Sharpe's Arena

[NoXion]

Richard Sharpe and his encounter with the Gladiators

Had this idea on the way back from work. Not sure if this is the right sub-forum for it.

Not long after the events of Sharpe's Sword, a bored Random Omnipotent Being plucks Our Hero from his home reality and dumps him in the Colosseum in Rome at the height of its Gladiatorial days, but not before informing Sharpe that should he be victorious in the coming battle, he'll get a free ticket home back to the exact place and time he was taken, with optional memory wipe or alteration to his encounter being a particularly vivid dream.

Richard Sharpe has all of the weapons and equipment he normally carries at the time specified, except that he will find that all of his powder is missing.

Our Hero has a choice of opponents:

1. The Retiarius

2. The Murmillo

3. The Hoplomachus

4. The Crupellarius

5. The Laquearius (if non-joke versions ever existed)

6. The Thraex

This is will be a one-on-one fight under standard conditions of the Roman Imperial period. I'm not sure how Sharpe's status as a barbarian would change things, if at all. Assume that ROB arranges things so that he is allowed to actually win.

Which of the opponents offer the best chances of success for Sharpe? Which ones would present the biggest challenge? Which one would Sharpe choose based on his own knowledge and experience of combat?

[Zaune]

The gladiator will get his arse handed to him. For the most part the games were the WWE of the age; pure entertainment where (with a few well-publicised exceptions) nobody got seriously hurt except by accident. Pit a gladiator against a professional soldier who's never heard of kayfabe and wouldn't give a shit if he had and they're going to have a bad, bad time.

[NoXion]

Interesting. I didn't think that Gladiator fights were that tame. Here's a quote from a listicle from History.com:

They didn’t always fight to the death.

Hollywood movies and television shows often depict gladiatorial bouts as a bloody free-for-all, but most fights operated under fairly strict rules and regulations. Contests were typically single combat between two men of similar size and experience. Referees oversaw the action, and probably stopped the fight as soon as one of the participants was seriously wounded. A match could even end in a stalemate if the crowd became bored by a long and drawn out battle, and in rare cases, both warriors were allowed to leave the arena with honor if they had put on an exciting show for the crowd.

Since gladiators were expensive to house, feed and train, their promoters were loath to see them needlessly killed. Trainers may have taught their fighters to wound, not kill, and the combatants may have taken it upon themselves to avoid seriously hurting their brothers-in-arms. Nevertheless, the life of a gladiator was usually brutal and short. Most only lived to their mid-20s, and historians have estimated that somewhere between one in five or one in 10 bouts left one of its participants dead.

The estimation at the end of the quote strongly suggests that Gladiator fights were significantly more lethal than today's WWE, though. If the Wiki page on Gladiators is to be believed (and I'm sure that Thanas or some other member more familiar with the subject can weigh in here), the lower social standing of Gladiators and the constant stream of bodies supplied by Imperial Rome's adventures abroad supports that suggestion.

I'm guessing that a key factor in whether a given Gladiator would stand a chance against Sharpe would be how much battlefield (as opposed to arena) experience they have. Some random lower-class Roman signing up for the chance of celebrity would get rapidly murdered, but a captured military veteran? Might have more of a chance, I would have thought.