Profs & Pints Nashville: Your Guide to Gladiators

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Your Guide to Gladiators,” a look at fact and fiction regarding the combatants of ancient Rome, with Chiara Sulprizio, senior lecturer in Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University and author of Gender and Sexuality in Juvenal's Rome.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-gladiators ]

Popular films like Spartacus and Gladiator have given gladiators an outsized place in our modern-day imaginings of ancient Rome. Contemporary film and television, however, often paint an inaccurate picture of the famed combatants’ lives inside the ancient arena.
Join Chiara Sulprizio, a scholar of ancient Roman society and culture, for a discussion of Roman gladiatorial culture that will separate fantasy from reality.

Drawing from the most up-to-date archaeological research and literary scholarship, she’ll explore the origins of gladiatorial combat and the question of who became a gladiator, and why. You’ll learn the rules engagement in the arena as well as how often gladiators survived the battles they fought. We’ll also cover important Latin terms related to the games, to allow us to better understand how the games functioned and what purpose they served in Roman society.

Dr. Sulprizio will offer some broader reflections on why the Romans were so obsessed with gladiators that go beyond simple notions of “hyperviolence” or “bloodlust.”

Finally, she will consider why so many of us—especially those of us who think about the Roman empire almost every day—remain fascinated with gladiators today. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Part of a gladiator mosaic from about 320 A.D. on display at Rome’s Galleria Borghese (Wikimedia Commons).