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.