“Unveiling the Blood and Glory: The Untold Realities of Life as a Gladiator in Ancient Rome”
In the meantime, you could buy souvenirs of your visit, and even potentially luck out in receiving giveaways from particularly wealthy editors that could span anything from free food to whole apartment buildings and farms if you were really lucky. On the not so fun side, the sweet aroma of animal feces, blood, sweat, and opened and rotting flesh was a thing. To combat these odors, perfume and water mixed with saffron were usually sprayed on the audience.
Going back to the main event, there was typically a little warm-up show where the gladiators showed off practicing and performing monologues against their opponents. From here, the first gladiators to fight were the horsemen, usually fighting other horsemen.
And just in general once the combat portion of the games started, it was pretty comparable to a modern combat sports supercard or pay per view, with the gladiator matches lasting around ten to fifteen minutes with around twelve matches to a card running around three hours, although sometimes games could be stretched into several days in this way. Between matches, decisions would be called to either break ties or decide the fate of the combatants by the editor. Viscera and blood were also cleaned off the arena as best as possible by sand or water. On this one, our term for “arena” comes from the Latin word for sand, Harena.
Matches were refereed, much like modern combat sports. This was to ensure that the fights were being fought fairly, and to make sure they didn’t get too boring. If action died down too much, gladiators could be whipped to encourage them to fight more dramatically. As alluded to, at the end of a fight, if a gladiator did not get killed, the audience voiced their decision, while the editor made the final decision on who lived and died.
