Transcript of Spartacus and Gladiators, with Mary Beard

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Hello, everyone. It's Tom Holland here, and I have teamed up with the great Mary Beard to bring you four episodes on what we together have decided are the four most iconic themes in ancient history. And today, we're looking at Gladiator's. Here's a short extract of that episode. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the last of our sensational, classically themed bonuses for You, our beloved members. The Great Mary Beard is still here. Obviously, her main focus at the moment is instant classics, her sensational podcast with Charlotte Higgins. But back in the mists of time, she co-authored a book on the Colosseum, probably the most iconic building in the whole of Rome, great emblem of the Roman Empire. And so for our final episode, what else could we do but gladiators? We've done an episode on the Colosseum and the rest of history. We've done one on gladiators. But what we haven't done is an episode on the most famous of all gladiators, namely, Sparticus. So I thought that that's what we would structure today's episode around. But Mary, before we come to Sparticus, can I just ask you, suppose you had the opportunity to go back in a time machine and to watch a gladiatorial show.

Do you think you would avail yourself of that opportunity?

I don't know. I mean, it puts you on the spot, doesn't it? I've written about gladiators, I've researched them, and then am I going to say, no, I wouldn't go and have a look? I think that when it comes to morals, I'd have to say to myself, look, you went to see Gladiator One in the movies, and you went to see Gladiator Two. Now, okay, those weren't real. The violence that you saw was staged, CGI and all the rest, but it sure looked real. So I wonder what the difference between watching that at the movies and watching it in the open air with real human beings. And I think that's a slightly more profound question than it might sound.

Do you think that the obvious fascination that people have for the idea of gladiators. What's that? Is that telling us anything about what people find interesting in ancient Rome per se, do you think?

It's quite difficult. If you quiz people and put them on the spot just like you put me on the spot. They will say, Oh, this is one of the... There are many blots on the national record of Rome, but gladiators, it comes pretty high in the list of the unacceptable about Rome. I think that you have to weigh that against the fact that thousands, hundreds of thousands of little model gladiators are still bore outside the Colosseum. That until the photograph trade was banned, people paid a lot of money to have their own photographs taken outside the Colosseum with people pretending to be gladiators. I think that we probably need to look quite carefully at our own fascination.

Right. So the implication of that is that the interest that people feel, we gladiators, the obvious fascination, is speaking to something perhaps that is deep within all humans rather than being culturally specific to Rome, do you think?

Well, I'm trying to avoid saying that, but I can see why you lost my answer in that way. I think that one of the things, and I don't know whether this is universal or culturally specific, one of the things that attracts people to Rome is that sense of over-the-topness. And that's over-the-topness And that's over the topness when it comes to sex, when it comes to violence, when it comes to cruelty. And maybe Rome remains a place where we can explore that side of ourselves, but safely under the alibi that this is all about ancient history.

Yes. I think that's very nicely put. A very quick overview of the life and career of Sparticus for those who who may not know it, that he is a gladiator who escapes, who inflicts a number of defeats on the Romans. He is finally cornered by Crassus, who we were talking about in our previous episode, one of the with Julius Caesar and with Pompe, who also plays a role in the defeat of Sparticus, as we will see. And if you believe the Kirk Douglas film, he doesn't die in battle, but is one of a number of slaves who get He's been crucified along the line of the Via Appia, the great road that leads south from Rome towards the heel of Italy. And what do we know about him before he becomes a slave? I know that he's a Thracian, so he comes from Bulgaria, doesn't he? Because I went to Bulgaria in the summer, and there's a town called Sandansky, which has a bitter feud with a neighboring town over where Spartic has come from. And they both claim that they were his birthplace. But Sandansky has built an enormous muscle-bound statue of Sparticus. So I think they now have bragging rights.

But presumably, we don't know for sure where exactly he was born.

Ancient writers agree that he was from Thrace. I've always thought it a bit odd that one of the special gladiator types, because gladiator come in various varieties with different armor. One is supposed to be a Thrax, a Thracian. And you think, is there some confusion here about Where he came from and his gladiator type. But ignoring my skepticism, everybody says he's from Thrace. There's a sense that he might have been a mercenary. He might even have served even for the Romans as a mercenary. But at this point, it all gets very murky.

But he ends up, doesn't he, in Campania, which is the area of Italy around the Bay of Naples. And it has particular length Perhaps with the origins of gladiatorial combat. It's famous for its gladiatorial schools. But before we come to gladiators, could we just focus on the process by which, if he did come from Thrace, he might have ended up in Italy? Because he is just one of hundreds of thousands of people from the Eastern Mediterranean who are following that road, aren't it?

I mean, euphemistically, we'd say he was a prisoner of war. What that means is that he sold into slavery. He's either kept by by the soldiers, the Roman soldiers and the general, but more often, they are literally taking into slavery, inslaving vast numbers of the conquered populations of the Eastern Mediterranean. The process of enslavement, followed by the transportation of those slaves to Italy to fulfill all the tasks that slaves do, from agriculture to domestic service to gladiatorial combat or whatever. It is one of the biggest movements of people, enforced movements of people that there has ever been. I mean, it is one guess would be that you've got a million slaves in Italy.

Yeah. So almost maybe a quarter of the population, something like that. And one of the things about this population transfer is that it's not just Thracians or people whom the Greeks would have classified as barbarians, and therefore, according to Aristotle, fitted to work as slaves, but Greeks themselves. I mean, that's what they really find offensive, isn't it?

Yes. And the kinds of tasks done by slaves are not all what we think of as menial tasks. I mean, some of them are forced labor in the fields, but quite a lot of teachers, doctors, members in Rome would be slaves. And those, presumably, are captured members of the Greek towns that were taken by Rome.

Yeah. Dilos, a small island in the Aegean, and roads, which preserves a precarious semiindependence. Both of these become great centers of the slave trade. And the descriptions of the number of people who are passing through the slave markets there gives you a very vivid sense of the dislocation that Roman power is bringing to the east.

Yeah. People visit Dilos now. It's one of the glorious islands of the Mediterranean. Its past is absolutely admired in slavery and its profits. And certainly a lot of that comes from war. But when we were talking about Julius Caesar, we talked about pirates. And one of the ways that the pirates in the Mediterranean are making their living is they kidnap someone, they might kill them in the end. More profitable, if they can't get a ransom, is to sell them into slavery.

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