A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator

Most Roman gladiators were not there by choice. They were enslaved people, prisoners taken in war, or convicted criminals sent to fight as a punishment. A few were free men who volunteered and signed a contract, usually because they needed the money.

That is the honest starting point, and it makes the rest more interesting rather than less, because the Romans put enormous care into something built on top of it.

The day started with a wooden sword

A gladiator lived and trained in a barracks called a ludus, under a trainer who had usually fought himself. Days were repetitive on purpose.

• Drill at a post. Hours against a heavy wooden stake, striking the same spot again and again, with a wooden practice sword deliberately made heavier than a real one.
• Kit training. Fighters learned one style and stayed with it, because each style used completely different equipment.
• Food. Mostly barley and beans. Romans nicknamed gladiators hordearii, "barley men". It was cheap, and it built the layer of fat that made cuts to the skin less serious than they looked.
• Medical care. Good, by Roman standards. A trained fighter was expensive and an owner wanted him back on his feet.

The pairings were designed

Gladiators were not thrown together at random. Types were matched so that each one's strength met the other's weakness, and the most famous pairing is the retiarius against the secutor.

The retiarius carried a net and a trident and wore almost no armor, so he was fast and could strike from further away. The secutor carried a tall shield and a short sword and wore a helmet, so he was protected but slower and had to get close to do anything at all.

What happened when someone lost

Films usually get this part wrong, so it is worth being careful about what is actually known.

A beaten gladiator could raise a finger to ask for mercy. The decision was made by the editor — the person paying for the games — who normally listened to what the crowd was shouting before deciding. A spared fighter was missus, "sent away".

The Roman poet Juvenal mentions a turned thumb, pollice verso. That is where the famous thumbs-up and thumbs-down come from. What nobody can tell you is which way the thumb pointed for which decision, because no Roman ever wrote it down. The version everyone knows comes mostly from a painting made in 1872, almost eighteen hundred years later.

Death was real but it was not the usual ending. Training a gladiator took years, and an owner who lost fighters every show would soon have none left. A great many contests finished with both men walking out of the arena.

Design a gladiator of your own

Every Roman type is one answer to the same question: what will you give up? Armor keeps you alive but slows you down. Speed keeps you out of reach but leaves you exposed.

Step 5 is the real exercise. If your fighter has no weakness, you have not designed a gladiator — you have designed something the Romans would have refused to put in an arena, because the audience came to watch a contest between two different kinds of risk.