The Roman poet Martial recorded vivid descriptions of gladiatorial combat, including a rare reference that suggests women fought in the arena. But because his manuscripts were copied by hand over centuries, can these accounts be trusted?
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TRANSCRIPT
-If we are trying to find out about female gladiators in the ancient world, then this book is pretty much as close as we can come to an eyewitness account.
This book here are the collected poems of Martial, who was a Roman poet who lived in the 1st Century AD.
This book is very exciting.
It's just so beautiful.
-Over the centuries, Martial's poems were copied by scholars and clerics, preserving his vivid descriptions of the Roman games.
-They comprise all sorts of different spectacles, from gladiatorial combat to aquatic displays and animal displays.
-But are there any references to women?
-There's a couplet, just two lines, which appear to be about women performing in spectacle.
And the first couplet makes a comparison between Mars, the god of war, and Venus, the goddess of love.
But both of them are wearing armor in the service of the emperor, which seems to refer to a male fighter and a female fighter.
-Here, women are mentioned appearing alongside men in the arena.
It's a tantalizing clue.
But can it be trusted?
-You can imagine how many mistakes could creep in in that time when you're copying everything by hand.
And in fact one really stupid mistake has come into this book, which is that we've got the 14 numbered books of Martial's epigrams.
And then a 15th book was added, which we know is not by Martial at all.
But obviously the person who copied the manuscript thought that it was by Martial.
-This extraordinary mistake is a reminder that written work can be misidentified, misunderstood, or even overlooked.
It's a good starting point, but the hunt for female gladiators has just begun.
-If we're on the scent of the clues that Martial gives us in this book, then we want to see if we can find other evidence to back this up, which indicate that this was a known phenomenon, a fighting woman in the ancient world.
-Martial gives a rare glimpse of a woman appearing before the amphitheater crowd, but her exact role remains unclear.
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