Alexandra Sills is an independent scholar and public ancient historian from the UK. After decades of chatting to the public about history during her museum, heritage site and tour guiding career, she was persuaded to undertake a degree in her first love, the history of ancient Greece and Rome, in her 30s. She earned a first class degree in Classical Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London, before achieving a distinction for her MA in The Classical Mediterranean at the University of Leicester. The hard work paid off, and she has since appeared on multiple podcasts as an expert guest, lectured in museums across the country, featured in a documentary, published several academic papers and written a slew of articles for the general public. Proving that life actually does begin at 40, her debut book ‘Gladiators in the Greek World: How a Roman Bloodsport Took Ancient Greece by Storm will be released in the summer of 2026.
In truth, I didn’t choose my research niche when I was casting around for undergrad dissertation ideas; it’s a topic I’d been pondering even before I enrolled. I’ve been fascinated by gladiators ever since seeing a full-scale re-enactment show in an amphitheatre in southern France, where, as I sat amongst thousands of cheering spectators, I suddenly understood the ancient hype. Gladiators = adrenaline, even when the fights are bloodless and choreographed. As I started reading, I couldn’t help but notice that amphitheatres pop up everywhere in the Roman empire, but they’re actually really rare in the Greek provinces in the east, despite these being typically very wealthy areas who could well afford big monuments. Did the Greeks simply hate gladiators?
So, for my undergrad dissertation I undertook a survey of all evidence I could find of gladiatorial combats in the culturally Greek areas of the empire, and found that an absence of amphitheatres doesn’t actually indicate the absence of interest. Three scholars have already spoken at length about collected gladiatorial epigraphy in these provinces, as well as others collating inscriptions from individual sites, but I wondered why epigraphy should be the sole source of evidence considered. For my dissertation, I decided to add in artworks, osteoarchaeology, and one of my favourite aspects; alternate venues.
The scholarship that I devoured mentions Greek theatres and stadiums, some already centuries old, being subtly altered architecturally under the Roman occupation to render them safe for hosting gladiatorial spectacles. Usually, the front row of spectators had their feet resting on the orchestra or running tracks, which isn’t a problem when actors and athletes aren’t armed to the teeth. When gladiators got involved, safety measures needed to be added in a way that wouldn’t detract from the primary use of these venues. So, we start to see post holes being drilled to erect temporary safety barriers, permanent stone walls being placed between spectators and fighters, or the raising of the front rows to lift spectators a metre or more above the arena floor to keep them safe from stray blades. The adaptations were as unobtrusive as possible, as well as being far less expensive than building a separate Roman amphitheatre. These Greek venues, which held their own, deeply embedded cultural significance, could now host a foreign cultural phenomenon safely whilst retaining their original purpose and atmosphere.
The theatre of Patara, at which a safety wall of rough hewn stones was built to protect spectators. It would likely have been plastered to make it more aesthetically pleasing.
So, I didn’t discover this habit, but I noticed that whilst archaeologists were commenting on these alterations in the excavation reports of individual theatres or stadiums, nobody seemed to know how common the habit actually was. I had stumbled across a question that I could answer, and in doing so, provide some original research.
I did what I often find myself doing, and built a set of spreadsheets. I’m neurodivergent, which might explain why I gravitate towards making them so frequently, but it makes spotting anomalies or patterns in a dataset an absolute breeze. I had one set of spreadsheets regarding gladiatorial epitaphs, because I figured they deserved a fresh pair of eyes and a new perspective. Then I created another set devoted to every venue I could find that gladiators once fought in.
When it came time to choose my MA dissertation, I tossed a coin to choose which set to write about, planning to turn both (eventually) into academic papers. I decided to concentrate my dissertation on everything about epitaphs, simply because my chosen supervisor is an epigraphy whizz. Then, I set about logging every published literary and artistic depiction of each type of gladiator, and added their locations to a spreadsheet with a column for latitude, and a column for longitude. For this to work, I had separate spreadsheets for murmillones, secutors, retiarii et al. Once every spreadsheet was saved as a .csv file, I then loaded each into a free GIS software; I chose QGIS for desktop. I’ve not been formally trained in GIS building, so QGIS was a good choice for learning ‘on the job.’ The joy of a GIS is the ability to isolate each subset of data, and to display or hide each subset as you wish in order to view exactly what you need at any moment. Each uploaded spreadsheet thus becomes a ‘layer’ of points laid on top of a standard map of the chosen region. Different shaped or coloured icons for each theme made it a lot easier to digest the information when looking at multiple layers at once. I already knew from my spreadsheets that some types of gladiator were more popular than others, but now I could easily see regional differences and preferences. Then I mapped all epitaphs that mentioned Hades, or family members, or that depicted victory wreaths and palm fronds. All of this epigraphy had been catalogued before, but seeing the data mapped for the first time allowed me to spot new patterns, as well as illustrating how widely gladiator gravestones were distributed.
The eureka moment came when I added my spreadsheet of known venues. Surely, the cities with a lot of gravestones of gladiators would be the cities with identified venues, right? But that’s not what I found at all. Sure, a lot of places had gravestones and venues, but even more cities only had one type of evidence. This isn’t too unexpected, as many theatres and stadia have been located but not excavated enough to know whether they were adapted, and of course hundreds of gravestones have been destroyed or reused as building material. Both sets of data are partial, which meant that neither could be used on its own as evidence for where gladiators were, and that meant that the true distribution of cities with gladiatorial evidence is even denser and wider than previously thought. This is the kind of discovery I never would have made unless I’d taken a new, multi-disciplinary approach that looked at archaeological sites as well as texts.
2025 Excavations and restoration at Kibyra stadium in Turkey shows exactly how the stadium was altered; we can see the safety wall known as a podium wall that raises the front row of seats much higher than they were originally situated; usually achieved by cutting away the first few rows of seating altogether and neatening up the new edge with dressed stone.
If I was looking for some clear answers to every question, or solid patterns in size and distribution, I didn’t get them. I didn’t see regional preferences for one method of safety adaptation over others, for instance, and I found that it wasn’t only large venues in large cities that were investing in these changes; tiny towns wanted a taste of combat, too. But what I can say is that, for instance, at least 20% of all Greek theatres built before the Roman occupation were adapted for spectacle. It doesn’t sound like much, but there were hundreds of Greek theatres. I can also say that the Romans noticed that Greeks preferred to watch gladiators in their own venues, so instead of forcing amphitheatres on Greek cities, Romans built even more theatres and stadiums there, and made them hybrid as a design feature.
The stadium of Messene, where we can see that a wall was added in the middle of the racetrack to create a permanent, enclosed arena. Evidence that in towns like Messene, traditional Greek running events eventually played second fiddle to imported gladiatorial events.
I made two separate layers for my (by now mammoth) GIS. Western amphitheatres, of which there are hundreds, and another for eastern amphitheatres in the eastern Mediterranean, including Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus, which despite the massive geographical span, boasts fewer Roman style amphitheatres than the tiny province of Britannia! No wonder the huge pile of Greek epitaphs about gladiators seemed strange (particularly since there are more gladiator gravestones in the east than all western provinces combined (including Italy itself but excluding north Africa, where gravestones haven’t been catalogued yet.) But, when I added my layers of venues including adapted theatres, odeons, stadiums, circuses and attested wooden, temporary amphitheatres, the map suddenly got a LOT busier. The Greeks clearly loved gladiators, because no Greek had to travel very far at all to see them fight. In fact, Asia Minor leaps up from the bottom of the gladiator-venue league table to the number 3 spot, with only Italy and the area of modern Tunisia having a denser spread of gladiator venues.
The true extent of some phenomena only really becomes clear when the data is presented visually, like I managed to do. I’ve recently published my venues dataset, including maps created from the GIS, in an academic paper. The layers of my GIS regarding epitaphs were a success in my MA dissertation, so they’ll no doubt end up in a future paper, too, because I want to drive home that neither epigraphy nor venues can be used in isolation as evidence for the true spread of gladiatorial spectacle in Greek culture. Artworks have been more difficult to map, as so many portable finds excavated in previous centuries have missing or vague provenance, but collating the relevant evidence still provided valuable insights into gladiators in art; who was creating these artworks, who was purchasing them, and what they were for.
A screenshot of my GIS software, showing each layer of venue information.
No dissertation or paper in a journal can paint a full picture, neither can looking at a single type of evidence on its own, which is why I decided to take all aspects of my dataset and discuss the results thoroughly and thematically in a full length book in the hopes of providing a broad overview of gladiators in the Greek world. The data collected in the spreadsheets and GIS provides the foundations which allow me to build a contextual discussion about cultural exchange, identity and heritage under occupation. I had to do all of this groundwork to ascertain how much gladiators were present, before I could even think about asking why they were popular. It’s a book I never could have written without first opening a blank document in Excel.
Building this one GIS has led to an award winning dissertation, a trade book, and one journal article with at least two more in the early stages of planning and writing. Learning to build a GIS from scratch may have been frustrating at times (as I am a Luddite at heart), but the potential that can spring from creating it is clearly worth the effort. As someone who focussed on ancient history far more than archaeology at uni, I only learned what a GIS even was a month before I started building one for this dissertation, and I know there is still many features I haven’t even begun to exploit, but I think I’ve proved that even a novice can build something useful.
Published aspects of my dataset are already out of date, which I’m choosing to be thrilled about. Once the manuscript was submitted, excavations undertaken during the review and publication process have already produced new examples of adapted venues, and there are rumours on the grapevine about new gravestones, too. I’m pleased that every new discovery adds new weight to my argument that gladiators were beloved in the Greek world. I don’t mind my publications becoming obsolete if new evidence proves my original point! I’m considering uploading my GIS to my website, which I can keep updated as new data comes in, and that scholars can peruse and perhaps prompt them to ask new questions, too, just like I’ve been able to do. I’ve built upon the scholarship of academics who came before me, so it would be an honour if someone took my work and was able to run with it.
I like how much visuals can be tweaked in QGIS. Here’s a map of all gladiatorial venues across the empire. With so many more layers, I found colour really useful. Normal amphitheatres are marked in white, Greek amphitheatres are marked in black, and coloured pins denote theatres, stadiums, odeons and circuses.
