“Unveiling the Blood and Glory: The Untold Realities of Life as a Gladiator in Ancient Rome”
This all may now have you wondering how exactly these incredibly popular games finally, and rather abruptly, went the way of the Dodo?
Well, remember how we mentioned Christians were rather brutally executed during gladiatorial games for the amusement of the masses? Well, a LOT of early Christians were killed this way. As you might imagine from this, Christian writers were rather hostile towards the games, either because their fellow Christians were killed in them, or because of the bloodlust the games inspired in their audience which kind of went against the whole “love your neighbor” thing and other such precepts.
As such, as Rome Christianized, church leaders put up more and more resistance to the games. In the late fourth century the church even made baptism impossible for gladiators and their trainers. Schools closed up and the games became an ever more rare part of Roman life.
Things finally ceased completely when, in 404 CE, a monk named Telemachus was stoned when he ran into one of the last active arenas to beg the crowd to disperse. His death led emperor Honorius to close the arenas for good, with the last game happening probably in 410.
This end to the gladiator games while Rome was still an entity is most likely why the games didn’t persist among the European, Byzantine, or Muslim inheritors of Rome, despite many of the old arenas and coliseums surviving in those locales, and that the human thirst for watching extreme combat existed before Rome and continues to this day… just now with less slavery, mass executions, and while crowds might scream for one opponent to destroy the other, the runners of the event aren’t deciding if the athletes live or die after a match. But otherwise, the general idea behind the thing and entertainment value is approximately the same.
