Gladiators and the Roman Psyche: Interview with Dr. Harry Sidebottom

Introduction

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0:13Hi, everybody. From Audible, welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today. When we think of the Roman world in the popular imagination, gladiators are one of the first things to come to mind. Muscular, oiled-up warriors performing on the sands for the adulation of the crowd, spilling blood and spending their lives to entertain the populus Romanus. But what was the reality of gladiatorial combat, and how did Romans understand their peculiar institution? What did it mean to them, and why does it matter today?

Guest Introduction

0:47We couldn't hope to have a better guest to help us answer those questions with us here today. Dr. Harry Sidebottom is lecturer in ancient history at Lincoln College, Oxford, and the author of numerous books. He's written a great deal of excellent historical fiction, including the Warrior of Rome series, along with numerous nonfiction titles focusing on ancient warfare, the Emperor Elagabulous, and many more topics. His most recent book is entitled Those Who Are About to Die. I enjoyed the heck out of it, and I think you will too.

Writing About Gladiators

1:17Dr. Sidebottom, thank you so much for joining me today. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you, Patrick. So, why write a new book about gladiators? What pulled you to this topic? As you just said, I mean, when modern guys think about Rome, ancient Rome, I guess the gladiator is the iconic figure they think of. And I've spent my whole career reading about Rome, thinking about it, teaching it, writing about it, and I'd never addressed gladiators. So, I guess they were just the elephant in the room.

1:47And as for why a new book, I guess you could say I did my due diligence as a historian. I thought I ought to do something about them.

Researching Gladiators

1:54So, I went and looked at all, as much as I could, of the ancient evidence, and I read all the modern stuff I could. And there are dozens and dozens of books on gladiators. And they fall into two camps. On the one hand, there's popular books, and on the other, there's scholarly ones. And in a sense, I thought there was a gap between the two, because the popular books don't really engage with the ancient evidence. They just repeat the same cliches, sometimes the same falsehoods from one book to another. Where on the other hand, the scholarly ones, okay, I've spent my whole career being a Roman historian,

2:28but I had to admit some of them are really hard going. So, I figured if I could write a book that was written for the general reader, but at the same time was kind of underpinned by proper modern scholarship, maybe this would just slot neatly into, I guess, a gap in the market. Well, I have to say, having read the book, I think you thread that needle really beautifully, because it's eminently readable. The narrative is fantastic. I love the way you structured the book with a kind of 24 hours in the day of a gladiator.

3:00I thought that was a brilliant way to bring the evidence together. And you really do incorporate all of the most recent scholarship on this. And the thing I found so fascinating was your emphasis on the physical reality of being a gladiator, that now we have the evidence to be able to say what it did to your body to be a gladiator.

Physical Reality of Gladiators

3:19So, 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 unique diet. It was called sagina in Latin, which means stuffing. It's got connotations of animal feed.

3:50And there are actual descriptions, you know, these guys are bulked up so that, and put it in modern medical terms, they've got a thick layer of subcutaneous fat. So, when they're in the arena, these guys can take a wound and they can bleed in a visual, spectacular way. But they're kind of padded. So, the blade is less likely to hit a vital artery or organ and kill them. So, these are big, big, bulky guys. Now, weirdly enough, I did an interview in the UK with the BBC on this, and I said this.

4:24And then it was picked up by some of the papers over here. And it just provoked this outcry of keyboard warriors going, oh, this is just woke revisionism. And, hell, no, I'm not making any comments about modern people's body shape. Yeah, I couldn't care less. I'm just looking at the evidence. So, there's the literary evidence, and then there's also the skeletons of gladiators. And there's one cemetery in Ephesus, which is in modern Turkey. And there are a lot of gladiator skeletons there.

4:55And forensic archaeologists have studied them in great detail. And, yeah, these guys have a big frame. The muscles of the bones show very strange muscular development. They're kind of like tennis players anymore. So, you know how a tennis player, the arm they use builds up, the shoulder gets more powerful than the other one. Gladiators are like this. They're almost deformed by their heavy, repetitive training. And they also actually had a special, unique drink. They drank ash, either bone or wood ash, dissolved in wine to build up calcium levels so that their

5:32bones could support the heavier structure of their body. And sure enough, you know, the gladiators in Ephesus, unusually high levels of calcium in their bones. And one final thing on this, they had really bad teeth compared to the average inhabitants of the Roman Empire. Their mushy diet and maybe their lack of saliva from their training and from their fighting. These guys had appallingly bad teeth, which also meant they had really bad breath. So, all in all, I'm building up a picture here from the ancient evidence of guys who, if

6:04you let me use a kind of rugby term, because I'm more experienced with that than American football, these guys have the physique of one of the forwards. You know, the big, heavy guys at the front. They're big, tubby guys with bad teeth. They're deformed. They're marked with scars from whips, from wounds. These are really not Russell Crowe and his pomp in the first movie. You know that moment when you order food and suddenly everyone around you gets very interested

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Gladiatorial Combat Discussion

8:15The thing that struck me as I was reading this is because I used to cover combat sports. I used to be a journalist and I covered boxing, mixed martial arts, kickboxing. And I had a lot of friends who covered professional wrestling in that time. And I was a fan of professional wrestling when I was a kid. And when you were describing their physiques, they reminded me of old-timey pro wrestlers, like from the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, these big strapping fellas who had a bit of an ogre-ish

8:46tint to them. And it's almost like that's kind of the default. If you're going to be a big, strong fella, you're going to be carrying a little bit of extra. Same deal with like, if you look at Soviet weightlifters, like Olympic champion weightlifters in the 1960s, 1970s, these were not lean guys. They were just thick. They were big old fellas. Yeah, just like I played university, college rugby. And let's face it, the guys with the low numbers on their jerseys, these guys were carrying a lot of pounds, but they needed to.

9:17They're taking a lot of impact. They need a lot of weight to put into the scrum, the tackle. I'm not saying all gladiators were like that because gladiators kind of divided in, were divided in the Roman mind into two groups. The big shield men, the small shield men. So you've got guys like the Mermelo, big shield, big, tough guy. At the other extreme, you've got the famous one, the Retiarius, the guy who has no shield at all, fights with a net and trident. Now he's going to need to have a different physique. He's going to be lean.

9:48He's going to be a little whippet. He's relying on speed and agility. So I'm not saying that they were all like sumo wrestlers. In fact, they were never that fat, I assume. But on the whole, yeah, these are big guys with bad teeth. Well, I mean, just from years and years and years of covering combat sports and watching fight video from some of the most out of the way places in the world, I just kept picturing a boxing match between two kind of journeyman Russian heavyweights. That's just two big fellas who like the food, like the drink, and they're out there.

10:21They're not looking like jacked, ripped professional athletes. But like there was a meme that went around the Internet years ago of the Russian heavyweight mixed martial artist Fedor Emelianenko. And somebody captioned it saying, like, this is the peak male physique. And Fedor is kind of a tubby fella, didn't look like the most dangerous man on the planet, but at one point had won 30 something straight fights, had beaten every legitimate heavyweight of his generation. And I just remember the disbelief that came across people's minds that this is the baddest man on the planet.

10:51But but like, yeah, a lot of really, really tough guys don't have visible abs.

10:58Absolutely. They haven't got six packs. They're well padded. They've got the muscles, but it's it's well padded under a good layer of fat. Yeah. Generously upholstered, you might say. That's a lovely way of putting it. I mean, I say this is as someone who believes in body positivity for refrigerator shaped men, that this is an issue that speaks very closely to my heart. Hey, as a retired rugby forward, it's very close to my heart.

11:27Well, OK, so I want to come back to the the physical evidence real quick, because you mentioned the retiarius. And I remember watching a documentary about excavations in, I believe, York. This is probably 15, 20 years ago, where they have found skeletons that they identified as being those of gladiators. And I remember the excavators of the site found one individual that on the basis of skeletal deformation, they argued was a retiarius, that the specific pattern of twirling the net would have led to these kinds of shifts in the bone and musculature. I'm absolutely fascinated that that is now a body of evidence.

12:01It's literally we have access to. Yeah. And there's still some debate whether those guys, the skeletons in York, there are 80 of them, were gladiators or not. I mean, I think they were, because initially when they first x-rayed, everyone thought it was a mass killing. And then they realized actually these skeletons were deposited over a long, over two centuries or more. But they're all young men. And they have, the retiarius one has that strange deformation. Some of the others do too.

12:32They've got a lot of cut wounds, a lot of crush wounds. One guy's got a bite wound from a big cat. And they were all decapitated. They've all died a violent death. So yeah, I do in the book include the evidence from York, along with the much more totally certain evidence from Ephesus. Yeah, we've got two really big gladiatorial cemeteries, and that allows us to do a hell of a lot of interesting archaeology with them. The York skeletons in particular, I remember the debate around it because they didn't seem like, it didn't seem to match the stereotypes of what gladiatorial combat looked like in

13:05the imperial core or what you might expect from that. And I just remember thinking, kind of thinking by analogy to combat sports and other things across the centuries, that they look different in different places. That there are different kind of social and cultural norms at a regional and even local level that determine what the spectacle looks like, and that we shouldn't expect gladiatorial games in York to look like those in Rome or Ephesus. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think we tend all too easily just to build up a composite picture based on Rome and then

13:35go, that's what this type of gladiator looked like, not only across the whole empire, from Scotland to Iraq, but across several centuries. No, they're changing, they're evolving. We do have every now and then little flashes of evidence. The two bits that pop into my mind both come from Gaul and they're just two literary texts. One's a legal text and the other's an inscription. And they mention a type of gladiator that is otherwise completely unknown. And one of them, I think they both actually explicitly say, this is a local Gaelic speciality.

14:09So yeah, it really backs up your point that we shouldn't homogenize them all into this is, if it looks like that in Rome at one point, he's got to look like that across the empire across centuries. No, I mean, I think there's also a thing here with the guys giving the games, whether it's the emperor in Rome or whether it's a big local magnate figure in, I don't know, some hick town like Colchester in England, what he's got to do, his show has to ideally be bigger and better and more lavish than his competitors, the previous emperor or the other

14:45big important town councillors in Colchester. But he also needs novelty. So there's kind of an inbuilt drive towards tweaking the equipment, maybe tweaking who fights who. You don't want to see the same thing every time. You want to have a basic idea of what you're going to, but you don't want it to play out the same way. So that's something I want to ask you about is, why does this appeal so deeply to the

Roman Values and Gladiators

15:13Romans?

Roman Values and Gladiators

15:13How does this become the medium for competition between ambitious town councillors who want to look good to the people of their city? How does this become the way that they show off their wealth and sophistication and interest in the well-being of the populace? Right. I think it kind of starts under the Roman Republic. The first gladiatorial combat, according to the Romans, this was the first one ever held in Rome. It's precisely dated, in our terms, to 264 BC, and three pairs of gladiators fight at

15:45the funeral of a senator. But what the senators, under the Republic, the senators need the populace to vote for them. They need to vote them into office. They need to support their friends into office. They need to pass the laws they want passed and whatever. So gladiatorial combat grows exponentially. The senators put on bigger and bigger shows, more and more lavish shows with more exotic types of fighter, as a vote winner. And then that game is just all over. Augustus defeats Mark Antony and Cleopatra, famously at Actium, 31 BC.

16:20Glad I remembered that date. I'm a historian who's really bad with dates. And he establishes the rule of the emperor, one-man rule. It's a military monarchy disguised as a restored republic. And that senators can no longer, they're not fighting for votes from the populace. They're fighting for the emperor's goodwill. They're not putting on shows in Rome, only the emperors, or fairly soon, within half a century, only the emperors. But the really weird thing is that it expands across the whole empire. The local big men in Colchester, Ephesus, wherever, they're still competing for votes from

16:54their hometown. And somehow, gladiatorial combat is very popular. But it also is a way of showing their loyalty to Rome. They're buying into the whole Roman idea, Romanitas. And they're spending a fortune on this. I mean, an amphitheater is probably going to be the biggest building in any ancient city. As the late Keith Hopkins, he was a great Roman historian at Cambridge University, as he put it really nicely once, because this guy had a really nice turn of phrase.

17:25He's one of those few scholars who could actually write prose you want to read. He said, what is it? The amphitheater would loom over the town like a cathedral did over a medieval city. They're huge. They're expensive. It's an incredibly expensive way of getting the locals on side, but also showing the guys in the center, hey, we're one of you. We're Roman. We're buying into the whole idea of the empire. You know, I hadn't heard that specific Hopkins quote, but it's so incredibly apt that, you

17:57know, what society's value, they tend to build big. And the extent to which the arena looms over the Roman consciousness and both channels it and defines it is just wild to me. Like, it's almost hard to explain to a modern person the literal and figurative centrality of this and the Roman way of understanding themselves. Yeah, absolutely. And it's because what the gladiators are doing is kind of enacting out the central core values

18:29of Roman identity. The Romans, as everyone knows, they love to see themselves as a martial warrior race. And here we have gladiators out in the middle. These guys, we might talk about that in a minute. These are the lowest of the lows socially. But when they're in the ring, they're on the sands, they are acting out skill, courage, endurance, what the Romans would call virtues, kind of physical courage with a moral dimension. And so they're enacting a core Roman thing.

18:59And what fascinated me, which I didn't realize until I researched the book, is the Roman explicit justification for gladiatorial combat, weirdly enough, stays the same. It doesn't change. You'd think it might change over kind of seven centuries. No, it always remains on these lines. If those scum out in the middle are showing that endurance and courage and skill, how much more so will us, the Roman citizens in the stands, if and when we're called on to fight for Rome, how much more will we show?

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21:43I'm so deeply fascinated by this, because as you point out, and we'll come back to this in a minute, these were absolute the bottom of the Roman social hierarchy who are out there performing. And even performing in public pushes you to the bottom of the social hierarchy. I had not realized until I was reading this how many references there are to free people going into the arena of their own volition. And the references that you put out about people viewing it as a replacement for military service,

22:14that this was a way to embody exactly that kind of masculine virtue that you were talking about, that had never occurred to me. I had never seen it that way. Yeah, I mean, it is. It's in some of the ancient writers. That's exactly what they're doing. Because once you've got the emperors in charge, the only way an Italian, a Roman Italian, can join a martial thing is to join the Praetorian Guard. And then that stops with the Emperor Septimius Severus about 200 A.D. because then they're recruited, the Praetorians are recruited from the legions on the frontier.

22:46And yeah, we have ancient texts saying, you know, this is terrible for the morality of young Roman Italian men because they're either going to run away and become bandits or they're going to sign up in a gladiatorial school and fight. Of course, most ancient writers have a very different take on why did free men volunteer? And I think it's best expressed by the poet Horace. It's just because they're morally bad people. They're just bad men. And there's certain kind of bad men. They're young, rich kids, privileged kids who've wasted their inheritance.

23:19And hell, there's nothing left for them but to go out there and degrade themselves by fighting. But actually, if we strip out the ancient elite moralizing there, he could have a point. I mean, poverty. We've got to remember that, you know, like, I mean, statistics are ridiculous for the ancient world. They're just guesses. But say 90% of the population are living on or below the subsistence level. If you sign up to be a gladiator, one thing you are getting is a hell of a lot of food to end up as a tubby boy.

23:51The food might not be very nice, but you've got a roof over your head. You've got employment, you've got food. Grinding poverty might be one damn good reason. But there again, going back to our martial arts and rugby stuff and boxing. Yeah, some young guys, it's a testosterone-driven thing. They actually embrace the – as my rugby coach used to tell me, I needed to embrace the physicality of it. Well, so – but there's so many things that I want to pull apart here because there's a term in the sociology of sports that refers to sports of hunger, right?

24:27These are particularly dangerous pursuits that people only really go into because the calculus is that of, well, either you're going to go hungry or you can put your body on the line. And that is boxing, especially in the United States. Boxing is very much a sport of hunger. In some parts of the country, American football is a sport of hunger. In other parts, it's very much not. It's very much a middle and upper-middle class sport. But there are different pressures that lead different populations, like source populations of athletes or, in this case, gladiators, into it.

24:59And I would just say, based on my own experience in gyms, I did know some rich kids who really were kind of dissolute and were looking for some kind of thrill. That was not a completely unknown archetype. And so the ancient writers who point to that, I think they probably did know a guy who exactly fit that. But if that's the guy you know, you're not thinking about the ones who are in there because they really don't have a choice and because this really is the only route to a better life. Actually, that's a really good analogy.

25:29Because going back to my rugby thing, I mean, in Wales, rugby is a working-class sport. But in England, it's unfortunately very dominated by what we call public schools, i.e. fee-paying private schools. In fact, when I played up north, I guess I was regarded as the disillusioned posh boy from the south who just wanted to see if he could test himself with really tough guys from up north. Hey, by the way, the answer was often no. Well, so this is what's happened in baseball over the last 30 or 40 years is it's gone from being a sport, to some degree, a sport of hunger in the United States to being a sport that's dominated by middle class, upper middle class, and even wealthy families.

26:12Because they're the ones who can afford to put their kids in these one-on-one training programs, to have them play year-round, to have them do strength and conditioning work in the off-season, that kind of stuff. That when you create these intensely competitive youth sports systems, you end up giving an edge to people who can give their kids a leg up. But I'm just fascinated by the idea that this might have done different things in different places in the Roman world. And I'm thinking about the analogy of Greek athletics in the East, where you do have tons of rich kids who go into it as a thing, as kind of a reasonably respectable career for what's called a fail son, maybe.

26:49No, that's absolutely right. And one of the interesting things there is we've actually got literally hundreds of gladiators' tombstones. And most of them are actually from the Greek East half of the empire. And one of the things that really struck me researching this book is these gladiators, these tombstones, sometimes they're put up by the dead gladiator left in his will. More usually, it's by fellow gladiators in the same training school as him. But most of all, by women claiming to be his widow.

27:20And so whoever's putting them up, it's a view from inside the school. It's the closest we're ever going to get to their mindset. And the interesting thing in the Greek East is these guys try and set themselves up as if they weren't gladiators, really. They're athletes. The iconography, the way they're portrayed. Hell, on their tombstones, they aren't tubby. They're an ideal Greek athlete figure. And they sometimes call themselves athletes or athletes of the arena. They're trying to appropriate a higher status thing that they really have no entitlement to whatsoever.

27:57God, well, it's so fascinating that you referred to that because I'm just thinking about the career arc of George Foreman, who went from being, you know, a guy who sold himself as scary, a big, scary, mean guy. That this was his persona through the first half of his career. And he goes away from it. When he comes back, he's the George Foreman grill guy. And he's, you know, he's happy. He's a pastor. Everybody loves George Foreman. But I'm fascinated by that transformation, that there's a move toward respectability through the performance of the sport.

28:33Yeah, absolutely. Of course, with the thing that even scholars tend to forget is we've got about, I think, from memory, 500 tombstones of gladiators.

28:44And incidentally, in the West, they like to pretend they're soldiers. Because, again, it's a higher status, respectable profession group they're not. But one thing we all forget about these tombstones is they're not just a random cross-section of gladiators. They're really self-selecting. Because, okay, at one level, they're really unsuccessful guys. The kid who dies in his first bout is not going to be embedded enough in the school or have the money or the connections. No one's going to put up his tombstone. So the guys who have tombstones had to have a certain level of success and longevity.

29:19But they aren't the guys who really made it because they all died in the ring. So what we're not hearing from here are the guys who maybe came out the other end, merged back into society, took their prize money and their winnings. Would they still carry on identifying themselves as an ex-gladiator? Hell no. They'd probably merge back into the population as a whatever else they'd set themselves up as. I mean, that's one thing I love about ancient history is we've got this evidence and it looks crystal clear.

29:50But then when you kind of think about it, you're thinking, why did these ancient people leave us this stuff? They didn't put up these monuments, write these inscriptions to give us info. They did it for a very specific reason there and then. And the gladiators and their widows and friends are putting it up to make a big boast. Look, this guy, he may have tragically died in the ring, but he was a success. I'm so fascinated here by the parallel with sex work in the ancient world where you have a truly unknown number of people who engaged in that as a career and then transitioned out of it.

30:28And we have not the foggiest idea that they ever participated because that's not the kind of thing that they're going to go boasting about in the sources that we have access to. And so the ubiquity of this or the wide cultural exposure that it had were left to kind of piece together and just because people weren't going to talk about it. Yeah, it's a really good analogy. I mean, if I were the gladiator who the poet Horace claims made so much money, he retired and lived the life of a big country landowner.

31:01Yeah. Well, if this guy ever existed, hell, it's in a poem. But imagine someone like guys like him must have sort of existed in reality. Yeah. Are they are they going to be going, oh, yeah, I made all my money back in the ring? Hell no. They're going to be they're going to be standing for the local town council. Yeah. And unless their present day business, whatever that is, depends on people remembering what they did, like an ex-athlete who opens a restaurant or a bar. Otherwise, no, they're just going to disappear. Like there was a basketball player in the United States named Dave Bing, who made a tremendous amount of money, vastly more money from his ventures in investing in the steel industry than he ever did from playing basketball.

31:43And now people that, oh, Dave Bing, the steel magnate, not Dave Bing, the former professional basketball player or ex-heavyweight boxing champion Larry Holmes. Larry Holmes made infinitely more money from real estate investments than he ever did as heavyweight champion of the world. So when people think about Larry Holmes, like, oh, yeah, wasn't he a boxer? Well, yeah, he was the heavyweight champion of the world, but also he was he just became a rich guy.

32:08Yeah, absolutely. One people we never hear about are the gladiator trainers, the lanista. Yeah, I mean, that is people do not put up tombstones saying, by the way, guys, I was the lowest of the low. I traded in human flesh. I traded in human misery. The closest we ever get is one guy in I think the inscription is from all in France. And he comes up with some roundabout way. He says he was a negotiator, a trader in the arena.

32:41And that's the only guy. And he's he maybe went too close to the wire. Then no one says I'm on the list. Of course, you don't. Everyone will despise you. You're once you're on a level with a pimp or a prostitute, male prostitute or well, in the Roman worldview with an actor or a barkeeper. Because, you know, hell, Romans knew these were bad people. Well, so this is again to come back to Ephesus as a place. Ephesus is one of the few places where we have inscriptions from people who actually dealt in slaves, who said that that was their job.

33:14But even in that case, they had euphemisms for it. They called themselves people who worked around the statarium. They weren't slave traders. They were people who happened to do business in the vicinity of the slave auction platform. And if that's what you had to do to talk about dealing in human bodies, which is an accepted thing that everybody knows about and practice and practices in the Roman world, more or less. If you have to be that circumspect about that, how much more circumspect do you have to be about? Oh, my God, you're a lanista. So you're in public view, too.

33:46My God. Yeah, it's that public viewing of the body thing, isn't it? I mean, it's just a no-no. Respectable Romans do not appear on the stage. They do not appear in the arena. They do not put, I mean, I think it's Juvenal, the satirist, writing about a rich kid who becomes a gladiator. And he not only becomes a gladiator, he becomes a retiarius. So everyone can see his face, see his shame. It always reminds me of that passage of when the not, well, very awful Emperor Vitellius is being marched to his death by a mob.

34:19And one of the sources says they put a blade under his chin so he couldn't hide his face and the shame. It's, yeah, it's a very Mediterranean. You don't want to lose face. You don't want your face seen in certain circumstances. It's one of those cultural aspects that is a little bit alien to us in the present looking back on it. That our concept of shame and embarrassment, that even though the emotion of shame is universal, right? Like everybody who's born human can feel shame, but the sources of it are so different.

34:53What causes a person to feel shame is so culturally specific. Yeah, absolutely. What triggers the shame and the way you deal with it? And, yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that really fascinates me about the ancient Romans and I guess any history from other cultures is they're so different but so similar. And at times, I mean, there's a great line by, there's a great novelist back in the 1980s called Mary Reno, did some superb novels, mainly saying Greece. But she said something like the fascination with the past is the similarity.

35:26What's universal to the human, to people, and what's very specific to that time and place? Because the Romans are just sort of, you go along and you're thinking, yeah, that's just like us. You know, they only had one husband and wife. They had 2.5 kids. And this is all looking quite normal. And then you stumble across something and you think, that is so alien. That is so weird. That is not how. And it's all the big ones that, you know, are really controversial now, like attitudes to foreigners, attitudes to women, attitudes to violence, attitudes to sex.

35:58These are just, you know, something, hang on, the world then, they had different mental furniture, a different way of viewing the world from us. And I really think it's insulting for, when really bad historical novels just dress ancient Romans up as us in fancy dress, you're thinking, you're just doing your reader and the Romans a disservice at the same time. You're making them like us and they weren't nice modern Western liberal people. They had a different culture. I'm Raza Jafri, and in the new season of The Spy Who, we tell the story of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran.

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38:35You're someone who's written a lot of historical fiction, and my view on this has always been that embracing the difference, the otherness, the alienness of a past culture is extraordinarily fertile ground for a novelist. That there is conflict in there. There are dynamics that you can play with. There's stuff that you can do that's really interesting and appealing and moves your story forward. And that not doing that, to dress it up, to make the past a costumes drama, that you're actually missing opportunities to tell better and more interesting stories.

39:05Yeah, absolutely. And you're making the whole thing really quite patronizing to your reader. You're making like a nice, cozy, comfy bath. One thing I always find with the historical fiction is, I mean, my main best-known and best-selling series, The Warrior of Rome, the main character and most of the secondary characters aren't Roman. And that opens up a wonderful thing for me, because Ballista, the hero, is actually from what is now modern-day Denmark. He's an angle. He's a diplomatic hostage.

39:36His best, his familiar, one's Hibernian, so he's Irish. One's a Caledonian, so he's Scottish. So apart from the fact I can do gags about an Englishman, a Scotsman, an Irishman who went into a bar, these guys can look at the Romans and then, in a natural way, comment to each other. That's weird. Why are these Romans doing that? If you have two Romans doing it, it's just an info dump. You have Julius Caesar telling Brutus how the Senate works. Hey, these guys grew up there. They know this. Why are you doing this?

40:08God, I hadn't thought about that, but it's so right. It reminds me, this is an absolutely random reference, but the 1991 masterpiece Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, having Morgan Freeman in there to be like, what in the world is happening? In this rainy, dreary place we're calling England is the most useful plot device in an otherwise pretty underwhelming movie. Yeah, absolutely. It just works. I mean, put it in, if I can put it for a moment in very Oxford Classics Don terms. It's kind of the difference between Tacitus, the great Latin historian, and his annals.

40:43He never tells you anything because he's an insider writing for insiders. I think it's brilliant, but you have to know a hell of a lot about Roman history to get anything out of it because, yeah, it's really a nudge is as good as a wink. Then you have compare, contrast him rather, with Polybius, the Greek historian writing about Rome, also a brilliant historian. He's a Greek, and he's writing for Greeks in Greek. He can say, then the Romans do this. Isn't that a strange way of seeing the world? It's kind of that contrast. Yeah.

41:13Oh, I mean, you could never pay me at this point to read Tacitus in Latin. That's just a text I am never going back to. That language will forever, like, we will remain unacquainted moving forward, I think. Okay, so I had one more thing I wanted to ask you about, and this is purely for my own interest. Gambling. You say in the book you are sure that they were gambling on fights. I am sure that they were gambling on fights. Do we know anything about the landscape of betting on gladiatorial contests?

41:48Okay, well, the first thing I ought to do is, you know, admit the personal interest here. My dad was a racehorse trainer in Newmarket. I grew up in Newmarket. It's a racing town. Everyone gambles. I can't imagine not gambling on sport. But is there any ancient evidence? Well, yes, there is. There's a lot. There's evidence of guys gambling in amphitheatres. They've actually got gaming boards scratched. There's one in the Colosseum in Rome and one in the amphitheater aphrodisiac in Turkey.

42:18But that's not gambling on the gladiatorial things. That's gambling while you're there as a sideshow. Yeah, there is a lot of ancient literary evidence of people gambling on chariot racing. And there are two bits of evidence which seem to extend that to gambling in the arena on gladiatorial bouts.

42:41Of course, their gambling is going to be nothing like modern gambling with the Paris Mutuelle in France or the government tote in England. They're not even going to be bookmakers. I guess the model would be much more like 18th century gentlemen in England gambling on horse racing. It's a private wager. And in the book, I do suggest that there's that weird ritual of the Kenna Libra, the free dinner. The night before the gladiatorial fights, the public are allowed in to watch the gladiators

43:11eating. And we've got various bits of evidence of this. And some guys are so scared they can't eat. Others are getting drunk. And others, of course, you know, in Plutarch, the Greek philosopher, just the Greek ones, they're dealing with it in a calm, grown-up way. Um, so why are the public going in to watch? And I think one of the reasons is to affect the gambling the next day. Because, I mean, the guy who can't eat, the guy who's just wrecked, I mean, he's out at 66 to 1. Whereas the guy who, in a good Plutarch, Greek way, is just calmly eating his meal, setting

43:46his affairs in order in case the worst happens. That guy's the odds-on favorite for me. And, you know, I mean, only a fool is going to bet even money on a fight where he thinks one guy's a favorite. No, it's, this is one of those cases where, I mean, because I think that's exactly the right interpretation. It's the same reason why modern combat sports promoters do open workouts. Like, it's, you're going to, you're going to drive interest in the proceedings. You're going to give the punters a look. And not often, but every once in a while, you're going to see something that changes your mind about the odds. You're going to see, it's not all the time.

44:19The experience bettors maybe more so. But it's not surprising to me, I think, that we have so little explicit evidence for it, given that gambling cultures today, like in-person gambling cultures are oral. They're gestural more, even as much as they are oral. Like, I'm thinking of, like, the Muay Thai fights in Thailand. And the betting is happening in the stands as the fights are ongoing. Odds are updating live, but it's all communicated via kind of shorthand speaking and hand signals. And it would not at all surprise me if there were similar systems in play in the Roman world.

44:54And we would never know. I mean, there's no way we can reconstruct that. Also, because all the literary evidence is written by members of the elite. And, I mean, you're not going to admit you gamble. Also, gambling is technically illegal. So, doubling down on the evidence being edited out, because you're not going to write it. Tacitus is not going to say, or pick a more autobiographical writer. Pliny the Younger, in his letters, in which he's creating this image of the perfect senator

45:27and country gentleman, he's not going to then suddenly say, and by the way, dear Marcus, I popped into the amphitheater and I bet 20,000 sesterces and I lost. Yeah, just went in, had a little goof, had a little goof, and then went right on out. Yeah.

45:43I mean, I know I moved to the suburbs a few years ago. And in that time, sports gambling has become essentially fully legal and appified where I live. And so now, like, half of the suburban adults I know are gambling all the time on sports. And they're not telling you about the losses. They may tell you about a bad beat, but they're not telling you about the straight-up bad bets they made. And so it's not at all surprising that people were a little circumspect about it. And the scenarios where it strikes me that we do have a lot of historical evidence for gambling,

46:15so I'm thinking colonial America is a good example, their gambling is a really inherent component in kind of masculine display. It's peacocking, you know? It's, look at how much money I can afford to lose. Look at how bold I am. But gambling for the Romans seems kind of different. It seems like it serves a different social purpose. Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that's kind of kept under wraps. I mean, Emperor Claudius was addicted to gambling dice games. And this is one of the reasons he's beaten with a stick as being a bad emperor.

46:48And he even went to the extreme, Suetonius, his biographer says, of having a special gaming board built in his carriage so he couldn't miss a minute of gambling. Bad, bad, bad. He should be, what he should be doing is thinking about the race publica and advancing Rome. Hell, not just losing thousands of sterses or winning them. I'd kind of try and make sure if I was gambling with the emperor, he always won. Yeah, you got to kind of chalk that one up to a loss. That's like, that is a sunk cost right there. Whereas, according to Suetonius, Augustus, just as much of a gambler,

47:21but he had the good sense to do it in private, like a good, proper Roman.

47:26Good, proper, dignified Roman. You keep any of those naughty things behind, yeah, behind shut doors and you do it in moderation. Yeah, absolutely. I have one more question I want to ask you before we go. And that's for the listeners who are listening to this and the people who are going to read the book. If they could take one thing away from this about gladiators, something they didn't know before, something you want them to think about when they think about gladiators, what would that be? Oh, tough one. I guess it would be that it wasn't all mass killing, mass carnage, pure sadism.

48:04And it wasn't that in two ways. One, because most gladiatorial combat was a carefully matched pair of gladiators with a similar expertise and experience with either contrasting of the same weapons. But what they're doing is they're not trying to kill each other. They're trying to exhibit skill, endurance, and courage. They're trying to play out for the stands Roman masculinity. And that's why these ugly fat guys with bad teeth can become sex symbols.

48:36God, I want to live in that world. I want to live in that world. I feel like my chances would be better. Now you said that, I've realized that I'd always thought I was just the ideal physique for a defensive card in American football. But now I realize I should have been a heavy shield gladiator. I mean, honestly, I keep thinking of my mom telling stories about her grandma. So this is my great grandmother watching the professional wrestlers in the 1950s, these big fellas in a singlet with one thing, you know, spilling out of it.

49:10And I remember my mom telling me about how raptly her grandmother watched these gentlemen. And I'm thinking, you know what? Maybe there is hope. Maybe there is.

49:22But the book is Those Who Are About to Die. I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you are interested in gladiators, and you absolutely should be because they're fascinating, this is the book for you. Dr. Harry Sidebottom, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Patrick, that was a lot of fun. Really enjoyed it. Thank you for having me on your show. Thank you.

50:03The show is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. Sound Engineered by Sergio Enriquez. Produced by Morgan Jaffe. The Executive Producer for Audible is Jenny Lower Beckman. The Head of Creative Development at Audible is Kate Naven. The Head of Audible Originals North America is Marshall Louis. The Chief Content Officer is Rachel Giazza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound Recording. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Audible Originals, this has been Tides of History.

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