The word gladiatrix did not exist at the height of the Roman Empire; it surfaces in the fourth or fifth century, and even then as part of a mocking pun. Yet women did fight in the arena, appearing in spectacles staged by Nero in 66 AD and Domitian around 89 AD and earning honorable draws that rivaled any male match.

This episode examines the Halicarnassus relief showing Amazonia and Achillia with the word missio, the mystery of how these fighters trained without any known women’s ludus, the concept of infamia, the ban of 22 BC, the Larinum Decree of 19 AD, and Septimius Severus’s blanket prohibition around 200 AD. It closes with the Great Dover Street Woman found in Southwark, London, in 2001 and the debate over whether her grave goods mark her as a gladiator.

• Why the collegia iuvenum theory of women’s combat training is rejected by most modern archaeologists
• What the Ostia inscription boasting of mulieres rather than feminae reveals about class anxiety
• Juvenal’s satire of a woman hunting boars in the arena and what it says about elite fears of social decline
• Why gladiators formed burial clubs and were interred outside respectable cemeteries
• Anubis lamps, a fallen-gladiator lamp, and burnt stone pine cones as clues linking a London burial to the amphitheater