RECONSTRUCTING THE GLADIATOR

In 1993, Austrian archaeologists working at the Roman city of Ephesus in Turkey made a spectacular discovery – a cemetery marked by the tombstones of gladiators. The stones gave the names of the men and showed their equipment – helmets, shields, the palm fronds of victory. With the tombstones lay the skeletal remains of the fighters themselves, many of which bore the marks of healed wounds as well as the injuries that caused their deaths. Perhaps the most spectacular find was a skull pierced with three neat, evenly spaced holes. This man had been slain with the barbed trident wielded by a type of gladiator called a retiarius, who also fought with a weighted net.

The gladiator has long been an iconic symbol of ancient Rome, and a popular element in any Roman epic movie, but what do we really know about the lives and deaths of these men?

Until the 18th-century discovery of the cities destroyed by Vesuvius, virtually everything we knew about gladiators came from references in ancient texts, from random finds of stone sculptures and inscriptions, and from the impressive structures of the amphitheatres dotted about all over the