Mary Beard

And ancient writers agree that he was from Thrace.

I've always thought it a bit odd that

that one of the special gladiator types, because gladiators come in various varieties with different armor, one is supposed to be a Thrax, a Thracian.

And you think, is there some confusion here about where he came from and his gladiator type?

But ignoring my skepticism, everybody says he's from Thrace.

There's a sense that he might have been a mercenary.

He might even have

served even for the Romans as a mercenary.

But at this point, it all gets very murky.

I mean, euphemistically, we'd say he was a prisoner of war.

What that means is that he sold into slavery.

He's either kept by the soldiers, the Roman soldiers and the general, but more often they are literally taking into slavery, enslaving vast numbers of the conquered populations of the Eastern Mediterranean.

I mean, the process...

of enslavement followed by the transportation of those slaves to Italy to fulfill all the kind of tasks that slaves do, from agriculture to domestic service to gladiatorial combat to whatever.

It is one of the biggest movements of people, enforced movements of people, that there has ever been.

I mean, it is one guess would be that you've got a million slaves in Italy.

Yes, I mean, and the kinds of tasks done by slaves,

are not all what we think of as menial tasks.

I mean, some of them are, you know, forced labour in the fields, but quite a lot of teachers, doctors in Rome would be slaves.

And those presumably are captured members of the Greek towns that were taken by Rome.