Very low social status, packed together with criminals... Not even close to American athletes who definitely have social status.
I've said "they were trained athletes" focusing on the trained athletes part, not on their status.
As I've said elsewhere they were mostly war prisoners forced into the fighting career. Of course war prisoners don't have the same rights of citizens.
But they were trained nonetheless, and could compete with modern american athletes in activities that require strength and resistance.
Also, we are discovering more and more evidence that are uncovering secrets or making us reconsider some.of the things we though we knew for certain about gladiators and ancient romans in general.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bloody-gladiator-f...
You could become a gladiator in one of several ways. Many gladiators had been taken prisoner in one of the numerous wars waged by the Romans. They gave the spectacles a multi-ethric character. Others were ordinary slaves whose owner had sold them to a gladiator manager. Some had been found guilty of a serious crime. None of these people had any rights Free men also became gladiators. These so-called auctorati elected to become gladiators of their on free will. They signed a contract relinquishing their civil rights for a given period. Mary hoped it would make them rich or bring eternal fame and glory. Among them were a number of high-placed officials, such as senators. Emperor Commodus even liked to appear as a gladiator. Gladiators lived in ludi, a cross between a training centre and barracks. Each was trained to become a certain type of gladiator. Life was tough. As a rule gladiators fought twice a year. Few fought more than twenty battles in their career. Many didn't survive beyond the age of thirty.
A gladiator was trained in the ludus by experienced former gladiators. They trained both in the morning and in the afternoon using heavy wooden weapons and a reed shield. Corporal punishment was common practice. Research into the bones of gladiator corpses reveals that they were fed a muscle-enhancing diet consisting largely of barley and beans and rich in minerals.
Nutritional/sports science has come so far in the past few decades, check the world records of any sport to see the progress... There's absolutely no chance that a Roman age athlete could compete in speed or strength fields. Look at people like Hafthor Bjornsson, steroid fueled giants. These people could not exist in the Roman age
Again, I've specifically mentioned strength and resistance
most records you are referring to were broken thanks to better overall conditions
Bolt can't run as fast as he does today on a dusty track made of pressed clay wearing leather sandals...
> These people could not exist in the Roman age
they would have also probably died before puberty
also: in ancient times sport competition was much more important than today and it was a very serious matter
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2013/february/ancient-athlete...
Different times.
Even if you survived, those claws are not sterile. The inevitable infections would kill you.
The important part is that "they were not sent to die"
They costed a lot of money to their owners and matches were often just representations of battles, like modern wrestling, not real battles.
It wasn't uncommon to fix matches, they had to provide entertainment, not death.
But more interestingly, many gladiators trainers rented them to fight in the Colosseum and they had insurance policies on their lives, if the gladiator was injuried or died in the fight, there were penalties to pay.
Most of the games were paid for by low level politicians that wanted to make a name for themselves and rented the gladiators from the trainers.
Also the thumbs up/thumbs down it's also a myth, it never existed as a gesture, if the organizer decided to send some gladiator to death because the crowd asked for it, they had to pay the aforementioned penalties to the trainer.
Not surprisingly the organizer had the last word and often times they spared them.
Most of those that died were war slaves already sentenced to death.
It was games, like we intend them today, they also had a referee on the ground.
It was a very modern take on the matter at the times, to the point that we still use the same setup for sports entertainment.
While I can’t speak for OP, the way I see it is that the athletes were expected to kill each other, so the wording you dispute is just semantics.
Sure, trainers wanted their slave to survive, so they could win the prize money and influence with the king. But that still means they fully acknowledged that the majority of them would die.
the job was fight, like boxers or mma fighters fight today
of course they are able to kill someone else, but that's not their main goal
Honestly I don't, not in English, but I'll be back with some if you can wait a couple of days.
I am from Rome, live at walking distance from the Colosseum and visited it many times.
One of my closest friend is a tourist guide there and he's also an historian specialized in roman history. That's were I gathered most of my knowledge.
it's a myth perpetrated by Hollywood movies that gladiators were slaves sent to die in the Colosseum, in reality they were trained athletes, much like football players in the US today
Of course 2,000 years ago society was very different, perhaps it was more violent, but Iraqi war killed at least 500,000 people in a few years.
More people died there over the next 15 centuries, when the Colosseum wasn't a battle arena anymore and the knowledge of what it was built for was lost, than during the Roman empires that used it also as a fighting pit.