Аве, Цезарь, идущие на смерть приветствуют тебя

Jean-Leon Gerome built his fame on making ancient Rome look like something you could photograph. He finished this in 1859, and it shows a line of gladiators in the arena raising their weapons toward the emperor's box, calling out the greeting the title translates, roughly, we who are about to die salute you. The bloated figure sprawled in the shaded stand is the emperor Vitellius, who ruled for only a few months. Gerome researched the armor, the awnings and the architecture obsessively so the scene would read as fact rather than fantasy. The gesture itself comes from a single line in a Roman historian describing one staged naval battle, but Gerome turned it into the standard image of what gladiators supposedly always said. Bright sunlight cuts across the empty sand in front of the fighters, the part of the arena still waiting to be used.