GLADIATORS AND PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING. My first post on Steven Pinker’s book asked: “Are people less violent?” It grew out of comments by Dick Weisfelder and Nick that, as I summarized, “people today are more concerned about injuries in sporting events than in the days of gladiatorial combats and bare knuckle fighting.” However, the National Hockey League playoffs have shown that there are a lot of people who value the danger and physical courage that are displayed in hockey violence.
And maybe the gladiatorial battles were not that dangerous. In this interview in the Guardian, the classicist Mary Beard says: “We’re more brutal than [the Romans] were in many respects. Gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum was more like modern wrestling than boxing – all show and not much pain.” I have read arguments that the death toll in gladiatorial combats has been exaggerated because it would have been uneconomic to lose a high percentage of highly-trained gladiators, but I had thought that this would result in more thumbs up than thumbs down votes. It had not occurred to me that gladiatorial contests could have been rigged.