15. The Ridiculous Belief in the Healing Properties of Gladiators’ Bodily Fluids
Many Roman women used the blood of their favorite gladiators to coat their jewelry, combs, wigs, and other accouterments or mixed it with their cosmetics. Gladiators were seen as especially virile, which led to the somewhat ghoulish and macabre practice of using gladiator blood (and sometimes sweat) as an aphrodisiac. The more successful and famous a gladiator, the more potent an aphrodisiac his blood or sweet were believed to be. It could be drunk pure, but more often, was mixed with wine and ingested that way. The use of gladiator blood was not limited to cosmetics and aphrodisiacs. It was also believed to have healing properties, particularly in treating epilepsy.
As Pliny the Elder described it: “Epileptic patients are in the habit of drinking the blood even of gladiators, draughts filled with life as it were; a thing that, when we see it done by the wild beasts in the same arena, inspires us with horror at the spectacle! And yet these persons consider it a most effective cure for their disease, to drink he warm, breathing, blood from man himself, and, as they apply their mouth to the wound, to draw forth his very life; and this, though it is regarded as an act of impiety to apply the human lips to the wound even of a wild beast!”