Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

To the Romans themselves, the whiff of the foreign that clung to gladiatorial combat was always a crucial part of its appeal. As the Republic’s wars became ever more distant from Italy, so it was feared that the martial character of the people might start to fade. In 105 BC the consuls who laid on Rome’s first publicly sponsored games did so with the specific aim of giving the mob a taste of barbarian combat. This was why gladiators were never armed like legionaries, but always in the grotesque manner of the Republic’s enemies – if not Samnites, then Thracians or Gauls. Yet this spectacle of savagery, staged in the Forum, the very heart of Rome, inspired emotions of admiration as well as loathing and contempt. The upper classes might like to pretend that the games existed for the benefit of the plebs, but the example of a gladiator’s courage could affect anyone. ‘Even when they have been felled, let alone when they are still standing and fighting, they never disgrace themselves,’ enthused the sophisticated Cicero. ‘And suppose a gladiator has been brought to the ground, when do you ever see one twist his neck away after he has been ordered to extend it for the deathblow?’35 Here, in the gesture of a vanquished foreign slave, was the embodiment of everything that the Romans most admired.