The fire-eating, sword-swallowing animal collector who brought ancient Rome to life
The first violent death comes about 30 seconds into episode one of Those About To Die, Amazon Prime’s new 10-part drama about Roman gladiators in AD79, when a disgruntled bookie (Iwan Rheon) has a creditor’s throat sliced open.
Over the course of the ensuing hour, more unfortunates are stabbed, trampled by horses or eaten by a CGI lion the size of a people-carrier. Breasts and buttocks are almost as plentiful as blood. Yet still the series strikes me as something of a PG-certificate version of the book on which it is based.
“Two armies of 5,000 men fought to the death.” “The show was lit at night by human torches.” “Leopards and bulls were taught to ravage women.” The juicy facts listed on the cover of Those About To Die by Daniel P Mannix give a flavour of its contents.
First published in 1958 — the title derives from the pre-combat greeting that gladiators supposedly delivered to the watching emperor: “Hail Caesar, those about to die salute you” — it is a fast-moving history of the Roman “games” covering several centuries. (The makers of the television series have narrowed the focus to the reign of the Emperor Vespasian, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins.) Some chapters come close to fiction, told from the viewpoint of invented characters.
Mannix, a sometime professional fire-eater, sword-swallower, animal collector and globetrotting photojournalist as well as a historian, has probably shaped the modern popular conception of the Roman gladiators more than anyone.
David Franzoni, the writer and producer behind Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000), came up with the idea for the film after an acquaintance gave him a copy of Mannix’s book. “It’s not the story of Gladiator, but what was in the book was an understanding of how to connect who and how we were to who and how they were,” Franzoni told Variety in 2020.
Mannix’s methods for making the Romans relatable have proved controversial. Harry Sidebottom, the Oxford history lecturer and novelist, who has called the book “abysmally bad”, cited a sentence from the opening paragraph: “[Rome’s] economy… was coming apart like an unravelling sweater.” Other readers, however, have found that such similes help to bridge the gap between the ancient world and ours.
It is in his set-piece descriptions of gladiatorial combat that Mannix really succeeds in bringing the Roman world to life. It is not just the fighting: he evokes the arena, thronged with “dwarfs dressed in extravagant costumes, many with huge, brightly coloured phalli strapped to their loins… performing simple acrobatic tricks”. He tells us what insults the plebs in the cheap seats hurled at the patricians (“Hey, Italicus, are you still your mother’s bed-companion?”)
He describes men in the audience biting themselves and tearing their clothes, and women brought to orgasm by the excitement. Others, unable to tear themselves away from the spectacle, give birth in the Circus Maximus. And then there are those human torches. Nero used to have crucified Christians dotted around the arena, covered in oil and set alight.
Mannix insisted that every squirm-inducing detail included in the book had been drawn from classical sources, although he admitted in an afterword that he had speculated about the methods used to train various animals involved in some of the combats.
His account of a crocodile-wrestling bout was largely derived from Strabo, the Greek writer: “but I added material told to me by a Seminole Indian who wrestled alligators in Florida”.
Bestiality shows were a popular form of pre-combat entertainment; no record has come down of how trainers persuaded their animals to mount women on cue, so Mannix suggests that they used “the technique employed by a Mexican gentleman I met in Tia Juana who was making 16mm stag [ie. porn] films on the subject.”
This involved wrapping the women participants in cloths dipped in the menstrual blood of female animals. As Mannix explains in his customary forthright way, this programme would have “used up several women” by the time the animals were fully trained, but luckily there was a steady supply of “brokendown old bags from the provinces who didn’t fully realise what their job involved until too late”.
It was his fascination with animals rather than scholarly leanings that drew Mannix to write about the gladiators. Born in 1911, he published his first books — comprising anecdotes about looking after the animals on his grandparents’ farm in Philadelphia — in his early 20s.
His other youthful obsession was magic. Mannix’s teenage hobby was attending the shows of phoney mediums and exposing their tricks. After finishing his journalism studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he came up with the idea of asking a visiting carnival if they would give him a summer job as a conjuror.
“I probably never would have become America’s leading fire-eater if Flamo the Great hadn’t happened to explode that night in front of Krinko’s Great Combined Carnival Side Shows,” Mannix observed at the start of his memoir Step Right Up! (published in 1951 and also known as Memoirs of a Sword Swallower). As Flamo was carted away, Mannix volunteered to become the carnival’s resident fire-eater.
After a difficult start (“blisters formed all over the inside of my cheeks and the skin on the roof of my mouth began to peel off in thin strips”) and the consumption of industrial quantities of ice cream, Mammix mastered fire-eating and graduated to sword-swallowing.
He recalled that “to find out how long a sword I could swallow, I purchased a very long sabre and then swallowed it gingerly until I could feel the tip of the blade touch the pit of my stomach. This is a very curious sensation to describe. I didn’t feel a definite impact, but a sort of thrill ran all through my body. Then I marked the blade with a grease pencil just above my teeth. I withdrew the blade, had it cut off at the mark and refitted into the hilt.” A gangling 6ft 4 inches tall, Mannix claimed to have been able to swallow a record-breakingly long blade of 26 inches.
With its endearing portraits of fellow carnival acts, such as The Human Ostrich (“Before swallowing a frog I always drink a quart of water to give the little fellows something to land in, as frogs have feelings just like anyone else”), Mannix’s book is a beloved text for many magicians and illusionists. “You don’t want to learn fire-eating from a book, but that’s how I started,” observed one of its biggest fans, magician Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller fame.
Mannix’s many other books included further racy historical works (studies of the Hellfire Club and the occultist Aleister Crowley) and the children’s story The Fox and the Hound, which, radically de-fanged, became a Disney animation in 1981.
All Creatures Great and Small (1963) is a memoir of his travels as a photo-journalist specialising in animal stories. It includes an account of his meeting with Grace Olive Wiley, the celebrated reptile expert. At the end of the interview she posed for a photograph with an Indian cobra, which decided to bite her. She was dead within two hours.
Mannix’s writing may have been sensationalist, but his work was good enough to be plagiarised by a Nobel Laureate. An article Mannix had written about training a bald eagle to hunt iguanas in Mexico was mined by Saul Bellow for eagle-hunting scenes in his novel The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Mannix threatened to sue, and in later editions of the book Bellow’s characters were obliged to cite Mannix as an inspiration.
James Atlas, Bellow’s biographer, states sniffily that Bellow “transformed” Mannix’s original descriptions, “turning magazine prose into literature”.
Maybe so. But Mannix’s books remind us that sometimes literature is no substitute for the writings of a man who has gone out and lived life — or of a born showman who lives by knowing what people want and giving it to them.
Those About to Die is on Prime Video from July 19