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who wore scaly armor and a fish-shaped helmet in a fanciful reenactment of Neptune fighting a sea monster.

      When a gladiator disabled his opponent, the audience would vote on the loser’s fate from the stands by giving thumb gestures.^a If the crowd was convinced that the defeated fighter had done his best, it would often spare his life. In fact, the tombstones of successful gladiators frequently listed fight statistics that included wins, ties, and losses, so a single loss wasn’t always a career-ending calamity. It has been estimated that only 20 percent of combats resulted in death during Augustus’s era, but under some of the later emperors, 50 percent of combats resulted in death.⁸

      A rare but special event was the munera sine missione, “offerings without reprieve,” a series of playoffs from which only one fighter would emerge alive. Early in the first century CE, Augustus banned the practice, considering it cruel to not allow a brave fighter the chance for a reprieve, but later emperors revived it for its dramatic appeal.

       Endgame

      Gladiators were trained in how to die with grace. A defeated fighter was expected to offer his neck for the final stab without a lot of embarrassing weeping, fleeing, or begging for mercy.⁹

      After every fight to death, attendants disguised as underworld gods came out and made sure the dead man wasn’t faking. Mercury with a winged hat and sandals poked the loser with a hot iron to see if he flinched. Charun, an Etruscan demon with pointy ears and a vulture’s nose, whacked the forehead of the fallen with a mallet.^b Then slaves hauled the body away and sprinkled fresh sand over the pools of blood.¹⁰

      Out of sight, in the arena’s morgue, attendants working under the strict eye of a supervising official stripped the valuable armor from the body and slit the dead fighter’s throat to ensure no deception. Because gladiators were slaves and criminals, their bodies were usually dumped into rubbish pits, but one of the perks of becoming a successful gladiator was the prospect of a decent burial paid for by grateful fans or sponsors, or by fighters pooling money in burial clubs.¹¹

      With luck, skill, or charisma, a successful gladiator might retire from his career alive and free. Retired gladiators often became trainers or highly paid contract fighters. Others hired out as thugs, bodyguards, and enforcers.

      Because Romans considered compassion a weakness, their philosophers rarely opposed the games on those grounds. Some of Cicero’s writings complain of gimmicky games he considered vulgar and sadistic, but he still approved of well-played games that illustrated traditional Roman values of strength and honor.¹² Naturally, the most unpleasant emperors (for example, Caligula and Commodus) enjoyed watching men hack each other apart and sometimes joined in the fun, but even emperors with better reputations showed proper Roman bloodlust. Emperor Claudius often ordered the loser’s helmet to be removed when the final blow was delivered so he could watch the agony on the dying man’s face. Marcus Aurelius, on the other hand, disliked the fights and tried to organize games with blunted weapons and as few killings as possible.

      Early Christians opposed gladiatorial fighting as a rival religious ritual that had martyred a couple of thousand Christians during the first three centuries of the Christian Era.¹³ The games lost some popularity after the empire turned Christian and compassion became a virtue. Constantine tried to abolish gladiatorial combat by edict in 325 CE, but the abolition was sporadically enforced. After the Germanic invaders dismantled the Western Roman Empire, however, there was no longer a need for Romans to toughen up by watching men die. The new barbarian kings generally put a stop to gladiatorial combat whenever they took over. The last recorded fight at the Colosseum occurred around 435 CE, although public animal fights continued there for nearly a century more.

ROMAN SLAVE WARS

      Death toll: 1 million¹

      Rank: 46

      Type: slave revolts

      Broad dividing line: slaves vs. masters

      Time frame: 134–71 BCE

      Location: Sicily and Italy

      Traditional translation of the name: Servile Wars (bellum servile)

      Who usually gets the most blame: Roman slave drivers

      Another damn: rebellion against Rome

      Economic factors: slaves, grain

       First Servile War (134–131 BCE)

      In their continuous wars of conquest, the Romans acquired hundreds of thousands of prisoners and confiscated vast estates from enemies all over the world, all of which they auctioned off to Roman speculators. This was especially true in Sicily, where the Punic Wars had broken the old Carthaginian and Greek aristocracy, replacing it with huge plantations worked by slaves for the profit of Roman landlords. By the second century BCE, Sicily had become the granary of the republic.

      In 134 BCE, the slaves of a wealthy Roman planter outside the Sicilian town of Henna killed their master. The murder put not only the killers under the threat of crucifixion, but also, by Roman law, every slave in the household. Faced with this gruesome penalty for merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time, all of the slaves fled into the mountains. There they attached themselves to another runaway, a former Syrian slave originally named Eunus but now rechristened with the loftier royal name Antiochus. He had taken over a mountain shrine to the earth goddess Demeter. By hiding a nut filled with sulfur and fire in his mouth, Eunus breathed flames when he spoke, which amazed his followers and convinced them he spoke for the goddess.

      Here grew a community of runaway slaves that supported itself by robbing travelers and plantations. It swelled to 2,000 followers as more slaves flocked to the temple of Demeter. Their general, a Greek slave named Achaeus, traveled around the island recruiting soldiers for the cause, attracting a number of free farmers who disliked the plantation owners as much as any slave. This rebel army then beat the Roman praetor (governor) of Sicily and his hastily assembled militia. That boosted Eunus’s following tenfold and more.

      Elsewhere, another infestation of runaways formed around Cleon, a slave who had been born in Cilicia (now southern Turkey). He soon agreed to recognize Eunus as the king of Sicily. By now 70,000 slaves were under arms.

      Because the Romans were tied up with wars elsewhere, they couldn’t give the rebellious slaves their undivided attention. Still, they managed to dispatch a new consular army every year to fight the rebels. Roman law decreed that all rebellious slaves taken alive had to be crucified, but local authorities considered that a waste of valuable property. Instead, they returned captured slaves to their master for discipline, which usually meant whipping rather than death. Eventually Publius Rupilius, the latest consul^a in charge of crushing the rebellion, took it upon himself to crucify any slaves he captured alive, eventually nailing up 20,000.

      Finally both Roman consuls took their combined armies into the heart of rebel territory and besieged Henna for two years. When the rebels were finally starved out and crushed, Eunus was taken back to Rome. However, he was not publicly strangled in the manner of an honorable foreign enemy. Instead, he died forgotten in prison some time later. Similarly, Publius Rupilius was not given all the pomp and glory of a full Roman triumph because beating mere slaves didn’t count as a true victory.²

       Second Servile War (104–100 BCE)

      While the big plantations prospered, small, free farmers all across Sicily were being forced into slavery by the crushing debt they owed to lenders and large land owners. Because so many of these new slaves had

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