“Superstar” doesn’t outweigh “slave”. Think about what being a gladiator meant: you were regularly put into situations where even a win risked disfigurement, serious illness or death (imagine being a MMA fighter without antibiotics), and a long career was a decade. Every fight was fought with the knowledge that your best case scenario was to hurt or kill someone just like you badly enough that you’d have a break before being forced to do the same thing next time, when you perhaps would be on the other end of that outcome.

In a fairly graphic comparison, Seneca recorded the suicide of a German slave who was being trained as a gladiator for animal fights. He took advantage of the only freedom he was given to choke himself to death on a xylospongium, one the communal sponges the Romans used instead of toilet paper. Think about how you’d get into a state of mind where that seemed like the best option.