The first gladiatorial contest at Rome took place in 264 BC as part of aristocratic funerary ritual, a munus or funeral gift for the dead. Decimus Junius Brutus put on a gladiatorial combat in honor of his deceased father with three pairs of slaves serving as gladiators in the Forum Boarium (a commercial area that was named after the Roman cattle market) . The Romans called a display of gladiatorial combat a munus, that is, 'a duty' paid by descendants to a dead ancestor. The munus served the purpose of keeping alive the memory of an important individual after death. Munera were held some time after the funeral and were often repeated at annual or five-year intervals.  Gladiatorial fights were not  incorporated into public games until the late first century.

Festus, a second century AD scholar, suggests that gladiatorial combat was a substitution for an original sacrifice of prisoners on the tombs of great warriors. There is an interesting parallel for this in the Iliad. Achilles sacrificed twelve Trojan boys on Patroclus’ tomb (23.175-76).¹ This practice is perhaps based on the idea that blood could restore life to the dead. One thinks of the ghosts in the Odyssey who come up out of the depths, attracted by the animal blood of animals slaughtered by Odysseus (12.95-96). Tertullian, a second century AD Christian writer, claimed that gladiatorial combat was a human sacrifice to the manes or spirits of the dead (De Spect. 12.2-3). Ville supports this view of gladiatorial combat as a substitute for a human sacrifice that nourishes the honored dead with blood. He calls gladiatorial contests an amelioration of human sacrifice that permits at least the winner to survive the ritual (and sometimes even the loser).²

Notes

1. Human sacrifice at the funeral of a great man is a phenomenon seen in other ancient cultures such as Ur and China. This practice also was witnessed by Europeans in the West African kingdom of Dahomey from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. See A. Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (Austin 1997) 177-82.  This view of the origins of gladiatorial contests, however, is not universally accepted.  See D. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London, 1998), 36-40 and D.S. Potter, in D.S. Potter and J.D. Mattingly, eds., Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor 1999), 305-6.  Back to text.

2. G. Ville, "La guerre et le Munus," J.-P. Brisson (ed.), Problèmes de la guerre à Rome (Paris, 1969) 186.  Back to text.

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