REVIEW BY MARC DeSANTIS
Romans were hypocritical about gladiators. Typically slaves, criminals, or prisoners of war, they were seen by the upper crust as sitting squarely among the dregs of society. Yet they were admired, ogled, and cheered across the Empire. Gladiatorial matches only came to an end at the very close of antiquity, when the western half of the Empire had fallen, and the eastern half, now Christianised, survived in a very changed world.
Here, Harry Sidebottom takes on the difficult task of collating the disparate material concerning gladiators and the attitudes of the general populace toward them. ‘General’ must be understood broadly to mean the wealthy who had the wherewithal to write, and, if fortunate, to have their words preserved from ancient times, unlike the silent masses. A few of the latter did actually record their attitudes to gladiators, not least the arena fighters themselves, who on occasion provided their own funeral inscriptions that served to tell, in brief, their stories, and how they saw themselves.
Sidebottom organises the book around a single, hypothetical day in and around Rome’s Colosseum. Divided into ‘watches’, the tour takes us from the gladiators’ meal the evening before their bouts, to the fitful sleep they had during the night, and then on to the manifold events running from morning until night. This is a remarkable way to arrange a book, and one that I enjoyed. It allows for a range of topics concerning the ancient world to be covered, across the broad range of time (centuries, in fact) in which gladiators fought, while never straying from the central focus on the gladiators themselves.
V. G. Childe’s archaeological theory