The Retiarius: Ladyboy of the Gladiatorial Arena

Not as hard as he looks, apparently

I've always thought that retiarii, the gladiators who carried nets to catch their enemies and tridents to spear them, seem like really hard thugs, so I was surprised to find out that these fish-men were instead considered the lowliest and girliest form of gladiator, often reduced to opening tournaments for comic relief. Because retiarii were often paired with stronger, sword-weilding gladiators, their MO was to move quickly, dodging blows while looking for an opportunity to net and spear their prey. As they had to duck and dive they wore little armour, and this fact made them stand out as being less masculine in a society where it was strangely thought that the more armour you wore, the tougher you were. Also, the crowd were unhappy with the manner of evasion and tactics the retiarii displayed in the arena, believing that it was far more sporting for gladiators to simply go toe-to-toe and slug it out to the death in a raw test of strength.

Unlike nearly all gladiators, retiarii didn't wear helmets as they couldn't afford to compromise their vision, and this meant that the cloak of anonymity and mystique that hid famous gladiators did not cover them, and they had more in common with the naked slaves sentenced to fight to death in the arena than with their peers. Consequently, they were seen openly as slaves, rather than warriors, and were forced to live in the scummiest of quarters. The emperor Caligula made it a habit to sentence any losing retiarius to death should they survive their contest. There's a whole wealth of brilliant information out there about the different types of gladiators and how and why they fought, which is why I was disappointed when I went to Rome and there was no museum to tell me all about them, just a decaying Colliseum ravaged by time. I was forced to get my knowledge from the brilliant tv series Spartacus: Blood and Sand, which I'm sure is as historically inaccurate as it is exciting, and that would make it very inaccurate indeed. The retiarius always seemed to me like a fascinating character in the way it imaginatively subverted the original stock gladiator, maybe a forerunner in imaginative combat characters that would eventually lead to men with stretchable arms and electric shock powers in Streetfighter 2, but it sadly turns out that they were just scrubbers, shunned for their use of cunning and pace in the face of brute strength.