Are You Not Entertained?

As far back as we can observe it, athletic competition has been a core part of human culture.  Over 15,000 years ago, alongside depictions of mythological figures, hunting parties, and great Paleolithic beasts, a footrace was drawn among the cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Likewise, 9,000-year-old cave paintings from the mountains of Mongolia show men engaged in a wrestling match. Today, sports are a cultural force. 2026 will see a rare convergence of three marquee events that will draw the attention of millions worldwide: the Olympics, the World Cup, and the Super Bowl.

As the graduate student instructor of the course Greek Sport and the Modern World, Rackham history Ph.D. candidate Alanna Heatherly helps U-M students, including many of its student athletes, connect with the history of athletics. The course includes subjects like early sports leagues, the ancient and modern Olympic games, and one of the most famous—and infamous—sporting events in world history: the gladiatorial games of the Roman Empire.

“Even though the nature of modern sports seems very different, there are a lot of points of comparison with modern athletes,” Heatherly explains. “They’re making decisions about protective equipment, for example, not just what best protects their health, but what lets them put on a good show. And a lot of that resonates with the athletes who take the class: how athletic bodies are treated and how their pain is profitable in a lot of ways.”

Heatherly’s interest in the Roman Empire emerged during the capstone class for her undergraduate degree in history at the University of Tennessee. It focused on spectacle and entertainment in the Roman Empire, an interest she would continue to pursue as a doctoral student in the U-M Department of Classical Studies. At the same time, far more personal experiences brought new focus to her research.

“A lot of this comes from my personal upbringing,” she says. “My grandmother battled opioid addiction throughout my graduate career. We live in a world where we were told there was a cure-all for your pain, one little pill that could just take it away. So pain, how we conceptualize it, and how it shapes us, became a topic that was both very close to me and also a common thread running through everything I’ve ever worked on.”

Combining physical and written evidence from throughout Roman history, Heatherly sought to understand the influence of pain on identity in the Roman world, especially among gladiators and Christian martyrs.

“My core aim was to investigate how physical pain in the Roman Empire is interpreted by different groups, and what kinds of meaning are attached to it,” she explains. “I wanted to make sure I captured not just the views of the upper classes, who left most of the written records, but also more marginalized voices.”

Since much of what has been written about gladiators is filtered through the perspective of Roman elites, Heatherly wanted to get closer to the lived experiences of the competitors themselves. This led her to travel to Rome in 2024 as part of the American Academy in Rome’s Classical Summer School, where she was able to examine detailed mortuary data and view frescoes and oil lamps decorated with images of wounded warriors. She also studied the tombstones of gladiators that outlined their careers, victories, and defeats.

What emerged was a view that while pain was a central element of gladiatorial entertainment, it was not an end in itself, but served the spectacle of the games. Heatherly found evidence that gladiators often sought to inflict superficial wounds that nonetheless made a show of blood and gore; indeed, even their diets were constructed to promote subcutaneous fat that could withstand injuries that looked more serious than they were dangerous. Likewise, between games, gladiators had access to a network of doctors, along with massages, baths, and saunas to repair and ease their pain.

“For gladiators, pain was part of putting on a show,” Heatherly says. “And their relationship to that pain reflects their individual identities. Sustaining and surviving injury is a point of pride, both in their own subculture and among audiences, managers, and owners. Pain was part of building their identity in the arena.”

The influence of gladiators’ pain and prowess went far beyond their own communities. When the North African Christians Perpetua and Felicity were sentenced to death for refusing to acknowledge the emperor’s divinity, their pain was commemorated as martyrdom by their own community even as it was meted out as condemnation by the state. And in her alleged firsthand account of her imprisonment leading up to her death by beasts in the arena, Perpetua wrote of having a dreamlike vision of herself fighting as a gladiator.

Heatherly sees similarities between gladiators and martyrs, as they were both marginalized members of their society whose pain was exploited for entertainment, yet found ways—even in death—of subverting and reclaiming it.

“A martyr’s death subverts the very meaning of that death,” Heatherly says. “It’s meant to be punitive and preventative, but when retaken by your community—in this case the Christians of North Africa—as a martyrdom, it becomes an act of salvation. Much like how the gladiators, disenfranchised and forced to sell the pain of their bodies for entertainment, become celebrated by facing the violence of the arena.”

It’s that perspective, Heatherly has observed, that connects with her student athletes the most, and often serves as a springboard toward better understanding themselves within the context of modern sport.

“How the bodies of athletes are treated, how their pain is made profitable in a lot of ways, that resonates with them,” she says. “They see that in the ancient world and connect it with their own lived experiences. One of the assignments I give them is to compose their own victory ode, a form of poetry that goes all the way back to the original Olympic Games. They get to be creative, and they get to consider how to celebrate an athlete, and they end up submitting some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen.”

Read examples of the victory odes composed by Heatherly’s students.