Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A gladiator (Latin: gladiator ' swordsman ', from Latin gladius 'sword') was an armed combatant who entertained audiences in the Roman Republic and Roman Empire in violent confrontations with other gladiators, wild animals, and condemned criminals. Some gladiators were volunteers who risked their lives and their legal and social standing by ...
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 20 January 2025. A retiarius ("net fighter") with a trident and cast net, fighting a secutor (79 AD mosaic). There were many different types of gladiators in ancient Rome. Some of the first gladiators had been prisoners-of-war, and so some of the earliest types of gladiators were experienced fighters ...
The Romans of the Classical period had no specific word for female gladiators as a type or class. [1] The earliest reference to a woman gladiator as gladiatrix is by a scholiast in the 4th–5th century, who mockingly wonders whether a woman undergoing training for a performance at the ludi for the Floralia, a festival known for racy performances by seminude dancers, wants to be a gladiatrix ...
A retiarius stabs at a secutor with his trident in this mosaic from the villa at Nennig, c. 2nd–3rd century CE.. A retiarius (plural retiarii; literally, "net-man" in Latin) was a Roman gladiator who fought with equipment styled on that of a fisherman: a weighted net (rete (3rd decl.), hence the name), a three-pointed trident (fuscina or tridens), and a dagger ().
The gladiator and his helmet were probably brought to Britain during the Roman invasion of 43AD or in the one or two decades following that invasion - and it's likely that they would have been ...
But sea battles, semi-aquatic creatures and plenty of other eye-popping spectacles were part of the real-life games at the ancient Roman Colosseum. 'Gladiator II' exaggerates, but historians say ...
The Samnite gladiators were also the first of at least three gladiator classes (list of Roman gladiator types) to be based on ethnic antecedents; other examples were the Gauls and the Thracians. These gladiators fought with the signature war equipment and in the martial style of ethnic groups who had been conquered by Rome, thus appropriating ...
A secutor (pl. secutores) was a class of gladiator in ancient Rome. Thought to have originated around 50 AD, the secutor ("follower" or "chaser", from sequor "I follow, come or go after") was armed similarly to the murmillo gladiator and like the murmillo, was protected by a heavy shield.