The arena has been built. Its skeletal steel dome, erected on the spot where an Easter egg roll was held in the days of the republic, rises as high as the topmost arcade of the Colosseum, towering over the White House. UFC Freedom 250, to be streamed by Paramount, will feature seven bouts fought inside an octagonal wire-mesh cage. Many people have noted the similarities to ancient gladiatorial contests. President Trump himself will occupy an arena-level seat, positioned like a Roman emperor in his pulvinar—the imperial box—and surrounded by senators and dignitaries, if not the traditional six Vestal Virgins.
Criticism has been predictable—the event smacks of excess. To me, though, what is most striking about the plans is their overall lack of ambition. True, the president has suggested that he might keep the steel dome in place—“Maybe we’ll never, ever take it down.” But the Roman gladiatorial spectacle involved more than just fighting; it spilled over into city planning, law, public health. In his single-minded focus on mounting a cage fight on a single day, the president has missed significant opportunities.
For instance, where’s the school? Ancient arenas typically had a gladiator-training facility nearby, so that combatants could march in procession to the arena. (The UFC fighters in Washington plan to march from the Oval Office.) The biggest gladiator school in the Roman Empire was the Ludus Magnus, whose remains can be seen today in an excavated rectangle near the Colosseum. People close to Trump have dreamt of a latter-day Ludus Magnus for years. The onetime presidential adviser Steve Bannon has floated the idea of founding a “gladiator school for culture warriors” at a secluded monastery outside Rome. Creating a mixed martial arts facility close to the White House would be easy enough. The ruins of the Ludus Magnus look strikingly similar to the current ruins of the East Wing. Dorms, classrooms, feeding stations, training cages, trauma bays—all could easily fit on the ballroom site. The secretary of education, Linda McMahon, is also the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment; she has the background to pull this off. And yet, so far, we’ve heard nothing about such an obvious idea.
The link between violent spectacle and the pardon power is a long-standing one, but here, again, ambition has been stunted. Roman emperors, sometimes urged on by the crowd, were known to grant pardons (to criminals) and freedom (to the enslaved) after an especially noteworthy performance. Thus, in a moment celebrated by the poet Martial in his Liber de Spectaculis, the emperor Titus freed two gladiators on the opening day of the Colosseum. Recipients of the emperor’s mercy were given symbolic wooden swords to carry with them in perpetuity. As president, Trump has granted pardons or commutations to roughly 2,000 individuals. And yet he has demanded a demonstration of physical prowess in the arena from precisely none of them—not even from the January 6 insurrectionists, many of whom would have been up to the challenge.
George Santos, Dinesh D’Souza, Michael Flynn, Lil Wayne, Conrad Black, Roger Stone, Rod Blagojevich—there has been no shortage of talent eager to engage with the clemency process, and desperate petitioners would likely be willing to compete. One might have expected the host of The Apprentice to have seen the possibilities: an offending head bent down in supplication; an imperial thumb turned up in magnanimity; the presentation of a little wooden sword to be worn forever. But no—not a word.
Finally, there is a missed opportunity in the field of health care, which Trump has been vowing to reform—“we’re going to come up with plans”—for more than a decade. The job of gladiator came with the best medical care Rome could offer: A gladiator was valuable, like a racehorse, and worth substantial investment in maintenance. Sudden death couldn’t be helped, of course, but physicians tended skillfully to injuries suffered by the survivors. Galen, known as the father of modern medicine, started out as a doctor for gladiators—the equivalent of a residency on The Pitt.
But even as gladiators got special treatment, benefits flowed to the wider population. A mixture of oil and sweat scraped from the bodies of combatants, and rubbed on one’s own, was thought to have therapeutic power. Similarly, drinking the blood of wounded or fallen gladiators was believed to enhance a person’s life force (and, more specifically, to cure epilepsy). The Roman writers Celsus and Pliny the Elder attest to these beliefs; people lined up to avail themselves of bodily elixirs. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has cast doubt on the efficacy of various drugs and vaccines while promoting the benefits of raw milk (and personally conducting forensic examinations of dead animals). He might well have the kind of open mind that would regard the fluids of cage fighters as beneficial for all Americans. Again, the White House has remained silent.
To be fair, the president has ordered commemorative coins to be struck. A triumphal arch has been designed. Perhaps the cage fighters will enter proclaiming some version of the gladiator’s oath. But as Martial related, the opening of the Colosseum was followed by games for 100 days. When a latter-day Liber de Spectaculis is written, Sunday’s events will be described as falling well short of the one benchmark that seems to matter to the president: talis qualem mundus numquam vidit—“such as the world has never seen.”