The Roman Gladiator
Return of the Gladiators
These days, the term “gladiator” is bandied about with waggish bravado to hype the reckless courage and physical prowess needed for particular athletic endeavors. Ultimate fighters, football players, rugby players, and boxers all have earned the moniker “gladiator” because they engage in head-to-head athletic competition in which serious injury is a genuine risk and death a remote possibility.
The term harnesses the grit required to compete in the most physically demanding sports while capturing the glamour of the spectacle. The US television program “American Gladiators” of the 1990’s sought to capitalize on the public’s fascination with the physical brutality and the sheer showmanship of gladiatorial games. The modern application of the word “gladiator” imbues athletic combatants with an aura of prodigious prowess and titillates audiences with prospect of brutality. For their extraordinary physical feats, latter day “gladiators” are venerated; just as ancient Roman gladiators were revered for their prowess and ultimate courage.
Today, some people do more than simply study ancient gladiatorial games, they replicate the games. In the country of Jordan, a land rife with Roman history, gladiatorial games have returned. This time, however, the gladiators do not cater to a blood-thirsty public audience; they cater to tourists hungry for a cultural-experience.
Pollice Verso by Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1872
Pompey the Great, a Roman statesman and general, first led Roman soldiers into Syria in 64 BCE and continued to propagate Roman dominance into Jordan. Pompey liberated ten cities from Greek control and these newly freed cities joined together in a mutually beneficial league loyal to Rome. One of these ten cities was Gerasa, modern-day Jerash, and this city is the site of the modern gladiatorial games.
Beginning in September 2005, the Jerash Heritage Company (http://www.jerashchariots.com) began staging re-enactments that showcase ancient Roman military battles, demonstrate the use of the ancient weapons, “fights to the death” between gladiators, and chariot races. Realizing the potential lure of ancient games, the Jordanian company instituted RACE (Roman Army and Chariot Experience) and thus returned gladiators to the ancient hippodrome in Jerash, where audiences can sit in the same seats as the ancient spectators before them and decide the fate of the gladiatorial combatants with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
RACE’s modern gladiators. © RACE 2005.
Despite the gladiators’ words of “Ave, imperator, morituri te salutant” (“Hail, emperor, we who are about to die salute you”), the Jordanian gladiators always live to see another day. While gladiators will never come back exactly as they were during Roman antiquity, the power and drama of their performances can return day after day in art, in literature, and in Jordan.
