Commodus enjoyed beheading ostriches and clubbing cripples to death. But it almost goes without saying that he wasn't stabbed in the arena by an enslaved ex-general who'd become a gladiator. But fighting as a gladiator was alluring enough that laws were passed every now and then forbidding members of the Roman upper classes to duke it out in the arena in the 1st-century version of extreme slumming. Most gladiators were slaves, criminals or prisoners of war. They were basically on the same social-outcast level as prostitutes and actors.
Death takes a holiday.
And yet, if anything, it sanitizes what Romans would have seen in the arena. Some serious stuff went down there. As with so much the Romans did, it was all extremely well organized. The arena might even be decorated with an artificial landscape of fountains and hillocks, a veritable open-air terrarium within which the beasts strode. Thus, even before the Discovery Channel, you could watch a nature special.