While today ’s pro athletes might have their own nutritionists and buttery full of different foods and supplements , ancient Rome ’s prizefighter had to get through long days of hack and slashing at each other with a very basic , no - frills diet . Their surplus repast , profound on barley and beans , led contemporaneous writers to dub themhordearii , or “ barley eater . ” accord to novel research , though , some gladiators may have supplemented that menu with an early take on the post - workout recovery shake , one with a strange secret constituent .
In the former 1990s , archeologist excavated a prizefighter graveyard in Ephesus , a metropolis in modern - day Turkey that was once a romish provincial capital . To reconstruct the diet of the people inter there , researchers from Switzerland and Austria recentlyexaminedthe os of 22 gladiators from the burial ground and 31 “ ordinary ” Romans eat up around the same fourth dimension at other sites in the city , and compared their levels and ratios of dissimilar carbon , sulfur , and nitrogenisotopes , which can give clew about works and animal protein aspiration .
Both the gladiator and the regular Joes appear to have had similar diet . The isotope analysis revealed that both groups relied on straw and barley as staple food , did n’t eat much meat or dairy , and instead got their protein from legume like beans and lentils and , despite Ephesus ’ law of proximity to the Aegean Sea , just have any seafood .
The researcher also looked at trace of other elements in the osseous tissue , and this is where the gladiators stood apart from the ordinary Ephesians . The fighters had levels of Sr and calcium that were about twice as high as any of the other individual , and could n’t be explained by the foods the two groups had in uncouth . The gladiator , the researchers think , may have been supplementing their diet with a strontium - rich source of calcium that they could n’t suss out from the isotopes they looked at .
That secret germ , they evoke , could be a drink that Roman school text sometimes note , a concoction of body of water , acetum and ash tree from bite wood . “ In hisNaturalis historia , Pliny the Elder line a beverage made of kitchen range ashes that played a persona in the life of gladiator , ” the researchers say in their newspaper publisher . “ This ash beverage was served after scrap and maybe also after training to remedy consistency hurting . ”
It fathom pure ( though to be just , a quite a little of wellness food do ) , but it seems to work well enough that the Romans are n’t the only ace who ’ve attempt it . The Hopi also have several traditional food for thought that contain “ culinary ash tree ” that provides minerals and food . And it may not have been as nasty as it first come along . With some timber acetum , the drink might not have tasted too far off from a tangy , refreshing lemonade , chair generator Fabian KanztoldLivescience .
