Gladiatori e schiavi

Abstract

The book of the ancient historian Christian Mann narrates the life and legal status of gladiators: the place they occupied in society, the heavy practice and grueling exercises which they were subjected, the recognized remuneration, practically, the daily life of those who in ancient Rome competed in the places the fights. If the Mann's essay helps to provide the elements to arrive at a figure of the gladiator, the parts of Jean Andreau and Raymond Descat are pointing straight at the target with the definition of slavery, clearing up the confusion that often engenders between the state of slave (which is legally the property of others), and the misery of a legally free person. French historians offer a clear image that slavery in the greek-roman world has reached, in certain places and at specific times, fifty percent of the population. The prospect of the work accomplished and reasoned allows you to understand how you became slaves and what it meant to be in slavery, their function in the different sectors of economic life and their presence in organizing family and town, and how you could get out of the specific condition and, most of all the changes produced on the slave system by the gradual spread of christianity and the gradual but inexorable end of the roman empire.