After a long day of training or a fight in the coliseum
a Roman gladiator might need something to kind of refresh themselves.
Unfortunately they got a couple millennia before Gatorade would be invented
so instead they drank a concoction of vinegar and plant ash,
and that's what we're making today, gladiator Gatorade this time on Drinking History.
In the city of Ephesus archaeologists have found gladiator bones that have a very high amount of
strontium and calcium and Pliny the Elder quoting Varro explains why.
"For convulsions or contusions of the viscera, let the hearth be your medicine box;
for a lye of ashes, taken from thence, mixed with your drink, will effect a cure.
Witness the gladiators, for example, who, when disabled at the games,
refresh themselves with this drink."
So that's kind of what we're making today except I'm not going to be drinking lye because well that's stupid,
but instead I am going to be mixing some plant ash into a posca of wine vinegar water and honey,
and for more information on posca watch this video. I'll put a link up there where I talk about posca.
So first we need some ash, unfortunately I have a gas fireplace so instead I am opting for culinary ash
that is often used in Hopi cooking from the Hopi tribe in Arizona which is where I'm from, and so
that's what I'm going to be using. I would stick to culinary ash because you never know what's
in any kind of other ash. In fact maybe don't make this at all. Maybe just leave this to me.
Watch me try not to poison myself while you kick back with a soda or something like that.
Then I'll need some wine vinegar and some honey and of course some water.
So all we're gonna do is mix this together. We don't have any real quantities of how much we put in,
hopefully not so much ash that I- I don't know what a safe amount of ash is.
I looked at some some recipes where it's used and I've kind of gleaned how much I'm going to be able to use.
So let's hope I'm- let's hope I'm right.
So just a little bit of that wine vinegar that really
adds the electrolytes, and whatnot and then
just a bit of this plant ash
and stir.
[stirring intensifies]
Alrighty then. I am going to pour this through a strainer simply because there seems to be
you know some of the some of the ash has larger particles.
See how this goes.
Want to bet I'm not going to drink this whole thing?
Now before I try this potion I'll remind you that on Tuesday's episode we talked about some of the food
that gladiators ate and talked about the life of some typical gladiator,
but today we're going to be counting down the top five atypical gladiators.
So the typical gladiator only fought a few times before dying in their mid-20s,
but our number five gladiator flamma defied those odds.
Number five, Flamma.
He was a Syrian gladiator during the time of Hadrian, and became one of the most famous gladiators in the Roman empire.
His gravestone reads "Flamma, secutor... fought 34 times, won 21 times,
fought to a drawn 9 time, won reprieve 4 times."
And what makes him exceptional is that on four different occasions he was awarded
the rudis or the wooden sword or baton that was given to a gladiator to award them their freedom,
and every single time he turned it down opting instead to remain a gladiator.
Exceptional? Yes.
Exceptionally smart? No, because while he did make it past that mid-20s mark
he died at 30.
Number four, Spiculus.
Now he would land on pretty much any list of top gladiators ever in his own right.
He was really the Mike Tyson of his age,
but the reason that he is on our list is because of one of his fans.
Spiculus's biggest fan was the Emperor Nero
and whenever the gladiator won a fight "Nero gave him properties and villas equal to those of men who had celebrated triumphs."
He became one of the wealthiest gladiators in history.
And Nero was such a fan of his that when he was overthrown in 68 AD
he reached out to the gladiator and asked him to kill him.
Unfortunately either because he couldn't be reached or because he was like
'new phone, who dis?'
Spiculus did not kill him, instead Nero had to commit suicide.
Number three, Mevia the gladiatrix.
So there were a number of female gladiators in ancient Rome
but they tended to be seen more as oddities rather than anything else.
Sometimes they would dress up as Amazons and fight mythical mock battles,
and sometimes they would be pitted against like amputees,
or wounded animals in a sick form of mockery.
Often they were the poorest of the poor but the poet Juvenile speaks of
"Rich women who have lost all sense of the dignities and duties of their sex."
And he also gives us one of the only names for one of these gladiatricies
Mevia.
"Mevia transfixes the Tuscan boar, and, with breasts exposed, grasps the hunting-spears."
Though while this sounds exceptional, it's part of a list of kind of things that he's ridiculing,
so they didn't have a great, great reputation.
Number two, the Emperor Commodus.
Now many emperors actually fought in the arena including Caligula, Caracalla, Titus and even Hadrian
but none is more famous than Commodus perhaps because he was featured in the movie Gladiator,
but typically when an emperor was fighting the risk to them was minimal.
Cassio Dio writes ofsome of Commodus's exploits in the arena.
"On the first day he killed a hundred bears all by himself,
shooting down at them from the railing of the balustrade...
On another day he descended to the arena from his place above and cut down all the animals that approached him.
They were led up to him or brought before him in nets."
Yeah that's not really as impressive as he might think it is.
Though he did actually fight gladiators but it doesn't seem that those bouts were all that dangerous either.
Cassius Dio says that only after the emperor went back to his seat up in the stands
"Did the contests no longer resemble child's play but were so serious that great numbers of men were killed."
Though that didn't stop Commodus from dedicating a statue to himself with the inscription
"Champion of secutores; only left-handed fighter to conquer twelve times one thousand men."
Sure Jan.
And number one, Spartacus.
Without a doubt the most famous gladiator in history
was of course Spartacus and not just because he has an excellent movie and a mediocre TV show made after him.
No, it was because he led his fellow gladiators and other slaves in the third Servile War,
or Spartacus's War. It was a slave revolt that threatened to topple the Roman Republic.
It lasted two years during which time Spartacus bested a number of generals in the Roman army
until Marcus Lucinius Crassus took over. The writer Appian says that after a particularly bad defeat
Crassus punished his own soldiers. "He decimated the whole army and was not deterred by their numbers,
but destroyed about 4000 of them. Whichever way it was he demonstrated to them
that he was more dangerous to them than the enemy."
So with his army more afraid of him than they were of Spartacus
it actually started to turn the tide of the war and eventually Spartacus was defeated,
but his legacy was such that he was one of the factors that led to a law that said that
no Roman citizen could have more than 320 pairs of gladiators in Rome at any time.
Not sure why they put them in pairs let's just say 640 but either way it still seems like a lot
of gladiators to me, but I guess it was less than they had before.
So that's our top five atypical gladiators. And now it is time for me to try this atypical gladiatorial drink.
[Stares in cocern]
Ay, mamma mia!
It's actually really refreshing. I mean-
I don't know- ah nope, there it is.
I was gonna say the ash doesn't get- doesn't really contribute anything. You just kind of get that that slight
sourness, the bite from the vinegar and then the sweetness of the honey
which actually isn't that bad, but then at the end you get this almost smokiness and the Romans
actually used to use ash in cooking to add a bit of a smokiness. They would use oak ash and
acacia I believe, but yeah not bad.
Am I going to finish this?
No, no I am not.
Yeah but you know
it was- it was fun to make. It's fun to kind of guess what they what they might have been drinking.
I'm sure glad I'm not a gladiator is all I can say.
So that's it for gladiator week, I don't know
necessarily that it's week but I did two episodes back to back on gladiators. So yeah that's it,
I will see you next time on Drinking History. I'm gonna just switch to water right now though.