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‘Gladiators: Heroes of the Colosseum’ arrives in Leeds at the Royal Armouries Museum
National World - LocalTV
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27/06/2025
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.
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00:00
Variators, Heroes of the Colosseum is a really exciting exhibition for all sorts of reasons.
00:06
The first reason that we're very excited is it's our first big international touring exhibition
00:12
here at the Royal Armouries for a very, very long time.
00:15
After a lot of work, we've spent well over a million pounds preparing the space to accommodate
00:20
exhibitions and we wanted to bring something people just wouldn't have seen before.
00:24
It's been created in partnership with the Colosseum in Rome, but bringing in lots of
00:28
objects from Naples which survived the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 and thanks to the eruption
00:36
have preserved an absolutely perfect record of gladiators, their weapons, their armour.
00:42
The Italians' contemporane progetti, who are the Italian designers, they've been all over
00:47
the world. They've been touring this exhibition since 2013, so it's amazing to have them here
00:52
and they've been absolutely fantastic. They've completely understood what we were after in
00:56
terms of the arms and armour story, but also of the men and women as well who would have
01:00
fought in the arena, their stories, where they came from and what we could expect to see if
01:05
you or I had gone to a day at the amphitheatre.
01:08
There's lots of insight into the day-to-day life. So one is that actually gladiators got
01:12
paid quite a lot. Well, unless you were a condemned criminal, in which case it was a punishment.
01:17
But if you went in as a freelancer, you could earn up to 12,000 Sesterci, which was quite
01:23
a lot of money for being a gladiator. So it wasn't just slaves, it wasn't just criminals,
01:27
it wasn't just prisoners. It was also adventurers, people with debts to pay, people who were seeking
01:32
glory and fame. Another thing that we learned is they didn't all die. They were expensive to train.
01:38
And some of the professional gladiators were real specialists. They were superstars.
01:42
One of the main things that's really stuck with me is their nickname during the Roman period would
01:47
have been barley men or barley eaters. And their diets, we know from some archaeological studies,
01:53
it was mainly vegetarian, which really surprised me and I think might have surprised a lot of our
01:58
visitors. During the course of the exhibition, we have a make and take where you can come and make
02:01
your own gladiator helmets. We've got our live interpretation who are acting out some gladiatorial
02:07
dramas for you. And we're also in the August bank holiday, instead of our joust this year,
02:12
we have a Roman festival. It's just a slice of life from ancient Rome that tells us a story,
02:18
which is a very old story, but it's also got some very, very close echoes to our own lives.
02:24
When you're looking at these objects, they are now the oldest things we have in the museum,
02:28
nearly 2000 years old. And the quality and the craftsmanship and the completeness of them,
02:34
they are, they're really special. The armories have developed over the last 30 years since we've
02:39
been in Leeds, a real language of bringing history to life through tournaments, jousts and combat
02:46
demonstrations. If you like, we are the inheritors of that gladiatorial tradition today. And we've tried
02:51
to keep it alive, not just for sort of prurient entertainment reasons, but also because there are
02:57
some important historical lessons to learn.
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