Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic

by Tom Holland

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 death-blow?”35 Here, in the gesture of a vanquished foreign slave, was the embodiment of everything that the Romans most admired. Distorted though the reflection may have been, the gladiator held up a mirror to the watching crowd. He enabled the Romans to witness the consequence of their addiction to glory in its rawest, most extreme, and most debased form. The difference between a senator campaigning for the consulship and a gladiator fighting f...