4. PREDETERMINED COMBAT 260 BC
GLADIATORS AND PRO WRESTLERS
Next time you find yourself standing in Rome’s mighty Colosseum, trying to imagine the overbearing structure filled with a cheering, jeering, frenzied crowd of citizens consumed with bloodlust as, in the center of the ring, sword- and net- and dagger-wielding gladiators impale one another and Christians are torn to pieces by wild animals, just conjure up the Astrodome on a night when it has been rented by World Wrestling Entertainment. The two forms of diversion have even more in common than might appear at first sight.
As its name implies, for all the threatening, scowling, and posturing that goes on in the ring, the WWE is pure entertainment. Boxers try to hurt one another; WWE wrestlers don’t. In fact, even as they slam each other to the floor and stomp on their alleged opponents’ heads, they are trying not to hurt one another—not always an easy task when the impression they are trying to create is of ultimate violence.
And they go to great lengths to create that violent impression. A video circulated not long ago of the WWE champ Triple H repeatedly banging his opponent Roman Reigns’s head on the announcers’ table, as the commentator Byron Saxton, himself a former wrestler, seems to be sneaking Reigns a capsule of artificial blood. The episode finishes with Reigns’s head an apparently bloody mess, while the crowd predictably goes wild. Real blood, by the way, would have been a violation of WWE policy, which insists on TV-PG programming—though it’s hard to see how it was avoided amid all that banging of Reigns’s face on the hard tabletop. But for some altogether unfathomable reason, in the absence of real blood the TV-PG rating is maintained.
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) shows are not genuine contests, but are purely entertainment based, such as this match featuring star John Cena. They feature plot-driven, scripted, and choreographed matches, and often include moves that can put performers at risk of injury if not performed correctly.
As wrestling, then, the TV pro version is entirely fake—though its practitioners hate that word, preferring to describe their sport (to the extent that it is accurately described as a sport) as “predetermined.” Still, as a form of entertainment that demands high skills in acrobatics, theater, and improvisation, professional wrestling is not at all fake. It is, indeed, highly demanding. Not to injure or to be injured amid all that exertion and activity in the ring takes a great deal of expertise and concentration. But it pays off. As one pro wrestling coach reportedly remarked: “Nobody ever loses a wrestling show.”
Naturally, the audience is perfectly well aware that it is being treated to a staged performance. Protected by the anonymity of the crowd, many people apparently like to lose themselves in the illusion of violence. But of course, if anyone were actually to get killed or badly injured down there in the ring, the spectators would instantly subside into a shocked silence. Or would they? After all, tradition tells us that those crowds in the Colosseum responded to all that gore with cries for more.
Recent research, though, suggests that what was going on in Rome was not quite that straightforward. The standard interpretation of gladiatorial combat is that it became formalized as a sort of ritual warfare after the Pax Romana (the Roman Peace) was established around 30 BC. For more than two centuries, the Roman army had been engaged in almost constant war, and with the arrival of peace the gladiatorial tradition allowed for the maintenance of martial skills. To keep those skills sharp, it is argued, such combat was necessarily as savage as the fighting it replaced. But that is to forget the entertainment value of conflict that is staged in front of an audience secure in the knowledge of its own safety.
Although some of those spectacles in the Colosseum and elsewhere were just as hideous as history paints them—especially when they were mass events involving prisoners of war, criminals, Christians, wild animals, and so forth—we should never underestimate the apparently deeply ingrained human need to worship celebrity. And some gladiators indeed became celebrities, famed for their skills in hand-to-hand combat and in making nubile ladies swoon.
Flamma, for example, was one of the biggest names among Roman gladiators. Using a small sword and shield, and armor on only one-half of his body, he terrorized his opponents in thirty-four combats, drawing huge numbers of spectators. Thanks to Hollywood, though, the most famous to us today is Spartacus, who led a slave revolt that defeated six Roman armies before he was finally brought down. Gladiators were often stars; and the parallels between the present and Imperial Rome are uncannily close: Roman children even played with clay gladiator “action figures.”
In the lower panel of this fourth-century mosaic, a retiarius (net-fighter) named Kalendio has thrown his weighted net over a more heavily armored secutor (chaser) named Astyanax. In the upper panel Kalendio is on the ground, wounded, and raising his dagger to surrender. The inscription above him bears the sign for “null” (Ø) and his name, implying that he was killed.
A-list gladiators were obviously far from expendable. Aside from the fact that these martial artists were expensive to train, the reputations of famous gladiators were hugely valuable to their sponsors, governmental and aristocratic alike. Although most gladiators were nominally slaves, we see their worth in what top practitioners got paid. The emperor Tiberius is said to have found his gladiators so expensive that he had to limit the number of games he staged to stave off bankruptcy, while a century and a half later one of his successors, Marcus Aurelius, was forced to try a salary cap. Maybe this was necessary because by then gladiators even had agents: impresarios called lanistae, who supplied them for the games staged by the emperors and the rich. A really famous gladiator with a good agent might fight only a couple of bouts a year, and make enough in that short time to buy a country estate.
Under these circumstances top gladiators could hardly fight to the death, or even risk serious injury. Instead, they often aimed at a broad display of all the fighting skills they had learned over time, thrilling their audiences with virtuoso performances. According to Steven Tuck of Miami University, many gladiatorial contests progressed in three stages. In the first, the fully armed combatants moved in on each other. In the second, when one was wounded (or, as rumor has it, feigned being wounded, even using fake blood), he would regroup and distance himself from his attacker; and in the third, both would discard their shields and weapons and move in to grapple with each other, perhaps even in the formalized style of modern WWE wrestlers.
Although most such contests were won or lost, the ideal outcome of a gladiatorial match involving superstars was for the combatants to fight each other to a standstill, maintain their honor, and live to fight another day. If that wasn’t exactly “nobody ever loses,” it wasn’t too far from it.