What Roman Gladiators Really Looked Like (6 photos)

This image is slightly different from the usual pictures of pumped-up fighters.





Gladiators, life-or-death battles, blood on the sand... All this has already become firmly imprinted in the mass consciousness. As has the standard image of a typical fighter in the arena - a real terminator with bulging muscles. Thanks to Hollywood for this: it has produced a plethora of films about Ancient Rome and has stuffed pumped-up gladiators into every single one of them.



Still from the film "Gladiator"

In general, it all turned out to be a fairy tale. In reality, the gladiators looked more like typical visitors to a dumpling house.





Employees of the Vienna Medical University were convinced of this. They examined the skeletons from an ancient burial site of fighters near the Turkish city of Ephesus and conducted an isotope analysis of the bones. It turned out that in between fights, they ate like they were going to slaughter.

By the way, the ancient Roman physician Galen pointed this out. He wrote that gladiators relied on dishes made from barley and legumes. And Pliny the Elder even called the rulers of the arena "barley eaters." Their diet included quite a lot of wheat bread. Such a diet not only gave the fighters the energy they needed for battles and training, but also built up a good amount of fat on their sides. Therefore, usually a gladiator looked something like this:



Some scientists even believe that the layer of fat provided natural protection for the body. And reduced the likelihood of injury to ligaments and joints. In short, only advantages.

Although their fatness did not prevent them from organizing real battles in the arena. The warriors had everything in order with this - thanks to the harsh training in the gladiator school.



But the fact that every fight resulted in someone's death is also a myth. There was a judge "summa rudis" in the arena, he almost always stopped the fight in time and did not allow one of the fighters to be killed or maimed. Gladiators were very expensive and rare goods, no one would just throw them away. Their fights were more like a performance: they inflicted small wounds and cuts on each other, then they were solemnly separated in different directions. And after the fight they were handed over to the best doctors of that time.



Of course, there were bloody battles and gladiators dying in the arena. But in rare cases. Many finished their careers without any murders and ended their days as instructors in gladiator schools, servants there, or even received freedom and opened a shop or bakery with the money they earned in battles.