Okay, so this is a pet peeve of mine, and random rant, but please bear with me. We’ve all heard modern commentators speak of professional athletes in terms of the gladiators of Rome, right? Heck, the NFL used to borrow that imagery quite intentionally in its commercials and iconography. You may even have been tempted to make that allusion yourself a time or two, perhaps. Yet can you, in good conscience, really draw a parallel between the two groups? Drives me nuts every time I hear it, so let’s look at it, just for fun.
On the surface of things, perhaps, the similarities seem overwhelming. Both battled it out, man-to-man in front of huge, cheering crowds. Both were subjected to the whims of popular demand as one gladiator or athlete comes into vogue and another fades out. Both were the result of systems that prepared them physically and mentally for the feats of strength, endurance, and willpower that they would endure. And finally, both sets of human beings entered competition with the ultimate goal of being a source of entertainment for an audience at leisure.
But these similarities really obfuscate a couple of key differences that are … well … kinda important. Let’s get the more obvious one out of the way first. The gladiators, often as not, fought to the death. Now there are a group of historians working to re-write that narrative today. These claim that the gladiators themselves were of such value that promoters would lose tons of money every time one of them died. As well, they say, there are numerous references to gladiators surviving their contests even after the most grievous of wounds.
Still, that gladiators died fighting one another in the arena is not seriously debated by the vast majority of historians, and it remains one of the most potent and enduring images passed on to us from that era. Few professional athletes today die as a result of their competition, at least not immediately. For your average gladiator, it really was victory or death. Not a downturn in popularity, not an early retirement, but dirt nap, sleeping with the fishes, death.
As well, don’t forget that gladiators were often pitted against wild animals, the more ferocious the better! Roman animal trappers, who made money by selling their prey to cities hosting gladiatorial contests, hunted multiple species to extinction in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In fact, the slaughter of wild animals in the arena, to include bulls, bears, lions, tigers, panthers, and elephants to name but a few, often reached insane proportions. Case in point, when the Roman Colosseum—the Flavian Amphitheater—first opened in 81 B.C., 9,000 animals were slaughtered during the ensuing, multi-day spectacle.
No matter how highly you think of your favorite professional football team, can you see them lining up against eleven lions? Or bears? Heck, as a Packers fan, both make me sick to my stomach—for very different reasons, of course—and yet this happened, a real life, verifiable historical fact. And it happened for a long time in a lot of arenas around the Roman Republic and Empire.
Now let’s move on to what is undeniably the single greatest difference between yesterday’s gladiators and our modern day athletes. It’s one most people prefer not to think about, yet creates the widest possible gulf between the two groups. The gladiators were slaves. They didn’t have agents … they had owners … not of the team … but of them.
You see, the gladiators didn’t go into gladiating—to coin a word—because they were interested in it, or because they’d tried it in high school and found they had a knack. They didn’t enter a ludus, a gladiatorial school or training center, because their Dad was a great gladiator and they wanted to follow in his footsteps. No, they were bought from slave traders primarily for their physical strength and seeming potential to be trained into a successful fighter, and sent into the arena to kill or be killed as entertainment for the masses.
This is kind of important, don’t you think, and sets a clear distinction between the quarterback signing a multi-million dollar contract today and the gladiator who fought because he had no choice and wasn’t legally entitled to any of his master’s earnings even when he was victorious. The gladiator, slave that he was, his body literally owned by another human being, did what he was ordered to do. No more and no less. There is no modern day equivalent to the owner of gladiators, not a sports agent, not the manager or even the owner of a team. If your master sent you in to get slaughtered by Maximus … you didn’t get to hire lawyers and renegotiate your contract, you didn’t have the option to enter free agency, you just did what you were told … and likely died in the process.
And your master, who had a contract to provide entertainment—not necessarily to provide surviving gladiators—likely made back the money he’d invested in you even when you died. This is quite a difference from today’s “gladiators” who live pampered lives attended by masseuses and personal trainers, and come back to “fight” again week after week after week, no matter how many games they lose. For the vast majority of gladiators, “retirement” came only with death, and if they had families at all, these were entitled the survivor benefits package of any other Roman slave, meaning nothing at all.
So okay, why am I bothering you with any of this? Were you incapable of finding meaning in this day without me ruining a favorite sports metaphor? Did you have so few things to think about that I should try to add one more? Were any of you so satisfied with life, so disgustingly positive that I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find some reason for you to be upset with something?
No, no, and probably not. But it’s interesting, I think, to consider the metaphors we routinely use and contemplate what it is we’re really saying. We speak routinely of a “war” on this or that, as if the essential nature of war itself weren’t to kill people and destroy their stuff. We talk of things going “viral” without ever stopping to think of the negative connotation something like that really has. We throw around terms like “fascist” without a thought to the truly horrible crimes against humanity those folks actually perpetrated not that long ago. And we say “gladiator” when what we really mean is “pampered, entitled individuals, who chose to do nothing more with their lives than to play a game, who are paid more in a year than any firefighter, cop, or teacher will earn in their lifetimes, yet produce nothing more tangible or beneficial to society than an endless supply of highlight clips on ESPN.”
Yeah, I guess you’re right. “Gladiator” is easier to say.
M. G. Haynes