Pilots: Thumbs Down Never Meant Death

Thumbs down never meant death.

Juvenal wrote pollice verso, a turned thumb, without saying which way it turned. The reading with the strongest evidence, argued by classicist Anthony Corbeill, has a thumb held up or out for the kill and pressed down or hidden in the fist for mercy. Our familiar version was fixed by Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1872 painting Pollice Verso, which Ridley Scott used when pitching Gladiator. Flamma's second-century tombstone in Sicily records 34 fights: 21 wins, nine draws, and four times missus, or spared after defeat. Trained gladiators were expensive and most defeated fighters left alive. The often-repeated claim that Flamma refused freedom four times misreads those four reprieves: the stone says spared, not freed.

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