Save for a few wisps of time-worn text and a bit of sharp-edged stone, little is left on this earth that tells the gladiatrix’s story. Thought to have battled during the first and second centuries C.E., she is much more elusive than her male counterpart, the gladiator, who has been venerated thousands of times — through art, historical text, and pop culture.
Close your eyes. You’ll see what I mean. It’s not hard to conjure the image of the Roman gladiator.
He probably looks like Russell Crowe, clad in leather, dust, and blood. Or perhaps he resembles Paul Mescal, brooding, slicked in oil, and strapped into Crowe’s old breastplate.
The Roman gladiatrix, though, is a well-kept secret. She has appeared in few pieces of media, among them a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance in Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator” — the famous vehicle of Crowe’s Maximus. In “Gladiator,” the only named woman character beyond Maximus’ wife is Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla, the embattled daughter of Marcus Aurelius. The lone, unnamed gladiatrix in the 2000 film is played by stuntwoman Jane Omorogbe, denoted under “stunts” in the closing credits.
The singular gladiatrix is a legionnaire archer who wears a gold breastplate with overstated gilded nipples. Having fired a few arrows, she meets a bloody but unceremonious end, in which she is shorn in half by a barbed chariot wheel after less than 60 seconds of screen time.
In the opening credits of “Gladiator II,” an oil painting of Omorogbe’s unnamed fighter wafts across the screen, promising, perhaps, a new generation of gladiatrices. Once the story begins to unfold, though, the promise quickly fades. After Mescal’s Lucius is introduced, a handful of women archers — one of them Lucius’ wife Arishat (Yuval Gonen)— appear in a battle between the Numidian and Roman armies. Ten minutes into the film, Arishat and her peers are dead, serving only as the breath behind Lucius’ hunger for revenge. One of “Gladiator’s” iconic lines — “we mortals are but shadows and dust” — rings especially true for the gladiatrix.
Nearly the whole of her history is held in a 25 by 30-inch marble relief at the British Museum. Housed among millions of relics, item number 1847,0424.19 was recovered in the 1850s in the dust of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, located in modern-day Bodrum, Turkey.
Imagine running your fingers over the jagged grey marble from which two gladiatrices were hewn thousands of years ago. Their names, Amazon and Achillia, are etched into a blocky platform, where they stand in stark lunges.
Both women draw their left arms back, creating negative space that bristles with potential. They each grasp a short dagger, the pugio, in their fists. Despite being softened by time, the light lift of the breast, flare of the rib cage, and divot of the collarbone are unmistakable — their lines are pulled into focus by tensed muscles. The reptilian heaviness of their armor must feel rich on the textured stone.
In the relief, the familiar domes of two combat helmets lay forgotten on the ground, revealing hair shorn to the scalp. With her chin lifted to an exquisite 45-degree angle, Amazon looks upon her opponent. Achillia’s face has been erased by time, a shadow of what once was.
The first-known grave of a gladiatrix — uncovered in London in 1996 — suggests the Roman social elite held women fighters like Amazon and Achillia in low esteem, whether they were enslaved women, common folk or disruptive noblewomen. The young London gladiatrix was buried alone, among gladiatorial symbols, ostracized from the roughly 30 other Roman graves in the area. But she was adorned with pine incense and intricate lamps usually reserved for the wealthy, leaving room for speculation about the popularity of gladiatrices among Rome and her subjects.
From Suetonius’ early-first-century writing to Cassius Dio’s in the second century, the few snippets of historical texts illuminating the gladiatrix share a unifying theme: social disgrace. Suetonius detailed Emperor Domitan’s nighttime events, highlighting the grotesqueness of gladiatrices fighting in the shadows. Dio, meanwhile, balked at the participation of both noble and enslaved gladiatrices in Emperor Nero’s deviant games.
Sixteen years after the discovery of the London gladiatrix and roughly 580 miles away, a statue of a fighting noblewoman was discovered in Germany. The bronze piece is housed in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, where it has stirred questions about the nature of the gladiatrix.
Roughly 2,000 years old, the bronze woman is damaged: the absence of her shorn-off right hand and foot is glaring. Still, the woman towers over the empty space. Her long tresses are twisted in an easy crown, flowing from the crest of her forehead to the nape of her neck and signaling her noble status. Looking down, the woman’s jaw is set in resolve. Who or what lies at her ghostly feet?
In that void, Alfonso Manas, a researcher from the University of Granada, sees a fallen fighter, struck down by the leaden women above her. In the bronze statuette, he sees a victorious gladiatrix standing over her mark.
In her left hand, she holds a sica, a hooked sword, which she lifts skyward to celebrate her conquest. Yet, for years, historians failed to see a gladiatrix in the tarnished bronze statuette. Instead, they saw a Roman housewife preparing for a bath.
In her hand, they have almost unanimously perceived a strigil, an ancient bathing tool for scraping filth from the body. Why did onlookers fail to see the posture of a champion gladiator? What about the telltale strips of leather around her left leg and the familiar loincloth that hangs from her hips?
All of the clues to her life as a warrior were eclipsed by her nobly styled hair and a lack of imagination. Most gladiatrices sported cropped hair, as Amazon and Achillia do in their marble relief, but a high-born fighter might have elected to keep her tresses.
There is also the matter of her breasts.
The victorious gladiatrix’s torso is starkly naked. She is a contradiction: an aristocratic woman who has abandoned feminine expectations to battle in the dirt. Yet she triumphs — two breasts and all.
To understand why the heroic gladiatrix is hardly a whisper in historical texts while the gladiator fills pages, you might consider the controversy these breasts evoked. In her semi-nude state, the gladiatrix rarely fought in the sweaty, sun-soaked Colosseum depicted in Scott’s “Gladiator.” Instead, she was likely relegated to fighting by torchlight. Beyond the melting shadows of the arena, gladiatrices would have heard thousands of faceless spectators howl obscenities, felt the heat of their breath, and smelled the mass of bodies raging in the night.
Some argue the gladiatrix performed an erotic homage to gladiatorship rather than engaged in actual battle. It is far more likely that the gladiatrix fought uncovered to match the gladiator’s customs — upping the ante by leaving more skin vulnerable to her opponent’s sword.
“In the literary texts that we have, female gladiators are not described in any kind of an erotic context,” Anna McCollough, an Ohio State researcher, told LiveScience in 2012. Instead, they are described as fighting “very fiercely.”
“To depict a female gladiator or a slave nude was really no big deal,” McCollough noted at the time. Yet, the gladiatrix’s toplessness has been a hot topic for nearly two millennia.
In his satires, Roman poet Juvenal wrote at length about the gladiatrix that had “fle[d] from her sex.” Juvenal cast his ire toward a gladiatrix named Mevia. She occasionally appears in Juvenal's work, “fight[ing] a Tuscan boar, with bare breasts, gripping the spear.” While Mevia has found positive attention as the fictional “first gladiatrix” in The History Channel’s “Colosseum” series and as the clever name of a gladiator-style Teva sandal, she is a source of deep disgust in Juvenal’s writing.
“Hear her grunt and groan as she works at it, parrying, thrusting,” Juvenal wrote. “Her legs look like tree trunks.”
Juvenal’s disdain is a patriarchal shudder that has been repeated throughout history, aimed even at clothed woman warriors — Boudicca in the first century, Hua Mulan in the fourth, Tomoe Gozen in the 12th, Joan of Arc in the 15th and Ronda Rousey in the 21st.
Nearly 600 years after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy and wearing men’s military attire, Judo Olympic medalist Ronda Rousey was nearly barred from entering the UFC, America's behemoth mixed martial arts league. Just 13 years ago, Dana White, president of the UFC, said that women would never grace his bloody octagon. Less than a year later, Rousey forced the issue with her undeniable talent, breaking open women’s combat sports on a national stage. Even still, talking heads grumble.
“When I think about pugilistic sports [like the UFC], I don’t like seeing women involved in that at all,” ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith said in 2021. “I just don’t like it.”
So, what compelled the gladiatrix to liberate herself from the expectations of womanhood — like contemporary fighters — and take the oath of the gladiator: “I will endure to be burned, to be bound, to be beaten and to be killed by the sword”?
The answer might lie on the dusty surface of the Halicarnassus relief.
In first and second-century Rome, Amazon would have been recognizable as a representation of the Amazonian Queen Penthesilea. Achillia, her opponent, was a feminized version of Achilles. Reenacting a Greek myth would have been expected in the arena: gladiators often did so.
In the mythical bout, Penthesilea — a gifted Amazonian fighter — strikes the great warrior Achilles dead. Zeus intervenes, reviving Achilles. Gifted with a second life, Achilles kills Penthesilea, silencing her victory among men.
It’s not hard to imagine that the gladiatrix fought for a chance to echo in eternity, just like Maximus Decimus Meridius, Lucius Veras Aeuralias and the historical gladiators who bled in the arena. What other reason does she need?
With the gladiatrix banned by Septimius Severus in 200 C.E., blotted from Roman history, and overlooked in both “Gladiator II” and its predecessor, it seems we’re still not ready for a woman to carry the sword. Even so, Amazon and Achillia remain — both whole in the historical torchlight. In the relief, neither woman was bested by the other. With her golden helmet behind her, each woman — facing the other — steps back into the night, ready for her next fight.
In spite of doubts about her, the gladiatrix lived. She triumphed, and there’s enough shadow, dust and stone to tell her story.
