 Complete the following phrase:  The account notes, uncomfortably, the bloodless human sacrifices performed to help turn the tide of the war in Romes favour. While the Senate mustered their willing slaves, Hannibal offered his dishonoured Roman captives a chance for honourable death, in what Livy describes as something very like the Roman munus. The munus thus represented an essentially military, self-sacrificial ideal, taken to extreme fulfillment in the gladiators oath. By the devotio of a voluntary oath, a slave might achieve the quality of a Roman Romanitas, become the embodiment of true virtus manliness, or manly virtue, and paradoxically, be granted missio while remaining a slave. The gladiator as a specialist fighter, and the ethos and organization of the gladiator schools, would inform the development of the Roman military as the most effective force of its time. In 107 BC, the Marian Reforms established the Roman army as a professional body. Two years later, following its defeat at the 