Style of the Week VI: Gladiator Combat

OK, so this isn't so much a style as a category. The gladiators were among the first warriors trained exclusively for sport fighting, albeit of a particularly brutal nature. The word gladiator means "one who wields a sword", so not surprisingly the training of gladiators often involved sword training. But other weapons and methods were used, for example the type of gladiator known as a retarius used a trident and a net to capture opponents' weapons.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of information about exactly what the combat style of a typical gladiator might have looked like, but there is evidence that gladiators were often trained in set of choreographed routines and that they would fight according to these sometimes in gladiatorial contests. Some archaeologists have even suggested that gladiatorial events were a sort of ancient WWE-style spectacle, although it's clear that combatants did in fact sometimes die in these contests.

Gladiators were trained in schools called ludi, the best known being the ludus magnus that was connected directly to the Roman Colosseum. There were also schools in which combatants were trained specifically to fight animals. Gladiators were owned by men called lanista, who were sort of the Don King/Dana White equivalents of their time. Sources including Epictetus and Cicero indicate that gladiatorial training was also like modern fight training in the sense that it included conditioning and dietary restrictions.

True gladiatorial spectacles, called munera, are mercifully a thing of the past. But apparently, you can still engage in the training of the gladiator.