According to director Ridley Scott, that scene was inspired by a painting from 1872 called “ Pollice Verso“. However, this fact is largely absent from pop culture representations, most notably in the otherwise enjoyable 2000 movie, Gladiator, in which Joaquin Phoenix is shown giving a defeated gladiator a thumbs down to signify that he wishes for him to be killed. Hence why it’s thought “turned thumb” may well have been simply waving your thumb around in the air, perhaps in a stabbing motion. And two, the gestures themselves are thought to be largely symbolic of what they represented- a pointed thumb represented the audience’s desire for the victorious gladiator to deliver his coup de grâce (stab the fallen foe), while a hidden thumb symbolised that they wished for the gladiator to stay his blade, sheathing it much in the way they’d hidden their thumbs. The reasons for this has been speculated to be twofold: one, it made the decision of the crowd easier to discern, since it’s easier to tell the difference between a thumbs turned and a closed fist than a thumbs up and a thumbs down from a long ways away. Instead, you had to hide your thumb inside your fist, forming a gesture known as pollice compresso, “compressed thumb”. So that’s voting for death, what about life? The gesture to spare a given gladiator’s life seems to have been neither a thumbs up nor a thumbs down. As such, we’re unable to say for sure which way the thumb was supposed to be pointed if the audience wanted a given gladiator to be killed or if they could just wave their thumbs around at random, which it seems may well have been the case. More precisely what this means isn’t known and there are no accounts that have survived to this day that describe it in any real detail. The fate of a gladiator, in terms of whether the audience was voting for a kill, was decided with what is known as “pollice verso”, a Latin term which roughly translates to “turned thumb”. While it is true that in the days of gladiatorial combat in the Colosseum and the earlier (and significantly larger) Circus Maximus, the audience could decide the fate of a fallen gladiator with a simple hand gesture, this isn’t typically depicted accurately and has little to do with why thumbs up and thumbs down means what it does today. The commonly told origin is that it came from the Romans and their gladiatorial games: thumbs up meant live and thumbs down meant die. But why is this seemingly innocuous gesture so widespread how did it come to mean “everything is okay” in so many cultures and where did it come from? There are few hand gestures out there as well known or ubiquitous as the humble thumbs up. asks: Is it true that the thumbs up and thumbs down hand gesture came from crowds in ancient Rome voting on whether a gladiator should live or die?

Drawing of two thumbs up