Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Gladiator School Discovery Reveals Hard Lives of Ancient Warriors
Archaeologists have mapped an ancient gladiator school, where the famed warriors lived, trained, and fought
Discovered at the site of Carnuntum outside Vienna, Austria, the gladiatorial school, or ludus gladiatorius, is the first one discovered outside the city of Rome. Now hidden beneath a pasture, the gladiator school was entirely mapped with noninvasive earth-sensing technologies. (See "Gladiator Training Camp.")
The discovery, reported Tuesday evening by the journal Antiquity, makes clear what sort of lives these famous ancient warriors led during the second century A.D. in the Roman Empire.
"It was a prison; they were prisoners," says University of Vienna archaeologist Wolfgang Neubauer, who led the study team. "They lived in cells, in a fortress with only one gate out."
The discovery shows that even outside Rome gladiators were "big business," Neubauer says. At least 80 gladiators, likely more, lived in the large, two-story facility equipped with a practice arena in its central courtyard. The site also included heated floors for winter training, baths, infirmaries, plumbing, and a nearby graveyard.
Prisoners of Rome
The gladiators were clearly valued slaves, Neubauer says, kept apart and separate from the town of Carnuntum, which was founded on the Danube River by the Emperor Hadrian in A.D. 124 and later became a Roman stronghold.
"The find at Carnuntum gives us a vivid impression of what it was like to live and train as a gladiator on the chilly northern border of the Roman Empire," says gladiator expert Kathleen Coleman of Harvard, who was not part of the study team.
Although more than 100 gladiator schools were built throughout the Roman Empire, the only known remnants are in Rome, Carnuntum, and Pompeii (which had small, private gladiatorial grounds). Within the 118,400-square-foot (11,000-square-meter) walled compound at the Austrian site, gladiators trained year-round for combat at a nearby public amphitheater.
"They weren't killed very often, they were too valuable," Neubauer says. "Lots of other people were likely killed at the amphitheater, people not trained to fight. And there was lots of bloodshed. But the combat between gladiators was the point of them performing, not them killing each other."
This map of the gladiator school reveals that it was like a fortress or prison.
Tight Quarters
The gladiators slept in 32-square-foot (3-square-meter) cells, home to one or two people. Those cells were kept separate from a wing holding bigger rooms for their trainers, known as magistri, themselves retired survivors of gladiatorial combat who specialized in teaching one style of weaponry and fighting.
"The similarities show that gladiators were housed and trained in the provinces in the same way as in the metropolis
Escape From Socialism...
Apparently, Americans Aged 18-29 Have A More Favorable Response To Socialism Than To Capitalism...
Perhaps after they see what happens to New York after the socialist mayor is done with it will change their minds...
Regional music listening preferences
So... Florida's favorite artist is Rick Ross? never heard of him.... I stand with Delaware...if I had to choose a State..
This guy has too much time on his hands: http://musicmachinery.com/2014/02/25/exploring-regional-listening-preferences/
The Race to the Bottom - The U.S. Plummets To #46 In Global Press Freedom Rankings... Tyranny Rising..
Once Obama successfully gets his FCC government minders in newsrooms, we won't be able to report on our ranking anymore. We will have already sunk into a dystopian socialist tyranny.
The IRS scandal: it's even worse than we feared
Last week the Heritage Foundation held a lunchtime conference to discuss the latest developments in what it calls 'Taxing the First Amendment: Using the IRS to Censor Speech?'. I'm going to post the entire hour-plus video of the conference below, but I wanted to first highlight five very short excerpts from a post-conference interview provided to the Powerline blog by one of the speakers, Cleta Mitchell. She's an attorney who's represented several clients facing IRS abuse over the past few years. In these short excerpts, she highlights an agency that appears to be completely out of control, and blames both the Democratic and Republican parties for their blind refusal to apply the law to the bureaucrats concerned. The five clips together total less than twelve minutes in length, and are well worth your viewing time.
Video 1 of 5
The Other 4 Videos Are HERE
Video 1 of 5
The Other 4 Videos Are HERE
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Marco Rubio Eviscerates Democratic Senator Tom Harkin After Harkin Praised Cuba ...
Why do Democrats continue to love countries that destroy freedom of speech and freedom?
Because they don't believe in freedom of speech and freedom when they are in control.
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