> At a time when three of every five persons did not survive until their twentieth birthday, the odds of a professional gladiator being killed in any particular

> At a time when three of every five persons did not survive until their twentieth birthday, the odds of a professional gladiator being killed in any particular bout, at least during the first century AD, were perhaps one in ten. For a full year in Nero's wooden amphitheater in the Campus Martius, no-one died at all, not even criminals (Suetonius, Life of Nero, XII.1).