Hello and welcome to Homeschool History. I am Greg Jenner and I've spent my whole career

making history fun on a TV show Horrible Histories and more recently on the BBC podcast

you're dead to me, although that one's mostly for the grownups.

With everyone being cooped up in the house, I thought I'd deliver a snappy history lesson

to entertain and educate the whole family, who says homeschooling can't be a bit of fun.

Today, we are grabbing our shields, swords and fishing nets to meet the superstars of ancient

Rome gladiators.

The word gladiator comes from Gladius, the Latin word for a short Roman sword.

Now gladiators first showed up nearly 2,300 years ago, roughly in the year 264 BCE.

This was when Rome was still a republic and didn't yet have an emperor in charge, so

it meant that a lot of very rich Romans would throw their money around to make themselves

look fancy and important.

One way to impress was to host really lavish funerals for dead VIPs and to make those

funerals entertaining so that everyone remembered them.

And what could be more memorable than a violent fight to the death?

Yes, posh Roman funerals sounded less like this… and more like this.

Yep, the Romans would commemorate one death by having someone else gruesomely killed for

fun.

I'm not sure about that logic.

Back in 264 BCE, gladiators were mostly enslaved people and captured warriors from places like

Samnium in what's now Northern Italy or Gaul, which is now France or Thrace, which

is now Bulgaria.

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