Those Who Are About to Die Salute You
studio album by Colosseum
Those Who Are About to Die Salute You is the debut album by Colosseum, released in 1969 by Fontana. It is one of the pioneering albums of jazz fusion. The title is a translation of the Latin phrase morituri te salutant that according to popular belief (but not academic agreement), gladiators addressed to the emperor before the beginning of a gladiatorial match.
The album reached number 15 in the UK Albums Chart.
Background
"Debut" is the first song Colosseum ever played as a group. Tony Reeves later recalled that "Debut" "was actually a phrase that I remembered Mick Taylor playing with John Mayall, and I changed it a bit into a bass line. [Sings the part.] And then the band all joined in – this is what happens during rehearsals – so technically you should have everybody's name in the writing credit, including, I guess, Mick Taylor's!"
"Mandarin" started from a series of sketches by Dave Greenslade that were based on a Japanese soft scale. Tony Reeves compiled the sketches into the main theme and arranged the song.
"Beware the Ides of March" borrows a theme of the fugue of "Toccata and Fugue in D minor" by Johann Sebastian Bach (Bach BWV 565).
Colosseum also recorded "I Can't Live Without You", which appears on the 2004 re-release as a bonus track.
The public source identifies “Those Who Are About to Die Salute You” as studio album by Colosseum. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Those, Salute and studio.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1131034. The first chronological checks are 1969 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Those Who Are About to Die Salute You” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.