New evidence of female gladiators

[Ted Mark]

New evidence of female gladiators


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The study of female gladiatorial combat encounters the obstacle of the dearth of sources that give testimony of it. Ten literary fragments and one epigraphic inscription is all the written evidence that speaks to us of those women. About graphic sources, the panorama is still more desolate, since a relief found in Halicarnassus is the sole representation we have of gladiator women. Yet, this is so because scholars may not have been able to interpret correctly some other artistic works we have from the Roman period. In this article, I propose that a bronze statuette, currently kept at the Museum f?r Kunst und Gewerbe of Hamburg, that scholars have traditionally considered as representing a female athlete holding a strigil, actually depicts a female gladiator (more specifically, a thraex, a gladiatorial type that fought with a short-curved dagger, a weapon that to the untrained eye can be confused with a strigil).


To appear in the arena (as a fighter) or on the stage (as an actress), performing in public in any case, was considered by the Romans as especially censurable because they thought that a respectable person should not serve as entertainment or spectacle for others, because that put him/her below the observer. The fact that the Romans took measures when a femina appeared in the arena but not when a mulier did that clearly shows that the concern about feminae was not so much due to the fact that they were women as that they were high-class women (the concern was the same if a man from the upper class appeared in the arena, since in both cases that action ? to perform in public ? was seen as a threat to the established social order; high classes must not entertain the other classes, only vice versa).2
Sword fighting among women has no precedent in cultures prior to the Romans (Spartan women were taught to use the sword but they did not hold combats among themselves regularly, as happened in Rome).3 A fragment by Nicolaus of Damascus states that, like male gladiators, these fights between women in Rome also date back to the origins of the Roman civilisation.4 Thus we see that female sword fighting already existed since the early times of gladiatura, when it was still a funerary practice. The moment when female gladiators passed from fighting in the funerary context to doing it in the public games is difficult to determine. Indirect evidence is provided by the senatus consultus from Larinum (year 19) that specifically prohibited feminae under 20 years of age to appear in the arena (so we can assume that such conduct was already common by that date).5
The sources that speak of female gladiators


As in the case of male gladiators, a female gladiator was ? in the strict sense ? the woman who, after having received gladiatorial training, fought with weapons against another woman. Due to the concept they had that combats had to be even in the level of the opponents, a woman was never pitted against a man in single combat.23 However, in group combats (gregatim) it might be possible that some women appeared among the ranks of the opposed sides, normally fighting on chariots to make up for their physical disadvantage with men (as suggested by the ?mulierem essedariam? cited by Petronius in Satyricon, 45.7), and probably armed with bows and arrows, as the bow is the weapon that requires less strength, so for women it was the easiest weapon to use successfully against men (for that reason it was the arms of the Amazons, of goddess Diana and of Atalanta).24

To have received specific gladiatorial training was the requisite to consider a man wielding a sword a gladiator. Men who had not received that training could appear in the arena fighting with weapons (e.g. damnati ad gladium) but they were not considered gladiators.25 Thus, the same requisite must be applied to determine whether the women mentioned in the sources fighting in the arena were real female gladiators or just women wielding weapons (because they were damnati ad gladium or for any other reason). Therefore, we must find out if those women trained in preparation for their fights (to improve their technical and physical level and thus to be able to achieve victory).


Figure 9. More gladiators from the Borghese mosaic. Note that all of them wear fasciae under one or both of their knees.



In conclusion, all this seems to indicate that the statuette at the MKG represents a gladiator, thus becoming the second piece of visual evidence we have of female gladiators (after the relief from Halicarnassus). Actually, the clear female anatomy that this statuette exhibits makes it a more evident testimony of female gladiatura than the relief from Halicarnassus (that really does not show any hint suggesting that the figures represented are women, since the protuberance on the torso of the fighter at the right can easily be the pectoral muscle of a man ?actually it resembles that more than the breast of a woman? and since the names could be applied to men (as we have already seen)).

That this statuette has traditionally been misunderstood as an athlete can be explained by a hasty interpretation of the object she is holding as a strigil, and by not paying attention to the body position, the clothing or the bandage.
Besides, the statuette also informs us that, since free women did not tend to perform in public with their breasts naked, it would represent a slave gladiator. Yet, her hair is long (instead of being cut short like that of a man, as the sources tells us was common practice with female slaves), which indicates that, obviously, the practice of cutting the hair of female slaves as short as that of men was not applied in all cases.