feminish

Londoners may half-remember that 6 years ago archaeologists claimed to have found the magnificent grave of a female gladiator in Southwark.

It made a sexy press release and a few news-waves at the time, but was it really true? Was the woman whose body they dug up just off Great Dover Street really one of the Roman Empire’s fearless gladiatrices? This week an excellent article trying to find the answer has become very popular over at digg.

I got clicking and looking and had fun skipping around at gladiatrix.info. I was really struck by the contrast between eroticised images of female gladiators produced now, when gladiatrices are just film characters, computer game icons or porn objects:

…And a contemporary image from Roman times, when gladiatrices were actually tough, real, formidable human beings:

What’s impressive about the Roman image (of ‘Amazon and Achillia’) is that the gladiatrices seem (as far as I can tell) just simply human - they’re not oozing their femaleness, their bums aren’t stupendously oversized, no breasts getting in the way, no tantalisingly skimpy skirts - they’re just fighters.

Perhaps the Romans’ sexy pictures of gladiatrices weren’t carved on stone but painted on scraps of paper or wall and haven’t survived?

Historians don’t have much to go on, but they do know that for Roman commentator Juvenal, a gladiatrix was in fact sexualised, but grotesquely rather than deliciously. He hated to “Hear her grunt and groan as she works at it, parrying, thrusting… Panting and sweating like this.”

Who needs a gladiatrix in Southwark when you’ve got Wimbledon?

quote is from Juvenal, Satire 6.246-267 as cited in Grant, M. Gladiators (1967), p. 34