[Teaser] Female Gladiators

Two months ago, we polled our YouTube community page on what episode of Gladiators y'all would be interested in seeing. At 44% of the total vote, FEMALE GLADIATORS dominated the poll!

Therefore, I'm very eager to give you all a teaser for our next Gladiator documentary on the FEMALE GLADIATORS. Enjoy!

Intro Hook

The ancient crowds of the Roman arena always hungered for new forms of entertainment. This desire could only be sated by the hosting of ever more massive games involving hundreds of fighters and elaborately staged productions. It's in this entertainment arms race that such novelties as the famed naumachia were developed. Today though. let us focus on another one of these exotic displays, the Female Gladiators of the arena.

Origins

Records of gladiator combat permeate the majority of Roman history, even going as far back as the Etruscans. As the centuries wore on and as the politicians of the Roman Republic looked to distinguish themselves more and more, the great games and festivals - known as munera - became increasingly elaborate. After all there was no better way to make a name for yourself than through this most exciting of advertising platforms. And so it was that the most ambitious men of their age sought power through the bread and circuses of the games.

In these matters. there were two major factors to making a series of games distinct: an editor could either go big or go unique. Size could be the number of gladiators, parades, or condemned criminals, with bragging statements on the numbers of these appearing in both pre and post game inscriptions. Uniqueness, though, was by far the more alluring trait. These could be animals brought in from beyond Rome's borders, they could be unique displays, such as dressing your gladiators in pure silver, or they could be distinctive acts. Today, we're covering perhaps one of the most evocative of those acts: the gladiatrix.

The word "gladiatrix" is not attested in ancient literature, and is a modern distinction. Latin inscriptions and references describe "women fighting in the arena" or "women wielding swords," but for our purposes, it's much more convenient to use the word - similar to referring to the Eastern Roman Empire as "Byzantine." Sourcing on gladiatrices is generally pretty rare: the vast majority of gladiators were men, trained in all-male schools. The idea of women fighting was scandalous to the Romans. Predictably, this meant that gladiatrices were incredibly popular in their events, even if those events were probably relatively rare. Emperors, looking to make their games distinct, would advertise massive games at which female gladiators were prominent. More minor officials would advertise gladiatrices as the memorable event at their games - memorialized in inscriptions such as this hyperbolic claim that:

"Hostilianus [...] was the first of everyone since the founding of the City to hold games with gladiators as well as giving women the sword."

Needless to say, that inscription, which dates to the late second century AD, is blatantly untrue. Not only is the man in question not the first to hold games with gladiators and swordswomen both, but he's also not the first person to allow women into the arena to fight. That distinction goes back to the murky and confusing days in the early Imperial era - the age of Augustus.