The growth and spread of the Roman Empire is one of the essential parts of world history, and it became even more glorious with tales of gladiators fighting each other or wild animals such as lions for the entertainment of a city's large audience. Usually, our ideas of these gladiators are limited to what we see in the media and read in books.
A new study that has been published in PLOS ONE gives us another new insight onto the lives of these gladiators: their diet.
A team of researchers from the Forensic Medicine Department of MedUni Vienna and the Anthropology Department University of Bern's Institute of Forensic Medicine discovered that most of these gladiators maintain a vegetarian diet plus a special tonic composed of ashes.
To come up with these results, the researchers checked out the bones of 22 gladiators found in a gladiator cemetery uncovered during the 1990s. This huge cemetery dated back to around 2nd or 3rd century BC and found in Ephesos, which is now in Turkey. Back then, however, it was considered to be a Roman city with more than 150,000 people.
With the help of technologies spectroscopy, they had identified isotope ratios that were stable and looked into the bones' collagen. They also determined the ratio between calcium and strontium, which has similar chemical properties with the former.
In their findings, they revealed that most of the gladiators eat very little dairy or meat. Instead, they consumed mostly barley, wheat, and beans, giving them the moniker "barley men." This type of diet, nevertheless, weren't so different from the rest of the locals.
What made their eating habits different is the drinking of a tonic from a source rich in strontium. These gladiators may have burned plants and collected the ashes, combining them to their drink, allowing their bones to heal after a significant physical exertion.
According to a similar report from BBC, however, 2 gladiators showed a different kind of diet that's high in animal protein, which may suggest that some of the gladiators may have come from a different Roman city.