The painting that invented gladiators

Sources

Roman sources

• Juvenal, Satire III (verso pollice), Latin and English in G. G. Ramsay's Loeb translation (1918); Prudentius, Against Symmachus II; Martial, Book of Spectacles; Suetonius, Life of Claudius 20-21 (Loeb, 1914); Tacitus, Annals 12.56 and 15.44 (the Florence manuscripts); Gaius, Institutes 3.146 (the Verona palimpsest); the Attilius graffiti from the Nocera Gate tombs at Pompeii (CIL IV 10236, 10238a); Flamma's gravestone (CIL X 7297); Pliny, Natural History 18.72 and 36.203.

Later research

• "Pollice Verso", Paris, 10 April 1879 (the pamphlet of evidence for and against); Anthony Corbeill, "Thumbs in Ancient Rome: Pollex as Index" (1997) and Nature Embodied (2004); H. J. Leon, Transactions of the American Philological Association 70 (1939); Donald Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (1998); Kanz and Grossschmidt, Forensic Science International (2006); Lösch et al., "Stable Isotope and Trace Element Studies on Gladiators and Contemporary Romans from Ephesus", PLOS ONE (2014); Gérôme & Goupil: Art and Enterprise (2000); Encyclopaedia Romana (University of Chicago); the Walters Art Museum and the Phoenix Art Museum.

Pages shown

• Juvenal and Persius, tr. G. G. Ramsay (Loeb, 1918); Prudentius, Opera, ed. Lanfranchi (Turin, 1898); Martial, Epigrams, tr. W. C. A. Ker (Loeb, 1919); Suetonius, tr. J. C. Rolfe (Loeb, 1914); Tacitus, Annals, tr. Church and Brodribb (1884), and the 11th-century Florence manuscripts; Gaius, Institutes, ed. Poste (1904); Dessau, Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae (1902); Pliny, Natural History, tr. Bostock and Riley (1856-57); the "Pollice Verso" pamphlet (Paris, 1879); Goupil & Cie's 1898 catalogue; How to Study Pictures (1910); The World Book (1918); The Martyrs of the Coliseum (Baltimore, c. 1872).

Pictures

• Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pollice Verso (1872), Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant (1859) and The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer (Walters Art Museum); Quo Vadis? (Enrico Guazzoni, 1913, public domain); the Zliten, Borghese and Leptis Magna mosaics; helmets and shin guards from the Pompeii gladiator barracks, Naples Archaeological Museum (photos by Carlo Raso, public domain); the bread-seller fresco from Pompeii (photo Marie-Lan Nguyen, CC0); the dedication of Pompeii's amphitheatre (photo Gary Todd, public domain); Luigi Canina's reconstruction of the Colosseum; Raffaele Fabretti's engraving of Claudius's tunnel (1683); Jean-Joseph-Xavier Bidauld, Lake Fucino (Metropolitan Museum of Art); Hubert Robert, The Fire of Rome (1785); Pierre Subleyras, Benedict XIV (Metropolitan Museum of Art); the Colosseum in the 1860s (Rijksmuseum, CC0); a sestertius of Titus (Münzkabinett, Berlin, public domain); the Fucino plain from the ISS (NASA, public domain); Ridley Scott, NASA/Bill Ingalls (public domain). The hand is an illustration.

Credits

• Gérôme's study for the defeated gladiator: Delfin Le Dauphin, CC BY-SA 4.0
• The Zliten surrender: Marco Prins / Livius.org, CC0
• The Colosseum: Quahadi, CC BY 4.0; Bodhisattwa, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Rome Reborn: Ancient Rome Live / Flyover Zone, CC BY 3.0
• Ephesus: Klapi, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Claudius's tunnel: Marica Massaro, CC BY-SA 4.0
• The Fucino fields: Rudy Massaro, CC BY-SA 4.0
• The Fucino plain: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel-2 data (2025)
• The Nocera Gate tombs: Brunella Pastore, CC BY-SA 4.0
• The Circus Maximus: Livioandronico2013, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Trajan's Circus Maximus coin: Christopher Gardner, CC0
• The denarius: Rijksmuseum, CC0
• Barley field: Adrian S Pye, CC BY-SA 2.0
• Ephesus excavation photo and strontium chart: Lösch, Moghaddam, Grossschmidt, Risser and Kanz, PLOS ONE 9(10): e110489 (2014), CC BY 4.0
• All via Wikimedia Commons, the Internet Archive and PLOS ONE.