Roman Gladiator Research Paper

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There were only a few different ways that the survivors could cope with what they had just been through. Most just focused on the fact that they were the survivor of said battle and kept on fighting to survive. Some, on the other hand, couldn’t deal with what they had just experienced and thought the only reasonable solution to their emotional pain was suicide. One such gladiator, a German slave and beast fighter, while preparing himself for his morning exhibition went to use the bathroom. While no one was watching, he shoved a Roman bog brush down his throat, thus clogging his windpipe, leading him to suffocate and die. Those gladiators who did not take this route found themselves again in the arena, facing death, which many of them suffered. Though there are not many well preserved paper writing sources to tell us of the life and death of these men, the inscriptions and illustrations of their tombstone, made by friends and family, tell us of some of the awful ways they perished. The tombstone of one gladiator, Diodorus, details his battle against another man named Demetrius. After Diodorus had …show more content…

An example of this is the First Battle of Bedriacum in 69 AD. Marcus Salvius Otho, who was the Emperor of Rome at the time, mustard up an army consisting of parts of his legion, the Praetorian Guard and around 2,000 gladiators. Due to heavy losses, the Othonian army surrendered and Emperor Otho committed suicide. Gladiators were not only used then, however. In 167 AD, the number of troops that were depleted by plague and desertion forced Emperor Marcus Aurelias to draft gladiators as soldier, and even then they were still treated as slaves. Though there were only a handful of times when the Emperor enlisted slaves into the army, he should have more often as most gladiators were better trained than the

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