Gladiator combat: not a blood sport after all?
Rebecca Lann
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg18524834.400
by Emma Young -- Gladiators' combat had become a martial art by the
beginning of the first millennium, according to a controversial theory
based on reconstructing the fighters' tactics from Roman artefacts and
medieval fight books.
To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad
fighting skills rather than fight for their lives, argues archaeologist
Steve Tuck of the University of Miami. "Gladiatorial combat is seen as
being related to killing and shedding blood," he says. "But I think
that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial art that was
spectator-oriented."
Gladiatorial art adorns everything from cheap Roman lamps to gems to
large-scale wall paintings. Tuck focused on the tactics used by pairs
of gladiators in one-to-one combat, rather than mass battles or staged
events, and examined 158 images that show active combat, such as a
gladiator pinning down an opponent, his shield and sword on the ground.
To try to better understand what these scenes show, he turned to the
pages of fighting and martial arts manuals produced in Germany and
northern Italy in medieval and Renaissance times. These manuals
provided instruction in everything from sword-fighting to wrestling.
They are a good parallel for gladiatorial combat, Tuck argues, in part
because opponents were professionals who used similar arms and armour.
"And they're incredibly important because they show sequences of moves,
and have accompanying descriptions," he says.
>From the manuals and art, Tuck infers that there were often three
critical moments in the course of a gladiatorial bout. The first was
initial contact, with both gladiators, fully armed, moving forwards and
going for a body shot. The second was when one gladiator is wounded and
seeks to distance himself from his opponent. In the third both
gladiators drop their shields, seemingly undamaged, before grappling
with each other, he says.
In the fight books, this act of throwing down weapons and shields to
grapple was a common way to conclude a fight, without necessarily
intending to finish off an opponent. Judging from the Roman art, the
same happened during gladiatorial bouts, says Tuck.
Other scholars have interpreted the art differently. "What Tuck
identifies as grappling has been convincingly explained in other ways,
for example, as part of the ritual immediately prior to the dispatch of
a defeated gladiator," says one expert, who prefers to remain
anonymous.
But the fight books, which were largely translated only in the past
five years, provide new insights, Tuck counters. "The major issue is
how pairs got on the ground, and why they are consistently shown
without their shields," he says. And there are literary references to
gladiators being trained to subdue without bloodshed, and also evidence
that by the 2nd century AD, gladiators were very expensive, suggesting
that deaths and bleeding were no longer the point of the entertainment.
(c) Reed Business Information Ltd.
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