Free The Colosseum by Mary Beard, Keith Hopkins

there, as some archaeologists try to argue, a crucial variation in the shape of his shield? Were ‘Samnites’ just an earlier form of the murmillones ? And what of those categories that are mentioned in literature or on tombstones, but never seem to be represented in images? Why can we find no images of the‘ essedarii ’ (‘chariot-fighters’), so often referred to in written sources?
    A telling case is one of the most startling and now most frequently reproduced images of any fighter in the arena: a unique bronze tintinnabulum (bell chimes) from Herculaneum, cast in the form of a gladiator attacking his own elongated penis which is half-transformed into a panther or wolf. Leaving aside the difficult questions of where this nightmarish creature might have been displayed, by whom and why – it is a favourite object among modern historians, who want to illustrate the complex identity of the gladiator, and especially the dangerous ambivalence of his sexuality, a subject we shall return to in Chapter 4 . In killing the animal, this fighter will castrate himself. ‘There is no more apt icon for the Roman cosmology of desire, and the place of the gladiator within it,’ as one writer has recently put it. But is he a gladiator at all, in the strict sense of the word? His headdress certainly bears little resemblance to that in other images of gladiators. Maybe we should better see him as one of the beast hunters in the arena, a much less common subject of ancient art or literature. Or maybe – and this would fit with his strangely dwarfish physique – he is meant to be a theatrical or mime artist. For all his fame in modern accounts of gladiatorial combat, he is a classic illustration of just how hard it is to pin images of gladiators down.
    The fact is that modern accounts which list and illustrate the different gladiatorial types plus their characteristic weapons, and define their particular roles in the arena (‘the usual tactics of the secutor were to try closing in on his adversary’s body with his shield held in front of him’, and such like), are at best over-zealous attempts to impose order on the wide diversity of evidence that survives. Different types of gladiators with different names there certainly were – but how exactly each one was equipped, what particular role they took in the fighting and how that differed over the centuries of gladiatorial display throughout the whole expanse of the Roman empire is very hard indeed to judge.

    11. The Freudian fighter? This set of chimes presents an unnerving image of self-castration. But is the figure, as many modern writers assume, really meant to be a gladiator?
    The question becomes even more tantalizing when we try to fit into the picture the authentic items of gladiatorial armour that still survive – splendid helmets, shields, protections for shoulders and legs (or perhaps arms: to be honest, it is not always clear exactly which part of the body the makers had in mind). There is a considerable quantity of this, most of it, about 80 per cent, from the gladiatorial barracks at Pompeii, excavated in the eighteenth century. At first sight, even if it is not from the Colosseum itself, this material provides precious direct evidence of what an ancient combatant in that arena would have worn, only a few years before the monument’s inauguration. And it matches up reasonably well with some of the surviving ancient images of gladiators. Yet it is far too good to be true … quite literally. Most of the helmets are lavishly decorated, embossed with figures of barbarians paying homage to the goddess ‘Roma’ (the personification of the city), of the mythical strongman Hercules and with a variety of other more or obviously appropriate scenes. It perhaps fits well with Martial’s emphasis on the arena’s sophisticated play with stories from classical mythology that one of these helmets (illustration 12) is decorated with figures of the Muses. It is also extremely