India, Oct. 2 -- Before gladiators stepped into the roaring arena, they entered a different kind of spectacle.

On the evening before the Games, Romans were allowed into the barracks to see the men who might die the next day. At the cena libera, a ritualistic public feast laid on for the gladiators, spectators could watch them put away enormous quantities of food and drink.

The on-lookers were often stick-thin, a result of their subsistence-level diet. The fighters, author and historian Harry Sidebottom writes in Those Who Are About To Die (2025) -his study of gladiatorial life in ancient Rome-were conspicuously heavy in contrast, "with great rolls of flesh." Their bodies were scarred, their faces callused, "some almost deformed with one...