[yunohn]

> they were not sent to die

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.

[vosper]

> 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).

[peoplefromibiza]

it's not semantic, it wasn't their job to kill each other

the job was fight, like boxers or mma fighters fight today

of course they are able to kill someone else, but that's not their main goal

[_ph_]

What is the percentage of gladiators which survived their career in arena fighting?