Female gladiators shocked the ancient Roman world — but not for the reason you think

“There were female gladiators and there’s no doubt about that.”

That's the assessment of historian Harry Sidebottom, author of Those Who Are About to Die: Gladiators and the Roman Mind, speaking on an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast.

A female gladiator is an image that challenges what many think they know about the role of gladiatorial combat in the Roman empire, and the role of women in ancient Rome more broadly. Or does it?

In fact, Sidebottom argues, the role of female gladiators wasn’t a subversive example of female empowerment. Instead, it was designed as a spectacle to shock and delight audiences, intentionally playing with preconceptions – and upholding them.

Still, it’s a hard image to reconcile with what we know of the gladiatorial games, and women’s lives across the Roman empire.

So how should we understand the presence of female gladiators in a society that imposed such strict regulations on women’s behaviour? And how does it fit into the broader story of gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome, and the way in which it evolved through antiquity?

Sidebottom has some of the answers.

Gladiatorial combat: a Roman spectacle with mysterious beginnings

Even the Romans were unsure how their most famous form of entertainment began.

“Ancient writers said it was an import from the south, from Campania. [Others] said no, it was an import from the north, from Etruria,” Sidebottom explains. Their disagreement reflects how far back the practice reached, well before gladiators became imperial icons.

Despite the uncertainty, Sidebottom notes that “the one thing they all agreed on was that gladiatorial combat was an import to Rome.” That claim wasn’t a denial of ownership so much as an affirmation of Roman cultural pride. Sidebottom explains that the attitude was that: “We Romans take the best from everything else in the world… and we then perfect it, transform it, adopt it, adapt it and make it ours.”

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The earliest evidence of gladiatorial games from Rome indicated that this combat, wherever it was imported from, was initially tied to funerary rituals, where fighters battled in honour of the dead.

But by the late Republic, the arena had become a distinctly political theatre. Julius Caesar’s lavish games, staged to commemorate relatives who had died decades earlier, show how far the custom drifted from those roots, and its main purpose was now a display of reputation-bolstering public entertainment.

How the arena became Roman imperial propaganda

By the time Caesar’s successor Augustus established the principate (the first period of the Roman empire, 27 BC–284 AD), gladiatorial games had become integral to public life. Roman emperors were expected to act as patrons, offering grand spectacles of entertainment to secure loyalty among the city’s masses.

As Sidebottom puts it, emperors became “the ultimate patron of the plebs” and were hugely popular. With imperial sponsorship came larger crowds, grander staging and an appetite for novelty.

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Romans prized variation as well as violence, with hosts of the games keen to find new and surprising ways to entertain. It was within this atmosphere that female gladiators took to the arena.

So, what exactly was a ‘gladiatrix’?

The term gladiatrix is modern, but the women themselves are historical fact. Evidence includes a carved relief from the ruins of Halicarnassus (near modern-day Bodrum, Turkey), plus a few inscriptions and references by Roman writers. It’s scant evidence, but Sidebottom says it collectively confirms that women did, at times, fight in the arena.

The real question is what role they played.

The role of Rome’s female gladiators

On that, Sidebottom is cautious. “The debate is: were they serious gladiators, or were they a novelty act?” On balance, he believes their purpose was spectacle rather than elite competition. “It was confounding gender expectations; it was women doing things that men did.”

This doesn’t diminish the danger they faced. Even if staged for astonishment, their bouts likely still involved real weapons and real risk. But it did mark them out as different from their male counterparts.

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Many forms of Roman entertainment relied on dramatic inversion, temporarily upending norms to delight or shock spectators. Men acted as animals and some emperors played enslaved people in mock performances in front of delighted crowds.

Female gladiators fit that pattern. Roman moralists insisted that respectable women stay out of the public gaze and avoid any association with bloodshed. To see a woman step into the arena – armed and on display – created a deliberate clash between expectation and reality. The appeal highlighted the transgression, thereby enforcing it, rather than contradicting it as some Roman form of female empowerment.

Their rarity amplified this effect. A female fighter would have been an event precisely because she was unusual.

In that way, the female gladiators illuminate a great deal about Roman society. They demonstrate how the arena functioned not only as a site of violence, but as a stage for political messaging and social commentary. Their fights exploited the thrill of seeing boundaries broken, while upholding and reinforcing the structures that created those boundaries outside the amphitheatre.

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They also highlight how gladiatorial combat was the product of centuries of Roman adaptation. As Sidebottom notes, Romans of all periods agreed on its broad evolution: from funerary rite to mass entertainment, and eventually to an imperial tool of persuasion.

Within that long story, the gladiatrix embodied both the transgression of norms and the sensational drama that kept an empire entertained.

Harry Sidebottom was speaking to Rachel Dinning on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.