Servi Morituri, a gladiator performance. (How this all started.)

It was spring 2015 when the city museum of Espoo was planning on how to attract audience to its upcoming "Gladiators, Deaht and Glory" Presentation done together with the Colosseum museum of Rome. I (Arttu) am in a firm believe that it was the Idea of museum lecturer Tiuku Talvela to hire performers to create a gladiator fight show.  After a complicated recruiting shenanigans a team of three people was put together. A long time reenactor, a teacher of viking age reenacting combat and ancient artisan Julius Väliaho was chosen. With him a HEMA instructor and experienced stage combat performer Joeli Takala plus a dancer and choreographer with a background in martial arts Arttu Peltoniemi. Julius and Joeli had trained HEMA together in Grieswartt fencing club, and Arttu and Joeli had worked together in stage fight choreographs at the Finnish National Opera. The additional luck was in that everyone in the group had large and useful artisan skill set. 

The preparations for the gladiator exhibition took one year, using the same principles as with the upcoming Hirdmenn productions. (Read about those here: https://hirdmenn.blogspot.com/2022/02/an-aproach-on-discovering-historical.html) This included producing and sourcing suitable replicas of the weapons and armor, studying and training of the period training methodology, and familiarizing with the ancient pictorial sources. The museum staff filmed an Art of Craftsmanship – type of documentary for the beginnings of the preparatory work the fight show with a successful viral social media campaign. (Its in finish but you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Avzs0AFaGU.)

The equipment was used according to their closest documented counterpart, or according to general principles which were familiar for the performers. For example, the scutum was used in the way any large shield would have been used with the addition of the positions shown in roman mosaics, whereas the trident was used in the ways shown by Joachim Meÿer in his Gründtliche Beschreibung der Kunst des Fechtens for a staff or a short halberd with addition of chosen pollaxe techniques from the anonymous Le Jeu de la Hache (MS Francais 1996) and Fiore de’i Liberi’s Fior di Battaglia (MS M.383)

One of the most useful sources was unsurprisingly De Sanitate Tuenda by Galen of Pergamon. Galen worked as an archiereus (a priest/doctor) of a gladiator school in Pergamon during 160-161 A.D. where he studied the wounds patterns and training methods of the gladiators, and wrote down 32 different ways that the gladiators trained. Not only did he operate successfully on seriously injured gladiators, but the reason why his writings were well known throughout the history was that later on he became the personal doctor of emperor Commodus.

Slightly later, in year 220 the Greek philosopher Lucius Flavius Philostratus described in his Gymnasticus how the Greek athletes prepared themselves for competitions using four-day training cycles. Another source for gladiatorial training was Epitoma rei Militaris by Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus in the 400s. On top of these texts, there are scattered short descriptions of gladiatorial fights mostly recorded by the members of the audience, discussing the tactics, fighting styles and equipment of different gladiators. The pictorial evidence provided by Roman mosaics and murals show us how did the gladiators look like. Finally, the probable cause of death findings from 67 gladiator skeletons, dated to year 2 A.D. in a graveyard in Ephesus show that the fights were violent but governed by a set of rules.

The 30 minute fight exhibition containing three gladiator fights was choreographed entirely based on the above findings. The exhibition was was well received by the audiences and critics alike, and was acclaimed by classical historians, the museum staff and news media, including the national broadcast company YLE and the country’s largest newspaper Helsingin Sanomat: “Everything shows that the gladiators of Servi Morituri group have prepared meticulously for their task” — HS
(Read the whole newspaper article here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ain09cRKsQna-hKyQvLBiKGseG2eaPv9/view?usp=sharing )

With this in mind it was a disappointment that the concept proved to be difficult to sell for booking agencies afterwards. Even though the planned reprise for the show is an unfulfilled dream at this point, the project is stored for safekeeping with existing marketing material, well documented choreographs and the weapons and armor maintained in the inventory. Even thou today Hirdmenn group is focusing mainly on viking age fighting our love for gladiator- and other roman era fighting has not faded.