Gladiators

Long before John Anderson started out as a referee our Roman forebears enjoyed the spectacle of gladiator combat. This was a lot more violent than its modern incarnation (and lacked the Queen soundtrack). Roman gladiators comprising condemned criminals, debtors, army deserters and prisoners of war fought to the death in the arena in the hope of earning the wooden sword of freedom

Well in the scene you presented above, all I see is a "dead" gladiator!   He is screwed via any way he could really react, especially if the "trained" Tiger decided to participate!

But, movies are movies and not the truth!

You may find this interesting.

Originally posted by Scholar7 I do think that a Gladiator could take on a tiger, but against a human opponent too, he's gonna be in for one hell of a fight.  By the way, here's a web address on Wikipedia (yes I know it's not completely reliable) of my favorite gladiatorhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MurmilloAlso, here's a site I found on gladiator weapons and armorhttp://www.gladiator.hu/index.php?Itemid=10&id=6&option=com_content&task=view&lang=enFinally, what can any of you tell me about female gladiators?Hope I was of some help.

I think Caligula arranged a fight between a female gladiator and a dwarf. It would be interesting to find out more about this

lol probably. He was a notorious pervert whose depravity rivaled that of Commodus and Nero

Another type of Gladiator I like are the Thraex and the Hoplomachus.

One gladiator i'd like to find out more about is the Scissor. His weapons were supposedly hooked knives wielded in a similar way to the Indian gauntlet swords

I'd have liked to see how they did the Naumachia. The Colosseum was apparently flooded and galleys full of gladiators fought a naval battle

It seems that the gladiator games developed out of the pre-Roman human sacrifice rituals.
  In the beginning it seems to have been more of a ritualised game, held in honor of the dead, and the participants partook in it voluntarily /the site says that death was rare/. Later though criminals were used; criminals were considered "sacer" - "belonging to the gods"; this shows how much the boundaries between the law and religion weren't distinct - so, the gods gave the criminals in the hands of the Romans; and the Romans handed them back to the gods for violating the laws, that were gods' laws. This is probably why later war captives were used as gladiators - the war captives were considered given in hands of the Romans by their very gods. So the death of one of the gladiators were considered as some aspect of a sacrifice to the Manes.
Anyway, seeing the gladiator games in religious context makes them more understandable, IMHO, that just seeing them as the cruel desires of spectators to see other people killed.

Here is another version how the whole thing started:
"...A contemporary second century AD scholar, Festus, (who abridged the work of the Augustan era writer Verrius Flaccus) suggests that gladiatorial combat was a substitution for an original sacrifice of prisoners on the tombs of great warriors. Tertullian, a Christian writer also of the second century, claimed that gladiatorial combat was a human sacrifice to the manes or spirits of the dead...."http://www.unrv.com/culture/gladiator.php

So far, I see 3 versions of the genesis of the gladiators' games :
1. Etruscan - 2 slaves fighting to the death, at the death of their master,as s sacrifice, to appease the gods of the afterworld.
2. Sabelian - ritualased game, with volunteers, death is rare.
3. Festus - direct substitution for a real sacrifice on the tombs of great warriors.

A wonder if all of the 3 versions have place in the story. suppose that is started with the Sabellian variant, and the Etruscans borrowed it and turned it into theirs. Then the Romans, who may had the sacrifice Festus is talking about, may have borrowed the Etruscan one, substituting it for theirs.
I'm just theorising, of course.

Officialy the gladiator games started in 264 BCE when Decimus Scaeva held a 3-paired game to honor his father Decimus Pera. This evolved in a popular death ritual, "munus", in which specially trained to kill slaves fought to the death. The vanquished one was though to follow in the afterlife arms and all, in order to defend his dead master. This is akin to the Thracian sacrifaces for a dead ruler when his wife, and some slaves were entombed with the dead ruler in order to serve him in afterlife; similarly the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs of the 1st dynasty were surrounded with the graves of their servants. Also the servants that were taking away the fallen gladiators were dressed as Charon, the god who carried the dead across the river Stix - this symbolism evokes even more the other-worldly sacrificial nature of the gladiator's games. Today the bull fights in Spain are a relic from both the gladiator games and of the sacrifice load of it.

Is modern Spanish bullfighting a remnant of gladiatorial combat? The crowds gather to watch an animal's suffering and cheer the matador for his ability to kill