Gladiator Blood and Epilepsy

This Romano-British mosaic of combating gladiators speaks to the tradition of these bloody contests. It turns out, they were sanguineous in multiple ways — not only with the frequent slayings of the losers, but also in the way gladiator blood was revered for medicinal purposes.

First appearing in the records about 260 BCE, gladiator fights originally had a religious significance, coming from the funerary rites orchestrated by the Etruscans who originally occupied much of the Romans’ lands. Perhaps this sense of religiosity — which diminished over time for the Romans — fed into the idea that gladiator blood was sacred, and could confer special properties.

Starting with the Roman encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus in 40 CE, documentation about gladiator blood and livers as a cure for epilepsy emerges in our sources. As Celsus writes: “some have freed themselves from such a disease (i.e., epilepsy) by drinking the hot blood from the cut throat of a gladiator: a miserable aid made tolerable by a malady still more miserable”.

Mechanistically, Celsus refers to the ubiquitous ideas of humors — four liquids that the Ancient Romans thought needed to be balanced in the body to have good health. He writes that cutting the gladiator’s neck in certain ways was done “in order that pernicious humour may exude through the burns”.

Pliny the Elder (d. 79 CE) was yet another who documented this practice. In horror, he notes that “the blood of gladiators is drunk by epileptics as though it were a draught of life . . . The patients think it most effectual to suck from a man himself warm, living blood . . .”.

Consuming gladiator’s blood may also have connected with a common idea that “like treats like” in medicine — the writhing jerks of a dying gladiator might have seemed to mimic the _grand mal_ seizures that some epileptics have. In fact, consuming gladiator blood as a medical cure continued throughout the Roman period, even after the advent of Christianity. Only when the contests were banned throughout Rome in 400 CE did it stop — but the vampire-ish demand for this cure continued. After, drinking the fresh blood of the beheaded became the substitute.

P.s. the deal with gladiator livers is not insignificant — hepatoscopy and related prognostications using animal livers was practiced by the Ancient Romans.