All of them were slaves, if they fought well they could buy back their freedom and become freemen.
The important part is that "they were not sent to die"
They costed a lot of money to their owners and matches were often just representations of battles, like modern wrestling, not real battles.
It wasn't uncommon to fix matches, they had to provide entertainment, not death.
But more interestingly, many gladiators trainers rented them to fight in the Colosseum and they had insurance policies on their lives, if the gladiator was injuried or died in the fight, there were penalties to pay.
Most of the games were paid for by low level politicians that wanted to make a name for themselves and rented the gladiators from the trainers.
Also the thumbs up/thumbs down it's also a myth, it never existed as a gesture, if the organizer decided to send some gladiator to death because the crowd asked for it, they had to pay the aforementioned penalties to the trainer.
Not surprisingly the organizer had the last word and often times they spared them.
Most of those that died were war slaves already sentenced to death.
It was games, like we intend them today, they also had a referee on the ground.
It was a very modern take on the matter at the times, to the point that we still use the same setup for sports entertainment.
While I can’t speak for OP, the way I see it is that the athletes were expected to kill each other, so the wording you dispute is just semantics.
Sure, trainers wanted their slave to survive, so they could win the prize money and influence with the king. But that still means they fully acknowledged that the majority of them would die.
> At a time when three of every five persons did not survive until their twentieth birthday, the odds of a professional gladiator being killed in any particular bout, at least during the first century AD, were perhaps one in ten. For a full year in Nero's wooden amphitheater in the Campus Martius, no-one died at all, not even criminals (Suetonius, Life of Nero, XII.1).
Honestly I don't, not in English, but I'll be back with some if you can wait a couple of days.
I am from Rome, live at walking distance from the Colosseum and visited it many times.
One of my closest friend is a tourist guide there and he's also an historian specialized in roman history.
That's were I gathered most of my knowledge.
The important part is that "they were not sent to die"
They costed a lot of money to their owners and matches were often just representations of battles, like modern wrestling, not real battles.
It wasn't uncommon to fix matches, they had to provide entertainment, not death.
But more interestingly, many gladiators trainers rented them to fight in the Colosseum and they had insurance policies on their lives, if the gladiator was injuried or died in the fight, there were penalties to pay.
Most of the games were paid for by low level politicians that wanted to make a name for themselves and rented the gladiators from the trainers.
Also the thumbs up/thumbs down it's also a myth, it never existed as a gesture, if the organizer decided to send some gladiator to death because the crowd asked for it, they had to pay the aforementioned penalties to the trainer.
Not surprisingly the organizer had the last word and often times they spared them.
Most of those that died were war slaves already sentenced to death.
It was games, like we intend them today, they also had a referee on the ground.
It was a very modern take on the matter at the times, to the point that we still use the same setup for sports entertainment.