Gladiatore Helmet

The Gladiatore
In History Pages

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The practise of the contests using fighters known as Gladiatore (called such after the Roman short sword called a Gladius) against each other and animals are said to have been first exhibited by the Etruscans, and to have had their origin from the custom of killing slaves and captives at the funeral pyres of the deceased.

The first recorded gladiatorial combat in Rome occurred when three pairs of gladiators fought to the death during the funeral of Junius Brutus in 264 BCE in the Forum Boarium which was sponsored by Marcus and Decimus Brutus, his two sons.  For a while exhibitions of gladiatorial combat were kept to being funeral games called "munera" or "munus" since considered to be duties paid to dead ancestors, but were gradually introduced more into the mainstream as an important part of public spectacles staged by emperors and politicians.  Under the empire the passion of the Romans for this amusement rose to its greatest height, and the number of gladiators who fought on some occasions appears almost incredible.  After Trajan's triumph over the Dacians, there were more than 10,000 exhibited.  The person who exhibited (edebat) a gladiatore contest was called an editor, munerator, or dominus, who was honoured during the day of exhibition, if a private person, with the official signs of a magistrate.
 
 

The popularity of gladiatorial games is indicated by the large number of wall paintings and mosaics depicting gladiators; for example, this very large mosaic illustrating many different aspects of the games covered an entire floor of a Roman villa in Nennig, Germany.

Many household items were decorated with gladiatorial motifs, such as this lamp...

....and this flask.

Thomas Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 1992) 169-80:

Notwithstanding its popularity, it is hard to accept the idea that ludi and munera were a means to divert the people away from politics.  Attendance at munera subjected emperors to pressure from the people, rather than diverting potential expressions of political will in other directions. Tiberius preferred to keep away altogether to avoid such pressure; but the unpopularity which this brought upon him shows that it was a mistake which later emperors knew they could not afford to repeat.  When an emperor was at Rome, then his personal presence at munera was expected.  An emperor who was unpopular might be criticised either for being too interested in these games, or not interested enough.  The tightrope which each emperor had to walk was a necessary consequence of the ambiguous position of the emperor as both autocrat and servant of the Roman people.

Alison Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997) 212-13:

The munera formed the basis of a complex of political ritual, meant not so much as a sugar-coated disguise of coercive force as it was the rhetoric of Roman authority enacted.  The ritual performance in the arena was a means of Imperial control through directed attitudinal change, the creation and manipulation of mass emotional response, renewed regularly at the behest of the ruling hierarchy. This was a polyvalent ritual, wrapped in layers of meanings to resonate with a diverse viewing public throughout the empire.

This was not gratuitous display, however, not simply exotica; the spectacles served the public good as well as the interests of the Roman center. Here was public pleasure as well as law and order, here was the conquest of the Roman world as well as its integration in the creation of a new balance, a working sociopolitical order. The amphitheater was Roman power, Roman agency, the ability to define and construct the space in which significant actions, resonant in a Roman and provincial interpretation, were made real, given active form, drawing on the spirit of the Roman people and the basic impulses of a mythic past to create and to celebrate a new world order.