 1 12:12
I mean, even my agent said, “Yeah, my deep, deep cover had failed. I’d finally been rumbled. I had no idea what these guys were talking about because you know, I’m not making any in the book. I’m not making any point about body shape or images now. I’m just looking at the ancient evidence and saying these guys were actually quite heavy. But yeah, that’s one. The other one that preconception is via Hollywood that it’s carnage that everyone dies, and they and they don’t. Okay, it’s very hard to form any realistic estimate of your percentage chance of survival or dying. I’ve seen one rather bloody-minded French scholar reckoned you had a one in four chance of dying in about, whereas one rather more Pacific American scholar came out at one in 20. I looked at one fairly intact inscription from Pompeii, which has it’s the program of the day’s fighting, and someone later has added on the results, including who died, and the answer was one in eight. Okay, you got one in eight chance of dying in a fight, but to make that at all meaningful, you’ve got to put it with how often did guys fight and how long did they fight for? Okay, the Emperor Hadrian again. This is a very specific legal enactment by him, which historians we just tend to generalize out across the whole empire and across centuries. But he asked one very specific legal question: What should we do with Spanish cattle rustlers who are condemned to the arena? And he replied, they can be condemned for five years, but they only fight for three of them. Now, okay, so maybe that’s you know kind of the norm, and you only were condemned for three years, and it looks like you only fought once or twice a year usually. So basically, if you’re in the arena for three years and you’re only fighting between three and six times, you have only a one in eight chance of dying in each combat. Your chances of survival are actually quite good. I mean, the chance of dying is always there, but yeah, the majority of guys probably would come out the other end, and so that’s. I think that’s one of the big misconceptions we all have. I mean, in the first Gladiator movie, which actually I really enjoyed, I thought it was great. I mean, it’s a bit weird that Marcus Servilius wanted to restore the Republic. I didn’t know about that, and I’d studied the subject for years. Put
Dr Rad 14:37
that aside. Yeah, suspension of that was confusing, admittedly.
Speaker 2 14:42
But it’s a minor detail
Dr Rad 14:43
Minor detail. But
Speaker 1 14:44
yeah, our popular image is you can. They’re mass battles, and the whole sands are just strewn with bodies afterwards. No, they weren’t even mass battles usually. Usually, gloat or about is a duel between two guys. With either the same or contrasting equipment, and they’re very much graded by their expertise and experience. And it’s not about death; it’s about exhibiting courage, endurance, skill. It’s playing out the central building block of Roman identity, which was virtues, courage, but with a moral virtue element, and the rationale for having gladiatorial combats at all really oddly remains the same throughout Roman history over centuries. It’s a lesson for warfare. the The story is the idea is that if that scum out on out on the sands, show courage, as they were to put it, close to the steel, and you have to pronounce it in a Russell Crowe way. Like you had to say, those who are about to die, as if you’re Richard Burton. If those guys scum out on the sands are prepared to show that courage close to steel, exhibit virtues, how much more so are us, the guys in the stands, Roman citizens, going to exhibit if and when we’re called upon to fight for Rome. So yeah, I think there there are two key misconceptions that all gladiators are really look like a young Russell Crowe, and that everyone dies. No, most of them were kind of tubby guys, and no, most of them didn’t die.
Dr Rad 16:22
Well, I take that as some bad news and some good news because I wouldn’t like all gladiators to look like Russell Crowe in his prime. But I’m very glad to hear about the higher survival rate. So, you’ve given me a bit of an even keel there. 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.
Speaker 2 16:52
Yeah, that’s a really good point, because 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. We have about 250 300 surviving ones, and they’re not only a few. The inscription on them was actually composed by the dead gladiator himself, but almost all of them are composed by people really close to him in the gladiator school. So either a woman claiming to be his widow, I say claiming because technically slaves can’t marry, so they couldn’t have a wife. It’s a woman who cohabits, but she takes to herself the role of wife and widow, or they’re set up by other gladiators in the school, so they’re as close as we’re going to get to the thought world of gladiators, and they’re very interesting. Um, what fascinated me, and I didn’t know at all till I did the research for the book, was the gladiatorial tombstones divide into those from the eastern half of the empire, the Greek-speaking half, and those from the west, the Latin-speaking half. And in the Latin-speaking half, the tombstones, both in their imagery and in their wording, very much try and aspire to make the gladiator like a soldier. They try and, as if they’ve been doing a more honorable, but still extremely violent profession. Well, the East is even odder because their gladiators try and make out their athletes, and of course, athletes in the Greek East are young men from high-status families, and they call themselves athletes of the war god, athletes of the sands, and in both cases, the gladiator who kind of is at the bottom of the social pyramid, they’re trying to aspire to and claim a higher status. They also, really interestingly, claim quite often to be merciful, that they spare people, they never killed anyone. Some say, which again kind of reinforces this idea: it’s not all about killing; it’s about skill, it’s about virtue, endurance, and weirdly enough, gladiators like to see themselves as merciful guys. So yeah, I think the tombstones are the best way for us to get close to the real thought world of the gladiator, rather than the thought world of rich members of the elite observing gladiators.
Dr G 19:31
I think that’s fantastic because it gives us this way into thinking about what is a gladiatorial subculture in operation between these members, because they’re living together, eating together, fighting together, and then going on tours at times as well, and meeting other groups and seeing what their culture is a bit like as well, and these tombstones then represent something infinitely useful in terms of insight into what we can learn about them. I’m wondering beyond the tombstones, what are the other important sources that we have for learning about gladiators?
Speaker 2 20:08
Kind of everything, basically all the all the sources we’ve got. What we don’t have, which would have been very helpful, is one literary figure giving us a long book on gladiatorial combat, literature is important, but it tends to be little scattered references here and there. Then we have the tombstones. Then we have the hard, you know, the bricks and mortar archeology. We have the Colosseum. We have all those amphitheaters. I always forget how many there are. I think it’s about 300 have been found across the empire, mainly in the west, because in the east the Greeks could repurpose and adapt an existing theater or an existing running track. So we have that, and we have glad tourist schools, of which there are five known archeologically: two, two in Pompeii, one in Rome, and two others. So we’ve got that sort of day-to-day thing. Then there’s art, visual imagery, and what is particularly a type that is particularly useful are mosaics. Rich guys who have sponsored gladiatorial games in their hometown like to have a mosaic recording their generosity to their community, which is kind of weird to ask because they’re usually situated in what would have been a dining room. So your guests come in and they have dinner, drinks, and dinner with you, and under their feet, people are being disemboweled. But yeah, it does delicious. Delicious. It does kind of remind me that I mean, this is the Romans weren’t just like us. I mean, this is the thing that always really irritates me with bad historical novels. They kind of get the the let’s use the German word the realien. They get the clothes, the food, the weapons and stuff right, but they make no effort to get mentalities right. You know, they they have a modern person with all our modernities and values, just in fancy dress, and it’s things like the mosaics in dining rooms of people being eaten by tigers in the in the executions or stabbing each other reminds us that in some ways Romans are very like us, but in other ways they’re as alien as a, you know, a very remote tribe in Papua New Guinea. Their mindset is not ours. So yeah, and the mosaics were a great one for writing the book.
Dr G 22:31
I think they also reveal the body shape as well for people who are like, where do I find this information that is ruining my understanding of the athletic body? Check the mosaics.
Speaker 2 22:41
Yeah, and the Borghese mosaic is a famous 1/4, century AD from Rome, and they are incredible. Those guys are almost sumo wrestlers. They are very, very tubby gentlemen. They also have really quite interesting sort of names in that they’re quite often named after famous, good-looking boys from and from myth, so you get Narcissus, you get Eros, you get one called Licentiosus, which I rather like. Iaculator, well, there’s a name to conjure with. These guys were sex symbols, even though they were tubby, which is one of the weirdest things because the Roman body image of what was a good-looking guy was very similar to ours. It’s ripped. It’s young. It’s not a tubby guy with scars. Yeah. In the book, I try and explore why were gladiators’ sex symbols, since they didn’t fit the ideal of sexual attractiveness for men, and I think the answer I had to come to is that they are just the ultimate rough trade. Yeah, these are dangerous, bad, or maybe the French expression.
Dr Rad 23:48
Bad boys.
Speaker 2 23:49
Jolie laide, pretty ugly. They may be like some of those great French character actors that that battered, lived-in face. Guys like Thierry Godard in Spiral. You know these guys who are not conventionally good looking, but there’s something really attractive about that. That one worries me because my mum, who’s 97, told me that Thierry Godard was a very sexually attractive man the other day. I’m going, hey mum, I don’t need to know what you think about that.
Dr Rad 24:17
She still got it. I like it. You’ve highlighted that gladiators and the displays that they provide are connected to the values of Roman culture, but there is also this interesting connection between gladiatorial displays and the political world of Rome, particularly at. We get, you know, really into probably some of the better known periods of Roman history, the ones where we have a bit more documentation. Can you tell us a bit more about that link?
Speaker 1 25:09
Yeah, sure. I think it’s best if we kind of divide it into two: the Republic and then the Empire. When Rome’s ruled by emperors, under the Republic, lateral combat first appears as funeral games, the Romans are very convinced. The first fight was in our terms, 264 BC. Three pairs of gladiators fight at the funeral of a senator. Senators very quickly realize they’re a crowd pleaser, and senators under the Republic need the populace to vote for them, to vote them into office, to vote for laws they want passed against laws they don’t, and they realize that putting on glad tour of games is is a surefire way of getting this popular favor. So there’s a huge exponential explosion in numbers and lavishness under the republic, and then that all kind of stops in Rome once you’ve got Augustus and an emperor, because an emperor has to be the one patron of the plebs of Rome. So senators can no longer put on games. Instead, you have the emperors doing it. But once again, there’s an inflation of numbers and spectacle, because if you’re an emperor, you’ve got and you’re putting on games, you’ve got to put on something bigger, better, and with more novelty than the guy before you, because otherwise, you know, the public will get bored. So I mean, they reach absolutely crazy, inflated numbers under Trajan, and then maybe in the third century, according to some really dodgy sources, you get ludicrous numbers of men and animals being consumed in the games. Meanwhile, out in the provinces under the emperors, the local elites are doing pretty much what the senators did in the republic. They are putting on games to win popularity in their own hometown, and of course, these small towns are building amphitheaters, which is the biggest building in any town. It’s an incredibly expensive way of showing the local elites’ commitment to the new order, how Roman they are, their commitment to Romanitus. There’s a great expression by the late Keith Hopkins, who professor at Cambridge, in the Roman world, the amphitheater would loom over a town in the same way the great cathedrals did in medieval towns in Europe, and I think that’s a really evocative way of thinking about it because just like cathedrals, the amphitheaters embody an awful lot more than entertainment. They embody core values of the culture of the time. So yeah, I guess kind of splitting into three ways. There’s also the little the the penny shows, the assiferana. We know next to nothing about them, but there are guys out in the provinces under the emperors putting on commercial shows. I mean, the fact they’re called assiferana doesn’t mean you paid one ass a small coin to get in. I mean, it it’s a judgmental term, I think, not an actual how much you had to pay. I mean, after all, penny dreadful novels don’t cost a penny. You don’t only buy airport thrillers at airports, but there’s this subworld of little local commercial lanistai trainers putting on shows for money. Incidentally, lanistai are right at the bottom. They are just the scum. Legally, they’re on a par with pimps, prostitutes, and very tellingly, for the Roman way of thinking, actors and actresses, and people who keep bars. I mean, these are just the lowest of the low, really, aren’t they? Well, they were if you they were if you’re Roman.
Dr G 28:40
Shocking stuff, the lanistas. Yeah, look, I think this is. There’s a sense in which I like this image that you’ve presented as well about this idea of the likeness to the cathedral. I think that’s that is a really useful image to keep in mind, and the way that as the center builds itself up to such a degree under the emperors, that it frees up the local elites outside in the peripheries to start doing something that feels very Roman for them, and I imagine that over time this leads to differences turning up in the way that things happen versus what’s happening at the center versus what’s happening in the periphery, and I’m wondering what do we know about that kind of thing?
Speaker 1 29:25
It’s fascinating topic, and you’re absolutely right. The trouble is, we don’t really know much about it. All our literary evidence is focused really on Rome, so when we’re trying to reconstruct how were gladiatorial shows put on out in the boondoggles, somewhere like Colchester in Essex in England, where let’s face it, nothing happens now, let alone then. Sorry to anyone who’s listening who happens to live in Colchester. We do get little hints. Twice we hear of types of gladiators who are specific to the Gallic provinces, to modern France, but. They’re just passing references, but it does show that out in the provinces there might be a different style of fighting, different types of fighters. I think the key thing is the shows in the provinces would be much smaller. Even the richest guy in Athens or Ephesus, let alone Colchester, cannot rival. And indeed, it’d be politically very unwise to start rivaling the emperor in Rome, because you do that. I mean, you’re heading for exile or death, really, aren’t
Dr Rad 30:29
you? Yeah, I think that’s a really useful point. It kind of highlights how the context of when you’re fighting, where you’re fighting, really would shape the kind of experience that a gladiator would have, and we, and that’s really all we can say, as you’ve highlighted. It’s hard to know any of the specifics, but you probably, for example, have a lower chance of survival the deeper we get into the empire when there are these huge displays that are being put on, or so it would seem, unless they’re exaggerating things as the Romans like to do, and if you’re not fighting in Rome itself and you’re fighting in the provinces, who knows what that would do to your treatment, your training, and your chances of survival? It would be so great if just a gladiator somewhere had thought to keep a diary. Honestly, they’re only fighting twice a year. Yeah, why didn’t they? Yeah, I
Speaker 1 31:18
think that’s that’s absolutely true. I mean, if you’re a star gladiator and you’re in the imperial school in the Ludus Magnus, the great school in Rome, your chances of survival are probably much higher than if you’re certainly much higher than if you’re a novice somewhere out in the boondocks. But I’ve always I kind of use the image I think in the book that I think your chances of survival increase the longer you are a gladiator.
Dr Rad 31:46
That’s true. Yes, you have a bit of a reputation. People don’t want to see you. Exactly. I mean, the
Speaker 1 31:51
guy putting on the show wants you to come back for the next show because you’re a crowd pleaser. Also, I guess because you’re getting more skilled. I mean, I use the comparison in the book with World War One fighter pilots, scout pilots as they should be called in their own terms. Basically, yeah, the terrible they only lived three weeks type thing and dawn patrol. Yeah, but these were the novices. These were the guys with no experience. Once you got through the first few combats, yes, you could always die, but your chance of survival increased exponentially the longer you did it. Until, of course, in their case, you broke down psychologically and couldn’t bring yourself to do it ever again.
Dr Rad 32:31
There is that now. Look, I think it’s very much like how when you’re watching a movie or a TV show, if you see a very well-known actor or actress appear, you most of the time can bet on the fact that they’re going to be in the movie for the majority of the story. They’re not going to be killed off in the next frame. People are going to want to see them more, and they’re the draw card. So you can most of the time, unless they’re going for shock value, guarantee that you’re going to see that person a bit while you’re watching it, in going in a totally different direction, there is a really interesting connection between Roman ideas around magic and medicine and gladiators, and we would love to know a bit more about that because I don’t think most people know about this part.
Speaker 1 33:16
Yeah, let’s start with medicine. Gladiators are really expensive investments. You’ve trained them. You’ve fed them. You’ve housed them, and it seems that every gladiatorial school gave them the best medical care it possibly could. We mainly know about gladiatorial medicine via Galen, you know, the great West father of Western medicine, who went on to be personal physician to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, and we know that he started out his career as the doctor of a gladiatorial troupe in Pergamum in Asia Minor in modern Turkey. Unfortunately, Galen didn’t write a book on me being a doctor of gladiators. What he does is, in loads of later works, you have this occasional references to what he did, and needless to say, as as it’s Galen writing this, he was really good. He claims he never had a fatality; every patient survived, which is odd. Because in another book, he says, “I quite often used to sit up through the night. Certain types of chest wound are invariably fatal, and these were the symptoms as the gladiator died. Okay, so doesn’t quite match. Galen
Dr Rad 34:28
gave himself away there.
Speaker 1 34:29
Yeah, he gave himself away a little there. He should have written one one connected book on it. It seems that Roman medicine was very good at suturing wounds, fixing broken bones. I mean, in the there’s a glad toural cemetery that’s been archeologically dug from Ephesus in Turkey, and modern forensic pathologists, forensic anthropologists have studied the skeletons, and it’s a treasure trove of information. But one of the most fascinating things for me, apart from the fact these guys do have the bone structure to support being tubby, and they have a very high calcium rate, they drank a special drink with ash mixed in to build up the power of the bones, strength of the bones. One of the things is they’ve they’ve almost all got wounds that survived, and some of them are really serious wounds, a lot of compression wounds to the head, to the skull, and one has survived them, having his leg amputated.
Dr Rad 35:27
Ouch! Yeah.
Dr G 35:28
Okay, that’s a tough one.
Speaker 1 35:30
I’m guessing he wasn’t still fighting. I’m guessing if we’re going back to the Hadrian model, he’s done his three years fighting, maybe been cut short, and then he’s in the two years of maybe acting as a trainer himself, or as a maybe a guard in the school.
Dr G 35:46
Although you never know, the Romans do like a twist. I have a vision of him having a very special stool that he then operates from, and is able to spin while doing his attacks. When he needs, yeah, that’s good. He’s got a
Speaker 1 35:57
special wooden leg.
Dr Rad 36:00
There’s a sword in the in there.
Speaker 2 36:03
Shifting from real medicine to magic, and the key magic thing is the blood of a gladiator was thought to cure epilepsy, and it features in several Christian books. Now, I’d be tempted to dismiss that as just Christian propaganda because obviously Christian’s main role in gladiatorial days to get killed at lunchtime, be executed, and they’re totally anti the whole the whole spectacle. But it also appears in a few pagan texts, including pagan doctors, and there’s a bit of a division. Some implying you have to drink the blood of the gladiator straight after he’s killed, others sort of imply you can take it away and have a bit later. Also, the liver of a gladiator that also is good for epilepsy, but that you definitely took took away and ate in little portions. What’s interesting is that all our sources are totally opposed to this. The medical writers say this is an abomination. It’s a it’s a lower class superstition, and all but one say it doesn’t work. And this is not something a real doctor should have anything to do with. One of the medical doctors does say it appears to have worked in some cases, and he says it’s an absolutely hideous cure for a hideous affliction, because obviously there was no way of understanding epilepsy or of dealing with it. But yeah, there’s also the the bride on a wedding day. The bride’s hair traditionally should be parted with a spear which was crusted with the dried blood of a gladiator.
Dr G 37:41
Hmm. intriguing. And before you ask
Speaker 1 37:44
me why, I don’t know because the Romans themselves had no idea. It’s just this. Even for historical times, Romans, it’s a weird tradition that we don’t understand. But it’s tradition. But then again, I guess why do we have wedding cakes at weddings? I mean, none of us know. I don’t know. Why do we have those tiered wedding cakes? I mean, is it some weird thing about fertility, or because
Dr Rad 38:06
they’re delicious? That’s is it
Speaker 1 38:08
just a tradition? Yeah, it can’t be a real wedding without a big cake. I don’t know. Yeah.
Dr G 38:13
So what I’m hearing is that there is a side trade on spears smothered with gladiator blood, so you can pick them up after the games. Got a wedding coming up? Just come and get your spear. Be prepared. Yeah,
Speaker 2 38:26
and it’s also kind of odd in that almost all types of gladiators don’t fight with spears; they fight with swords. So, is it a weird sort of trade in which the body of the gladiator after he’s dead and he’s in the room where they strip the armor off, is his body then pierced with a spear so you can sell it? Because I’m thinking I can only think of the hoplomachus, one type of gladiator out of many, whose primary weapon was a spear. Other guys use a sword or a trident, or a bow and arrow. They don’t use spears, so why a spear? Why isn’t it a sword? I mean, it’s a mystery.
Dr G 39:08
Yes. Well, this is the trouble with history, isn’t it? As soon as you find one piece of evidence, it all just opens up so many more questions. I’m like, well, that couldn’t have been something that they did for wedding ceremonies pre gladiators. So the early republic that couldn’t have been a thing, surely not. So where does that come from? I have more questions. Yeah,
Speaker 1 39:30
exactly. When did they invent this tradition? I guess some sometime after 264 and then it just became tradition.
Dr G 39:39
Fascinating. So, thinking about the structure that you’ve taken with this book, you’re following 24 hours in the life of a gladiator. What drove you to choose this structure?
Speaker 1 39:56
Okay, I’d used the structure once before. In a novel called The Last Hour why did I use it in a history book? Those are about to die. I was inspired by a brilliant book by a Cambridge scholar called Colin Jones, which is The Fall of Robespierre It’s a day in the French Revolution, and obviously the material he uses entirely different. He’s got dozens, hundreds, maybe 1000s of contemporary documents. He can date everything, whereas I’m trying to do a composite picture, pulling evidence from across the empire and from across centuries. But I thought it was a really cool way doing it because following them through, as in the intro, from the ritual dinner the night before through the night, the big parade in the morning, the beast fights in the in the morning, executions and spectacles at lunchtime, then the big deal, the gladiators, then the gift giving, then back to the barracks. It kind of allowed. There’s a really good structure for exploring all sorts of different aspects of Roman culture, so I can do obviously food, diet, body shape, sleep, dream, sex, attitudes to animals and the natural world, crime, punishment, yeah, and barbarity, civilization, politics. It I thought it was just a really cool way of almost using gladiators and the 24 hour spectacles as a window through which we could view loads of different aspects of Roman culture that people wouldn’t necessarily associate automatically with gladiators. That if they read the book, yeah, they’ll learn about gladiators, but they can whole sorts of other avenues open up for them to think about
Dr Rad 41:41
does definitely situate them. I think much more within the society, which I think is a good way to look at them because if we’re thinking about them and the way that they’re presented in popular culture, that’s not always the way that we see them. They’re sort of they seem kind of separate sometimes, but this kind of leads into a question as we sort of get to know a little bit more about you and what drew you to this career path. You’ve obviously been studying ancient history for a few decades now. What was it that initially drew you to the ancient world and ancient Rome in particular?
Speaker 1 42:16
I can actually answer that one really easily. I was a 16-year-old kid at school. I was very lucky. One of my godfathers was the manager of a bookshop in Cambridge, so birthdays and Christmas. I got given really nice hardback books. And one year, when I was 16, can’t remember his birthday or Christmas, he gave me Robin Lane Fox’s biography of Alexander the Great, and it’s a big book, and it terrified me because it’s got a lot of endnotes at the back, and I thought it was just way too scholarly and way too grown up for 16-year-old me. But then I started reading it, and I absolutely loved it. And I decided pretty much there and then that the idea of being a top-class rugby player or an actor was out of the window, and I wanted to spend my career reading and hopefully writing books like Robin’s, and luckily, you know, by getting a job at Oxford, Robin actually ended up as a colleague and a friend, which is incredibly cool. And I suppose the one thing I’ve done for him is I’ve said that in interviews before, and he seemed quite pleased that he ruined my life by telling me introduction story.
Dr G 43:23
Another one. I got another one. The tragedy. The
Speaker 1 43:29
Roman bit because that was the Macedonians I was first into, and I’ve done one novel, The Shadow King, on Alexander. But what turned me to the Romans was just an inspirational tutor at my first uni Lancaster, where I was studying archeology, a guy called David Scholter, who was just a brilliant lecturer and tutor, and I thought, well, maybe those Romans could be quite interesting. So yeah, one book and one guy, and his
Dr Rad 43:54
name is a name I definitely recognize.
Dr G 43:56
I was going to say, listeners, you will not be disappointed if you seek out Schulter’s work as well because it is good. So I’m interested also thinking about how within the course of your writing career you’ve done pretty good like nonfiction history stuff, and on the other hand there’s the historical fiction side, and I’m interested in your approaches to these different modes of expressing the ancient world.
Speaker 1 44:26
Okay. Yeah. I mean, this might surprise some people, but it’s not that different. Actually, not that different at all. I mean, people tend to think of history as all being fact and a historical novel all being made up, but there’s a big gray area, border area in between, because in my novels I use as much conventional straight history as I possibly can, and I’m very keen on actually lifting dialog from ancient writers, and then again on the other. And on the history books, you know, you have to, with Apache evidence, you have to use your imagination to try and fill in the gaps and interpret stuff to do what the great American anthropologist Clifford Geertz described as thick description, which I always use that because it’s just like a it’s like a get out of jail card to make stuff up, which is fine, providing you tell the reader you’re speculating that this isn’t grounded in hard evidence. This is what I think it was, but no, I don’t. I don’t find the process across the processes are a bit different, but they’re not totally different. You still decide what you’re going to write about, and then you draw up a plan of research. What you’re going to read, what you’re going to look at, where you’re going to go. You take copious notes, and then you try and arrange it in a narrative, and you try and take the reader with you. And in the the nonfiction like those who are about to die, I mean, I’m I am trying to use every technique and trick I’ve learned from publishing 15 novels to get the reader on side and enjoying it, so they’re not as different as they might be. Although I tend not to make up dialog in history books, although the I would like better point out the the start of every chapter in Those Are About to Die has a paragraph or two in italics, and that is flagged up right at the start in the intro. This is fiction, just to set the scene for each chapter. I think you’d be really bad at reading books not to realize that.
Dr G 46:33
Well, I mean, but you’ve let everybody know, and I think that’s that’s perfectly acceptable. And I think I, in the sense that studying the ancient world is a process of trying to weave together small bits of evidence in a way that perhaps in some cases modern history is not. I feel when you get into modern history, it’s more about what are you going to leave out and how are you going to constructively leave things out without destroying the argument that you want to present about the the past, whereas for ancient historians, it’s much more about have we even got enough to say, and how plausible can I make the bits that I put in between that are the part of my imagination to tie those pieces together. So in that sense, I I definitely hear you that the process of constructing the fiction and the process of constructing the history actually almost one in the same from a process perspective for an ancient historian. So that’s really interesting. Thank you for sharing.
Speaker 1 47:28
Yeah, absolutely. And with the fiction, I do always have an author’s note at the end saying, “By the way, these are the bits where I played with the history for the sake of the story, and a kind of a further reading if you want to actually find out what it’s based on, go away and read this, this, and this, which is kind of interesting. When my first novel came out with Penguin, they really didn’t want that there, and I’m going, but but they’re going, yeah. Basically, my editor went, no one wants to read that. No, some guys do, and you know, it’s like a boneless feature on an old-fashioned DVD. It shouldn’t really upset people if it’s there, although weirdly enough it sometimes does. I had a string of really odd online pseudonymus reviews going. My Kindle ended 80-7% of the way through, and the last 13% was full of historical notes and other rubbish. Mate, are you working on the principle that if I hadn’t put the endnotes in, I’d have written 13% more story. I mean, how dumb are you?
Dr G 48:25
Clearly, those were wasted pages. There should have been more action. Come on! When in doubt,
Speaker 1 48:32
always stick in another rooftop case. That’s what several of my editors have said.
Dr Rad 48:37
Now, obviously, those who are about to die is the best thing you’ve written today. But putting that one aside, are there any other publications that you’re particularly proud of that you’d like to mention before we finish up?
Speaker 1 48:50
Well, obviously, yeah. Those who are about to die is undoubtedly. Yeah, it’s the best Roman history book ever written by anyone. Below me. Yeah,
Dr Rad 48:58
I have no questions. You heard it here first.
Speaker 1 49:03
I’ll always have a special fondness for my first novel. It’s called Fire in the East, and I mean, I think if I wrote it now, it would probably be kind of different. But it was my first published novel, and it’s a bit like a rock band. You know, they spend years and years writing songs and doing gigs and touring, and then they finally get a break and they throw every idea that they’ve been thinking about for years into that first album, and kind of that’s how it was with me in Fire in the East. I’d been trying to, you know, decide what sort of history book, what novel I’d write, and I think I would probably this doesn’t encourage people to go and buy it and read it, but I think it’d probably be better written if I wrote it now, 20 years later. But it has a kind of raw energy that I think is really good because it’s the first one, and and also because it started a lot. Series of novels that I realized from the start that the hero of that series, Ballista, is a very durable hero and nicely conflicted, put in bad positions, but a decent guy and people related to him.
Dr Rad 50:13
Excellent. Well, that’s another one that our listeners can check out from your back catalog. Thank you so much, Harry, for joining us, listeners. Just a reminder: our wonderful guest has been Harry Sidebottom, and the book is Those Who Are About to Die: A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator It should be out now, wherever good books are sold. Make sure you pick yourself up a copy. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 1 50:38
Thank you so much. That was a lot of fun. Thanks, guys!
Dr Rad 50:50
Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Partial Historians. You can find our sources, sound credits, and an automated transcript in our show notes. Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman. The Partial Historians is part of the Memory Collective, creators and educators dedicated to sharing knowledge that is accessible, contextualized, socially conscious, and inclusive. To find more from the Memory Collective, head to collectiveme.com. You too can support our show and help us to produce more engaging content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon. In return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes and ad-free content. If monthly patronage is not your style, we have merch, we have a book, or you can just buy us a coffee on Ko-fi, and we’d like to say a big thank you to all our Patreon supporters for making special episodes like this one possible. However, if your imperial coffers do not overflow us, one of the easiest and most important ways to help us is to tell someone about the show or give us a five-star review wherever you listen. Until next time, we are yours in ancient Rome.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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