When did the Romans invent gladiator fighting start?

Answer 1

The Romans did not invent the gladiatorial combats. They originated from outside Rome. Nicolaus of Damascus believed them to be of Etruscan origin. Livy thought that that they were first held in 310 BC by the Campanians (a people who lived south of Rome, near Naples) to celebrate a victory in a war. Both men were ancient historians. Recent evidence suggests that the combats either originated or were borrowed from Campania.

The earliest recorded gladiatorial combat in Rome was in 264 BC when Decimus Iunius Brutus Scaeva had three gladiator pairs fight to the death honour his dead father, Brutus Pera, as part of the munus (plural: munera), a commemorative duty owed to the manes (the guardian god) of a dead ancestor by his descendants. Julius Caesar held public gladiatorial combats and thus initiated the transition of the combats from being part of funerary rituals to being public games. The gladiatorial games at this point stopped being fights to the death. The life defeated gladiators was customarily spared. Skills became more important than bloodshed and gladiators who defeated their opponents without injuring them were held in high esteem.