The Barley Men: What The Gladiators Really Ate, And Who Chose It

The most famous plant-based athletes in history never chose a single meal. They were owned, and their owners fed them the cheapest bulk food in the Roman world, because a gladiator who died quickly was money down the drain.

That part rarely survives the retelling. In 2018 The Game Changers opened with its presenter, the fighter James Wilks, laid up with an injury, reading a study of gladiator bones and flying to Austria to meet the scientists behind it. He came home convinced the most feared fighters of the ancient world had trained and competed on plants. Plant-based accounts have repeated it ever since, and it is the first answer a search for “were gladiators vegan” turns up.

The bones are real, and so is the diet. What went missing on the way to the documentary is who ate it, who paid for it, and why.

Property with a sword

A gladiator was, before anything else, stock.

Most came from three places: the slave market, the war and the courts. Men taken prisoner on the frontiers. Slaves sold on by owners who had no further use for them. Convicts sentenced to the school instead of straight to the sword. A man condemned ad gladium was expected to be dead within a year. One condemned ad ludum, to the school, could hope to put down his sword after three years and be freed after five.

Then there were the volunteers, free men who sold themselves into it for a fee. Their oath survives in Seneca: to be burned, to be bound, to be killed by the sword.

The school was a ludus, and the man who ran it was the lanista. He bought the men, trained them, housed them, doctored them and hired them out to whoever was staging the games. Roman law classed him as infamous, in the same bracket as pimps and actors, and Rome kept paying him.

What he owned was worth a fortune. In 177 AD Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus had the Senate cap gladiator prices, because provincial priests obliged to put on shows were ruining themselves. For the top rank in the grandest shows, the cap was 3,750 denarii. A legionary earned 300 a year. A first-class fighter could cost twelve and a half years of a soldier’s pay, and that was the price after it had been brought down.

The lawyer Gaius, writing in the same century, set his students a puzzle about exactly this trade. An owner supplies gladiators for a show on agreed terms: 20 denarii for each man who comes back whole, paid “for the sweat”, and 1,000 for each man killed or crippled. Is that a hire or a sale? Gaius answered that the living men had been hired and the dead ones sold.

In a legionary’s wages, the hire came to about three weeks’ pay. The sale came to more than three years. Every gladiator carried that sum onto the sand with him.

What went in the bowl

The Romans left a fair amount on record about how these men were fed, and none of it is flattering.

Pliny the Elder mentions, in the 70s AD, that gladiators were known as hordearii. Barley men. It was a sneer, and the barley was the joke. In Rome’s own army barley was a punishment: Suetonius records that when a cohort gave ground under Augustus, it was decimated and put on barley. Wheat was what a soldier ate. Barley was what he was demoted to.

It was also cheap. Diocletian’s price edict of 301 AD, the only empire-wide price list that survives, sets barley at 60% of the price of wheat. In the same edict a pound of pork costs 12 denarii and a camp measure of barley, around 13 litres of grain, costs 60. An owner feeding a barracks of fighting men could do the arithmetic as well as anyone.

The doctor who knew this diet best was Galen. Before he became the most celebrated physician in the empire, he spent several years in his home city of Pergamon, north of Ephesus in the same province, treating the high priest’s gladiators. He describes them putting away beans in quantity every day, and he did not think much of it. The beans gave them bulk, he wrote, but “not compact, dense flesh like pork, but flesh that is somehow more flabby.”

The physician’s yardstick for what good flesh should look like was a pig.

Tacitus supplies the word for the whole regime. Describing the emperor Vitellius handing out cooked rations to his soldiers outside Rome in 69 AD, he says it was as though he were fattening gladiators: gladiatoriam saginam. Sagina is Latin for cramming, the feeding-up of an animal bound for the table. Tacitus reaches for the same word when he describes Vitellius himself, a man he calls enslaved to luxury and gluttony. One word covered the barley in the fighter’s bowl and the banquets of the emperor watching him fight.

The cemetery by the stadium

In 1993 Austrian archaeologists digging at Ephesus, on the Aegean coast of Turkey, uncovered a burial ground about 300 metres from the ancient stadium. Some of the graves had tombstones carved with fighters. The men inside dated to the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, when Ephesus was capital of the province of Asia and its games were at their height, and most had died in their twenties.

Genuine gladiator remains almost never turn up, so the bones went to Vienna, to the forensic anthropologist Fabian Kanz and the palaeopathologist Karl Grossschmidt at the Medical University.

The injuries described the job. Three skulls had been holed by a trident, and two of those men had lived long enough for the wound to heal. Ten had died of a single blow to the head, from every kind of weapon the arena used. Four carried the marks of the finishing stroke, a blade driven down into the heart, through the shoulder blade of a beaten man lying face down or down through the throat. Many also carried older head wounds that had been treated and had healed, which is what good medical care for expensive property looks like in a skeleton.

In 2008 a magazine feature quoted Grossschmidt, and it has been repeated ever since. The early chemistry, which measured strontium among other elements, was read as showing the gladiators had eaten more plants and less animal protein than the average Ephesian. He explained why. Gladiators, he said, were fat on purpose: a cushion of fat under the skin protected them from cuts and shielded the nerves and blood vessels, and a wound that stayed in the fat looked spectacular to the crowd while the man fought on.

That article is where the modern gladiator comes from, vegetarian and padded like a sofa.

What the bones actually said

The full chemistry was published in PLOS ONE in 2014, by Sandra Lösch of the University of Bern with Kanz, Grossschmidt and two colleagues. They tested 53 people from Roman Ephesus, 22 gladiators among them, against townspeople buried close by.

The first finding is the one everybody quotes. Everyone in the sample, gladiator or not, lived mainly on wheat and barley. The nitrogen readings, which rise with animal protein, were low across the whole city for a Roman site, and the authors’ likeliest explanation was a great many beans and pulses.

The second finding is the one nobody quotes. On carbon and nitrogen, the gladiators could not be told apart from the townspeople. The gladiators averaged 9.3 on nitrogen; the town’s men averaged 9.4. There was no special gladiator diet in the collagen at all. They ate what Ephesus ate.

Inside the gladiator group the spread was wide, about a full step up the food chain from bottom to top. One gladiator sat among the lowest readings in the study. The two highest readings in the entire study, higher than any townsperson, also belonged to gladiators, and the authors read them as regular eating of animal protein. Some of the barley men were getting meat.

The strontium was the only place the two groups split, and it split hard, nearly double in the gladiators. By 2014 that measurement meant something different from what it had once been taken to mean. Work in the 1990s showed that strontium in bone tracks where a person’s calcium comes from, not how much of the plate is plants, and the Ephesus team said so in the paper. Their candidate was the drink Pliny mentions, made from wood ash and taken by gladiators after a fight to ease the pain. Ash is full of strontium. They could not rule out some other source of calcium, dairy for one.

The famous plant signature in gladiator bones is, by the scientists’ own account, most likely an ash tonic scraped out of the stove.

Bone collagen renews itself slowly, somewhere between 1.5% and 3% a year in adult men, so a thigh bone carries an average of well over a decade of eating. (Bones keep other records too; our piece on human height covers what the skeleton remembers.) A gladiator’s career was short: two or three fights a year, and almost all the Ephesus men were dead in their twenties. A man captured at 22 and killed at 26 mostly carries the diet of whatever life he had before anybody owned him, in a village, a camp, a gaol or a slave gang.

And collagen records nothing whatever about body fat. Whether these men were lean or padded, their bones cannot say.

Was the fat armour?

The heaviness stands up well. The Romans named the diet a fattening. Galen, who fed and treated these men, says the beans made them bulky and soft. The word and the doctor agree.

The armour is a guess. No ancient writer says owners fattened fighters as padding, and Galen, the one physician who wrote about their feeding, treats the softness as a flaw. The Ephesus skeletons record what actually ended careers: a trident through the skull, a single blow to the head, a blade driven down into the heart. A layer of fat stops none of those. The cushion theory began as one scientist’s remark to a journalist and has been repeated as settled fact ever since.

The explanation that needs no guessing is the one written into Roman law. The owner made 20 denarii on a man who came back and 1,000 on a man who did not, but a dead man had to be replaced, and a trained replacement at the top of the market cost nearly four times that. Barley and beans were the cheapest bulk food going, and a heavy fighter kept in one piece for years was the entire business. Whatever the fat was for, the menu was set by a man counting money.

The Romans who ate the meat

None of this makes Rome a nation of vegetarians, and none of it makes Rome a nation of carnivores. It depends entirely on which Roman you mean.

The legions that actually conquered the known world ate wheat as their staple, and they ate meat as a matter of course. When the historian Roy Davies surveyed the animal bones from Roman forts in Britain and Germany, from Augustus to the 3rd century, he found cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, deer, boar and hare, beef bones split for their marrow, and kit for making cheese. Later bone studies found beef the commonest meat at the forts in Britain.

At Vindolanda, just south of the line Hadrian’s Wall would later take, the fort’s own paperwork survives on thin wooden tablets. The accounts, many of them from the commanding officer’s household, list pork, beef, venison and chicken, alongside wine, fish sauce, pepper and Celtic beer. A brewer called Atrectus turns up in them paying for pork fat.

A soldier was fed like a man the state needed strong. He had his bread, and he had the animal.

The men who owned and staged the games ate higher again. Vitellius, the emperor Tacitus mocked for fattening his army like gladiators, had a dish built for him that Suetonius describes: pike livers, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongues and lamprey milt, served on a platter so enormous it was named the Shield of Minerva.

The crowd in the stands, meanwhile, was kept on the state’s free grain, the dole Juvenal sneered at as bread and circuses. In the 270s, according to the Historia Augusta, the emperor Aurelian added pork to the handout.

So Rome was both of the things it gets called. Its army and its rich were built on meat. Its poor, its slaves and its arena ran on grain. The gladiator sat at the very bottom of that order, on the cheapest ration of all, entered in somebody’s accounts as a price.

That order is where a long story starts, and it runs through the rest of this site: the first farmers who shrank when grain replaced the hunt, the forest laws that kept the deer for the king, the peasants who bought meat the moment the Black Death made their labour dear, and the 18th-century Englishman who made roast beef a byword for liberty. Wherever ordinary people have had the choice, they have spent it on meat. The short version of the gladiator story sits in our piece on the modern diet.

The sale

When The Game Changers put the Ephesus bones in front of a mass audience, it kept the barley and the beans and left out the rest. It left out that these men were slaves, convicts and prisoners of war, and that the diet was the cheapest their owners could buy. It left out that the Romans called it a fattening and the gladiators’ own doctor called it soft. And it left out that the isotopes put the gladiators level with the ordinary townspeople, that the two strongest meat signatures in the study were gladiators, and that the strontium was most likely a drink made of ash.

The plant-based movement has its own history, and it did not begin in the arena. The modern muscle trials it leans on are taken apart in animal versus plant protein, and what a strength athlete should actually eat is on carnivore training.

Two thousand years on, a slave’s feed bill is being sold to free people as the secret of champions. The man who actually stitched those champions back together said it made them soft, and when he wanted to describe the flesh they ought to have had, he reached for pork.