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.]

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.

Reprising an excellent talk that packed the house last year, she’ll draw from the most up-to-date archaeological research and literary scholarship in exploring the origins of gladiatorial combat and describing who became a gladiator and why.

You’ll learn the rules of 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, going beyond simple notions of “hyperviolence” or “bloodlust.”

Finally, she will consider why so many of us remain fascinated with gladiators today. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)