I was recently having lunch with a young man who asked me, “The real ancient gladiators, were they buff? All of the gladiators in Spartacus [the cable TV series] are chiseled—or do they have these studs [in the cast] to attract female viewers…They are portrayed living on slop. If ancient nutrition was really so bad how could you have guys that looked like that?”

This is a layered question with a lot of texture, and I will address it one layer at a time. When researching The Broken Dance I had to do a body-typing study, using surviving artwork, the slim ancient skeletal record, and our own modern athletes and couch potatoes as comparative models.

The central question is three-fold: genetics; diet; culture, to which I can offer three initial responses.

With a less diverse population, the ancient Roman world could support fewer remarkable athletes, per capita, than our modern population.

The increased size and athleticism of our modern athletes over the past 30 years due to drugs and dietary supplements [including baby formula and growth hormones fed to livestock], surely indicates that ancient athletes were smaller. However, there is no reason to suppose that the ancients were any less developed than athletes who competed up until the 1960s.

Despite a less numerous, less diverse and less well-fed population, ancient combat athletes [including gladiators] were drawn from a proportionately much larger segment of the population than their modern counterparts. In the ancient world there were only two kinds of athletes: the few who raced, and the many who fought. Playing ball was something you did with your sister. So when we think of what the ancient combat athlete would have looked like, we must include, as a modern study group, not just boxers, wrestlers and MMA fighters, but the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL [the barbarians obviously], weightlifters, power-lifters, tennis players [Don’t laugh, if that racket was a blade you would be shaking in your sandals when that rich brat sent it whistling your way.] gymnasts, and some martial artists and extreme athletes. An ancient warrior society will dedicate its best and brightest to combat. So, within the limits imposed by nutrition and genetics you would have had in combat-obsessed Rome, proportionately, the most able body of fighting men available for man-cleaving that a human culture is capable of producing.

Most folks think that humans have just been getting bigger forever. The fact is that human body mass and stature is cyclic and regional. In the 1800s the largest people in the world were Polynesians, who were stone-age people with mixed agricultural and hunting [fishing in their case] economies. The other large-bodied groups of people were the Bantu of Southern Africa [typified by the Zulus], the American Plains Indian, and the American of European descent, who was much larger than his European counterpart. What linked all of these genetically and geographically diverse populations was a high protein intake provided through hunting, fishing or livestock management. In these cultures women had higher status than normal worldwide, resulting in better prenatal care.

Throughout history the meat-eating barbarian from the hinterlands has always been larger than the grain-fed farmer of the valleys. This resulted in wave after wave of conquest of farming societies by herding societies, who retained the farmers as low class slaves to be able to enjoy all of that grain along with their meat, not to mention all of that soft grain-fed female companionship. The one universal complaint of soldiers and explorers who spent long stretches of time in primitive regions was an all meat diet. Kit Carson [American frontiersman] went 17 years without bread and said it was the worst thing about being a pathfinder.

Modern nutritionists know that a mixed diet is best for human development. Apparently the ancients did too. While the meat-eating nomad herdsmen generally slaughtered the grain-eating farmer when they met in battle, they inevitably added that grain to their diet, and denied meat to the lower class. One of the capital crimes throughout medieval and early modern history, guaranteed to get a dirt farmer executed, was poaching. In Eurasia virtually all hunting rights were reserved by the nobility, who were the descendents of the nomad conquerors.

What did this mean? In the early 1800s there was an average height difference noted by the British military between its enlisted men [poor boys] and officers [rich boys] of 22 centimeters. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, poor hillbillies descended from those very same poor Brits, but who hunted for their food, were every bit as big as the British officers. People intuitively know that height equates to social success. In the 20th Century 22 of the 25 U.S. president elects were taller than their opponent. Likewise doctors around the world measure the height of their patients as part of a worldwide public health strategy for monitoring population health, height being a great residual indicator of prenatal and childhood nutrition.

Height is a social confidence marker for humanity. Height is also the combat athlete confidence marker noted by their handlers, who seek a man with a reach advantage over men his own weight, as well as a potential king of combat, whose tall heavy frame might be developed into a devastating weapons platform.

The ideal of the prime combat athlete in society, and his physical relationship to the male population he is drawn from, can be glimpsed by taking a look at middleweight stature in the premier combat sport of the day. Middleweight is supposed to be the size fighter that the average Joe can identify with. He will, of course be taller than the average Joe, but the sport can fix his weight at average, or there about.

Boxing weight classes were fixed before the post World War Two nutritional boom, and stipulated the middleweight class as being 160 pounds. The average male bodyweight in 1960 was 168 pounds. When weight classes for boxing were fixed 60 years earlier American nutrition among the poorer classes from which boxers were drawn was not nearly so good as it was in 1960, as indicated by the middleweight limit, probably reflecting an average population weight of 150 pounds. These fighters have typically been six feet tall to this day, compared to the average 5’ 7” inch 1900 Joe and the 5’ 9.5” inch 2002 Joe.

When MMA weight classes were set around 2000, the organizers knew that the old boxing weight classes no longer made sense to the young baby-formula-weaned, breakfast-cereal-fed, and fast-food-burger feasting postmodern sports fan. While the MMA middleweights still range around six feet or just over, the MMA version of the weight class is 185 pounds, compared to the average male weight of 191. Note, since we are on the subject of gladiators, that the premier MMA promotion has typically used gladiatorial imagery in its pre-event buildup.

In my book All Power Fighting I did an extensive reconstruction of ancient fighters compared to modern athlete counterparts. In that study we were primarily considering heavyweights. Keep in mind that we are considering weapon combat in which size plays a lesser role. The central purpose of Roman gladiatorial combat was to instill martial virtue into the culture. There was no TV, or even public literature. Gladiatorial combat was intended to bring the bloody frontier home, like Dan Rather covering Vietnam if he were a violent, sadistic psychopath. Short fit Roman soldiers had literally carved up a world of bigger men to build their empire. To a large extent the matchups between different types of gladiators were intended to teach the lesson that a smaller, more brutal man, could, but not necessarily would, take down a larger one. But still, all of these men would be giants compared to those who watched them.

The typical low class bread-fed product of childhood neglect flooded into the amphitheater not just to be entertained but fed. Before the criminals were executed at lunch and the studs came out to duel in the afternoon, flocks and herds of exotic animals were slain by professional hunters, and the meat distributed to the protein-starved population. Christians—and gladiators who neglected to set aside a burial fund—might be fed to the lions, but the lions were fed to the crowd! Imagine a world where the equivalent of a fading NBA star would be fed to pitbulls on the court; pitbulls that would eventually be killed at halftime by some redneck with a pitchfork, and made into hotdogs to be given out to the famished spectators that showed up for the next game—imagine that world, and being born into it poor and malnourished.

The typical Roman had a low calorie, critically-low protein diet and went about 5’ 6” and 130 pounds.

The typical modern American has a super-high calorie super-high protein diet and goes 5’ 9.5” and 191 pounds.

The typical Roman legionnaire had a high calorie, low protein diet and went about 5’ 8” and 145 pounds.

There was no typical gladiator type. [More on body types below.] The physicians that handled gladiators actually tried to fatten them up to pad them against injury [probably more against shields and armor-absorbed blows than actual cuts]. Rather than the wheat-based diet of the legionnaire and Roman mob, they ate horse-feed—or barely, mixed with beans such as lentils, peas, fava beans and lupine beans. This is not an ideal bodybuilding diet, but has served Latino boxers well for decades, and is utilized by some vegan MMA fighters. So your gladiator would tend to average out at about 6’ and weigh in at between 160 and 220 pounds. That usually looks pretty good to the ladies, slaves as they are to their biological imperative to breed with an ass-kicking machine.

So the short answer is yes. There is no reason to suppose that a cross section of gladiators would not look as ‘buff’ and chiseled as Gerald Butler in 300, Russell Crowe in Gladiator, or Hugh Jackman whenever he gets paid extra to take his shirt off. I used those movie examples to draw attention to the fact that the gladiator would tend to be hairy as opposed to what I am guessing is a fairly denuded TV gladiator population. Keep in mind that he may well have been eating bull testicles and lion nut-sacks as a primitive form of steroid-banging. Now, if Major League Baseball forced steroid bangers to eat livestock junk raw, they might find enforcement a might easier…

The boxer/MMA fighter makes a good model for certain types of gladiators, namely small shield fighters and double-blade fighters. Overall if you want to wonder what the population of a gladiatorial school which trained about a dozen types of gladiators would look like, you just look at an NFL team. American football provides a great body typing study because the body types present on the gridiron are reflected in every other major sport and in boxing and MMA. Tight ends and wide receivers could be guards in basketball. Quarterbacks could have been baseball pitchers or boxers. Your little men in the backfield on offense and defense could be boxers or MMA welterweights. Linebackers and fullbacks could be heavyweight MMA fighters, the linemen wrestlers.

Likewise, each position on a football team could easily correspond to a type of gladiator. Gladiator types were grouped into two overall types: light [small shield, no shield, or exotically armed] and heavy [generally large shield].

Obviously the quarterback, pass-protectors and wide receivers would make for a good retiarius [net-fighter, armed with trident] or a lasso & spear fighter.

Your tight end is a tall, strong, versatile character who could be trained as a hoplomachus, [heavily armed small-shield fighter], or as an equis [dismounted horseman].

Linemen are obvious candidates for large-shield fighters like the myrmillo, the human chopping block of the arena. You don’t want to be this guy, he fights everybody, and they are mostly armed with more aggressive weaponry. You are even named after a fish, and have a plumed fin on your helmet for the retiarius to hang his net on while he spears you…sounds like a lineman’s job to me.

Linebackers are natural candidates for the highly aggressive hooked-sword small-shield fighter known as a Thracian or a thrax, or as the other aggressive type, the provocator [challenger].

The most popular gladiator in one era was Flamma [blaze] who was a secutor [chaser] whose job it was to run down and murder the net and trident fighters. The modern fullback would be ideal for this job.

Finally, for that small guy on the field, your running back, I see him as a dimacharius [double-cleaver-fighter] or scissor [knife-fighter].

Your ancient gladiator would be a head taller than the average guy and be built pretty much like the assortment of MMA middleweights and light-heavyweights that fight for the UFC. The monsters that rule the heavyweight division in MMA and boxing would be rare, but would come along, and, considering their potential crowd appeal, would be trained to fight as the type of gladiator that was armed with a large shield or a trident and net, depending on build and agility.

Brock Lesnar would be a secutor.

Wladimir Klitschko would be a retiarius.

Caesar would be pleased.

The body removal grunts would be cinching up their hernia girdles.

The lions would be crossing their paws that Brock went down and had neglected to make payments to his burial fund.

James' book on ancient combat, which includes this essay, is available here

The Gods of Boxing is a comprehensive study of ancient Greek boxing contests, training, methods, politics, and personalities. Every aspect of the ancient boxer's life is uncovered. Meet the heroes, villains, gods, and even a pre-Christian saint, who fought before the sacred altars of Thunderchief and the lesser Olympians.