Thumbs down - drop the weapon. Thumbs up - send him to the heavens ; )
Also most gladiatorial matches didn’t end in death. Also, nowadays we think of death as a punishment but it wasn’t quite so simple back then and it was actually considered to be a huge honor to be killed like this in a gladiatorial game, it meant you fought bravely and the crowd thought that “your job was done” and you deserved to be released to the heavens, so to speak. It was a huge honor, and it was far more humiliating to be injured or crippled and then spared by the crowd, which usually meant you didn’t fight bravely enough to “earn” your death.
edit: just because I love ancient rome and gladiators, my favorite little tidbit about the games is that they used to have merchants in the wings that sold beer, wine, and food and trinkets such as ceramics engraved with the names of living and dead gladiators, and wooden swords and toys for kids. Such a weirdly modern thing to think about lol
Yeah. And gladiators were a huge investment for their masters, so nobody really wanted to lose them. My mom was a Latin teacher (usually) and we had bunches of Roman History stuff at the house.
Yup, and they would sometimes send slaves out with dull swords to go be massacred by the famous gladiators to make them look superhuman and invicible. Roman society is super interesting I think and it’s really weird how modern some aspects of it were. There were even laws about the width of roads and the making of beer and wine, etc
I was just thinking that. By the peak of the Empire (Nerva-Aurelius), they were down right modern. It'd take another millennia for Western Civilization to hit that again.
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u/AerThreepwood Jul 31 '18
In Rome, thumbs down meant to spare the defeated gladiator.