‘Gladiators: Heroes of the Colosseum’ arrives in Leeds at the Royal Armouries Museum

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For the first time in the UK, the internationally acclaimed exhibition ‘Gladiators: Heroes of the Colosseum’ has arrived at the Royal Armouries Museum, delving into the dramatic world of ancient Rome’s most revered warriors.

Transcript

00:00Variators, Heroes of the Colosseum is a really exciting exhibition for all sorts of reasons.

00:06The first reason that we're very excited is it's our first big international touring exhibition

00:12here at the Royal Armouries for a very, very long time.

00:15After a lot of work, we've spent well over a million pounds preparing the space to accommodate

00:20exhibitions and we wanted to bring something people just wouldn't have seen before.

00:24It's been created in partnership with the Colosseum in Rome, but bringing in lots of

00:28objects from Naples which survived the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and thanks to the eruption

00:36have preserved an absolutely perfect record of gladiators, their weapons, their armour.

00:42The Italians' contemporane progetti, who are the Italian designers, they've been all over

00:47the world. They've been touring this exhibition since 2013, so it's amazing to have them here

00:52and they've been absolutely fantastic. They've completely understood what we were after in

00:56terms of the arms and armour story, but also of the men and women as well who would have

01:00fought in the arena, their stories, where they came from and what we could expect to see if

01:05you or I had gone to a day at the amphitheatre.

01:08There's lots of insight into the day-to-day life. So one is that actually gladiators got

01:12paid quite a lot. Well, unless you were a condemned criminal, in which case it was a punishment.

01:17But if you went in as a freelancer, you could earn up to 12,000 Sesterci, which was quite

01:23a lot of money for being a gladiator. So it wasn't just slaves, it wasn't just criminals,

01:27it wasn't just prisoners. It was also adventurers, people with debts to pay, people who were seeking

01:32glory and fame. Another thing that we learned is they didn't all die. They were expensive to train.

01:38And some of the professional gladiators were real specialists. They were superstars.

01:42One of the main things that's really stuck with me is their nickname during the Roman period would

01:47have been barley men or barley eaters. And their diets, we know from some archaeological studies,

01:53it was mainly vegetarian, which really surprised me and I think might have surprised a lot of our

01:58visitors. During the course of the exhibition, we have a make and take where you can come and make

02:01your own gladiator helmets. We've got our live interpretation who are acting out some gladiatorial

02:07dramas for you. And we're also in the August bank holiday, instead of our joust this year,

02:12we have a Roman festival. It's just a slice of life from ancient Rome that tells us a story,

02:18which is a very old story, but it's also got some very, very close echoes to our own lives.

02:24When you're looking at these objects, they are now the oldest things we have in the museum,

02:28nearly 2000 years old. And the quality and the craftsmanship and the completeness of them,

02:34they are, they're really special. The armories have developed over the last 30 years since we've

02:39been in Leeds, a real language of bringing history to life through tournaments, jousts and combat

02:46demonstrations. If you like, we are the inheritors of that gladiatorial tradition today. And we've tried

02:51to keep it alive, not just for sort of prurient entertainment reasons, but also because there are

02:57some important historical lessons to learn.

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