Ask an elementary school kid where gladiators fought, and they’ll tell you: the Colosseum.
Fact check: partly true.
Julius Caesar would pipe up here... he never saw the place. The Colosseum opened in AD 80, 123 years after he died.
Rome had staged gladiator fights for more than three centuries before then. Where? The Roman Forum, among the temples and law courts.
Caesar put on some of the grandest shows Rome ever saw. In 65 BC, he was 35 and buried in debt.
Suetonius, writing nearly two centuries later, puts it plainly: “the huge band which he assembled from all quarters so terrified his opponents, that a bill was passed limiting the number of gladiators which anyone was to be allowed to keep in the city.”
The law forced Caesar to cut his lineup. He still sent 320 pairs of gladiators into the arena, each one armed with silver.
So how did gladiators end up fighting next to Rome’s law courts? And how did Caesar’s shows get forgotten once the Colosseum went up?
The story starts at a funeral in a cattle market.
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Rome’s gladiators started at funerals
Gladiator fights began as a way to honor dead fathers. In 264 BC, the sons of Decimus Junius Brutus Pera set three pairs of fighters against each other in the cattle market at their father’s funeral.
By 216 BC, the fights had moved to the Roman Forum. Hannibal had butchered a Roman army at Cannae that August... and a few months later, Livy says, 22 pairs fought in the Forum at the funeral games for Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.
From then on, the Forum was Rome’s arena.
Caesar spent money he did not have
Before Caesar held a single public office, Plutarch says, he owed 1,300 talents. The sum works out to roughly 34 tons of silver. Somebody hide Julius’s checkbook.
In 65 BC, he became aedile, the official in charge of public games, alongside a colleague named Marcus Bibulus.
They split the bills, but Caesar got all the cheers. Bibulus grumbled that he had met Pollux’s fate. Rome’s temple to the twin gods Castor and Pollux stood in the Forum, and everybody called it the Temple of Castor.
“So the joint liberality of Caesar and myself is credited to Caesar alone,” Bibulus said. Poor fellow.
The gladiator gear was solid silver
Caesar dedicated his gladiator show to his father, who had dropped dead at Pisa some 20 years earlier... one morning, while pulling on his shoes. Caesar was 15.
Pliny the Elder, writing about 140 years later, explains the silver. Caesar was:
“The first person, on the occasion of the funeral games in honour of his father, to employ all the apparatus of the arena in silver.”
Even the condemned criminals who faced the beasts got silver weapons. Plutarch says Caesar “washed away all memory” of every aedile before him.
Nineteen years later, Caesar threw a party so packed the crowd crushed two senators, and he hung a silk roof over the whole Forum.
Then Rome met its first giraffe... and the Colosseum hogged the whole story…..
