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In 2005, during excavations of a Roman villa in North Africa,

archaeologists made a surprising discovery. In mosaic on the

floor of the villa’s bath house was the image of a man:

muscular, exhausted, in repose. To his left are his discarded

lance and helmet, and he stares forward at a defeated opponent.

Seated on the sands of the arena, he is what Mark Merrony has

called “worthy of Botticelli”. He is a gladiator.

When I say the word “gladiator”, what immediately comes to

mind? Big muscly brutes, slick with sweat and blood, clashing

swords in front of a lascivious audience? Slaves, beaten men,

treated like cattle? Do you think of Kirk Douglas, Russell

Crowe, or Andy Whitfield?

Of course, the image of the gladiator is moving away from

the one-dimensional afterthought of Roman cultural analysis. No

more is he used simply as a footnote to justify opinions about

the inherently violent temperament of the ancient Romans. Thomas

Wiedemann wrote as recently as 1992 that “the universality of

violence in the ancient world, as in most pre-industrial

societies, is well attested: the gladiatorial games of the

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Romans glorified violence to the point where these games became

the central ritual of public life”1. His work on the ritualistic

value of gladiators in Roman society was one of the first steps

towards a more conscientious consideration of Roman cultural

identity. However, there are several earlier examples that

suggest this shift in scholarship was, perhaps, more than

inevitable. In R.M. Chase’s 1927 article ‘De Spectaculis’, he

revealed a serious concern for changes in social morality and

“what the world [was] coming to”2. The fact that P.A. Brunt

wrote about the Roman mob in the late 1960s, coinciding with the

socio-political upheavals affecting a large part of the world, is

also revealing3. Michael Grant compares gladiatorial shows to

Nazism as “two [of the] most quantitatively destructive

institutions” in human history4. If, from the earliest stages of

study, academics have compared gladiatorial shows with their own

eras, there is something unanimously clear about the social

implications of the games.

1 Wiedemann, T. Emperors and Gladiators, 1992, p.27.2 Chase, 1927, p.1093 Brunt, 1966, pp.3-74 Grant, 1967, p.8

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Indeed, gladiators offer modern scholarship a remarkable –

if still foggy – mirror into Roman society. Although it is

difficult, and sometimes impossible, to separate the inherent

violence of Roman society with our own, or reconcile cultural

similarities with modern western humanist bias, Mary Beard offers

us a solution. She writes: “It would be utterly implausible to

recast Roman culture in pacifist clothes. But the most

militaristic societies can also be – and often are – those that

query most energetically the nature and discontents of their own

militarism”5.

One of the most effective ways for any society to engage in

such investigations is to provide visual avenues for members of

that society to consider. The German academic, Tonio Hölscher,

in his short investigation The Language of Images in Roman Art, writes:

“we can no longer approach works of art exclusively from the

standpoint of production, as the expression of artists or

patrons, but we must also examine them as forms of communication

– that is, as a factor in the collective life of a society”6.

5 Beard, M. The Roman Triumph. P.1396 Hölscher, T. The Language of Images in Roman Art (translated by Anthony Snodgrass and Annemarie Künzl-Snodgrass, Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.7

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Mary Beard, in her comprehensive book on the Roman Triumph, notes

something that the triumphator and his planners faced throughout

the parade: “the problem [that] underlies all mass spectacle

[is] how do you control the gaze of the viewer” and the potential

for “ambivalence between victor and victim”7.

This question was of great concern to elite Roman men as

well – and I say ‘men’ simply because the paterfamilias was the

formal holder of political office, of familial power, of divine

focus in the Roman world – and it affected the way in which they

saw themselves as part of the larger Mediterranean society. “For

the Romans, their hegemony and their very security depended on

universal recognition of their empire’s maiestas, its

‘greaterness’. Their policy depended on perceived and

acknowledged military superiority, on the terror and awe of the

enemy; and if this image was challenged by invasion, defeat, or

revolt, the Romans reasserted it with the maximum possible

brutality and ferocity”8. Susan Mattern’s 2005 analysis of what

is anachronistically referred to as Roman ‘foreign policy’

7 Beard, M. The Roman Triumph. Pp.136-1378 Mattern, S. Rome and the Enemy, 2005, p.209-210

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demonstrates very effectively that, what in the modern view is

perceived as the hyper-aggression of the Roman Republic,

Principate and Empire, was in fact a socio-psychological

interaction between the Romans and the world around them.

Mattern continues: “The Romans at all times valued victory and

conquest, as part of a system in which aggression… was crucial

for maintaining honour and security”9. And she rightly notes

that the literary primary sources available to us, from which she

draws her conclusions, were written by “that small group of

individuals that was entrusted with making Rome’s most important

decisions; and it was in rhetorical terms that this group was

trained to think”10.

Ovid, for example, slyly suggests that taking a girl to the

gladiatorial shows is a great way to get her into bed because the

images of conquest and glory – the gladiators themselves – will

facilitate such intensive imaginative thoughts on her part that

she can’t help but want to re-enact them with her gentleman

friend later on11. Marilyn Skinner supports this assumption when

9 Mattern, 2005, p.20810 Mattern, 2005, p.20911 Ovid, I:165-170, 171-228

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she says that “in a culture where sex was so unashamedly on

display, where violence was accepted as routine, and where bodily

penetration was synonymous with dominance, brutality may have

been erotically stimulating”12.

The rhetoric of the games is best exemplified by Martial, in

his De Spectaculis honouring the dedication of the Colosseum in AD

80 or 81 by the Flavian Emperor Domitian. Martial’s poetry – at

times also cheeky and subtly disparaging – are composed in the

language of reverence and glory: his verbs are direct (labor),

his references are to gods and goddesses and mythological stories

(of Pasiphae, Prometheus, Daedalus etc), and he mentions the name

‘Caesar’ directly no less than 22 times. But, in the short book

of commissioned poetry, he also identifies three gladiators by

name: Leander, Priscus and Verus13.

Bettina Bergmann’s delightful article on ‘The House as

Memory Theatre’ – based on comments from Cicero and addressing

the conceptual use of a physical space for memory exercise and,

ultimately, rhetorical excellence – focuses the psychology of

12 Skinner, 2005, p.20813 Martial, 31 (27;29) – translated by Shackleton Bailey

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elite Roman males even further: into the domestic space of the

home in which both public and private activities occurred.

In sum, the decision-makers of the Roman world – those who

utilized aggression in a very deliberate and meaningful way –

recognized that the gladiatorial shows invested the audience with

intense thoughts of glory and greatness (Ovid and Skinner), that

the audience recognized the imagery and iconography of the

theatrical aspect of the games and of the people who ‘performed’

in them (Martial), and that elite Roman males were accustomed to

incorporating all this into rhetorical study based on

conceptualizing domestic space (Bergmann).

As heirs to much of Greek cultural discourse, it is a

natural extension that, in the Roman world, worth was invested in

the physical body. To taint the body, be it by over use for

labour, sex, or other indulgences, was to slap the face of the

social systems that – in a passive and natural but very real way

– granted citizenship (citizenship being the formal investiture

of socio-political worth in the Roman world).

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Balancing the potential pitfalls of indulgence with the

reverential presentation of Roman citizenry fostered social

anxieties on a variety of subjects, as Maud Gleason

demonstrates14. Of interest in regards to this paper, she writes

“the specter of gender indeterminacy – even gender reversal –

always lay in wait for potential deviants from the norms of

correct deportment”15. Therefore, the Romans were accustomed to

being acutely aware of one’s physical presentation in society as

well.

The gladiator, on the other hand, is a paradox of Roman

culture. From our earliest evidence from the fourth century BC,

gladiatorial combats were a part of funerary celebrations to

honour the life of the recently deceased. From there, Vitruvius

notes that, before specific venues were built for gladiators,

shows “were held in the social and ritual centre of the city, the

forum, specifically, at least in the late Republic, in the Forum

Romanum”16.

14 Gleason, M. “Elite Male Identity in the Roman Empire” in Potter & Mattingly, p.7315 Gleason in Potter & Mattingly, p.7516 Dodge, H. “Amusing the Masses: Buildings for Entertainment and Leisure inthe Roman World” in Potter & Mattingly, p.225; also Vitruvius, Concerning Architecture, 5.1

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At the same time, the gladiator – like actors and

prostitutes – were infamis, a word that, ironically, has a

satisfying double entendre in modern understanding. These were

non-citizens, often slaves in fact, who were socially and

politically inert. Not only were they unable to be politically

active, they were incapable of restoring dignity to themselves

once it had been lost. The use of their bodies for public

entertainment precluded them from attaining the reverence of the

elite Roman male.

Again, simultaneously, gladiators were the focus of a rather

surprising kind of sexuality. As non-citizens, they could not be

called ‘men’ in the traditional Roman sense – they were not like

the paterfamilias who was the figurehead of the basic Roman social

unit – because their physicality set them apart. But they were

identified as men nonetheless; their fighting prowess ennobled

them in the eyes of the audience in a counter-intuitive way.

Susan Mattern’s work on Roman foreign interactions includes

emphasis on the manner in which the defeated were to be handled.

“Defeat and humiliation of barbarians was highly valued within

Roman society and conferred immense personal prestige on anyone

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who could accomplish it… The theme of the humiliated and

submissive enemy – always easily recognized by his long hair,

beard, and characteristic ethnic clothing or, alternatively,

nudity or partial nudity – is extraordinarily popular in the

iconography of the Principate..”17. Gladiators were kitted out

in the style of various conquered enemies – Thracians, to use the

most obvious example – and were nearly always partially nude. In

the world of the 25-foot length of material that was the toga, to

see a man on public display often in nothing more than a loin

cloth, greaves, and possibly a shoulder-guard, was (to forgive

the pun) spectacular.

So, when we wish to consider the reverence due to the

paterfamilias and the overt physicality of the gladiator, we are

left at somewhat of an impasse. Victory offered personal

prestige. Gladiators were public combatants18. And the

paterfamilias wanted to reinforce his value to society in focused,

gender-specific ways from an advantageous position.

17 Mattern, p.194-19518 Potter…..

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How does one define masculinity in such circumstances? Is

that definition fixed or fluid? What is the value of that

definition to society? Here is the post-modernist disconnect

that plagues much of modern scholarship, the distance we strive

so carefully to recognize and respond to: how can idealized

masculinity, in all its manifestations, be connected in a

meaningful way with elite Roman males and gladiators in the Roman

world? Textbook definitions aside, what we are dealing with is a

concept borne of gender but not limited by it. ‘Virility’ – man-

ness – transcends the physical person, but is inextricably tied

to the physical body in the Roman mind. Marilyn Skinner writes

that “once war was ‘converted into a game’ (Hopkins 1983: 29),

the gladiator’s combat skills, bravery, and self-possession in

the face of death turned him into an emblem of virility”19.

To return to Tonio Hölscher, the semantic system that he

utilizes in his exploration of a language of artistic expression

is defined thus: “I [Hölscher] mean a system in the broad sense

– not a consistent structure shaped by unifying principles but a

flexible interplay of elements which together form a co-ordinated

19 Skinner, M. B. Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture, 2002, p.208

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whole… Since no culture was designed to fit to scientific

measurements and methods of research, academic study must develop

models and points of view which account for the indeterminacies

of cultural life”20. Hölscher theorizes that Roman artistic

representation was primarily subject-based – that the narrative

of monumental works was meant to be emphatic – while the style

utilized in constructing these monuments was of import for its

historically validated worth. For example, there are both

Hellenistic and Classical forms on the Ara Pacis in Rome, lending

weight to the narrative, and the subject itself – the focus of

the monument - is additionally validated by the weight offered by

the form. To consider this in reverse: Augustus’ demonstration

of the correctness of his place as Pater Patriae is made

recognizable and therefore that much more potent because it is

visually represented in a recognizably revered form.

We therefore cannot connect Roman art historically or

chronologically in the same way that ancient Greek art and also

modern art are categorized. Hölscher uses as further examples

the The Alexander Mosaic, the monuments to Lucius Verus at

20 Holscher, p.2

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Ephesus and to Aemilius Paulus at Delphi, and several of the

Borghese Marbles – including the Ares and the Antinöous, among

others.

It is clear that such monumental art, just as the value

invested in the imagery of the Roman Triumph, was designed for

public consumption and continuously so. Gladiatorial

representations, on the other hand, are not monumental; they are

not in public squares or on the walls of public buildings. The

gladiatorial figural art that remains extant is found almost

exclusively in the domestic sphere, though certainly not the

private sphere.

The house of the paterfamilias and his family was not solely a

private space for habitation. He held meetings and dinner

parties here, received his clients (salutatio), and handled the

business of his estates and of politics. Depending on a guest’s

value and the degree to which he or she was esteemed by the

paterfamilias, a person could step into the deepest precincts of the

home… or be left standing in the doorway. It was what each guest

was permitted to see in the house that reinforced his or her

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standing in the eyes of the paterfamilias and also his or her

relative place in society. Bergmann’s interpretation of the

psychological use of space to develop rhetorical prowess suggests

that physical space had a vital meaning and value to Roman

elites. John Clarke and Amos Rapoport’s studies on angles,

viewpoints and sightlines in the Roman house offer an expression

of exclusivity for visitors to and inhabitants of the homes of

the elite.

So let us consider some of the representations of gladiators

to determine if viewing privilege can be applied.

The huge mosaic floor at Zliten (arguably the first or

second centuries AD, arguably Flavian) is perhaps the most

famous, most recognizable example of gladiatorial figural art in

the Roman world. From this mosaic alone much of what we

understand about gladiators is derived. Functioning as the

interior border of a larger pastoral image with geometric aspects

– upon which it is most likely that reclining couches and tables

of food would have been placed – the gladiator figures are

comparatively unobstructed from view, but also separate from the

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main vantage points of the diners. They would have stepped over

them to enter the room before they focused their attention on

each other, the delectables on offer by the host, and possibly

the central images of the main floor.

Yet the intricate creation that framed the room demands more

than passing attention. Three of the four border panels that are

still largely intact portray the execution of criminals ad

bestiam, the venationes, musicians and gladiatorial matches. This

suggests that the commissioner of the mosaic may have meant his

guests to remember a particular public beneficence he offered.

The border acts as a continuous narrative of a day or days at the

games, itself framed by the exterior border’s geometric patterns,

thereby directing the eye from the abstract to the figural to the

pastoral in that order.

The gladiators themselves are paired together in all but one

instance, (where two fighters seem to be arguing a la National

League baseball with the referee). The fighters therefore

further focus the visual emphasis on to individual combat even

though not all of the fighters are actively engaged in such. And

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yet they constitute the participants in the main – some would

argue only – action of the room.

At the Roman villa at Nennig (ca. third century AD), in

northwestern Germany, the huge atrium – over ten metres long –

contains one of the most spectacular amphitheatre mosaics

depicting seven emblemata of various scenes from the arena.

[These are hexagonal emblemata of a keeper with a tired lion, a

venator killing another lion, and two musicians playing a horn and

what could be a water organ. There are also two lightly armed

fighters engaged in combat, a lion grappling with a donkey and,

in the centre of the floor between the impluvium and the main

gladiator emblem, the figures of two venatores whipping a bear.]

The focus of the huge floor depicts a retiarius and a murmillo

engaged in combat, with a referee off slightly in the background.

These figures occupy a prominent place on the atrium floor and

contrast the octagonal impluvium at the west end of the room,

itself a normally central element in atrium design. What is most

noteworthy in this example is that the gladiators are very nearly

life sized21.

21 Dunbabin 1999, p.84 measures the entire floor at 10.3m by 15.65m

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From two central visitation spaces in the Roman house, we

have examples from the northernmost and southernmost extremities

of the Empire depicting gladiators in very realistic and active

terms.

To the westernmost end, across the Great Ocean, to Britain

and a villa site in southern England: Bignor (ca. third century

AD) in Sussex. Comparable to the palace at Fishbourne, this

lavish 65-room villa boasted gladiatorial mosaic decoration on

the floor of the winter triclinium. Heated from below, these

figures would have been visible from any entranceway into the

room from different areas of the villa. Unlike Zliten and

Nennig, these gladiators are all depicted with their faces

entirely covered by massive helmets, but are again shown fighting

in pairs. As John Dobbins pointed out at an AIEMA (l’Association

Internationale pour l’Etude de la Mosaique Antique) colloquium in

1981, the “use of dynamic compositions in areas of traffic

[allowed for] a kind of co-ordinated programming of physical and

visual motion”22. The decoration of this triclinium as in the atria

at Zliten and Nennig suggest a concerted effort on the part of

22 Bulletin AIEMA 1983, p.39

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the commissioner and his artists to make these mosaics visually

accessible to guests visiting the house.

At the eastern end of the Greek archipelago, on the island

of Kos, in the House of Silenus, we find one of only two

documented examples of gladiator mosaics in Greece (the other

being at Patras near the Isthmus23). At Kos, the faces of the

gladiators are also obscured by helmets but are also named in the

tesserae of the bathhouse floor.

The Bignor and Kos mosaics impersonalize the gladiator

figures by obscuring their faces, thus stepping away from the

reality that their fights in the arena are being memorialized.

In both, the action of the combatants remains the main focus of

the composition, and at Kos, the gladiators are named, though

their faces are hidden.

Although Susan Mattern’s conclusion that reinforcing victory

through aggression was a vital means by which Roman elites

maintained the security and honour of their empire, this seems

more effectively demonstrated in descriptions of the Triumph and

23 Dunbabin, 1999, p.216

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on monumental architecture. What we see from the gladiator

mosaics at Zliten, Nennig, Bignor and Kos are past actions in

progress. It is the ongoing action that is emphasized here; the

fight itself rather than the victor who emerges at the close. In

the case of Kos, where the fighters are named, and very likely at

Zliten as well, where the mosaics were meant to recall games put

on by the paterfamilias of the house, the victor was most likely

known in common memory without having to present him as such. At

Nennig and Bignor, the gladiators portrayed in the dining space

are more anonymous – yet their very presence in houses in the

provinces suggests that a common understanding of the value of

amphitheatrical imagery existed throughout the Roman world. The

sheer cost of mosaic floors would demand a careful consideration

of the subject matter to be depicted.

Finally, the Wadi Lebda discovery is unique for a variety of

reasons, none of which includes its location, placement, or

subject matter. As we have seen, it is not unusual to find

figural representations of gladiators in villa baths (Kos), nor

is it untoward for wealthy Romans to have incorporated

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amphitheatrical subject matter in expensive, ornate mosaics in

high traffic areas of the house (Zliten, Nennig and Bignor).

The Exhausted Gladiator is part of a large floor mosaic from

the frigidarium of a villa bath complex (though this conclusion

remains to be tested, as the excavations have not yet been

published). Unlike previous examples of domestic mosaic

featuring gladiators, he does not wear his helmet, nor does he

wield weapons of any kind. These have been put aside in favour

of inaction, of stillness. This contradicts what we have

previously seen in gladiatorial representation that focuses on

the ongoing action of the combats but also their relative

anonymity. Perhaps its location could offer a clue to this

particular image. If nothing else, The Exhausted Gladiator

mosaic is found in a bath complex, which Roman men and women

visited to cleanse, exercise, trade gossip and news, and relax.

Could this gladiator have been designed to mimic the bathers’

repose intentionally?

David Potter writes: “The gladiator may have been the

quintessential representative of the virtues of Roman

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aristocratic society”24. Gladiators as ‘emblems of virility’

were incorporated into decoration of domestic houses so that the

paterfamilias could utilize their overt masculinity in a way that

did not contradict their own social norms. By removing the

physicality of the gladiator – his actual presence before an

audience – the intensive imagination of guests in Roman houses,

at the very least aware and likely past audience members of

gladiatorial combats, could associate this distilled version of

virtus on to the physical presence before them: the paterfamilias.

To conclude, I again quote Hölscher: “For few cultural

phenomena have a more pronounced collective and social character

than artistic style and the language of artistic imagery”25. If

he felt the subject matter was key to the language of images in

Roman art, what does the gladiator offer to tell us about Roman

culture and Roman identity? Were they utilized in a more

subversive way than previously believed? Were elite Roman males

so buttoned up that they had to extricate the masculinity of

gladiators from the arena to use in a more controlled

24 Potter in Potter & Mattingly, p.32325 Holscher, p.1

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environment? Or, in a world accustomed to violence, was the

value in the way a man faced death sought after as a kind of

noble ideal?