Does the Thumbs-Up Sign Come From Gladiator Fights?
The thumbs-up sign is one of the most instantly and universally recognized symbols of approval in modern Western culture. This ubiquitous gesture appears in everyday acknowledgments between friends and colleagues, in emojis across social media, and in numerous TV shows and movies, with famous fictional proponents including “The Fonz,” Borat, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
Despite this popularity, a fair amount of confusion and misinformation surrounds the origin of the thumbs-up sign. Most notably, many people believe the gesture has its origins in ancient Roman gladiator fights, where spectators supposedly used a thumbs-up to spare defeated fighters and a thumbs-down to condemn them to death. This narrative has been reinforced by popular culture — particularly the 2000 Academy Award-winning movie Gladiator. The historical reality, however, is not nearly as clear cut as Hollywood would have us believe.
The Problem With Pollice Verso
It’s true that there’s a link between thumb gestures and gladiator fights in ancient Rome, but we don’t know exactly how the gesture was used. At the heart of the historical debate is the Latin phrase pollice verso, meaning “with a turned thumb.” This phrase appears in ancient Roman literature, including in connection with gladiatorial contests, but its exact meaning remains unclear to historians. We don’t know whether pollice verso referred to a thumb being turned up, turned down, held horizontally, or concealed inside the hand to indicate positive or negative opinions — or, in the arena, to signal whether a gladiator was spared or killed.
The ambiguity of ancient sources has allowed later interpreters to project their own meaning onto the gesture. The most significant example of this in the modern era is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s 1872 painting “Pollice Verso.” The painting brilliantly captures the power and drama of a gladiatorial contest, with one gladiator standing above his fallen opponent, who, lying stricken on the ground, raises two fingers to plead for mercy. In the stands of the Colosseum, Roman spectators, including an animated group of vestal virgins, signal death for the defeated gladiator with a thumbs-down gesture. The painting greatly popularized the idea that a thumbs-up signaled life, and a thumbs-down signaled death for a defeated gladiator.
It didn’t take long, however, for scholars to highlight the painting’s lack of a solid historical foundation in its portrayal of the gladiatorial contest. In 1879, a 26-page pamphlet titled Pollice Verso: To the Lovers of Truth in Classic Art, This Is Most Respectfully Addressed presented evidence against the historical accuracy of the thumb gestures in Gérôme’s painting.
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Ridley Scott’s Gladiator
Debate surrounding the gesture did not end there — to this day, historians argue about the meaning of the thumb sign in gladiatorial contests. In recent years, for example, Anthony Corbeill, a professor of classics at the University of Virginia, told Time that the commonly held belief about the thumbs-up gesture is incorrect. According to Corbeill, “Sparing [a gladiator] is pressing the thumb to the top of the fist and death is a thumbs-up. In other words, it’s the opposite of what we think.”
But widely held notions can be hard to shift, especially when Hollywood puts its full weight behind something. Ridley Scott’s hugely successful historical epic Gladiator cemented in the public consciousness the idea that the thumbs-up we use today came from ancient Rome. Gladiator was itself inspired by Gérôme’s “Pollice Verso”painting, which was shown to the director to convince him to make the movie. Scott in turn took some ideas from the painting, including the use of the thumb gesture, despite a lack of historical evidence for it. In the same way that “Pollice Verso” shaped public opinion regarding the thumbs-up sign in the 19th century, Gladiator reinforced the idea through the power of the modern-day blockbuster.
A Wartime Gesture
Despite the persistent Roman gladiator narrative, the modern positive meaning of the thumbs-up gesture likely developed through different cultural channels over many centuries. Though the exact origins are unknown, historians believe the gesture gained widespread recognition during the 20th century, particularly in English-speaking countries. And the reason for its spread might be found in war.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the first recorded instances of the thumbs-up gesture used to indicate approval occurs in the 1917 book Over the Top by Arthur Guy Empey, an American who served in the British army in World War I. In the book, he explains the thumbs-up sign as being “Tommy’s expression which means ‘everything is fine with me’” (“Tommy” being a slang term for a British soldier).
Another theory suggests the gesture was used by pilots to communicate with the person starting a propeller in early preflight checks. The gesture then became common among fighter pilots during World War II, who used it to indicate to the crew that everything was good and they were ready to take off. So, while the modern thumbs-up sign might not have come from the gladiatorial arena, it was likely popularized during the two largest conflicts of the modern age.
