Location Filming on Women Gladiators

 

A few weeks ago, Barney Rowe, a brilliant young TV producer specializing in factual history, asked if I could join his team at Tomos TV who are making a documentary about female gladiators. I’d encountered Barney through the Against the Lore podcast, which is making an episode on my work teaching in prisons, so I trust his motives completely. Amazingly, I was able to shift round things in my schedule sufficiently to find myself on Wednesday fighting for survival in something that felt like gladiatorial combat in the non-priority Ryanair queue at Luton Airport on my way to Naples.

Senatus Consultum of 19 CE 

 First up, we filmed at the Samnite Museum of Campobasso, which houses an extraordinary inscription recording a decree of the Senate of 19 CE banning women of the equestrian and senatorial classes as well of men from performance on stage or fighting in the arena. The Emperor at the time, Tiberius, was keen to reinforce social class distinctions and therefore police the conduct of upper-class females.

Roman Women Entertaining themselves IN PRIVATE. From Pompeii or Herculaneum

On day 2, I found myself driving a Volkswagen round hairpin bends up the terrifyingly steep peak of Montecasino, with Eduardo the cameraman sticking a camera in the back of my neck from behind my seat and a drone hovering like a techno-mosquito in front of the windscreen. I did not dare tell the team that I had scarcely driven since a car accident in Guernsey in 2021.

The nerve required for this hair-raising car stunt was rewarded when we found our quarry in the museum of the monastery on the mountain’s summit—the magnificent stone inscription which an aristocratic woman named Ummidia Quadratilla had placed at the entrance of the amphitheatre she had built—and funded—for her citizens. UMMIDIA QUADRATILLA BUILT THE AMPHITHEATRE AND TEMPLE FOR THE PEOPLE OF CASINA WITH HER OWN MONEY. SUA PECUNIA FECIT. Girl-Boss or what?

At Ummidia's Inwscription with Assistant Producer Rachele Fregonese

We know about Ummidia from her splendid Mausoleum and especially a letter by Pliny (7.24) which my colleague at Durham, Professor Roy Gibson, had briefed me on and I read, on screen, from a suitably antique-looking book kindly lent to me by Nicholas Denyer at Cambridge. 

The daughter of a governor of Syria, she had inherited a fortune, which had allowed her to enjoy her taste for spectacular entertainments in the liberal days of Nero; she had a troupe of pantomime (masked ballet) dancers whom she leased out, and a large following of cheerleaders to get the audiences going. 

Ummidia's Amphitheatre

There was overlap between pantomime dancing and gladiatorial spectacle, so I got to brandish a replica pantomime mask of the helmeted Minerva similar to this one when filming at Ummidia’s amphitheatre.

It takes a village to make a TV documentary. The camera and sound men from Rome were constantly encouraging.

With Cameraman Eduardo and Sound Technician Giacomo

The uber-competent and kind director Susannah Ward was a delight to work with. She gave us all canisters of olive oil decorated with amphitheatres when the British team—also including Barney and Rachele Fregonese, whose combined research for the documentary had been as rigorous and meticulous as any professional academics’—we reluctantly parted.

I’ve never really aspired to do TV. It is bewilderingly hard physical work and I want to be able to go to supermarkets without being recognized. I tried once or twice to hawk myself round ghastly North London parties to suck up to Very Important People in the industry, but always ended up (a) wondering why they were so up themselves and (b) drinking with the wine-waiters in the kitchen. But these people have restored my faith in the possibility that TV people can be excellent humans.

Parting from Susannah, Barney and Raquele at Naples Airport

I can’t wait to see the show, which will hit history channels and Channel 5 in due course. I dared the crew to include this oil lamp, found in Southwark, which an article by writer and tireless supporter of Classics Caroline Lawrence, who was very generous with her time and assistance, had led me to. It shows clearly how female gladiators affected the Roman erotic imagination. It might not be allowed on American television. But then America is descending further every minute into a cultural desert as well as a proto-fascist dystopia.

My Telegraph article on Gladiators in Britain

 

The brutal reality of gladiators in Roman Britain

Headless skeletons, feral bears and female fighters – a new British Museum show revolutionises our understanding of life in 175 AD

 Edith Hall

 

It’s 175 AD in Colchester – then called Camelodunum – a prosperous industrial town. Several thousand people are making their way past villas, pottery factories and temples of Jupiter and the deified Claudius to the amphitheatre. Local Britons, descended from the tribes who long ago rebelled under Cunobelinus (Cymbeline) and Boudicca, now live peacefully side-by-side with retired legionaries from Gaul, Thrace, Italy and Anatolia.

After buying refreshments from market traders at the entrance, they take their seats on wooden benches around the oval arena to await the day’s entertainment. First, hares and deer are released, followed by a large, ravenous dog, who takes some time to shed the first blood of the day. Then, to great applause, the famous venators (hunt-showmen) Marius and Secundus, armed with only a whip and a cudgel, subdue an enraged bear. 

But the climax is a long-awaited showdown between the professional gladiators. Loud applause greets the helmeted Memnon, a celebrity African combatant who has adopted the stage-name of an Ethiopian superhero who fought Achilles at Troy. It is Memnon’s ninth appearance here; he has always won. He takes the role of secutor, armed with sword and shield; the retiarius with a hunting net and trident is named Valentinus, sent by a division of the 30th legion stationed in Gaul. Few retiarii have ever kept Memnon at bay for long; he has the advantage of being left-handed and difficult to ward off. Valentinus eventually drops his net and Memnon lifts his sword to strike. Valentinus points his index finger upwards to concede defeat. The crowd roars to signal whether he should live or die.

We can time-travel to these thrilling spectacles because they are illustrated on a clay vase made locally around the time of the event, which will be on display at the British Museum throughout its touring exhibition Gladiators in Britain, which opens at the Dorset Museum & Art Gallery on January 25 and travels throughout the rest of year. The vase was buried at the funeral of a middle-aged man, perhaps a deceased gladiator. The names were inscribed before the pot was fired. It was one of the more elaborate souvenirs that spectators could purchase at stalls around the amphitheatres in at least ten towns in the province of Britannia. 

Gladiator culture united this north-western extremity of the Roman Empire with hundreds of towns across the Roman world, from Algeria to Israel, Spain to Syria. Britannia was no rustic backwater, but a thriving and cosmopolitan civilisation receptive to all the technology and culture that flourished under the Roman Empire.

 Gladiators were common across Roman Britain – and evidence for them is abundant. At Richborough in Kent, the arena wall was painted in brilliant hues of red and blue. Chester offers plentiful evidence for portable fast-food ovens and souvenir shops. Londonium’s amphitheatre, beneath Guildhall Yard, sported tiled entrances. At Aldborough in North Yorkshire (Isurium Brigantum) the amphitheatre entertained the merchant travellers who passed through this trade point at the highest navigable point on the river Ure.

One of the oldest arenas was constructed at Silchester, the capital of the Atrebates tribe, in around 75 AD. It could seat around 7,000 – a capacity midway between the Royal Albert Hall and the O2 Arena. The clergyman William Lisle Bowles visited it in the early 19^th century, recalling, “Here – where the summer breezes waved the wood / The stern and silent gladiator stood, /And listened to the shouts that hailed his gushing blood.”

 A muddier envisioning of Silchester gladiators occurs in the Roman Britain action movie Eagle (2011), directed by Kevin Macdonald and adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth (1954). In the film, the British youth Esca (played by Jamie Bell of Billy Elliot fame) faces death at the hands of a gladiator clad in a sinister full-face helmet, but is rescued by the Roman centurion Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) before they travel north to seek the famously missing 9th Legion.

 Meanwhile, the Neolithic henge at Maumbury Rings near Durnovaria (Dorchester) was converted into an amphitheatre in around 100 AD, its arena levelled with chalk and sand and recesses built into the walls to house the caged animals. Thomas Hardy used this atmospheric sense of a long-buried history to echo the pain of a lost marriage in The Mayor of Casterbridge; Michael Henchard arranges his clandestine reunion there with Susan, the wife he has not met for eighteen years. The emotional turbulence is reflected by the overgrown grass, “bearded with withered bents that formed waves under the brush of the wind, returning to the attentive ear Aeolian modulations, and detaining for moments the flying globes of thistledown”.

More recent archaeological finds have revealed more about the appearance of gladiators in Roman Britain, including a visually intimidating copper alloy helmet found at Hawkedon, Suffolk which is on show at the exhibition. The short City of London street named Poultry revealed an oil lamp portraying a fallen Samnite gladiator. The popularity of gladiator culture is further demonstrated by more than forty knife handles carved to portray fighting gladiators that have been discovered, from Corbridge and South Shields to Caerwent, Monmouthshire. Cupids fight as miniature gladiators on a mosaic from Bignor Roman villa in West Sussex.

Less certain evidence is provided by the more than 80 decapitated skeletons of well-built men under 45 found in a Roman cemetery in York, some of whom came from Syria, may have been gladiators; one of them had been bitten by a large carnivore. They may have been criminals beheaded in the arena after being forced to fight with beasts. Although female gladiators are attested in Rome and Antioch, it may be wishful thinking that has interpreted the skeleton of a twenty-something Romano-British woman found in Great Dover Street, Southwark, as belonging to a gladiatrix; the evidence is only that she was wealthy, perhaps suggesting a successful career in the arena, and that one of the oil lamps buried with her depicts a gladiator.

The exhibition will breathe new life into our understanding of ancient British recreation, revealing that new finds extend the evidence for the appreciation of gladiators across all England and Wales. Just last year, a delightful figurine found on the banks of the Tyne near Hadrian’s Wall depicts a perky, helmeted gladiator, and he is left-handed. Did Memnon, after his ninth victory at Colchester, tour every amphitheatre in Britannia?

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Gladiators of Britain runs until April 2026; further details, see: britishmuseum.org

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University. Her forthcoming book is Epic of the Earth (Yale, £18.99)