ABSTRACT
One of the components of the ambivalent Roman attitude to gladiatorial contests is the frequency with which moralists both emphasise and express their revulsion at the tendency for free men, sometimes even free men of high status, to choose a career as a ‘professional’ gladiator. The fact that this expressed a moral attitude should warn us against assuming that it occurred as frequently in practice as it does in literature. In historical narratives too instances of free persons, especially if they were senators or equestrians, who chose to appear as gladiators are overemphasised precisely because they were unusual. The gladiator’s place at the furthest margin of the Roman social world implied that, if that world were properly ordered, such cases would not have existed at all. A person with standing in the community who wished to fight as a gladiator not out of necessity but for pleasure was openly and demonstratively threatening the status-distinctions on which Roman society was based, and claiming that he was beyond the reach of the laws with which successive emperors tried to codify these distinctions. Paradoxically it was those who held the imperial office who were the most tempted to demonstrate that they were above the laws applying to ordinary members of the elite by participating in gladiatorial contests. Very few of them went as far as Nero did, and broke the laws forbidding senators to appear on the stage as actors; but several appeared in the arena.
