The gladiators are coming to North America for the first time ever — and their only stop is in Ottawa. The exhibit “Gladiators and the Colosseum – Death and Glory” will be featured this summer at the Canadian War Museum.
The display features many notable artifacts as well as details on this brutal bloodsport of combat in ancient Rome. Both the lives and deaths of the gladiators will be presented through visuals, sound and interactive components at the LeBreton Flats museum.
Mark O’Neill, president of the Canadian Museum of History and the Canadian War Museum, said in a press release that the show will be “a thrilling exhibition for all, taking audiences right into the heart of ancient Rome.”
Some of the artifacts include actual pieces of the Colosseum in addition to rare armour and weaponry from the gladiator barracks in Pompeii. There will also be a statue of a legionary’s foot. According to the museum’s pre-confederation historian Dr. Peter Macleod, that’s all that’s left of the original statue.
“Everything about the exhibition is exciting,” says Macleod; people will get to see artifacts that have never travelled to North America before. He says he believes that an Ottawa audience will find the exhibit particularly interesting because a straight line can be drawn from the Colosseum to any hockey arena in Canada.
The Ottawa Senators are also based on Roman imagery – including the team crest. The original name of the Canadian Tire Centre was “the Palladium” – part of the whole Roman iconography of the team.
“Just about anywhere you go, you will see a roughly oval building with tiered seats surrounding a playing area,” says Macleod. “When you talk about gladiators and the Colosseum you are talking about something that has carried onto the present. We still watch athletes compete in arenas, we’d just rather they don’t kill each other.”
One of the main features of the exhibition is a recreation of the experience of being in the audience at the Colosseum.
Michael Carter, chair of the department of classics at Brock University and associate professor in Roman History and Latin, says that Roman gladiatorial spectacles were a lot more complex than we’ve been led to believe by popular culture.
“The violence and the popularity of it is accurate but the idea that the Roman crowd was always thirsting for the blood of a gladiator just doesn’t match our evidence,” says Carter.
He says that there were several different types of spectacles in the Colosseum and in the other amphitheatres all over the empire. Wild beast fights, executions and gladiatorial combat are just a few examples of these scenes. There were referees who governed the fights and, contrary to popular belief, the gladiators could indeed surrender when forced to or when wounded.
“What the Romans were actually after with gladiatorial combat seems instead to be the combat itself and less so the death of a gladiator, but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a lot of killing or executing,” says Carter.
Dr. Rossella Rea, the Colosseum’s archaeological director, originally curated the exhibit. It was designed by Italian firm Contemporanea Progetti and will be brought to Ottawa by Expona, an Italian-based museum exhibition network company.
The exhibit will run from June 13 to Sept. 7.