As a fight to the death reached its end around 1,800 years ago, a victorious lion sank its teeth into a young man’s thigh bone. Those feline bite marks, preserved on a skeleton interred in northeast ...

Lions, tigers, and bears. These, among many other exotic animals, are the beasts with which gladiators did battle in amphitheaters across the Roman empire. It’s a spectacle that has long captured the ...

Wed, April 23, 2025 at 6:00 PM UTC Gladiators, for instance, fought each other—and often animals—to the death in arenas where bloodier was better. Ancient Romans often delighted in watching carnivores ...

1st century C.E. Roman relief portraying gladiators and lions fighting. Roman gladiators’ fights to the death have inspired morbid fascination for millennia. But for something seemingly so ...

The Roman Empire remains a cinematic staple, and here are the best movies to explore the era's scale and scandals.

A Roman oil lamp shows two female gladiators fighting like men—strong visual proof women fought. An ordinary Roman oil lamp shows two gladiators with unmistakably female features, fighting in the same ...

Ancient Roman gladiators were often pitted against animals in the arena—animals capable of killing a human being. Skeletal remains in a Roman burial ground in northern England were found to have ...