Stills, Alexandra Gladiators in the Greek World

How a Roman Blood Sport Took Ancient Greece by Storm

It was once assumed that the educated ancient Greeks would have rejected Roman gladiators as the most barbaric cultural import of all. Would Greeks, who loved philosophy and theater, really approve of fights to the death? Surely the Romans must have forced the Greeks to watch against their will? As Alexandra Sills shows in her study, the truth could not be more different: Greeks throughout the eastern Mediterranean revered gladiators to an unprecedented degree. After first explaining the political and ideological function of gladiators in Rome, the author reveals why the Greeks abandoned tedious imperialism and instead developed their own, distinctly Greek form of gladiatorial entertainment. The Greeks saw in gladiators the perfect fusion of all their passions: the drama of mythical duels, the brutal contact sports of the Olympic Games, and the visual perfection of a finely sculpted body. Readers learn how a famous Roman was outmaneuvered a Hellenistic king, once held hostage in Rome, in introducing gladiatorial combat to Greece a full century earlier, and how another famous Roman maintained a gladiator troupe in Turkey to impress his Egyptian mistress. There are more memorials to Greek gladiators than in the rest of Europe combined, and they offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives and deaths of these ancient fighters. Unlike anywhere else in the Roman Empire, "Gladiators in the Greek World" tells their stories in their own words. The Greeks under Roman rule took a foreign sport and molded it into the ultimate expression of Greek culturewith more drama and splendor than Rome could ever have imagined.