Were there female gladiators in ancient Rome?

The Roman Empire is famous for its arenas like the Colosseum where gladiators fought each other in gory skirmishes. But were any of these gladiators ever women?

Several lines of evidence, including historical records and artistic depictions, suggest that female gladiators did exist in the Roman Empire, but they were much rarer than their male counterparts.

However, this evidence is limited to roughly a dozen texts and inscriptions, and an even smaller number of artifacts that depict them. For instance the Roman senate passed laws in A.D. 11 and A.D. 19 banning upper class women and freeborn women under age 20 from fighting as gladiators. And another text mentions that around A.D. 200, emperor Septimius Severus banned female gladiators because after one show, jokes about the fierceness of the women were "directed at other very prominent women" (translation by Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant).

Who were the female gladiators?

In Rome, women tended to be excluded from politics and could not serve in the military. However, they did have some freedoms, and some ran their own businesses or worked as doctors. They could also own property and make contracts.

But less is known about female gladiators, so it can be difficult to know who they were and how they competed.

That said, the vast majority of male gladiators were enslaved people, and this was probably also true for female gladiators. There were different ways a person could become a slave: they could be enslaved after a war, as punishment for a crime or for unpaid debts, or for other reasons.

"I believe women-gladiators were primarily slaves who committed crimes," Anna Miączewska, a lecturer at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Poland who has extensively researched and written about female gladiators, told Live Science in an email. She noted that another source of female gladiators could have been free women with high debts who were forced to sell their freedom to a gladiator school.

However, there were exceptions. A few male gladiators included people from the upper echelons of society — perhaps most famously the Roman emperor Commodus (ruled from A.D. 176 to 192), who dressed as the god Mercury and made the senate watch his triumphant battles, likely to send a message about his power. Likewise, ancient texts suggest a few women from the upper classes also competed as gladiators.

The ancient Roman writer Tacitus (lived circa A.D. 56 to 120) wrote that in A.D. 63, during the reign of Nero, a large gladiator show was put on by the emperor, during which "many distinguished ladies and senators disgraced themselves in the arena." (Translation by Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant.)

How did female gladiators compete?

Male gladiators tended to wear a helmet and potentially other forms of armor. They competed as specialized fighters, such as a retiarius, who battled with a net and trident. Gladiators did this after some level of training, potentially at a gladiator school. While some male gladiator fights resulted in the loser being killed at the end, not all did, and having gladiators die could be costly to those charged with putting on a show.

There is a lot of uncertainty as to how female gladiators competed and how they were selected and trained. A relief from Halicarnassus in what is now Turkey depicts two female gladiators holding shields and swords with the stage names "Amazon vs Achillia" (names likely based on mythology).

Stephen Brunet, a professor emeritus of classics at the University of New Hampshire, noted in a chapter of the book "A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman Antiquity" (Wiley, 2013) that the two women are shown wearing armor associated with a "provocator" — a gladiator type that was meant to look somewhat like a Roman soldier. And, just like many male gladiators, the women are shown fighting bare-breasted. The women also don't appear to wear helmets, although it could be that the artist didn't include them, Brunet wrote. An inscription says that the women were "released while still standing" with neither of them being killed.

Another is a statuette of a female gladiator. It shows a female gladiator holding a short, curved dagger called a sica, a type of weapon used by a type of gladiator called a "thraex." However, just like the relief, the female gladiator wears no helmet and wears only a loincloth and a wrapping on her knee.

How were female gladiators selected?

Alfonso Mañas, a researcher at the University of California Berkeley who identified the statuette as a female gladiator in 2011, told Live Science in an email that he suspects that appearances played a sizable role in the selection of female gladiators. Mañas noted that one of the earliest sources to mention female gladiators was Nicolaus of Damascus (lived circa 64 B.C. to A.D. 4), who wrote that the women who were selected to fight were not the strongest or most skilled but rather "the most beautiful." This text indicates that the person sponsoring the gladiator contest had a considerable amount of influence over which women fought.

Mañas said that the textual references often refer to female gladiators performing in shows put on by Roman emperors. The use of female gladiators was likely a "very expensive and exclusive show, strongly associated with the emperor, so that it would be offered on very few occasions," he said.

Female gladiators were likely told to not wear helmets so that their faces could be seen by the audience, Mañas said. He also suspects that they would have been prohibited from fighting to the death, noting that none of the written sources mention a female gladiator dying. Furthermore, no tombstone of a female gladiator has ever been found, despite the more than 1,000 tombstones of male gladiators that have been documented.

In "Rome no one expected a woman to be skilled with weapons, brave in combat, or have to face death by fighting," Mañas said. The rules and perhaps weapons would likely have been modified somewhat to reduce the risk of death, Mañas noted.

Virginia Campbell, a lecturer at The Open University in the U.K. who has studied gladiators extensively, thinks that physical fitness likely played a role in the selection of female gladiators. Because "there is an expense associated with training and keeping gladiators, the selection of women — and men — would at least in part depend on their physical fitness, and ability to fight," Campbell told Live Science in an email. "Gladiators, after all, were meant to entertain, not meant to die, so it would be in the best interest of the [owner] to make smart choices in picking their [fighters]."

Even if beauty was emphasized, some audience members were impressed with the way they fought. The poet Statius (lived A.D. 45 to 96) wrote of the female gladiators fighting in one show that "you would think a band of Amazons was battling by the river Tanais…" (translation by Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant).