Curators long believed this Roman statuette showed a female athlete. But high-resolution imaging reveals gladiatorial attire and a combat pose, suggesting it’s a statue of a female gladiator from ancient Rome.
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TRANSCRIPT
In a museum in Hamburg, Germany, he noticed a 2,000-year-old statuette that curators had identified as an athlete.
But he wasn't so sure.
♪♪ -It has been interpreted as a woman making some kind of athletics.
But this is impossible if you make a close examination of the statuette.
-Female athletes were a world apart from gladiators and weren't outcast in the same way.
Athletics was a leisure activity.
Being a gladiator was a notorious profession.
Alfonso uses high-resolution imagery to assess whether this statuette has been mislabeled.
-It's a very special moment for me to be able to examine her and all the details.
-Her clothing signals she can't be an athlete.
-Female athletes typically wear a tunic.
In this case, we don't see any tunic, so she is not an athlete.
Many gladiators fought with a loincloth, and female gladiators adopted that same clothing.
And very important is the knee bandages.
Athletes are never depicted with knee bandages.
However, the knee bandages are very useful in gladiators.
-The statuette wears the outfit of a gladiator, not an athlete.
But that's not all.
Previously, curators had thought the item in her hand was a cleaning tool used by Roman athletes.
But Alfonso's investigation proves it's a deadly weapon.
-That is clearly a sword.
We can see the ball at the back of the handle, typical of Roman sword.
We have a flat hand protection on top, like in the sword.
And then we have the blade.
It's possible that the blade has been bent by an accident.
So maybe originally, it was straight.
-And the statuette's pose mirrors that of her male counterparts.
-This is the victory position.
This is how gladiator fights ended.
He raised his hand with a sword on top, saying, "Okay, I am the winner, and this is my victory position."
-The victorious fighter looks to her rival on the ground.
-For me, there is no doubt that she's a gladiator.
-Hiding in plain sight for more than a century, she's the only statue of a female gladiator found so far.
And it's clear from this statuette that female fighters acted just like their male peers.
But can anything be said about the lives they led?