Those Who Are About to Die: A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator - Hardcover

Sidebottom, Harry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593801768 ISBN 13: 9780593801765

Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

ONE OF THE ECONOMIST'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025 • See ancient Rome through the eyes of a gladiator—from the evening before the games at the Colosseum to the evening after

"A grippingly original way of making the alien world of the Roman Amphitheatre both accessible and comprehensible." —Tom Holland, co-host of The Rest is History

What did a gladiator feel when he stepped out onto the sand of the Colosseum, his life in the balance? What ran through the minds of the masses there to witness his likely execution? And how did this bloodthirsty ritual come to exist in the first place?

In Those Who Are About to Die, Harry Sidebottom pulls us into the arena, and into the homes and forums of ancient Rome, taking the reader on an eye-opening, twenty-four-hour tour through Roman life at the height of the gladiatorial games, from the first century BC to the second century AD.

We follow the gladiators through the schools (ludi) where they trained, watch in awe as the massive event unfolds—from the gambling at the pre-festival dinner, to the dawn rush to get a seat in the arena, to the resounding music, the elaborate stage sets, and, yes, the public executions that served as lunch-break entertainment—and we unlearn all the bogus movie tropes (gladiators did not have ripped bods; they were kept fleshy so they’d bleed more).

Broken down by time of day—Vesper, Prima Vigilia, Secunda Vigilia, up through the following sunset (Solis Occasus)—Those Who Are About to Die offers illuminating insights into every aspect of Roman life and thought: their social mores and hierarchies, their feelings about death and sex and violence, and the myths and dreams that fueled the spectacle of the Games.

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HARRY SIDEBOTTOM was educated at various schools and universities, including Oxford, where he is now Lecturer in Ancient History at Lincoln College. The author of The Mad Emperor: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome and other studies in Roman history, he is best known to the general reading public as the author of fifteen historical novels, including the Warrior of Rome series. He was brought up in racing stables in Newmarket, where he has returned to live with his wife and two sons.

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1

Vesper

(Evening)

The men reclining at the tables are heavyset, with great rolls of flesh; very different from the stick-thin spectators watching them eat. The bodies of those dining are scarred from the edge of the blade and the track of the whip; their necks ridged with muscles; their faces lined and callused from wearing helmets. Some are almost deformed, with one arm longer than the other. They are all the subject of intense scrutiny. Some laugh and joke, talking lightly; others are calmly ordering their financial affairs; many are silent, pale and sweating, unable to choke down their food. Some drink heavily. By this time tomorrow some, perhaps one in eight of them, will have died a violent death. But no one knows which one in eight. This is the cena libera, when the public are admitted to the barracks to watch the last supper of the gladiators.

The Cena Libera

The cena libera, a kind of public meal for gladiators, was a strange ritual: thin men observing fat men eat. Like so much ancient history—like the structure of a day at the Games itself—it must be stitched together and reconstructed from scattered fragments of evidence: a line in a Latin novel, a passing example in Greek philosophy, a couple of pieces of Christian propaganda, and a humorous mosaic. It raises many questions: of diet and body shape, of privacy and dining, of courage and disgrace, of the purpose of this odd custom and of what drew the spectators, of how the fat men became gladiators. In the cena libera the gladiators offer us our first window into the Roman mind.

Diet and Body Shape

The thin men watching habitually ate a vegetarian diet. This had nothing to do with modern concerns about health, or morality, or animal rights, let alone saving the planet. In antiquity vegetarianism was very much a minority choice. It was best left to eccentric philosophers, like the motley band of charlatans and wizards who liked to think of themselves as the school of Pythagoras. For the Pythagorean vegetarianism was all about the transmigration of souls. There was always the danger of eating your deceased parents. In his youth, Seneca the Younger flirted with Pythagoreanism and gave up meat, until set right by his father: vegetarianism was un-Roman and might bring accusations of adherence to one of the dubious, if not illegal, eastern cults, with their bizarre dietary restrictions.

The vegetarianism of those viewing the gladiators was caused by poverty. They existed in a time when the social pyramid was as steep as in any modern country in the developing world. The elite (maybe about 10 percent of the population) were well-off, if not fabulously wealthy in contemporary terms, while the vast majority existed on or below the subsistence level. The plebs, or hoi polloi (respectively in Latin and Greek—both pejorative terms in elite mouths, usually coupled with adjectives like dirty or superstitious), lived on what is often called the “Mediterranean triad” of grain, olives, and the vine. They also ate other vegetables—mainly beans and legumes—though they have not made it into popular understanding of the “triad.” Although nowadays endlessly lauded in color newspaper supplements for the affluent middle classes, the Mediterranean triad makes for a limited and repetitious diet. When animals were sacrificed at religious festivals the plebs gleefully seized the opportunities for a dinner of roast meat. The moral philosopher Plutarch felt the need to remind people that festivals were more enjoyable for those who attended with genuine religious belief.

The gladiators were also usually vegetarian, but they had a different and distinctive diet. Pliny the Elder said they were nicknamed the “Barley-men” (hordearii), from the stew or soup of beans and barley that was the main component of their rations. In the Roman army barley was a punishment food. Pliny goes on to say it was mainly used to feed animals. Gladiators were given large amounts of food. The emperor Vitellius, in a doomed attempt to increase the loyalty of his soldiers, increased the level of their wheat-based, better-quality rations to match the quantities given to gladiators. A member of the elite wrote that gladiators were crammed with food, which was worse than any hunger. The word used—sagina, “stuffing”—was more appropriate to feeding animals. As we will see, the elite often equated gladiators, or at least most gladiators, to beasts. But there again the elite tended to see everyone except themselves—the plebs and barbarians alike—as “bestial.”

Gladiators not only ate different food; to strengthen their bones they drank a unique concoction of ash (either from burned wood or bone) dissolved in watered-down wine. Just outside the ancient Greek city of Ephesus (in modern Turkey) archaeologists have excavated a graveyard of gladiators. It contained the remains of at least sixty-seven men and one woman (we will return to this important site frequently). Scientific analysis has shown that the bones of some of the men exhibited exceptionally high levels of calcium.

Gladiators were fattened up by their barley stew “stuffing” (it is all too easy for us to slip into the attitudes of the ancient elite, as they wrote all our literary texts). Those depicted on the Borghese Mosaic (named after the owners of the estate outside Rome on which the seven panels were found) look very heavy indeed (Plate Two). Why was it thought desirable for them to be so bulky? 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 that shielded the vital organs. This enabled the combatants to take flesh wounds that would bleed profusely but would not prevent them from continuing to fight. Fat gladiators made a better visual spectacle.

Food and Participants

The cena libera literally translates as the “free dinner,” but the gladiators’ rations probably were always provided for them free of charge. Libera could be translated as “unlimited,” but quantity was never an issue. It should best be understood as “unconstrained,” as in the type and quality of what they consumed. The Roman expression for “mansplaining,” spelling out obvious things in tedious detail, was to go “from the eggs to the apples.” Formal Roman dinners, like modern Italian ones, tended to consist of three courses. Eggs, often hard-boiled, usually featured in the first, apples, fresh or dried out of season, in the last. Greeks under the empire continued to divide a meal into the sitos, the staple (almost always bread), and the opson, sometimes translated as “relish,” but really covering everything else: the meat, the fish, the sauces, the pies, all the good stuff. Plutarch says that gladiators about to enter the arena had set before them many expensive foods. For once, instead of stodgy stews and cheap wine that tasted of grit, the gladiators could enjoy meat and other delicacies copiously washed down with fine wines. Perhaps among the emotions of the thin men watching them eat were hunger and envy.

Apart from the gladiators, who partook of the cena libera? In his Apology, a defense of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593801768
• ISBN 13: 9780593801765
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar