“Unveiling the Blood and Glory: The Untold Realities of Life as a Gladiator in Ancient Rome”
We should probably also explicitly mention there were female gladiators. Female gladiators were not tied down to a singular female-only style and could also specialize in more than one style of fighting.
As for what gladiators got up to in the matches, this could be all over the map. As noted in the first game in 264 BCE, it was a three-way match between the three slave-gladiators. As the sport became more refined, however, one-on-one matches became common. That didn’t mean there weren’t, say, 74-man matches in later Roman history, because there were- massive battle royales between trained gladiators happened. However, most of the large-scale matches were between criminals whose lives were less valuable, or not at all really, rather than trained gladiators. This would eventually be a part of the experience of going to the gladiator games. Sometimes these prisoners would recreate sea battles complete with battleships, sacking of villages, and other key Roman victories. The idea was the prisoners got a chance to die like brave Roman soldiers while the masses were thoroughly entertained by their deaths. In fact, many were expected to die in these battles to the point that once during a recreation of a sea battle, emperor Claudius was misheard to be offering the prisoners a pardon; this misunderstanding caused the prisoners to revolt.
In any event, while trained gladiators did die during their less frequent multi-man battles, these were spectacles rather than the norm, at least compared to one-on-one matches.
