I was a bit skeptical at first and thought how could gladiators have been vegetarians? But looking a little bit deeper into this claim made in The Game Changers movie, I found that it might not be that crazy after all.
According to a study of bones from a cemetery where the arena fighters were buried, Roman gladiators had a diet that was mostly vegetarian.
The study was conducted by researchers from Austria’s Medical University of Vienna and Switzerland’s University of Bern.
The gladiator diet was found to be grain-based and mostly meat-free.
Gladiator bones analysis also found evidence that they were consuming a drink made of plant ashes.
This ash drink was a kind of tonic which helped gladiators heal after battle and practice.
“Plant ashes were evidently consumed to fortify the body after physical exertion and to promote better bone healing,” says Fabian Kanz of the forensic medicine department at the Medical University of Vienna.
He said it was like”we take magnesium and calcium, in the form of effervescent tablets, for example, following physical exertion.”
The results of this ash drink were focused on testing strontium levels in the bones of the gladiators.
The bone study was based on excavation in the Roman city Ephesus, now in Turkey, of the tombs of 22 gladiators from about 1,800 years ago.
The bones showed that wheat, barley and beans were the usual food eaten by gladiators-and this echoed the contemporary word for gladiators as “barley men.”
In the diet of virtually all these professional fighters, who appeared before the Roman public, there was little evidence of meat or dairy products.
Yet bones from two people seemed to have a different pattern, showing a much higher diet in animal protein and a lower diet in beans and pulses.
They claim that each time men fought in a gladiator competition, they had a one-in-nine chance of being killed.
This could suggest that there were originally gladiators from other parts of the Roman Empire who had a different diet form.
And the next step in the research will be to use the bones study to look for where gladiators might once have lived.
According to the authors, gladiators are primarily prisoners of war, captives and convicted criminals. But citizens have volunteered to practice and compete in competitions.
Looking to get started on your journey to eat like a gladiator? Check out gamechangersmovie.com where you can catch the documentary and find recipes and other useful information to get you going.