The Brutal Life of A British Gladiator

Put to the sword: The merciless world of the gladiators

The Yorkshire Museum in York has just made an astonishing and gruesome discovery on the ancient site of Eboracum — the skeleton of a man of tremendous build estimated to have died around AD400 in the late Roman era.

He was some 40 years of age and a study of his bones show that they once carried huge amounts of muscle. It is clear from his broken skeleton and the hole in the back of his head that he was brutally stabbed many times and suffered a fatal sword blow to the back of his head, before being buried without ceremony.

Archaeologists believe he may have been one of the hundreds of gladiators who fought in Britain in bouts of extraordinary savagery. But how did he live and how was he killed? Here, top thriller writer William Napier, who specialises in Ancient Rome, imagines his last hours on Earth…

They ate their last meal in public. It was a solemn occasion. Tomorrow, one in seven of them would die in the arena of Eboracum, before the cheers and screams of the crowd and the grim gaze of the hard-bitten veterans of the Legio VI Victrix — the Sixth Victorious Legion that had long been based in Britain.

Marco was the oldest gladiator in the training school. Only Scaurus, their brutal, unsmiling lanista, or trainer, was older. A former gladiator himself, he had earned his wooden sword and freedom after countless bloody fights to the death. ‘Munera sine missio’, the fights were called: games ­without remission.

By the guttering light of oil lamps and candles on this cold winter’s evening, in this far northern outpost of the mighty Roman Empire, the gladiators ate their meal at a long table in the refectory. It was lavish by usual standards.

Their normal daily fare was stolid, nourishing, and plentiful: barley and lentil broth, boiled beans, oatmeal, coarse bread, vegetables and thin ale. But tonight they dined like wealthy citizens, with the best cuts of meat: roasted boar dripping with winter fat, hare and pheasant, and horsemeat steaks oozing red on wooden plates.

All ate with gusto, for to show fear was a disgrace. Even those who knew they would die tomorrow ate well. Perhaps some dream or premonition had come to them, a soft word from their ancestors heard in sleep, or a mere chill in the bones.


And Marco was old and slow now. He suffered injuries in every bout. Only a month ago he had been badly mauled by a ferocious Caledonian bear, saved only when his fellow fighters speared the animal and heaved it off him, still snarling. He knew with certainty that tomorrow would be his last day in this world.

The doors of the refectory were thrown open and the people of the town filed in to ogle and stare. Young lads to whom the gladiators were heroes, even more so than athletes or chariot racers. Older men, with gambling money invested in tomorrow’s bloodshed.

And women. Young girls giggling and then looking afraid, staring wide-eyed at these men of blood calmly eating their meal. And there were the older women, noticeably dressed in their finest gowns, immaculately made-up by their maids with powder and kohl eye-shadow, their lips tinted and plumped with carmine wax. They watched breathlessly.

The gladiators’ skulls showed many livid scars through their close-cropped hair. Even on this cold British night in December, they wore no more than coarse homespun tunics, with broad leather belts at the waist, leaving their powerful arms and shoulders bare.

Their muscles were huge, their chests massive, their arms knotted and hands thick with snaking veins like ropes. Their jaw lines were as hard as iron. They were the dregs of society, often criminals or prisoners of war who had been plucked from obscurity and disgrace by trainers.

They had lost their honour, but fighting gave them a chance to escape execution. They existed on a level with actors, pimps and criminals. Yet the women could not take their eyes off these beasts among men. Such was the living paradox that was the gladiator.


Outcasts doomed to an early death, possessing nothing in this world but their courage, they were desired as well as despised, envied as well as feared. They were the Empire’s ultimate celebrities.

Ordinary men weighed down by the burdensome pettiness of daily life — laws, taxation, bureaucracy — envied the simplicity of their kill-or-be-killed lives, their status as icons of doomed glamour, of blood-sacrifice.

They were the most vivid symbols of Rome’s grim martial ethos. Gladiators put lesser anxieties behind them when they swore their terrible oath, the sacramentum gladiatorum, promising ‘to endure burning, beating, binding and slaying by the sword’.

After such an oath, little else could worry a man. For the women, these men of blood inspired an even more complex mix of loathing and longing — so much so that in the arena, females were only allowed to sit on the very back row, in case they should become over-heated by the spectacle below.

Yet it was widely rumoured that many of the most outwardly respectable women still found ways of getting closer to these violent outcasts they claimed to find so repellent. A midnight flit through the streets of the city, with only one trusted servant to carry the lantern. A knock at the door of the gladiators’ quarters, the hurried whispers.

Then the favoured fighter taking the woman in his rough hands and dragging her to his cell. The rustle of fine silken robes, before she fled back to her villa and her plump, snoring husband, her heart still beating furiously, her eyes still shining with pleasure. Marco glanced up at the spellbound women.

Among them he knew of at least two who had born his children, their husbands happily unaware that they were raising these young cuckoos in the fine feathered nests of their villas.

The old warrior could have smiled if it were not so solemn an occasion. His blood would be shed tomorrow, he could sense it. The gods had spoken. But his bloodline would live on.

The day of the games dawned bright and cold. The gladiators began to prepare themselves at first light, though it would be hours yet before they fought.

They bathed, exercised lightly, ate nothing, drank only water. You moved faster on an empty stomach. But the waiting was always the worst. Ask any soldier. They played dice, draughts, made bitter jests, and prayed in private to their gods.

The manager and overseer of the games was known as the editor, an unpredictable and irascible man, widely feared. But he knew what the people wanted.

In the arena, the day’s entertainment was carefully planned, progressing from knockabout comedy to spectacular atrocity. The mornings were taken up with light-hearted entertainments little different from pantomime.

An actor dressed as a bear pretended to play the flute, and another dressed as a chicken played a brass horn. Then the bear sat on the chicken. The crowd roared with laughter.

After that there was a mock fight between a dwarf and a one-legged man, using wooden swords, and then an elaborate re-creation of a mythological Greek battle between Hellenic tribesmen and centaurs.

That one went on far too long, and there was still no real bloodshed. The crowd booed loudly. The editor signalled the midday break for lunch.

The crowds filed out, chattering with eager anticipation, for the best was still to come.

They went to buy snacks from the street vendors: meat patties or fish balls, deep-fried to disguise their rottenness. Scrawny prostitutes were already gathering under the arcade. They always did good business on a day of the games.

Then it was back to their seats for the midday punishment of criminals, which decent citizens always enjoyed. Malefactors were commonly slain in public in the arena before the gladiators came in; the crowd liked to look down on them, both literally and metaphorically, from their seats as they died.

In the drill yard, the gladiators were arming: 12 of them today, in six pairs. Marco fought in heavy armour, with a massive bronze helmet, a big rectangular shield, and the classic short stabbing sword with which the Roman legions had cut a fearsome swathe across half the known world: the gladius, from which these slave-warriors took their name.

The differently armed gladiators included a pair of fast-moving retiarii, men who were armed only with net and trident; another pair of Thracian gladiators, with their small shields and curved scimitars; and two laquerarii, who cast lassos to snare their enemy.