Thumbs down? What we really know about gladiators

A "turned" thumb… but which way?

The satirist Juvenal pokes fun at some former arena horn-players who've gone into business and now put on their own shows. When the crowd demands it with a "turned thumb", he says, they have the loser killed to keep the people happy. In Latin, verso pollice.

Later, Prudentius, a Christian poet, is outraged by a Vestal, a priestess meant to be the very picture of modesty, who could have the fallen man's breast pierced "with a turn of her thumb". In Latin, converso pollice.

And that's where our knowledge runs out. Both writers talk about a thumb that's turned or twisted. Neither says which way. Up, down, sideways? Nobody knows.

The scholar Anthony Corbeill suggests the exact reverse of what we all picture: the outstretched thumb, a hostile gesture, was the signal for death, while the thumb pressed down on the closed fist begged for mercy. That's a hypothesis, not a certainty, but it shows how flimsy the picture in our heads really is.

Blame it on a painting

So where does thumbs down come from? A canvas. In 1872 Jean-Léon Gérôme, a French painter, produced Pollice Verso: up in the stands, the Vestals signal death for the fallen gladiator. The painting, now in the Phoenix Art Museum in the United States, perpetuated the mistaken idea, and the cinema inherited it, right up to Gladiator (2000).

In other words, the most "Roman" gesture of all was popularised by a painter, working from two Latin words that don't say what he painted.

"Hail, Caesar": one phrase, one lake and one joke

The second cliché is the salute from the films: "Hail, Caesar, those who are about to die salute you." That line really does appear in an ancient source but, so far as we can tell, only once. And a long way from the Colosseum.

Suetonius tells the story in his life of the emperor Claudius. Before draining the Fucine Lake, in central Italy, Claudius laid on a mock sea battle there. A silver Triton rose from the water on a mechanical device and sounded the signal on his horn. The fighters shouted: Have imperator, morituri te salutant. "Emperor", you'll notice, not "Caesar".

Claudius replied: "Or not." His English translator, J. C. Rolfe, calls it "one of Claudius's feeble jokes". The fighters decided they'd been let off, and there was no getting them to fight. Claudius spent a good while pondering whether to wipe out the lot of them, with fire and steel, as the text puts it. At last he sprang up and went stumbling along the shore, threatening some and cheering on others, until he'd forced them into battle.

No gladiators' ritual, then, and no Colosseum, which hadn't been built yet.

Did every fight end in death?

No. There were rules. Martial, a poet from Roman Spain and author of a whole little book on the games that opened the Colosseum, describes the bout between Priscus and Verus. The rule was to fight on until one raised a finger to signal surrender. Neither did. The crowd shouted again and again for them to be released; the emperor stuck to his own rule, though he kept sending them dishes and gifts. In the end they fell at the same moment, and the emperor sent each of them the victor's palm and the rudis, a wooden sword that meant their discharge.

A word of caution: Martial's aim was to flatter the emperor, and he presents it as something that had only ever happened under him. It wasn't the norm. But it isn't the only case we know of: on a Roman medallion held in the archaeological museum in Nîmes, in France, a retiarius and a secutor, Xanthus and Eros, appear under the inscription stantes missi, "released standing".

The spectators recorded both outcomes. On the marble of the Colosseum's seating, during the long waits, they scratched their favourite gladiators: by name, like one Vindicomus, or with a feliciter, "hurrah!". Beside them, victory crowns and palms. Or a theta, θ, the first letter of the Greek word for death.

Because death was real. According to Suetonius, who had no love for him, Claudius had even men who slipped and fell by accident finished off, above all the retiarii, who fought bare-headed: he wanted to see their faces at the moment of death. You don't need a thumb for that scene to be horrifying.

Who went into the arena

The pairing the crowd drew most often was the retiarius against the secutor: one with a net and trident and his head bare, the other with a rectangular shield and a helmet with neither crest nor brim. A gladiator's kit could weigh up to twenty kilos, and bouts pitted different weapons against each other, designed to even out the odds.

They weren't all professionals. Suetonius says Domitian put on night-time fights by torchlight, including fights between women. And Commodus, son of Marcus Aurelius, went out into the arena in the afternoons as a secutor, fighting with his left hand and a wooden sword, and helped himself to a million sesterces a day from the gladiators' fund. Our source is Cassius Dio, who sat in the Senate, watched those games and was no admirer. Minimal risk, scandalous pay.

How it ended

The gladiator fights died out in the fifth century; the sources can't agree on the year. Theodoret, a Church historian of the same period, tells how a monk from the East called Telemachus leapt into the arena to separate the fighters, how the crowd stoned him to death, and how the emperor Honorius then put an end to the spectacle. Whether it happened in the Colosseum is a matter of tradition: Theodoret only says "the stadium".

The wild-beast hunts lasted longer. In 523 the Gothic king Theodoric wrote to the consul giving the games, asking him to pay the hunters what was customary: skimping on men your show has driven to their deaths, the letter more or less says, makes you guilty of homicide. It's the last time the records mention hunts in the Colosseum.

Fact or legend.

• Thumbs down for death, thumbs up for life. Not recorded. The texts speak of a "turned" thumb, without saying which way. The popular image was spread by an 1872 painting, and one scholar's reverse theory is a hypothesis.
• "Hail, Caesar, those who are about to die salute you." A single attestation, at a sea battle on the Fucine Lake, before the Colosseum existed. And it said "emperor".
• Every fight was to the death. False: there was surrender, the crowd could call for release, and there were draws with both men discharged. But people really did die in the arena.
• Thousands of Christian martyrs died in the Colosseum. There are no authentic records; the accounts placing martyrdoms here date from the fifth century onwards.

Where to hear it

On the "Inside the Colosseum" visit, the arena section (if your ticket includes it) has two stories on exactly this: the draw between Priscus and Verus, and the truth about the thumb and the salute. And without a ticket, from the street, "The Imperial Forums and the Colosseum" tells you how much truth there is in its martyrs.

If you're planning your trip, our Rome guide has the practical side covered.

Further reading

• Juvenal, Satire III, lines 34–37 (Latin text). The Latin Library. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/juvenal/3.shtml
• James Grout, "Pollice Verso", Encyclopaedia Romana, University of Chicago. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/polliceverso.html
• Suetonius, The Life of Claudius, 21.6 and 34.1, translated by J. C. Rolfe (Loeb, 1914), on LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Claudius*.html
• Martial, Liber de spectaculis (Latin text). The Latin Library. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/martial/mart.spec.shtml
• Parco archeologico del Colosseo, "I graffiti dell'Anfiteatro con scene di combattimenti tra gladiatori" (in Italian). https://colosseo.it/opere/i-graffiti-dell-anfiteatro-con-scene-di-combattimenti-tra-gladiatori/
• Cassiodorus, Variae, V, 42 (Latin text). The Latin Library. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cassiodorus/varia5.shtml