The world of We Who Will Die, with its gladiatorial games and elite imperial guard, is heavily modeled on the complex society of the ancient Roman Empire. Historically, enslaved athletes called gladiators fought in lavish spectacles for the entertainment of Roman citizens, and the emperors funded these events in accordance with the old adage of panem et circenses—“bread and circuses”—the idea that feeding and entertaining an otherwise poverty-stricken populace would render them easy to control. The novel loosely mirrors this structure with the compulsory Sands and the optional Sundering, and in Stacia Stark’s version, these brutal games function as both entertainment and a twisted form of social mobility for the desperate.

While the novel’s title is a reference to the Latin phrase “Avē Imperātor, moritūrī tē salūtant” (“Hail, Emperor, those who are about to die salute you”), there is scant historical evidence for the popular belief that gladiators delivered this statement before each event. Instead, the only explicit reference to this saying comes from the annals of the Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, whose De Vita Caesarum describes one specific incident in which a group of condemned prisoners—not gladiators—were about to fight in a mock naval battle on a lake. They reportedly delivered this statement to Emperor Claudius, who was said to have replied, “Aut non” (“Or not”), prompting the prisoners to claim that the emperor had just pardoned them. According to Suetonius, only when the irate Claudius hobbled down to the arena and cajoled the men to perform did they finally comply (“Ave, Imperator.” University of Chicago). In modern, popularized depictions of the ancient Roman games, this statement has frequently been portrayed, however inaccurately, as a traditional opening line.

In fact, while gladiatorial combat was often bloody and brutal, modern depictions of these historical events often misrepresent many other factors as well. For example, few such bouts were actually fought to the death; “[m]ore commonly, a gladiator who lost a fight would be granted mercy—missio—and was allowed to leave the arena alive,” primarily due to the financial investment involved (Miller, Marlee. “Gladiators: Types and Training.” The Met, 1 Aug. 2023). If a gladiator who was also an enslaved individual happened to die during the games, “his owner could charge the show’s editor as much as fifty times the rental price to compensate for his loss” (Miller). In We Who Will Die, the medical care for the “gladians” reflects this calculating form of frugality, and despite the bloody heroics of certain scenes, Stark does accurately depict the historical reality that gladiators were drawn from multiple classes of individuals.

In ancient Rome, gladiators were prisoners of war, enslaved individuals, “volunteers (auctoritas) from society’s lower classes,” or even “former aristocrats […] in need of other means of income” (Miller). Stark takes this historical reality one step further when her poverty-stricken protagonist, Arvelle, takes up the duties of a gladian only under extreme duress, having been forced into obeying the orders of the vampiric Bran in his bid for power. Thus, Stark blends historical precedents with the trappings of the fantasy genre to create a narrative fraught with violence and political intrigue in equal measure.

The novel’s depiction of urban poverty also draws from Roman life. The Thorn district, where Arvelle and her brothers were raised, sports hordes of families “wedged into insulae” (7). In ancient Rome, the term insulae referred to the crowded, often dangerous apartment blocks that housed the lower classes. In We Who Will Die, Stark describes Arvelle accepting dangerous work because “poverty and desperation go hand in hand” (4), and this grim dynamic is based on the author’s in-depth research of the flawed social systems of ancient Rome, in which the state placated the masses with violent spectacles while offering few genuine escapes from such systemic hardships.