Gladiators Then and Now*

   In the waning years of the Roman Republic—that is in the period before Rome was ruled by a long succession of emperors—gladiator games “provided their sponsors with extravagantly expensive but effective opportunities for self-promotion while offering cheap, exciting entertainment to their clients.[27] Gladiators became big business for trainers and owners.”  “Enrollment in a gladiator school offered a trade, regular food, housing of sorts and a fighting chance of fame and fortune.”

   This was so, because gladiatorial performances were immensely popular and while there was some governmental supervision, the spectacles spread throughout the empire, with amphitheaters built from the north of Europe to Africa, with the Coliseum in Rome is no doubt the most famous.

   Today, football is the closest analogy.  Just as Roman politicians, from emperors on down, gained visibility and adherence by sponsoring gladiatorial events, so cities and universities attain fame and supporters by fielding teams that can draw fans from near and far.  Moreover, just as in today’s stadium, food was then made available to the spectators, music accompanied the gladiators’ clashes, with their skill more prized than brute force.  And just as in contemporary football, fights were then supervised by the equivalent of umpires.

   The fly in the gladiatorial ointment was the fact that many—not all—contests ended in a death.  Gladiators died young, even most of the successful ones.  The ethos seemed to consider it more important how someone died—honorably, bravely—than that one died, a belief accepted not only by the spectators, but, it seems, by the combatants themselves.  Such an ideology makes some sense for a nation that maintained a huge army professional enough to overcome most of the then known world and disciplined enough to extract taxes from the places they had conquered.

   One might be tempted to say, “life, then, was cheap.”  But I think that would be a mistake.  Life expectancy was about half what it is here today, even when not considering infant and early childhood mortality, making quite common an early death from natural causes.  Still, there was mumbling, if apparently not much: objection to people being killed for entertainment.  At the end of the first century CE, however, Tertullian, the early Christian theologian, vehemently condemned the entire murderous gladiatorial practice.

   Today, people live a lot longer, thanks to huge advances in medicine. For most of a person’s lifespan, the goal is not to prolong life, but to maintain a life of high quality.  And playing football is certainly a serious obstacle in the way of that goal.  The hazards of playing football have been written about almost since the beginning of the game.  But even so blunt an instrument as Dr. Richard Schneider’s 1973 book, Head and Neck Injuries in Football—arguing that injuries to the brain cause serious, permanent disability so that players who survive these injuries will never again be able to function normally—had no effect on the profitable football industry, because its consumers also cheerfully kept their heads in the sand.

   And not just the spectators of big time football.  Since 1997, more than 50 youngsters have been killed or sustained serious injury playing football, even before reaching gladiator status.  More recently the professionals took actions of their own and succeeded in getting the NFL to allocate $760 million—widely believed to be an insufficient sum—for medical help and compensation for more than 4000  retired players for brain injuries incurred while they were in harness. 

   Many of those former heroes lead sharply diminished lives.  “I went into the kitchen and could not remember why I went there,” says one.  Here is a fuller description of what happened to a star on the field: http://nyti.ms/1f57hEe. Not dead, but not alive either.
       This is not the end of the story and who knows how it will end or whether it will end at all.  The tea leaves are not encouraging.  Even after Constantine converted to Christianity early in the 4^th century and forbad gladiatorial spectacles in the Roman empire, it took still another couple of centuries before they disappeared altogether.  Not a good sign for the future of football and its victims.

* The quotes about gladiators and most of what I learned about them comes from a very scholarly Wikipedia article.  What I know about recent events in the world of football comes from The New York Times.