One thing Hollywood gets right about Ancient Rome
Gladiators really were sex symbols—just not in the way one might expect.
Hollywood is often criticized for getting history wrong, rarely more so than in films about Rome.
One could take issue with the lack of color, whether in the robes that clothe posh-sounding British actors or the statues and other works in marble stripped of their polychromy. In arguably the most famous movie about Rome, Gladiator, inaccuracies abound, from puzzling choices in how the gladiators are armed to the tigers released to endanger the combatants. Credulity is strained even further in the sequel when a naval fight is recreated in the Colosseum (which could not be flooded by the period in which the film is set) and great white sharks devour those who fall into the water. The heights of physical impossibility are reached when a gladiator rides a rhinoceros, complete with saddle and stirrups, into the arena.
But there is one thing Hollywood gets right.
Gladiators were ancient Roman sex symbols, although not in the way one might expect, or that Hollywood portrays.
As the graffiti etched into barracks in Pompeii capture, gladiators saw themselves as sex symbols. Cresces, a net and trident fighter (retiarius), boasted he “sorts out the girls in the night, in the morning and all other times.” His friend, and fellow gladiator, Celadus the Thracian (Thraex), who fought with a small shield and a curved sword, described himself as the “heart-throb and pride” of the girls. Together they were the “lords of the girls.”
It was not just gladiators themselves who thought they had sex appeal. Martial, the Latin poet, praised a famous fighter, Hermes, as the “darling and passion” of the ludiarum. A ludia was a widely used slang term for a woman with a sexual interest in gladiators. The Christian theologian Tertullian deplored that men gave their souls and women their bodies as well to gladiators.
Yet gladiators were strange sex symbols.
The classical ideal of male sexual attractiveness was epitomized by Greek sculptures, such as Polyclitus’ famous statue Doryphoros (The Spear-carrier): a young man, in his twenties, with a slim, muscular and unblemished body.
Most gladiators did not fit this model. They were bulked up by a unique vegetarian diet built around large quantities of sagina (which translates literally as stuffing), a barley and bean stew. As Cyprian, an ancient Christian bishop and opponent of the Games put it: “The gladiatorial Games are prepared, that blood may gladden the lust of cruel eyes. The body is fed up with stronger food, and the vigorous mass of limbs is enriched with brawn and muscle, that the wretch fattened for punishment may die a harder death.”
In modern terms, gladiators needed a strong frame to support short bursts of intense and violent physical activity, and their carbohydrate-rich diet produced a thick layer of subcutaneous fat which shielded their vital organs. This enabled the combatants to take flesh wounds that would bleed profusely but not reach a vital artery or organ, and so neither kill them nor prevent them from continuing to fight. Heavy-set gladiators, with a physique similar to a modern power lifter or rugby front row forward, made a better visual spectacle.
(The real history of the gladiators)
Gladiators’ rations combined with their hard training and fierce combat had other noticeable effects on their bodies. Forensic examination of skeletons from a gladiatorial cemetery in Ephesus in modern Turkey show that combatants had worse teeth than the majority of the contemporary population. This was a result of their pulpy diet and the physical and psychological stress which frequently inhibited the production of saliva. Their bad teeth would have caused gladiators to have bad breath.
Their hard and repetitive training also impacted their body shape, in some to the point of deformity.
According to the Latin writer Pliny, a gladiator called Studiosus, a Thraex belonging to the emperor Caligula, had a right arm longer than his left. Archaeology suggests that such asymmetry was not unique. A gladiatorial cemetery excavated in York in modern England contained eighty-two skeletons, of which seventy-four were young adult males. Of the later, one in seven had one arm more developed than the other. Like longbowmen in Medieval England, some gladiators were distinctively lopsided.
The equipment of a gladiator could also leave its mark. Sergius, a gladiator that the Roman satirist Juvenal claimed ran away with the wife of a senator, had a furrow on his forehead and a hump on his nose, caused by the rubbing of his helmet. Then there were the scars of their trade. Many of the skeletons from both Ephesus and York display evidence of sharp or blunt force trauma. Some of these wounds had healed. Most strikingly one gladiator from Ephesus, who presumably had retired from the arena to become a trainer, had survived the amputation of a leg.
What gave these bulky and scarred gladiators sex appeal was a potent mix of the dark glamour of violence and the thrill of transgression. Juvenal was clear about what attracted the senator’s wife to Sergius: “He was a gladiator, that makes each one an Adonis… it’s the steel they love.” The steel (ferrum) was his sword (gladius), and both were slang for penis. Gladiators were at the bottom of society. They were prisoners of war, criminals, slaves, and free men who had voluntarily reduced themselves to the status of slaves, swearing an oath “to be burned, bound, beaten, and killed with steel.”
Male writers thought that gladiators held a strong erotic appeal for elite women. A maid in Petronius’ 1st century AD novel The Satyricon says her mistress is one of those women whom the arena set on heat: what gave her pleasure was kissing the tracks of the whip.
Gladiators were the ultimate Roman rough trade.
