Gladiatorial sacrifice

Barton again: “The Romans’ expectations of the brave gladiator were identical to their expections of the sacrificial victim: the victim in a Roman sacrifice was led to the altar by a slack rope, in order that it might not seem to be dragged by force. Any show of resistance on the part of the victim was considered a bad omen.” Likewise, honorable gladiators were “voluntarily” into the arena.

The connection between combat and sacrifice was expressed by the notion of devotio , modeled by the Decii of early Roman history:

“The particularly Roman model of aristocratic voluntary self-sacrifice was the devotio , the ceremonial dedication, by the Roman general Publius Decius Mus in the Samnite Wars (340 BCE), of his own body, through a violent death at the hands of the enemy, to the Earth and the gods of the dead, before and in return for the victory of his beleaguered troops. The devotio was a desperate bargain struck by the commander with the hostile Powers That Be in the hope (here successful) that the gods would accept his own life (in addition to the lives of the enemy) as payment in full for the victory of his troops. Livy, like Juvenal, imagines Decius Mus as a sort of expiatory sacrifice ( piaculum ) for the Roman forces that transfers the wrath of the gods (the plague or pestis ) to himself and to the enemy. Before the eyes of enemy and comrade, Decius, having devoted himself to death, rushed the enemy with the fierce and suicidal amor mortis of a Leonidas at Thermopylae” – or, the amor mortis of a gladiator.

For the Romans, this was a scandalous cross-boundary act, “a dramatic embrace by a member of the warrior caste of types of expiatory sacrifice ordinarily reserved for the lowly, the condemned, and the enemy: the sacratio or consecratio capitis and the closely related sacratio (or devotio ) of an enemy or town.”