A Gruesome Sport With Executions at Halftime

“The Gladiators: History’s Most Deadly Sport,” a new book by Fik Meijer, a professor of ancient history at the University of Amsterdam.


A Gruesome Sport With Executions at Halftime: " “Why did the Romans have such a passion for the gladiator games?” he writes. “Why did they let themselves

get carried away by such an orgy of bloodthirsty violence, time and again over centuries?”

Yet the question of why human beings would enjoy watching female gladiators fight dwarfs by torchlight seems like the wrong question. It’s a line of inquiry better fit for psychologists, moral philosophers, theologians, or movie directors — anyone with a penchant for speculating about human motives. Thankfully, Mr. Meijer soon abandons it.

Instead, he turns to describing how the games entertained. Along the way, he devotes chapters to gladiators’ backgrounds, training, life expectancies, and love lives. In case there was any doubt, Mr. Meijer’s careful academic research shows that, yes, gladiators had groupies. "...

At one point, Mr. Meijer pulls together his research to re-create the program for a typical day at the Colosseum. According to the author, the day of games would begin with hunting and animal fights.To warm things up, a bull might fight an elephant — followed by, say,a rhinoceros versus a buffalo.Afterward,a bunch of hunters might roam through the arena picking off gazelles by the hundreds.

At midday, the games paused for an intermission, during which the crowd ate their lunches and watched public executions. Sometimes, the organizers would dress up the condemned criminals as famous villains or doomed characters from mythology — all of which lends credence to the previously unimaginable notion that perhaps halftime shows actually have improved over the past 2,000 years.

But everyone’s favorite part was when the gladiators squared off in oneon-one combat. Gladiators, Mr. Meijer notes, were trained as specialists, differentiated according to their weapons and armor. He provides a taxonomy of gladiatorial types explaining, for instance, the difference between a thraex (small shield, sword like a dagger) and a retiarius (shielded left arm, trident, net).Organizers continuously would pit different specialists against each other, mixing and matching gladiators for the remainder of the afternoon.