ANCIENT ROME'S FIGHT CLUB

REAL GLADIATORS WEREN’T QUITE LIKE THOSE IN MOVIES. THEIR BATTLES WERE MORE ABOUT PUTTING ON A GOOD SHOW THAN KILLING ONE ANOTHER.

- ANDREW CURRY

CHAPTER I

ARLES, FRANCE

THE TUNNEL UNDER THE ROMAN AMPHITHEATER in Arles, France, is dark and cool. The shade is a welcome relief from the blazing Mediterranean sun beating down on the amphitheater’s sand-strewn arena and stone bleachers.

The gladiator helmet I’ve just put on, though, is stifling. A replica of the head protection worn by a Roman gladiator almost 2,000 years ago, the dented, scratched helmet weighs more than 13 pounds—three times as heavy as a football helmet, and far less comfortable. It has a tangy metallic smell, as though I’ve put my head inside a sweaty penny.

Through the bronze grate covering my eyes, I can make out a pair of men in loincloths warming up for a fight. Metal armguards jingle as one bounces on the balls of his feet, his stubby, hooked sword clutched in a leather-gloved hand. As I shift uncomfortably, his partner lifts his sword and offers to hit me in the head, just to demonstrate how solid the helmet is.

I shrug. Anything for a story, right? Then their trainer, a deeply tanned, wiry Frenchman named Brice Lopez, intervenes. “He’s not trained for it,” Lopez says sharply. “He doesn’t have the muscles. You’d snap his neck.”

A former French police officer and combat trainer with a black belt in jujitsu, Lopez knows what a real fight looks like. Twenty-seven years ago he took a detour into ancient fighting styles. After commissioning working replicas of gladiator weapons and armor, he spent years thinking about how they’d be used in a fight to the death like the ones portrayed in countless movies and books about gladiators.