The Love Lives of Roman Gladiators

The gladiators performed also outside of the arena

Gladiators attract our imagination. Slaves fighting each other to death in front of a frenzied crowd of thousands of Romans.

In the Roman hyper-masculine and hyper-warrior culture, the gladiators embodied Roman virtues. The gladiators were sex symbols and the object of women’s sexual fantasies. The Romans even believed a gladiator’s sweat to be an aphrodisiac.

The Roman women adored gladiators. They fell crazy in love with these slave warriors. Girls even wrote graffiti declaring undying love for their favorite gladiator.

The gladiators were like superstar athletes of today. They were famous like Tom Brady, LeBron James, or Cristiano Ronaldo. But with one notable difference. If they had a bad day in the arena, they would die.

Rich women who wanted to broaden their sexual experience took the gladiators as lovers. They paid a handsome sum of money to spend a night with a gladiator.

The Roman gladiators were not freely available for sex. To keep their fighting spirit high, their masters put a large ring through their foreskin. So paying to spend the night with a gladiator literally meant getting a ring away from him.

One of the socially accepted ways to get closer to the gladiator was to hire him as a bodyguard. Of course, the Roman ladies made sure the bodyguards examined their bodies.

Even wives of the Roman emperors were not immune to the lure of sex with a gladiator.

Faustina the Younger (130–175), a wife of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, fell in love with a gladiator. The rumors had it that the gladiator fathered Aurelius’s son and heir Commodus.

Messalina (20–48), a nymphomaniac wife of Emperor Claudius, took gladiators as lovers…

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