Gladiatorial Combat (Munus)
A Roman public spectacle with fixed rules and deliberately paired armaments; the first recorded bout dates to 264 BC.
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About Gladiatorial Combat (Munus)
Gladiatorial combat was a Roman public spectacle in which trained fighters, differently armed, met each other under fixed rules. It was not a martial art in today's sense but a profession and a theatrical form: Roman sources place the first such fight in 264 BC, when the sons of Junius Brutus Pera staged it as a funeral rite, a munus, in honour of their dead father. Over the course of the republic the funeral offering turned into political spectacle, and under the empire into a regular industry with an economy of its own. Gladiators trained in schools called ludi under the eye of an owner, the lanista; the largest of them, the Ludus Magnus, stood right beside the Colosseum and was joined to it by an underground passage. The equipment was divided into types that were deliberately matched against one another so that opposing advantages met: the murmillo with a large shield and short sword against the Thracian with a small shield and a curved dagger, the sica, or the retiarius with net and trident against the secutor, whose smooth helmet with small eye-holes was designed so that the net could not catch on it. The bout was run by a referee, the summa rudis, and by no means always ended in death, because a trained gladiator was expensive property; reprieve for the loser was common, and freedom was symbolised by a wooden sword, the rudis. Most fighters were slaves, convicts and prisoners of war, a minority volunteers.
Similar styles
Selected by overlap in the style profile, not by historical lineage.