bbc sounds music radio podcasts Hello and welcome to Homeschool History.
I'm Greg Jenner and I've spent my whole career making history fun on the TV show Horrible Histories and more recently on the BBC podcast You're Dead to Me, although that one's mostly for the grown-ups.
With everyone being cooped up in the house, I thought I'd deliver a snappy history lesson to entertain and educate the whole family.
Who says homeschooling can't be a bit of fun?
Today we are grabbing our shields, swords and fishing nets to meet the superstars of ancient Rome Gladiators.
The word gladiator comes from gladius, the Latin word for a short Roman sword.
Now gladiators first showed up nearly 2,300 years ago, roughly in the year 264 BCE.
This was when Rome was still a republic and didn't yet have an emperor in charge.
So it meant that a lot of very rich Romans would throw their money around to make themselves look fancy and important.
One way to impress was to host really lavish funerals for dead VIPs and to make those funerals entertaining so that everyone remembered them.
And what could be more memorable than a violent fight to the death?
Yes, posh Roman funerals sounded less like this.
And more like this.
Yep, the Romans would commemorate one death by having someone else gruesomely killed for fun.
Hmm, I'm not sure about that logic.
Back in 264 BCE, gladiators were mostly enslaved people and captured warriors from places like Samnium in what's now northern Italy, or Gaul, which is now France, or Thrace, which is now Bulgaria.
And we know this because in the early days, a gladiator could be outfitted with three types of armour and weaponry, depending on where they were from.
And the three gladiator types were called Samnites, Gauls and Thracians.
Oh, and by the way, these funeral fights weren't yet happening in big arenas.
They would usually take place in the cattle market in Rome.
Presumably they had to get rid of the cows first.
Once Rome became an empire in 27 BCE, all of this changed.
The first emperor, Caesar Augustus, got nervous about rich people trying to turn the public against him, using gladiator parties as a way of buying public loyalty.
So from then on, the emperors were always in charge of gladiator games.
Imagine the queen taking over Saturday night TV in case Ant and Dec got any big revolutionary ideas.
Hello.
One is very pleased to welcome you to Saturday Night Takeaway.
Gladiators now became more professional.
Around half of all gladiators weren't prisoners of war or enslaved people, but were volunteers, because they got paid, they got a nice place to live, they ate good food and they had a chance of becoming really famous.
However, even though gladiators could be as popular as your favourite YouTuber, it still wasn't a profession that Roman parents wanted their kids to go into.
A bit like a YouTuber, then.
Happy Monday, everybody!
Welcome to the vlog!
Gladiators were part of a lowly class of people called infamies.
This was someone who wasn't given the rights or dignity of a Roman citizen.
A gladiator, no matter how successful, could never escape his infamia.
Even the ones who retired or were freed weren't treated as proper Romans.
Also, it was a tad riskier than being a lifestyle vlogger.
I mean, these colours, I am obsessed with.
Around 8,000 people died in arenas per year across the empire.
Yikes.
Gladiators lived and trained in special gladiator schools and had very little control over their own lives, including their own love lives.
They were a lot like many K-pop bands now.
You might assume gladiators were always chomping big hunks of meat, but actually they carb loaded with barley.
In fact, they were nicknamed the barley boys.
Professional gladiators also had access to medical care and even sports massages.
Sounds nice, right?
Well, yes.
And this was to stop them from getting grumpy.
In 73 BCE, an enslaved Thracian gladiator called Spartacus had led a rebellion with around 70 other people and he'd escaped from his gladiator school.
He soon built a huge army and he caused quite the kerfuffle before finally being defeated and executed.
The Roman government desperately wanted to avoid this happening again.
So they improved living conditions for gladiators, so that gladiators wouldn't want to rebel.
The trainers also kept their gladiators separated from each other in their own rooms, so they didn't spend their free time plotting together about what kind of mischief they could get up to.
Although they were forced to fight each other in the arena, there was a sense of brotherhood.
Some gladiators formed unions and picked spokesmen so they could demand things as a group with one voice.
Some made close-knit groups called familia, who would ensure fellow members got a nice funeral when they died or money would be sent off to their family members.
Remember at the beginning when I said there'd been three types of gladiators initially, the Samnite, the Gaul and the Thracian.
Well, by the time of the Roman Empire, some 300 years later on, these places had been mostly conquered, so only the Thracians were still considered to be the shouty barbarians.
In came new types of gladiator.
The main ones were Secutor, Mermillo, Retiarius and Thrax.
Now Secutor's had a big sword, a big shield, a metal arm guard and a huge helmet with a little round eye holes.
It was a pretty heavy piece of kit, but not as heavy as the Mermillo's, who had the shield and sword along with a big grilled helmet and leg protection.
Speaking as a total weakling, I would have been rubbish as a Mermillo.
Thrake's gladiators still had some armour, but it was smaller and lighter.
They held a shorter, curved sword.
Easier to move about, but slightly less protection.
And the least protected of all were the Retiarius gladiators.
These guys fought with fishing nets and tridents, like the Roman sea god Neptune.
Think Aquaman.
But probably less buff.
They also had a small dagger and a tiny piece of arm protection, but that was it.
The skimpily-dressed Finnick from the Hunger Games books is based on a Retiarius gladiator.
But you might think that the Retiarius would be killed immediately because they've got no protection.
But he was quicker, he could see better because he didn't have a big old helmet on and he could strike from further away with his jabbing trident and his throwing net.
Also the heavily armed gladiators, the Mamillos in particular, would get very tired and very sweaty very quickly.
Oh!
The thrill for Roman crowds was impitting different types of fighting gladiator against each other.
Kind of like Pokemon.
After all, who wants to watch Pikachu versus Pikachu?
Boring!
Pika pika!
Pikachu!
There were lots of other gladiators too, including blindfolded fighters called Anne de Bataille and the female gladiators known as gladiatrixes, although they would only ever fight other women.
Those were the fighters, but what was it like to be in the crowd?
Well, it was certainly a big day out.
These state-sponsored events would go on for hours and might run for weeks in a row.
They took place in huge open-air stadiums or amphitheatres.
We call them arenas too today, but arena is actually Latin for the sand on the floor that was there to soak up all the blood.
Yuck.
The biggest and most important amphitheatre was the Colosseum in Rome, but there were probably about 400 smaller ones all over the Roman Empire, including several in Britain.
You weren't allowed to just sit anywhere in the stadium.
There were different places for posh people and poor people, and they even had their own exits and entrances, so they didn't have to mix at all.
Kycilius, look at that!
The middle folk would sit in the middle, obviously.
The poorest folk had to stand with women, foreigners and enslaved people at the very, very back.
And the super swanky senators would bring their own little folding chairs and they would sit down at the front.
It's alright for some, isn't it?
Oh yes, this is very nice.
The best seat in the house was of course reserved for the Emperor.
He had a royal box where everyone could see him and he sat on a huge two-seater sofa called a bycelium, in case he needed a lie down.
I'm sure watching other people do all the hard work must have been very tiring for him.
Although he would have struggled to take a nap with all that noise, because the Coliseum could hold 50000 people, and that's around the same number of people that can fit into Liverpool's Anfield Stadium today, and that's a pretty noisy stadium.
Okay, so if you had found your seat, what could you have expected to watch?
Well, the morning started with beast hunts, where people called Vinatores fought wild animals like lions and tigers, bears and elephants.
Poor animals.
And if that wasn't grisly enough, there'd be public executions of criminals at noon.
Mmm, just what you want to see when you're eating your pet lunch.
And then in the afternoon came the main event the gladiator fights with enough stage tech to rival a Lady Gaga concert.
Yeah, because under the floor they had clever technology such as trapdoors, lifts and pulleys, so the animals and gladiators could rise up to the arena floor from below.
A very dramatic entrance, I think you'll agree.
Oh, and watch out for the water.
Yes, the arena could be totally flooded quite quickly as well for a truly sensational spectacle.
Staged naval battles.
And if you'd had some spare cash?
There were fast food sellers offering you snacks like roast dormouse.
Mmm, delicious.
And the rich women would pay extra for the sweat and muck scraped off of a gladiator's body.
And they used it as a fancy anti-aging moisturiser.
You're worth it, Femini.
No thank you.
Under the Colosseum, there were also special tunnels leading to the gladiator schools.
And if things didn't go well well, there was also a special tunnel leading to the morgue for all the dead bodies.
Bit of a downer.
But most fights didn't end in death.
It cost a lot of money to train up gladiators, and the people who ran the schools didn't want their precious investments being killed all the time.
Crowds would be told in advance if a fight was going to be a fatal combat.
Otherwise the losing gladiator would live on, provided he had fought bravely enough and he'd entertain the crowd.
Also, some fights were probably choreographed in advance, like WWE wrestling, and there'd even be a referee there to make sure that none of the rules were being broken.
You might have heard that the emperor could spare a defeated gladiator by putting his thumb up like the emoji, or putting his thumb down to say the gladiator should be killed.
Alas, this is a big old myth.
It comes from a very modern painting, so it's not true.
The emperors really did love gladiator matches though.
In fact, several of them liked to have a go themselves as being gladiators.
Caligula, Commodus and even the sensible Hadrian took to the arena to show off how tough they were.
Although these fights would always be done with wooden swords so they didn't get injured.
And of course, they would always miraculously win.
Wooden swords weren't just used in pretendy emperor fights.
They could also be symbolically given to a freed gladiator if they'd earned enough money to buy their freedom.
Flama, a very famous Syrian gladiator, won his freedom no less than four times, but he kept returning to combat.
He liked it too much.
Surprisingly, he died of old age in Sicily.
Sounds quite nice, doesn't it?
Of course, that was nothing like the experience of thousands of people who were enslaved and trapped in this way of life.
Remember Spartacus?
Poor chap, he had no choice.
I am Spartacus!
Gladiator sport lasted for about 650 years, from 264 BCE, when we have our earliest reference to the early 400s.
It stopped because Rome became Christian And they didn't think all the brutal violence was very well, you know Christian.
And that brings us to the end of our time with the Barley Boys.
So now it's time for the quiz.
Are you ready?
Contenders ready!
Question one.
Gladiator comes from the Latin word gladius.
But what sort of weapon was this?
Question two.
Gladiatorial games started as ways for rich people to show off at what kind of event?
Question three, which enslaved Thracian gladiator led a rebellion in 73 BCE?
Question four, different types of gladiators used different weapons.
Retiarius gladiators could use daggers, tridents, and what else?
And question five, what was the name of the biggest, most important amphitheater in Rome?
Let's do the answers.
The answer to question one, the gladius was a sword, a short sword.
The answer to question two, gladiatorial games started as funeral entertainment.
The answer to question three, Spartacus was the Thracian gladiator.
The answer to question four, a retiarius would also use a fishing net.
And the answer to question five.
The biggest, most important amphitheatre was, of course, the Colosseum.
How did you do?
If you didn't get all five, that's OK.
Why not listen to a different episode on the podcast and see if you can get full marks there instead?
Tune in next time for some more homeschool history and make sure to subscribe to the podcast on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode.
Thank you for listening.
Take care and goodbye.
Homeschool History was a Muddy Knees media production for Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
The script was by Gabby Hutchinson Crouch, Emma Neguse and me.
The producer was Abby Patterson and the historical advisor was Professor Michael Scott.
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