When a Gladiator died in the arena, what did they do with their remains?

This is a really interesting question, and one that few scholars have explored. Partly that’s down to the evidence – we don’t have a lot to go on, so a fair bit of speculation is often needed to fill in the gaps.

Contrary to the popular image, properly trained gladiators rarely fought to the death. They were too valuable to their owners (most were slaves), and so the defeated fighter was often given a reprieve. We can see this in some graffiti from Pompeii, which list the results of fights and mark the defeated gladiator as ‘M’ - missus est, or ‘spared’ (see this book for some examples). Successful gladiators could become quite rich and popular, so when they did die, either in the arena or from other causes, they were often given proper burials and commemorated by owners, fellow gladiators, family or friends. These epitaphs often give details of their fighting record – how many victories etc – and sometimes record the manner of their death (see this book for more examples). One particularly interesting example is ILS 5123 from Trieste, northern Italy:

Constantius, sponsor, because of the great popular acclaim of his gladiator show (munus), has given the gift (munus) of a tomb to his gladiators: to Decoratus, who killed the retiarius Caeruleus and then fell, himself killed. The trainer’s rod killed them both, the funeral pyre covers them both. Decoratus, the secutor, veteran of nine fights, bequeathed primarily grief to his wife Valeria.

Now, it’s worth pointing out that lots of people that weren’t ‘true’ gladiators died in Roman arenas. These were not just places for fighting between trained combatants, but were sites of public executions for criminals and prisoners of war. These people were given no hope of survival, no proper weaponry or armour to protect themselves from whatever grisly death awaited them. They could be crucified, burned, tortured or mauled by wild animals. The most lurid descriptions of these events come from Christian sources describing the martyrdom of saints in the arena, and so need to be treated with some caution, but there is likely to be some kernels of truth to their reports. Tertullian (Ad Nationes 1.10.47) reports that figures dressed as Dis Pater and Mercury confirmed that people were really dead by prodding them with hot metal rods, and then dragged them out of the arena with hooks.

However they died, these criminals had been condemned to death, and therefore were denied all rights to proper burial. Their dead bodies were potentially polluting, both physically and spiritually, and so needed to be disposed of outside the city. In Rome itself, they may have been dumped outside the Esquiline gate, where Horace (Satire 1.8.19) suggests huge fields were given over to burials of the urban poor and other undesirables. These mass graves seem to have been closed in the reign of Augustus, and after that we have no solid evidence for what happened to such people when they died. Perhaps large-scale crematoria were opened, further from the city, to which bodies could be brought? In other cities, our knowledge of this stuff depends on the archaeology. In Trier, excavators have recently found a cemetery immediately outside the amphitheatre, which seems to contain the bodies of people who died in the arena. The bodies seem to be predominantly male, and were buried without ceremony or commemoration. They seem to date to the 3rd or 4th centuries, which might possibly tie in with some executions of prisoners of war that occurred here after Constantine’s campaigns against the Franks and Bructeri, and which were mentioned in some panegyrics (Panegyrici Latini 6.12.3 and 12.23.3).