Gladiator, multiple Oscar-winner in 2001, brought the brutality of the Roman arena to audiences worldwide. The word ‘gladiator’ is often used in modern times to describe someone engaged in an adversarial contest. For example, in Some Aspects of the Victorian Age (1918), Herbert Henry Asquith described the pro-Darwin T H Huxley as ‘the young gladiator of evolution.’
The term appeared first in English in Thomas Paynell’s 1541 The Conspiracie of Lucius Catiline, a translation from the Latin of Costanzo Felici’s 1518 De Coniuratione L Catilinae. In the Paynell version, Cicero tells the Senate that ‘If I had demed it best… to put Catiline to deth, I wolde not haue giuen this gladiatour one houre space to liue.’
Gladius was a general Latin word for ‘sword’. A gladiator was someone who fought with a gladius – a swordsman. As usually employed today, gladius refers to a double-edged short sword.
Excavating the CA archive: Great sites associated with the early church